Monthly Archives: October 2006

Damn Wii Smokes Too Much

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I’m way too old and disinterested to be getting into a “which console rocks hardest” battle, but I still read the videogame blogs and am bemused by the wackiness surrounding the Nintendo Wii. Specifically, it has the power to turn [...]

And it procrastinates.I’m way too old and disinterested to be getting into a “which console rocks hardest” battle, but I still read the videogame blogs and am bemused by the wackiness surrounding the Nintendo Wii.

Specifically, it has the power to turn people into hypocrites. First was this quote from one of Sony Australia’s managers saying that the Wii was “a bit pricey.” If you’re not laughing, it means that you haven’t been following the next gen console battles and aren’t aware that the Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost six hundred dollars in the US, and, according to the blog post, an even thousand of those funny Australian “dollars”. I heard something about the PS3′s price being reduced, where now in the US it will only cost you 500 bucks and a kidney.

Now, there’s this couple of quotes about the system. Somebody from San Rafael game developer Factor 5 called it the “GameCube 1.5″ and criticized it for not distinguishing itself enough from the previous generation console. Factor 5, you may remember, is the company that built its reputation with Rogue Squadron VIII, also known as Shadows of the Empire 10.5.1, also known as What the Hell, Let’s Do the Death Star Trench Run and Hoth Battle One More Time Because God Knows You Lapped it Up Like Starving Dogs The First Dozen Times We Sold It To You.

It seems pretty clear to me that Nintendo is taking the same tack with the Wii that it did with the Nintendo DS. That is, release an incremental update to the hardware with a fundamental change in the way the games are played.

I was as big a nay-sayer as anybody else when the DS and Sony PSP were first released; the PSP clearly had better hardware (and it still does), a better screen, and was just a better machine overall. And I’ve seen how wrong I was about that. My PSP is now collecting dust, while I still pull out the DS at least once a month. Because Nintendo knows how to make games; there’s always at least one or two classic, must-have titles exclusive to the system. People remember how they played a game, not whether it had a higher resolution than its predecessor.

I’ve got a couple of friends who work for Sony, so I feel kind of bad for saying it, but: there’s no way in hell I’m getting a PS3 anytime soon. This isn’t like when I swore I’d never get an Xbox 360, either; that was just a case of my trying to talk myself out of buying it. My opinion of the PS3 started with my assumption that of course I’d have to buy one, then changed to lack of interest once I saw how capable the Xbox 360 is, then complete lack of interest once I found out how expensive the thing is going to be, and now active contempt.

The contempt comes from the arrogance Sony’s taken in releasing the thing, and their refusal to learn from past mistakes, like with the PSP. The PS3 just seems completely inessential. It’s just prettier versions of the exact same types of games that are already available on the 360 and the PS2. It’s got a DVD player in a format that no one needs yet, because there’s not enough content available for it. And charging that much for an inessential machine just strikes me as arrogant.

Combine that with all the other little criticisms: the batteries in the wireless controller can’t be replaced; the PS3 only works with its own remote and is incompatible with universal remotes because there’s no IR sensor; the online service sounds as if it’s going to be a big, decentralized mess similar to the one that failed on the PS2. I keep getting reminded of the Memory Stick and the UMD — the company’s shoving formats down our throats, trying to sell us what they want us to have, instead of what we actually want.

The whole videogame console business is seeming increasingly irrelevant to me, the less I become an employee and the more I become just a fan. The 360 does everything I want: it’s got a lot of fun games, it’s got an online system that’s so well-designed I still can’t believe it’s from Microsoft, and its DVD player is streamlined enough that I can finally get rid of my old standalone player. The Wii just looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. The PS3 has so little appeal to me that I figure I’m just not their target market. But with as much Sony crap as I’ve already bought and my tendency to spend all my discretionary income on overpriced gadgets, if I’m not the target market, then who the hell is?

Hellboy: Sword of Storms

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The Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it [...]

Mr. BoyThe Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it in a magazine this week.

