Cheap shot, maybe, but it’s uncanny.
“When you appeared with your ebay fortune and complained that California has become a welfare state, what did you mean by… Ms. Whitman? Where did she go this time?!”
Reading comic books on the iPad is kind of great. Discovering a comic like Atomic Robo is even better.
Man, I love Atomic Robo. It’s a comic book series about an indestructible robot designed by Nikola Tesla in 1923, who now leads a team of Action Scientists who are “sanctioned by the U.N. to investigate weirdness.” The influence of Hellboy and The B.P.R.D. are pretty clear, both in the art and the writing and tone. But instead of feeling derivative, it stands as a great counterpart to those books: there’s less of the folklore and epic mythology, in favor of pulp science fiction and B-movies. Plus, it’s played pretty much strictly for laughs, but with enough plot and a strong enough storyline to keep everything from evaporating.
Plus it hits all the right notes. It’s nearly impossible to find writing this sharp — especially comedy writing, which hardly anyone in comics can get right — or artwork this polished in the “big three” publishers, much less from a semi-obscure smaller house. The guys behind the comic published their manifesto a couple of years ago, and it proves that they didn’t just stumble onto a good comic, they know what they’re doing. It’s clear that they’ve put a lot of thought and effort into making something that’s smart, goofy fun.
But as much as I like it, I can all but guarantee it never would’ve caught my attention if not for the Comics app from Comixology. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I have one of the Atomic Robo Free Comic Book Day issues in print lying around somewhere, but I didn’t pay much attention to it (assuming I read it at all). It’s a perfect example of the long-promised potential of digital distribution, but it actually worked for once.
The Princess and the Frog defied (and exceeded) all my expectations.
I’d heard plenty of people say that The Princess and the Frog was surprisingly good, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Now I wish I’d seen it sooner, because it’s pretty great.
It was pretty aggressively marketed, and you can see that there was a lot riding on it as the first in a resurgence of hand-drawn animation at Disney, but I get the sense it didn’t make quite as big a splash as people were hoping. That’d be a shame, because this could be exactly the shot in the arm Disney animation needs.
I’d been afraid that in their attempts to make Disney more “contemporary,” that the movie would come out Dreamworksian. That’s definitely not the case; this is a Disney animated feature, almost self-consciously so. It’s got Disney animation in its DNA; it’s practically an homage to the classics, a sampler of all the animation and background styles the studio has used since Snow White.
Did you like the CG-heavy stuff like the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast, or do you prefer the looser and sketchier style of 101 Dalmatians? Doesn’t matter, because they’re both in there. Or the more cartoony and elastic characters in Hercules and The Emperor’s New Groove? They’re included in a sequence with a voodoo priestess. Maybe you’d rather have The Jungle Book, in which case a trumpet-playing alligator makes a fine Baloo substitute. Did you like the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp? So did they, so they made a version with frogs. The “Under the Sea” number from The Little Mermaid? Have two of them, Bayou-style. How about Fantasia? Which one: there’s a good bit of the early 20s style characters from the 2000 version, and shadow creatures that evoke the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from the original. And of course you can’t have such a swamp-heavy movie without being reminded of The Rescuers.
That might make it sound like a rip-off, or at best a muddled pastiche of a ton of disparate art styles. But that’s not the case: it all somehow works together, and it feels like a real homage instead of uninspired cribbing.
And while the art stays close to the past, the story does a great job of avoiding the Disney formula. The decision that got all the attention was making a Disney movie with African-American lead characters — that could be a pretty big deal, and luckily it was handled extremely well. The movie doesn’t ignore race, but doesn’t make a big issue of it, either; Tiana’s at a disadvantage because of her lack of money, not because of her race. Even better, her best friend since childhood is a spoiled rich white girl, and she’s never reduced to the villain or wicked stepsister role.
