Sunday March 9 2008 Lost

Knowing Goodwin

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Thursday’s episode of “Lost” was called “The Other Woman,” and the double entendre in the title is the most interesting thing about this episode. (Assume spoilers in all these “Lost” posts.)

Not that it was bad, just completely straightforward. The whole question of whether the freighter gang are bad guys was supposed to climax in a tense showdown at the immediately-gas-everybody-on-the-island plant, but it didn’t quite work out that way — there wasn’t any possible way that scene could’ve played out differently and kept the series running, so there was no tension. Their throwing in a catfight was a nice gesture, but ultimately this one only exists for Juliet’s flashbacks and the Locke/Ben subplot.

Important things we did get, assuming I didn’t miss anything:

  • Locke is still a total tool, who is ridiculously easily manipulated by Ben
  • Widmore is most likely the guy running the freighter, if Ben’s info to be trusted (and this connection seems reasonable enough). But I don’t believe Ben’s explanation for why Widmore is investigating the island; I hope there’s more to it than just that.
  • The Tempest station has the cool logo from The Living Seas at Epcot. Have they revealed all the Dharma stations at this point? I lost count.
  • The island’s healing factor is what causes pregnancies to go awry. I can’t remember if they’ve said that before, but at least here they’re saying, “This is something important to remember.”
  • Ben’s crush on Juliet is his biggest vulnerability, considering he seems to be impervious to repeated punches to the face.

And new or outstanding questions:

  • If it’s only pregnancies conceived on the island that are at risk, why was there such a big deal about Claire’s baby? When they kidnapped Claire, was it to have Juliet study and/or work on her?
  • The therapist, Harper, said that Ben’s crush on Juliet was understandable, since “you look just like her.” Who’s the “her?” Ben’s mom? Are we going to start seeing Ghost Mom again?
  • Are they ever going to give British Freighter Woman any identifiable personality, other than “likes to fight other women?”
  • How is Ben issuing orders to the remaining Others? And where are they hiding out?
  • DOES ANYBODY KNOWS WHAT IS THE SMOKE MONSTER?????????
  • Are they expecting us to be at all surprised when they reveal who Ben’s inside man on the freighter is? There’s only one person it could be: of course, it has to be Boone. But no really, I hope they’re not hoping that showing Michael is going to be a dramatic reveal next episode; every time they mention the inside man, you can practically hear “WAAAAALLLT!” off in the distance.

I kept hoping that they’d do one last little jab at the end of this episode. In particular, I was hoping that one of Juliet’s flashbacks would show Harper’s getting killed, and the version of her in the rain at the beginning would be a Walt-like ghost or the smoke monster or an immortal or whatever it is that’s explaining all the visions from season 1. In a way, having her come out of hiding to find Juliet in the middle of the jungle during a rainstorm was both more straightforward and more implausible than her just seeing a ghost.

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Friday March 7 2008 Apple

The three words every geek loves to hear

“Software Development Kit.”

Today Apple announced its iPhone SDK. Considering how excited I am about the release, I don’t want to imagine what it’s like for people who are actually going to have time to use any of it.

I’d been saying that the real potential of the iPhone (and iPod touch) — whether it’s just an expensive and flashy status symbol/geek toy gadget, or a truly revolutionary device — would come down to the SDK release. It’s what made Palm a big (albeit temporary) player: half was the novelty of the gadget itself and the simplicity of its design, and half was that it was an open development platform. From what I can tell, Apple’s surpassed that several times over with this release.

Like any other Apple follower on the internet, I’ve got a few complaints. But overall, they knocked this one out of the park, and did everything right from start to finish:

  • Everything’s built into the already-free XCode and developer tools.
  • Pretty much every useful feature on the device is supported by an API, including the camera, accelerometers, and even the location-detection feature in Google Maps.
  • It’s all well-documented, with slick API reference docs and plenty of how-tos.
  • The sample apps are slick and polished, and a few look like they’ll even be useful.
  • There’s a complete UI kit, so it’ll be difficult to make an app that’s not as professional-looking as the built in ones.
  • An iPhone simulator is included, that works immediately after install without having to mess with licenses and downloading the correct ROM version and the like.
  • The SDK is free for anyone (with an Intel Mac) to download and try out with the simulator, but
  • To install apps on the device itself, or to distribute them, you’ll need to pay at least the $99 developer program fee. Which is actually a good thing, because the cost alone might help weed out thousands of worthless apps — I think the Palm OS had at least 20 “Turn your Palm into a mirror LOL!” apps and variants on the Magic 8-ball.
  • Apple’s “App Store” for distribution has the potential to make the company a bundle and will be easier to deal with than having to go through the iTunes store.
  • Assuming Apple applies the same policy for vetting apps on the App Store that it does for software on its own site and music through the iTunes store, you sacrifice the open-endedness of free downloads in favor of at least a base level of quality in the apps.
  • They finally seem to be targeting business users as well as consumers and gave a nod to game development, without making any one of them feel like an afterthought.

