Astute readers will notice I haven’t been updating this weblog, and that’s because of a desperate attempt to get caught up with work. (That’s what happens when every time you get stuck writing, you run to the safety of The Orange Box and watching Japanese movies from the 80s about schoolgirl detectives). But it’s still my obligation to give a news update in the world of things that are interesting to me:

Joel Hodgson announced a new project called Cinematic Titanic, which sounds like a relaunch of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 concept. Details are there on the website, but in brief: it sounds similar to what the RiffTrax guys are doing with Film Crew Online, licensing a bad movie and putting out a DVD release with the commentary baked-in.

And considering that Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu are involved, it’s very likely that it’ll be more of a high-concept thing, with an overall storyline and more sketches in between the movie segments. (For RiffTrax and The Film Crew, they don’t try to hide the fact that all their energy goes into the gags during the movie, and the rest is just gravy).

Other good news is that Frank Coniff and Mary Jo Pehl are signed onto the project as well. And they’re planning to release the (first?) DVD before Christmas, and do a live show in San Francisco! But the live show is only open to ILM & Lucasfilm employees. Of all the times to quit working for Lucas, 7 years ago!

I’m sure this will just rub salt in the recently-healed partisan wounds that have divided our nation for so long, and we’ll soon go back to seeing lame “Who’s your favorite? Joel or Mike?” questions popping up all over the place. But for those of us who loved all of MST3k, it’s great news.

Also also: according to MST3Kinfo.com, the last remaining members of the MST3K gang have rebooted Best Brains, Inc. with a weekly animated series about Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy. No guesses here as to how that’s going to turn out, but it should be interesting.

Now that making fun of movies is turning into a growth industry, I’ve just got to get my work done so I can listen to the RiffTrax for Raiders of the Lost Ark in time for the new stuff.

On his Invincible Super-Blog, Chris Sims wrote a fine review of the 1987 Japanese movie Sukeban Deka that was enough to make me put it at the top of my Netflix queue, and for that I’m thankful.

Still, it’s hobbled by the old “aren’t those Japanese people wacky?” mentality that doesn’t really capture the sheer awesomeness of a movie like this. I mean, he hits on the old stand-bys of tentacle rape, bukkake, and goofy translations — frankly, it’s all just a little too easy and obvious.

An hour after reading that review, I was already hungry for a more detailed analysis of the movie, one that I could tell apart from all the other reviews (you see what I did there?!?) of wacky Japanese action fantasies based on a TV show based on a manga. So I’ve prepared the following photo essay to explain exactly why Sukeban Deka: The Movie is required viewing for anybody who likes things that are awesome:
Read the rest of this entry »

Nick and Jake at Telltale have done another great job with the trailers for the Sam & Max games; here’s the one for the first episode of season 2. It’s called “Ice Station Santa,” in case that’s not clear.

The season starts November 8th & 9th, and I’m interested to see what the reaction’s going to be. Much of the first episode was written by Ian Dallas and Jeff Lester, and they came up with a few of my favorite lines of the series so far. Working at the company instead of freelancing has taught me two things: that a ton of work goes into making these episodes, and that I’m a very slow writer. So I’m hoping it all pays off and lives up to the good reaction we got from the first season, because I think the episodes are improving the more we do.

Also, co-publisher GameTap has a promotion running where you can play Episode 4 of the first season, “Abe Lincoln Must Die!”, for free. So if you’ve been curious but not curious enough to pony up the 9 bucks or so (and you’re running Windows), go for it. It’s a great concept (which I can say, because I didn’t come up with it), and it turned out pretty good. My personal favorite gag: try to shoot the President a couple times when you’re alone with him in the office.

I just want to make sure everybody else heard that, and it wasn’t just me.

In “Bionic Woman” this week, Isaiah Washington’s character interrupts the completely pointless training sessions between the Bionic Woman and Yoda-san, telling her she needs to bring out the animal inside herself, and he actually says the line, “I’m about to go analog on your ass.”

That really happened, right? ‘Cause I wouldn’t want to declare that a TV show isn’t just bad, it’s the opposite of everything that I stand for, on the basis of a single mis-heard line.

And speaking of NBC and catch-phrases: “ME WANT FOOD.” How long can “30 Rock” keep going without a single bad episode?