Because it’s 2006, you can find an online production diary for the series in blog format. I haven’t read it yet, part of my stay-completely-unspoiled policy (which is cleverly disguised as having no free time at all).

My knee-jerk impression based on nothing other than the pictures on that blog: it looks like a more standard animation style than trying to do an exact duplicate of Mike Mignola’s style. That could be good or bad; The Amazing Screw-on Head was clearly made by people who were huge fans of the comic book and ended up being a slavish reproduction. It was neat to see my favorite comic book in motion on a major network, or even the Sci-Fi Channel, but at the same time it felt like there was nothing there I hadn’t already seen. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about the continuation of that series, so I’m assuming it didn’t make a huge impression.

Hellboy (apparently it’s intended to be a series) looks like it’s going for a more easily-animated style, and the synopsis of Sword of Storms sounds like it’s faithful to the comics while leaving plenty of room to be an ongoing action-heavy series. If you want to grab the anime market, start your story in Japan: good idea.

At this point, I’m expecting to have the same reaction as I did to the movie: good effort, nice to see the characters in motion, but on the whole basically forgettable. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.

A bum, which is what he is

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For years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without [...]

Contender blah blah blahFor years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without all that tedious reading. And I’ve been quoting them for so long, I feel like I owe it to the moviemakers to actually know what I’m talking about.

I may rethink that homework assignment, though, if all the movies suck as much as On the Waterfront. How did this thing ever get to be a classic?

It’s speechy, and ham-handed, and actually pretty gross in its message and characterizations. It acts like there’s this difficult moral ambiguity going on, when there is none. It’s clear from scene one what’s the right thing to do, and you spend almost two hours just waiting for this loathesome, affected idiot to just do it already. It’s insulting to women, because Eva Marie Saint’s character is nothing more than a stupid girl who digs Bad Boys and will abandon any moral compass she supposedly has just to hang out with one.

And it’s got the worst kind of faux-Populist attitude, where a bunch of filmmakers act like they’re down with the Common Man and they understand the honor and code that comes with life on the docks. But the movie shows the people as nothing more than spineless idiots and bums. They’re not regular joes who are put in a difficult position; in this movie, they’re cowards who will stand by while people get murdered right in front of them.

Of course, the whole business with Elia Kazan and the HUAC is pretty gross, too. Especially when he expects us to feel sympathy for this conscienceless moron who says he’s just trying to do the right thing and doesn’t understand why all the guys gotta be so mean to him and kill his pigeons. But the movie’s bad enough even without Kazan’s attempts to make himself out as a martyr.

I really don’t understand the appeal of this one, at all. I even tried to think that it’s all about context, and maybe it was brilliant in its day. But Rear Window came out the same year, proving that Hollywood could tolerate subtle performances, complex plots, and intelligent women. I thought the US was done with ham-handed, insulting “message movies” as soon as Frank Capra stopped making them.

I always thought that Best Picture winners were at least supposed to be watchable, even if they weren’t really enjoyable or even all that good. Now I’m afraid to see A Beautiful Mind.

You Taste Like Fish Biscuits

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DirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in [...]

Polar Bear picture Copyright philg@mit.eduDirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in my apartment Monday as well, waiting for a service guy to come out and fix the new receiver.

The tech support person on the phone kept going on about how these new receivers were so much in demand, and every time I pointed out that they don’t work, she found a way to spin it. I’m one of the lucky few to be on the bleeding edge of technology, apparently. Ditching TiVo to make their own bug-ridden and less-functional PVR wasn’t a colossally selfish and short-sighted business move on DirecTV’s part, it’s the beginning of a brave new world.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I finally got caught up with the last two episodes of “Lost” by watching them in tiny, pixelated format on ABC’s website. I liked them better than I liked the season premiere, but the whole thing still feels weird. Not the kind of weird that you watch “Lost” for in the first place, but the kind of weird where you can’t quite tell what the people making the show are doing.