But from what I’ve seen so far, there are some problems too:

  • Although the SDK and the simulator are free, the simulator doesn’t support the coolest features of the phone: no accelerometers, camera, or OpenGL support. To do anything really cool, or even to run half the included sample demos, you need to pony up the hundred bucks.
  • The App Store takes a 30% cut from the developer distributing any iPhone software. Just speaking as someone who doesn’t make a living directly off selling shareware, I’d say this isn’t completely unreasonable, but it does sound pretty high.
  • I definitely haven’t given more than a glance to the documentation, but I haven’t seen any sign of support for syncing between the phone and the desktop. This is a necessity for most productivity apps, and all the fancy screen transitions in the world aren’t going to do any good if you can’t get your notes or To-Do list off your phone.
  • It’s understandable considering what’s been included and the level of polish and professionalism in the SDK, but still: the official version isn’t coming out until June, a year after the phone’s release.

I’ve already got a dozen ideas for things I’d like to write for the phone, assuming I could ever find the time and/or skills. No doubt they’re all already in development by somebody else, not to mention more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me yet. Even though the likelihood of my making productive use out of it is infinitesimal, I’m tempted to pay the developer fee just for the sake of getting to play around with it.

I think I already mentioned on here my reaction to seeing a co-worker’s Pilot PDA for the first time, years ago. Even on a small, low-res, black-and-greenish screen, with a cartoonishly simple interface and no connectivity, it was like seeing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The neat thing about the iPhone is that it’s already cooler than I ever imagined the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy being.

Just the sample apps alone show that they’ve got people on staff who are thinking of non-obvious ways to use the phone. After watching today’s announcement, I felt like the hyperbole around Apple was almost justified, for once. I had been looking forward to the SDK just for the chance to have e-books, a decent ToDo list, and a personal database on a device as small as the iPhone. When they start throwing in the stuff you can do with motion detection, always-available wireless access, 3D support, and pseudo-location detection, it really does seem like an entirely new platform with enormous potential. It’s like getting to write the first programs for the tricorder.

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Sunday March 2 2008 Videogames

Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me, I want to be Ghibli

Any game company would envy the amount of buzz around Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS. For months, it’s been getting breathless previews from writers who wanted it RIGHT NOW!!!, and since its release it’s gotten extremely positive reviews.

It’s not hard to see why; it’s got stellar production values. You can see from the trailer:

A DS game with painted backgrounds, animated sequences, voice acting; it’d seem like one of those epic old-school adventure games, with a Nintendo-level budget and a Studio Ghibli-inspired art direction applied to it.

But it’s actually even less a standard adventure game than the Phoenix Wright games are. Professor Layton is a collection of riddles and Brain Age-style puzzles loosely connected by painted backgrounds and fully- or partially-animated cutscenes. The 1up review linked above claims that this separation is a refreshing change from standard adventure game puzzles, because it removes all the ambiguity and artifice from the puzzle-solving. But or me, the effect is like watching Castle in the Sky while taking an SAT prep test.

You go through the village, tapping on different things in the background, and Professor Layton will pop up with something like, “That bookshelf reminds me of this old riddle that’s tangentially related to letters,” or “That’s a boat, much like the one in that old puzzle about getting a group of predator and prey animals safely across a river.”

I can’t fault the presentation at all; it’s slick, well-polished, and more clever than you might think at first. When I was presented with the “predator and prey on a raft” puzzle, my first reaction was “Oh great, this one again.” But the interface for the puzzle itself is seamless, even somewhat entertaining. And after the puzzle was finished, a text screen came up acknowledging the “fun fact” that this is an ancient puzzle, and variants on it have been around for thousands of years.