In a just universe, all the press and marketing attention devoted to Halo 3 would’ve been saved for The Orange Box.

Now, I realize that’s kind of ridiculous — I’m skeptical that Valve is in any way strapped for cash. And Half-Life isn’t exactly some obscure title that needs passionate fans to blog about to get the attention it deserves. And, I would imagine, Microsoft-sized sales strategies aren’t 100% compatible with the company philosophy that Valve keeps trying to project: take as long as you need to put out something highly-polished and innovative.

Still, I’d feel a little better if the stuff that Valve is doing were put forward as the public face of videogames, if we had baffled parents and grandparents going into stores asking where they can buy “one of those Half-Lifes” instead of the Nintendos or the X-Boxes. To say that this is the kind of thing we’re all trying to do, to some degree.

I still haven’t played the latest of the Halos, but I’ve seen screenshots, and they’re beautiful. Beautiful, but kind of dull. You can’t dismiss it, since it works, and a ton of work went into making it. But then you look at Team Fortress 2, and just the expression on the Spy’s face alone is more compelling and imaginative than anything I’ve seen in the whole of the Halo series.

But I’ve already effused about Team Fortress 2 on here enough that it’d make the dev team feel creeped out if they ever saw it. I already had the PC versions of the Orange Box as an extremely appreciated gift from a friend at Valve, but I went ahead and bought the Xbox 360 version as soon as it was released, just because I was so impressed with TF2, I wanted to be sure to give the company more money.

So far, I’ve played TF2 enough to realize that I’m spectacularly bad at it, and show little signs of ever improving. (But it’s still fun). I’ve played through Portal twice, once on the 360 and once on the PC, haven’t hit the bonus missions yet. And I’m about two or three levels into Episode 2.

Portal is another example of blatant excess. It would’ve been a perfectly fine and innovative puzzle game without adding character and story-telling elements to it, but they had to do it anyway. The main gimmick of the portal gun is intriguing enough, and you spend most of the time at the beginning of the game feeling completely disoriented, as if your brain is being uncomfortably stretched. Then they take it even farther, subtly inserting signs that there’s even more going on than what you can see.

It’s a fantastic example of world-building and presentation. And it’s a concrete example of that holy grail of story-telling game design: tying story and character into a game mechanic, so they’re delivered simultaneously, and build off each other. You’re stuck in a completely artificial environment, with the level designers’ hand clearly visible, and are focused on a set of obvious puzzles. At the same time, you get flashes of character and peeks behind the scenes, until it all comes together. As somebody with a vested interest in four-to-five-hour storytelling games, I’m extremely impressed.

If I’m being completely objective and critical and all that, I’ve got to say that it didn’t 100% work for me. I was absolutely loving it for the first 80% or so, and then it started to fall apart. The pacing is a little off; some of it seemed to go on way too long. Some of the stuff around the climax was really frustrating, because even though I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, I didn’t feel like I was given a good enough opportunity to actually do it — it required several cycles of die-and-try-again, which killed the mood. The very last set of puzzles was tedious, and had the same do-the-same-thing-three-times feel as a billion other games. And I was disappointed with the tone of it, which got less and less subtle as the game went on. It wasn’t bad, and most of it was pretty funny, but seeing as how Team Fortress 2 got the tone exactly right throughout, towards the end it seemed like Portal just went for straight-up wacky.

Which is all kind of like winning the lottery and then bitching about having to pay taxes. Because it’s a great game, and it’s already got legions of devoted fans, and it does kind of invent a whole new genre, the first-person action comedy puzzle game. I really hope they’re planning more puzzle packs and expansions, because I’d be happy seeing more of the first 17 levels. And I’m really hoping the rumors across the internets are true, and they’re planning to bring the Portal gun to Half-Life.

As for Episode 2: I called Valve the “Pixar of videogames” before, and that’s proving to be pretty accurate so far. That game was the big draw of the Orange Box for me, so I was already pre-disposed to like it. The only question was whether it was going to be great, or outstanding.

When I started it up, I wasn’t all that impressed. Sure, it looks perfect, and your objectives are clear, and they know how to push things forward, and how to provide enough details so you feel like you’re in a real environment with a real story going on around you. But I kept thinking, “Great. More antlions. And scripted events. What else you got?” I was already tired of just seeing excellent production values; after the bar was raised by TF2 and Portal, I wanted something to really surprise me.