Best of all, the story takes a long-past-due break from the “Don’t be afraid to be different”/”Be true to your dreams” moral that’s become rote in pretty much every piece of family entertainment made in the past few decades. Tiana’s problem is that she’s gotten too attached to her dream, and everybody but her knows it. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a Disney movie with such a fully fleshed-out female character. Especially one who couldn’t care less about being a princess. It’s actually pretty risky to propose an animated movie about a woman whose biggest flaw is that she works too hard to make her dreams come true. Somehow they pulled it off.
Not to mention that the “meet cute” involves frogs being chased by alligators and beating the crap out of redneck hunters.
One of the things I can see keeping it from reaching classic status is that there are no real standout songs. It’s got a Randy Newman-composed, Dr. John-heavy soundtrack that’s fine, but without anything that’s particularly memorable. I have heard two of the songs, “Almost There” and “Dig a Little Deeper,” sung at Disneyland by their own Tiana in New Orleans Square, and I’m genuinely glad to see the movie taking hold like that. But without a real show-stopper, it just has to stand as a good, entertaining Disney movie.
It doesn’t hit any false notes (remarkable on its own), its attempts at contemporary humor actually work, the characters are appealing, the story keeps moving, and there’s enough imagination for something new happening almost constantly. I found myself genuinely surprised in places, which I didn’t think was possible from a Disney movie. It’s hard to imagine The Princess and the Frog becoming one of the most revered Disney classics. In spirit, it’s more loose and fun, much like the movies of the Robin Hood/Aristocats era, but it’s got enough meat to it to keep it from being a lightweight.
In the brilliant XBLA game Limbo, you play as a little boy going through just about the worst day ever.
The new game Limbo has been getting a lot of buzz for what seems like a year now. It’s the first release in Xbox’s Summer of Arcade campaign, and it’s been getting a ton of great reviews, many of which use descriptions like “close to perfect.” For the most part, the hype is completely justified: Limbo is an outstanding game I’d recommend to anybody with patience and without a fear of spiders. And playing it should be mandatory for anyone making games.
But the problem with Limbo is that it sets such an extraordinarily high standard for itself at the beginning, and the rest of the game doesn’t live up to that. I’m not sure that it’d even be possible to live up to it. You’re dropped into the game controlling the silhouette of a small boy in the middle of the dark woods. The premise is that the boy is in Limbo, looking for his sister, but the only way you’d know that is from the description text when you buy the game; there’s no story setup, no voice and almost no text in the minimalist presentation. So you begin by walking to the right, and you soon encounter the first of the thousands of things in Limbo that will kill the boy, instantly and brutally.
You’ll die a lot while playing the game. It’s not an issue, since you’ll simply restart at the most recent checkpoint, and the checkpoints are, without exception, placed perfectly and predictably. But the die-and-try-again cycle is pretty indicative of the entire game. At the beginning, it works brilliantly: the deaths are sudden, gory, vicious, and even callous. It creates a sense of dread and apprehension more effectively than any game I’ve played since Silent Hill 2: this is a genuine horror game, one that makes the increasingly photo-realistic attempts at horror games seem clumsy and amateurish. I was taken in completely, startled every time a trap snapped shut, wary of walking any further. And even though I’m not particularly put off by spiders normally, I was genuinely repulsed by the ones in this game.
But as you go further in the game, that shock and feeling of apprehension wear off. Seeing the boy get killed just becomes a minor impediment, and you impatiently tap the A button to give the puzzle another try. And that’s the other thing: they become puzzles. Early on in Limbo, everything feels natural and perfectly integrated into the experience — as with any other puzzle game, you’re presented with an obstacle and all the pieces you need to get past it, but everything feels as if it’s supposed to be there. The further you progress, however, the more the puzzles seem contrived and puzzle-like.
And it’s a shame that that’s a complaint, because Limbo is an excellent puzzle game. There are only one or two puzzles that I’d call unfair, and the rest range from very good to genius. And “genius” isn’t an exaggeration — many of the puzzles and obstacles later in the game are the best I’ve ever seen in a videogame. What’s more, almost all of them are presented perfectly: it’s clear within seconds what the obstacle is, you’re given ample room to experiment instead of passively waiting for the a-ha! moment, and you’re given adequate feedback all without words or voice. There are perfectly subtle clues and hints throughout; one example is the minimalist soundtrack, which kicks in during the later puzzles to give you the rhythm you need to get past an obstacle.