You can see the lack of artifice throughout: yes, they’re puzzles. Get over it. I can definitely see how it’s a shrewd marketing move, considering how hugely popular puzzle games on the DS have been, and how relatively easy it is to drop new puzzles in for sequels and downloadable content. And I can even see how it’s somewhat appealing to have a puzzle presented to you with its own rules screen and interface and a clear indicator if you’re right or wrong. Complete with short segments of the Professor or his apprentice thinking about the puzzle, this game’s equivalent to Phoenix Wright’s “Objection!” screens.

But still, the whole concept behind this game somehow offends me to my core. It just feels like the developers have thrown up their hands at the notion of integrating story and gameplay, and instead offered up the two duct-taped together. It’s a bunch of disparate elements that as well-produced as they are, still don’t work together.

I’d started to get uncomfortable even during the opening sequence: it’s your standard videogame cutscene opening, giving you tons of expository dialog. And like most console games, it requires “interactivity” in that you tap the screen at the end of each line. I always assumed that console games did that to give everyone in the audience a chance to finish reading the line, but here the lines are voiced. So is it some left over interface convention from console games past, or is it a token nod towards interactivity? I’ll admit that it’s fun during the opening cutscenes to wait a long time before tapping for the next line — to make it seem like the Professor has said something inappropriate, and an uncomfortable silence has filled the car. But it’s not “interactivity.”

There are also plenty of sections where there’s only one valid thing to do, but the game still pretends that you’ve got options — every time you try to just explore something, your apprentice pipes up with “Shouldn’t we be headed to the old manor that we just talked about in that long cutscene?” This plagues tons of games, including several that I’ve worked on, so it’d be unfair to point it out as a criticism unique to Professor Layton. The difference here is that that’s not a problem in puzzle games, so it feels like here they’ve just dragged the worst aspects of storytelling games into the mix.

And the puzzles themselves have so far (I’m only about 15 in) bounced around between “really really old” or “impossibly vague”. Some of them are just plain riddles, not requiring that much cleverness. Others are weirdly esoteric, like choosing the “right type of chair” for a multi-purpose stadium (that one’s triggered by clicking on a chair in a store, for some reason). I don’t know if integrating these in the story would make them any more palatable.

But I do know that Professor Layton’s approach hasn’t magically solved the most common complaints about adventure games. Because I’ve just barely started with the game, and I’ve already encountered all of them: the feeling that everything has stopped because I’m stuck on some esoteric aspect of a puzzle, and the sense that I’m battling against the designers who are vaguely and confusingly pointing me in the “right” direction.

What Professor Layton‘s approach does successfully is make it clear that everything you need to solve the puzzle is right in front of you, so there’s no pointless wandering. What it misses out on, though, is the potential for a game’s story to play into the puzzle-solving. While you’re exploring for parts to solve a puzzle, you pick up on the story and characterization. And then that story and characterization can feed into the solution of a well-designed adventure game puzzle: I can understand the answer, because my character thinks about things this way and his obstacle does things that way.

Professor Layton is a solid game, and there’s not much wrong with it, for what it is. It just feels to me like they’ve taken an evolutionary dead-end in game design and applied the highest production values to it. It’s like the world’s most charming and highly-polished passenger pigeon.

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Sunday March 2 2008 Movies

Yojimboring

lesamourai.jpgEven though I’ve gone on record as being unimpressed with the French New Wave, I still feel totally justified in my rental of Le Samourai. Movies with the word “Samurai” title have rarely let me down.

And listen to the Netflix description (with most intriguing words highlighted by me):

A little bit gangster film, a little bit samurai flick, this 1960s French masterpiece from Jean-Pierre Melville introduces the memorable anti-hero Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a contract killer with the instincts of a Japanese warrior and the features of Adonis. After offing a nightclub owner, Costello has two big problems: his double-crossing employer, who now wants him dead, and the dogged police investigator who’s determined to rein him in.

Now listen to my description:

Ninety-five minutes of attractive but vacuous people opening and closing doors and walking into rooms. Our expressionless hero spends great stretches of time lounging on a bed smoking and occasionally feeding his pet bird. The action begins with a 45-minute long police lineup, continues with a barrage of shots of the hero parking tiny French cars on Paris streets and walking into convenience stores, and culminates in a climactic 20-minute long sequence being casually pursued by old men and young women on the public transit system!