It seems like they suddenly forgot how to make a great show and are feeling their way back to it, just based on somebody else’s written description of the series. (And yeah, I said “suddenly.” Remember that I think that season 2 was great.) They know that an island’s involved, and strange things keep happening, and the characters have flashbacks, and didn’t somebody mention a polar bear at one point?

(By the way, spoilers apply from here on out, in case you haven’t seen the two episodes).

So each episode has a really cool sequence — the guy landing on Jin’s car, and Locke’s vision quest. After each, I thought, “Yes! This is the show I got into.” But by the end of each episode, I was back to thinking, “Wha? But I… huh?” The flashbacks seem unfinished; are they going to be extending them across multiple episodes now? What’s the resolution of the guy landing on Jin’s car? Did he really just jump, and that’s the whole story? I kept waiting for Sun to flash back, right before she shot one of the Others, to show her pushing the dude out the window.

And what about Locke’s flashback? The whole point was for him to say he used to be a farmer but now he’s a hunter? No sudden gruesome death of undercover police guy? The pot farmers get arrested, and that’s what he meant by “bad things happen to people who hang around me?” I can see why he waited 69 days for that flashback, because that’s a totally boring memory.

On the whole, it seems like they’ve only got enough material for three episodes, and they’re trying to stretch them out to fill six. And the big revelations are okay, I guess, but they’re stretched out to the point where my reaction isn’t “whoa!” but “whatever.” Jack is going to be tempted to betray his friends, okay, and… here, look at the Red Sox winning the World Series! How weird is that? And Desmond can now remember the future. Yep, he sure can. Look at him, there, standing there on the beach, rememberin’. Hurley sure is freaked out by that, even though that rates about a 4 on the scale of Weird Shit Happening On This Island.

There are three episodes left to go, and hopefully my TV situation will be worked out by the time the next one airs. One of the creators has said that by the end of the sixth, before the hiatus, there’ll be this major revelation that takes the show in a whole new direction that nobody saw coming. I hope they’ve got the goods to deliver.

Jetlag is the worst kind of lag

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Do you know what’s the best thing to do for jetlag your first night back home? If you said, “sleep through the day, then stay up all night watching a marathon of ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on DVD,” you’re wrong! Don’t [...]

EX TERM I NATE!Do you know what’s the best thing to do for jetlag your first night back home? If you said, “sleep through the day, then stay up all night watching a marathon of ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on DVD,” you’re wrong! Don’t worry, though, because that was my answer at first, too.

I’m definitely no stranger to unnatural circadian rhythms, but being this far out of sync is weird, even for me. Usually I can have a somewhat normal day, just offset a few hours from the rest of the world. Today and yesterday have felt as if I’m stuck in some kind of limbo — I can’t do anything, and can’t seem to get back on track.

It doesn’t help that I had to stay by the apartment all day waiting for the FedEx guy to not show up. I’m still without a functional satellite box, so I’m missing all the TV shows airing this week in addition to all the ones I missed last week. “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” and even “Heroes” and “How I Met Your Mother” are all going on without me, and I’ve been trapped here without any contact with non-televised humans, either.

On the bright side, though, I can’t say enough how much I like the new(-ish) “Doctor Who”. The ones I watched ended with a two-parter set during the London blitz, and it’s the two most enjoyable hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. Everything in the story was telegraphed way ahead, and none of the “surprises” in the plot were all that surprising. But still by the end of it all, I was laughing at just how well-told a story it was, and by how well the ending worked. It’s not going for gritty realism or “adult” complexity; it’s just great, well-crafted storytelling.

And creepy as hell in parts, too. You can tell that the creators of the new “Doctor Who” are going for the same kinds of indelible images imprinted on them from the original series, more of an iconic, emotional reaction than a cerebral one. It’s the same kind of phenomenon that lets us instantly recognize a Dalek and the “EX…TERM…I…NATE!” cry even if we don’t remember watching the original series. And I think the image of a gas-mask wearing boy who wanders the streets of London during air raids, repeatedly asking “Are you my mummy?” is something that won’t be going away any time soon.