I was extremely impressed with the game design, especially as I’ve gotten more and more frustrated with the wordiness (see: pot, kettle) and lack of challenge in videogames. Limbo is difficult, but with just a couple of exceptions, it’s never unfair. The challenge is in being forced to think; with most of the obstacles, after I’d figured out what to do, actually executing the solution was straightforward. And the solutions were frequently clever and satisfying, and for the first time in years, I actually felt smart while playing a game.
But it was still a game, where before there’d been this completely engrossing and captivating experience. I stopped empathizing with the little boy and started getting frustrated at the mushy jumping physics, or the extra jumps he’d unpredictably take at just the wrong moment, or the fact that he’d never learned to swim, or how long it took him to respawn after he was crushed by a giant weight or impaled on a spike. I encountered too many puzzles where you have to die at least once to even see what the obstacle is, so I stopped dreading the deaths and started seeing them as inevitable trial-and-error. I stopped thinking about secret caverns and spooky woods and scary spiders, and started thinking about platforms, switches, boxes, and physics puzzles.
If Limbo had been released with just the last 70% or so of the game content, then it would’ve been an ingenious puzzle game, a little on the difficult side, with amazing art and beautiful presentation. And it’s still one of the most impressive games ever released on XBLA. But after being so completely taken in at the beginning, I have to wonder what a game would be like if it could take that sense of dread and exploration and complete immersion in a nightmare, and carry it through the entire game.
(And for an example of what I mean by perfect presentation of a puzzle, I’ll describe my favorite puzzle set-up after the break. It’s spoiler territory, so best not to read it until after you’ve “finished” the game).
Blendo Games took the characters from Flotilla and made a perfectly weird educational game called Air Forte
I already admitted to being a shameless fan of Blendo Games, creator of Gravity Bone and Flotilla. The newest release is called Air Forte, and it’s another brilliantly bizarre game, this time teaching multiplication tables, parts of speech, and geography.
Even if edutainment isn’t your thing, you should at least check out the demo — it’s available for PC/Mac OS X/Linux as well as the Xbox 360 in the Xbox Live Indie Games section. (And it’s only five bucks there, which made it a sight-unseen purchase for me). The graphic design is phenomenal as always, and I was a fan right from the title screen.
Air Forte takes some of the characters you run into in Flotilla and re-casts them as subjects of a kingdom whose multiples, words, and countries are being stolen. As the best pilot in the kingdom, you’ve got to take off and find the missing multiples while avoiding the mines. The story’s presented all in comic book format, set to a perfectly inappropriate surf guitar soundtrack.
As for the educational merit, I don’t have a kid present so I can’t comment one way or the other. (It was, however, an unwelcome reminder that I’ve forgotten all the multiplication tables). And I have to be a jerk and point out a couple of errors in the grammar sections — “smiling” can be a noun, and “lunch” can be a verb, for instance. But for me, the game wins on presentation alone, and I loved every second of it.
If you’re wondering about platforms, flying with the Xbox 360 controller is a lot easier than with the mouse.
I never would’ve expected that the follow-up to Flotilla would be an educational game, but that’s the consequence of dealing with an unrelentingly original game developer, I guess. At this rate, Blendo could release a game that’s nothing but quick-time events and I’d still be on board from day one.
Inception is a dream heist movie that stops just short of being fantastic
Last night I saw Inception (working title: What Are We Going to Do With All This Money We Made From The Dark Knight?). Actually, that kind of undersells it — leaving the theater, I didn’t feel so much that I’d seen a movie, as I’d been beaten about the head and neck with a movie.
That’s not to say I didn’t like it; I thought it was very good and engaging. It’s just very dense. You get the sense that they wanted to make damn sure everybody in the audience got his ten bucks worth, so they crammed eight different movies into one. At least one scene in the movie has a character asking, “Why should I have to choose” between fantasy and reality. Inception asks why should it have to choose just one type of movie.