I suspect that my issues with Le Samourai are pretty much the same as my problems with Breathless: the movies it influenced are 10,000 times more interesting than the original. After watching the movie, I attempted to read more about it online to see if there was something crucial about it that I’d missed, some justification for its being called a “masterpiece” and warranting a Criterion edition. The writing about this movie is even more soporific than the movie itself, but the bits that I can glean before I nod off are always the same: it’s influenced dozens of other directors; and it’s not about action, but cinematography.

I can appreciate a filmmaker’s attempt to go for style and establish a mood over plot. Sometimes that approach even works. But whether it’s because Le Samourai has always been painfully dull, or because it’s had over 30 years of movies and TV expanding on the concept, the attempts at style here seem as forced, self-conscious, and self-important as a student film. Pointing to this movie as groundbreaking or influential seems pretty silly, since there are plenty of contemporary and earlier movies that do more interesting things with both the storytelling and the filmmaking.

So here you end up with a pretty and whisper-thin guy with an OCD fixation on his hat who lives alone with a tiny parakeet (c’mon, even Baretta had a cockatoo) and keeps all his car-stealing keys on a gigantic ring and reacts to a bullet grazing his arm by running back to his apartment and very carefully dressing the wound with a comically oversized bandage before hopping on Le Metro for a polite and relaxed ride through the Paris suburbs. When you try to sell me that as being a “samurai,” you just come across as being a poseur.

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Saturday March 1 2008 Lost

I hardly know her Stevens.

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This week’s episode of “Lost” (I was laid low with crushing head trauma Thursday, so I’m just getting around to watching it) was called “The Constant.”

If I ever start bouncing back and forth through time, the one constant I’ll be able to latch onto is that I’ve always been ridiculously easy to manipulate, and will start crying like a hormonal pregnant teen watching the last 15 minutes of a Disney movie. The ending of this episode had me all misty-eyed, in the sense that my eyes were still a little bit misty after having cried profusely.

And it was remarkably restrained, is the funny part. They kept the swelling music under control, and they weren’t in the most romantic setting — an ugly room in a freighter with a dead body being watched by a sweaty Iraqi holding a goofy looking phone hooked up to a lantern battery with frequent interruptions of creepy static. I think it was the editing that got me, of all things. It was just masterfully done.

Especially remarkable since I don’t really like the character of Desmond. The actor’s fine — nobody on TV does the confused and panic-stricken expression better — but the character’s kind of a loser. He’s always seemed like a cipher that cool stuff happens around. Underground late-70s era bunker: cool. Hey, he’s like Ulysses!: very cool. Precognitive powers: that’s neat! Traveling through time: even neater! And meeting people who know he’s traveling through time: wow! But the guy himself: my only cue that I’m really supposed to care about his love story is that they keep showing that picture over and over again.

And yet, it obviously works if a phone call can make me weepy.

For the series overall: am I just confused, or did they really drop a bombshell with this episode? I suppose they’ve been hinting at time-displacement for so long that it’s not really “hinting” anymore, so maybe I’m just still unaccustomed to “Lost” resolving anything. Even with this season’s fantastic record so far. But this seems to suggest an explanation for everything from Jack’s dad, Kate’s horse, and Locke & Shannon’s frequent sightings of Walt; to why the “natives” don’t age.

It even calls the flashbacks into question: are they not just memories? It’d be awesome to think that all this time, whenever a character goes into a flashback, everybody else is standing around staring at them while they’re catatonic. But nobody’s bothered to talk about it yet, because, you know, it’s “Lost.”

As for ongoing questions: I suppose Faraday’s journal note to himself was supposed to be intriguing, but I didn’t get it. I also couldn’t tell when he wrote it; is it supposed to be a note he left for himself from 1996, that he’s just now discovering? Did it only appear when Desmond did his thing, suggesting that you really can alter history when you’re time-jumping? Or did he just write it for himself on the ride out to the island? Whatever the case, I felt like I was hearing a “duh Duh DUNNN!” but not seeing what was causing it.

And the auction scene had Mr. Widmore bidding on The Black Rock journal, and Alvar Hanso was mentioned in there somewheres. If I remember correctly, the last time Desmond was in Widmore’s office, there was a painting of The Black Rock on his wall. It’d be cool if they’re rolling that stuff back into the mix; I was afraid they’d abandoned most of the season 1 intrigue with that doofusy and disappointing alternate-reality game.

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