And I was reminded of Finding Nemo, for some reason. Not in the setting, but my reaction to it. I went in just expecting the typical level of competence from that movie, but didn’t find the setting all that compelling, and I wasn’t expecting much. But before I knew it, I was completely drawn in, and all my skepticism was gone, and the movie could have its way with me.

So far, Episode 2 had one of those moments, with a completely low-key scripted event that wasn’t designed to impress, but just to make the story and characters more real. I was climbing a ladder out of a long pit, and all of a sudden a Vortigaunt pokes his head over the edge of the pit and says something like, “Ah, it is not a pit without The Freeman climbing out of it.” Maybe I’m just a sucker for goofy non-sequiturs, but they had me from that point on. And I haven’t even gotten to the driving yet.

Back on Friday word spread around the videogame blogs that the Writers Guild of America is introducing an award for videogame writing.

My first reaction to reading that was, “Huh. Another award for BioShock this year.” Which is a good thing; videogames will be better as soon as more people acknowledge that a good story and good writing can help take a game from good to exceptional. And more importantly, that “well-written” and “best-selling” are not mutually exclusive.

Of course, that reaction just shows my naivete, because I hadn’t appreciated the darker side of the announcement. On Ron Gilbert’s blog, he points out that the WGA will be judging based on submissions of game scripts, instead of how the writing is incorporated into the actual game. Which means an award for the worst kind of videogame writing: lengthy, non-interactive attempts to sound smart, and monologues that make a point of showing off how well-written they are. (If you want examples of over-long and wordy writing in videogames, I can point you to several of the things I’ve written).

On John Scalzi’s blog, he’s got a more positive reaction overall, but points out that this is basically a not-very-subtle attempt by the WGA to recruit people outside of its usual field, and to eventually unionize another section of the entertainment industry. And talking about unionizing any part of the games business still gets me very nervous. The two things that convinced me I wanted to eventually work in games instead of movies were that games were still innovative, and that games were still small.

And thinking about unions in games finally did something even three years of working at Electronic Arts wasn’t able to: it made me realize that I’m basically a dinosaur, and that videogame production has gotten huge. I worked on my first videogame about 11 years ago, and that was already — based on how charitable you want to be — either the silver age, bronze age, or final phlegmy death rattle of the adventure game. But there was still a sense of small teams with little specialization, where everybody who wanted to be involved in the game, could be to some level. More often than not, the person who wrote the game was the person who designed the game, meaning that the story (if any) and game design were perfectly integrated. If you emphasize writing as this separate thing, then that just widens the divide between story and gameplay. And sets back attempts to tell a story through a game, instead of telling a story that gets interrupted every so often for an interactive sequence.

And then I had a end-of-The Sixth Sense-moment when I realized that in the 11 years I’ve worked in games, I’ve never written for a game I designed. And the work I’ve been proudest of has been on games that were already plotted out and completely designed, and I just came in (sometimes as a freelancer) and added jokes. So I’m part of the problem, and I have been all along!

So then I just stopped thinking about it and started playing Team Fortress 2 some more. Which, without any doubt or reservation, gets my vote for Game of the Year. And does a better job than any game I’ve seen this year (including BioShock) of proving that videogames can be art. And which has no story to speak of, and very little “writing,” but still has a sense of style and overwhelming character that hits you like a rocket to the face.

Or, Shallow and Not Particularly Novel Insights Gleaned from Watching Return to the Blue Lagoon on Satellite Just Now:

• It’s got Milla Jovovich in it! For some reason, I’d always thought The Fifth Element was her first movie.
• Even in her jailbait days, Milla Jovovich was shockingly beautiful.
• The “Brian Krause” in the movie is the blond, angel-looking dude from “Charmed.” He’s not Peter Krause, the perpetually-unshaven guy from “Six Feet Under.” So if you’re watching the movie just to see how they got a fairly average-looking, hairy guy who must’ve been in his mid 20s at the time to run around on a beach in a loincloth for an hour and a half and not look completely ridiculous, then you’re going to be disappointed.
• In the first five minutes of the movie, they show the tender young lovers of the first one face-down on a boat, dead. Then they wrap the bodies in canvas bags and throw them overboard. That is awesome.
• It makes the “Return” guys’ adventure a lot less impressive when their only struggle is moving into a two-story house built by uneducated teenagers.
• Milla’s reaction to her first period: initial horror, followed within seconds by… delight? Gas? Mischievousness? It’s difficult to read.
• Watching this movie made me vividly remember my own adolescence, growing up naked and unashamed on a South Pacific island.
• Actually, my own adolescence was spent growing up clothed and very much ashamed in the Bible Belt. And we would scan the channels desperately for movies like The Blue Lagoon and Losin’ It and Porky’s, anything, anything to get even the barest glimpse of the good stuff.
• We had a cable box with a dial on it, and I’d spend at least an hour every night trying to turn it to that sweet spot halfway between channels where you could see the barest glimpse of teh boobies on Cinemax.
• When we actually got HBO, and you could watch “The Hitchhiker” and see almost everything, it was a total disappointment.
• Puberty sucks.
• But not as much as it must have sucked having to be on a film crew making an entire movie dedicated just for the desperate and pubescent.
• Even on those terms, Return to the Blue Lagoon is a total cock-tease. They had a mom on the island, who explained sex to them! There’s like a total of 2 minutes of youthful abandon; the rest is sitting in a house that somebody else built, making goofy euphemisms about menstruation and masturbation, fishing, and comically misunderstanding how to put on Western clothes.
• And even if you’re supposed to be the son of two stupid people, stripping off your clothes and having the villain chase you into a shark-infested coral reef is the lamest ending ever.
• Holy crap, Milla Jovovich was only 15 years old when that movie was made! That’s just kind of gross, and now I feel bad.

Tonight was a bad night for TV. Two shows on the DVR that I really tried hard to make myself like, but I just couldn’t do it.

“Bionic Woman” is just plain not good. It’ll trick you at first, because if you hear the overall concept (minus the belligerent hacker lil sister), and just catch glimpses of it, you might think it has potential. And if I didn’t mention it yet, the star is really, really pretty. But it just keeps on failing. I’ll watch one more episode just because it looks to be Bionic Starbuck-centric, but after that I’m dropping it.

I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody, but the boring but generally likable fiance of the boring but generally likable star apparently died sometime over the last week — since he just had a clearly non-fatal bullet wound at the end of the pilot, I’m guessing he had a sudden aneurism or something. And it’s too bad, because somehow his dullness combined with hers to make a character who wasn’t exactly interesting, but was at least more appealing than everybody else back at Super Secret HQ. Miguel Ferrer, and a holy-cow-I-never-saw-that-coming Asian guy who’s a martial arts expert, and a harsh woman who drives a GTO, just can’t make up for Oscar Goldman.

And I hate to kick a jackass when he’s down, but if you’re trying to bring in fresh exciting new blood to invigorate your show, Isaiah Washington is a bad, bad choice. And then having him exchanging banter about What Color Is Your Parachute? is just embarrassing.

I hope I don’t end up sounding like Isaiah Washington when I say that watching “Pushing Daisies” just gave me the creeps all over. I watched it on the recommendation of a commenter here, and I really wanted to like it. But as I was afraid of, I had about the same reaction to it as I had to Wonderfalls. It was just way too fey and precious and pleased with itself. (And I’m the guy who loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer!)

Barry Sonnenfeld was Barry Sonnefelding the hell out of it, and it showed. Really high production values. Clever concept. Smarter-than-average dialogue. Clearly distinct from anything else on network TV. And a good bit of it hit just the right tone for a romantic black comedy.

But come on. Even Wes Anderson would call out the show for being too affected. And it’s all so brightly-colored but with a sinister undertone!, complete with the narrator from the Walgreens ads. And the characters banter with puns about rumination. And it’s just full-to-bursting with that insufferably confessional, blatant allegory, the same kind that drags down Tim Burton’s “I’m a tortured soul ’cause I’m different!” movies. Here you’ve got a woman who lives with her eccentric spinster aunts. And a taller, thinner Kevin Spacey-looking guy who was close to but tragically separated from his mother and emotionally distant from his father, who falls into a gloriously romantic but completely non-sexual relationship with his spunky dream girl.

By the end of it, I was overcome with the need to eat a steak and read Maxim.