At its core, it’s a high-concept heist movie, like The Prestige. On top of an already complicated heist movie, it adds spy thriller, murder mystery, psychological drama, fantasy, and the Weapon of Choice video. That means a ton of exposition — the first hour at least is spent explaining the rules of “dream-sharing” (and then later explaining why those rules are now broken). I’d heard about the premise going in, so I was watching carefully from the beginning to make sure I could follow what was a dream and what wasn’t. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered, since the movie goes to incredible lengths to make sure everyone’s clear on what’s going on.
It’s remarkable that it succeeds, considering how much is going on, but in the end that over-explanation is my biggest problem with Inception. Almost all of the imagination and spectacle is undercut by a character commenting on and explaining what’s happening. The most egregious example: fairly early on, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is explaining to Ellen Page’s character how to build M.C. Escher-like loops into a dream world to create paradoxes. Later, during one of the many climaxes, this inevitably comes back at a crucial moment, Gordon-Levitt’s character looks at it, and says “Paradox!”
Obviously, he didn’t need to comment on it (at least without going all the way with it and shouting, “Now THAT’s what I call a PARADOX, bitch!”) But I’d say the movie should’ve gone even further: cut out the whole first scene introducing the concept, or at least mention it without showing it. Then at the crucial point of the action, show the impossible staircase. By this point, the audience has already bought in to the concept of a dream world, so it would’ve been a satisfying surprise to see something fantastic thrown in at an unexpected moment, without all that setup.
That same feeling of spectacle that stops just short of being mind-blowing is one that carries through the rest of the movie. Christopher Nolan’s built up a reputation for favoring practical effects instead of over-relying on CGI. Normally, I’m all for it — Avatar, the Harry Potter movies, and the Star Wars prequels all demonstrate what happens when your movie gets so far removed from reality that nothing is impressive anymore; it all just blends together as a big lump of featureless computer graphics. But with Inception, it means that you end up appreciating the movie on an intellectual level instead of having a pure gut response to it.
Technically, the movie’s flawless throughout, with none of the effects — even the CG ones — drawing attention to themselves as gimmicks. And there’s an extended (very extended) zero-gravity sequence in particular that’s pretty spectacular. But I spent most of the sequence watching it from three levels back: this is a scene with actors on a rotating set performing a choreographed fight to represent agents in a hotel fighting in a dream that’s inside another dream that’s taking place inside a van falling off a bridge. For a movie with this much fantastic stuff on screen, the genuine gut-level “Wow!” moments were few and far between.
Although I’ve done little but complain about the movie, I still think it’s justified to say that Inception is virtuoso filmmaking. It’s all meticulously plotted and planned out and edited, and even more impressive: it keeps up the pacing even over two and a half hours. But it still felt more clever than genuine to me, a little cold and calculated. (For the record, I’ve gotten the same feeling from all of Christopher Nolan’s movies, where I feel like I’ve appreciated them on an intellectual level more than actually enjoyed them. That even includes The Dark Knight, which I still say is his best movie, but I don’t like as much as everyone else seems to. So I could very definitely be in the minority).
Inception finally loosens up at the end, no longer answering questions but asking them, like “Does it really even matter what’s fantasy and what’s reality?” and leaving itself to an extremely well-done ambiguous ending. I just wish that there’d been more of that sense of ambiguity throughout.
Helsing’s Fire for the iPhone OS is a puzzle game with a clever mechanic and terrific presentation
I’ve been neglecting my site for iPhone OS recommendations, but I haven’t forgotten it. But I didn’t want to wait until I could fix it up before recommending a cool new game that, for me, perfectly encapsulates why the iPhone is such a genuinely exciting platform.
The game is Helsing’s Fire by developer Ratloop, published by Chillingo. It’s a puzzle game in which you destroy creatures of “The Shadow Blight” with a combination of Professor Helsing’s torch and his assistant Raffton’s tonics. The puzzle is positioning the torch so that your target creatures (and only your target creatures) are hit by the light of the torch, and then using the matching-colored tonic against them. It’s a simple, clever, and surprisingly engaging mechanic that I’ve never seen in a game before.
It’s a good thing the mechanic is so novel, because the puzzles themselves take a long time to get interesting. The entire first screen of the game is no challenge at all, and it takes a while for the game to start throwing new complications at you. In effect, the first 20 or so puzzles play more like a “software toy” than a puzzle game. But the puzzles are generated randomly, so you’re free to keep experimenting.
That sense of experimentation is the most interesting thing about the game, since it’s so rare for puzzle games. Typically in a puzzle-based game, you’re expected to think of a solution first, and then start interacting with the game to put the solution in motion. In Tetris, you find where the piece fits, then move it into place. In Bejeweled, you find the match, then click or tap on the screen to make the swap. And in an adventure game, you stop and think about what item works with what object, then try the combination to see if it works. It results in the player “switch modes” throughout, alternating between passive and active, and it can be a turn-off. On the other end of the scale, you’ve got physics-based games, where the developer just sets up a condition and lets you do whatever you can think of to hit on the right solution. That has its own set of problems, since to me it always feels like I’ve just interacted with a simulation, instead of interacting with the developer — there’s too much randomness involved to make me feel like I’ve accomplished anything.
I think that the torch in Helsing’s Fire does a great job of splitting the difference: you’re constantly moving the torch around, seeing how the light interacts with obstacles, actually playing the game. Not just staring at a screen waiting for inspiration to hit.
And even taking all of that into account, the puzzles aren’t even the best thing about Helsing’s Fire. The presentation is fantastic — you can tell that the developer’s a fan of Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy (and Edward Grey: Witchfinder), which earns it double plus extra points with me. It’s not just in the artwork, either, but in the tone of the whole game. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but isn’t filled with desperate attempts at humor, either. The dialogue’s clever and used sparingly, and the music carries the tone throughout, blending a contemporary-sounding track for the puzzles with a title-screen track that reminds me of a 16-bit Castlevania game.
And best of all: the victory screen for each puzzle has Helsing and Raffton giving each other a fist bump or high five, one of those completely gratuitous touches that can send a good game over the top.
According to the credits, only two people worked on the game, but you wouldn’t know from playing it. It’s got a professional level of polish to it while still feeling weird and novel enough to be an indie project. And it’s only a dollar, so there’s absolutely no reason not to recommend it. Even if you breeze through all the puzzles, you’ll be entertained while doing it.
Sam & Max is still happening! You can’t stop it!
To promote The Devil’s Playhouse, GamePro has been running a series of videos on the history of Sam & Max. Part 3 is up now, covering the period when Telltale picked up the license and started making the episodic series. Note: I am in the video, but not enough to cause drowsiness.
And episode four of the new season, Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, is going to be released next Tuesday, July 20. It answers all kinds of questions, like, “What’s with all the Sam clones at the end of episode three?” and “Who is the mysterious Mr. S that Stinky was talking to?” and “Who is the ominous Dr. Norrington?” and “How many of these things are they going to make, anyway?”
Travel don’ts for the solitary urbanite
It seemed reasonable enough: I had to be in Orlando for business, I just left my job and felt like I could use a vacation, and I like Walt Disney World. Love roller coasters, love Aerosmith, hello. I still stand behind my logic leading up to this decision.
Perfect logic or not, I can’t recommend it. It’s not even like I’ve never been to places inappropriate for the Lonely Planet treatment. Paris? Just hit the Louvre, take photos from the top of the Eiffel Tower, and skip the moonlight walks along the Seine. Venice? Just glare at the guys trying to sell you roses and go to the next museum. Disneyland? I can’t really recommend it, but they get enough annual passholders that you can make a go of it solo. But Disney World may be the most inhospitable place for the single guy outside of a Lamaze class.
It’s not as if the parks failed me somehow; the place is just plain designed for families or couples on their way to being families. And the result of going solo is that you end up at the Orlando airport going through what felt like every single side effect listed in ads for Abilify.
But hey, Disney World! I’ve been at least thirty times and I still see something new each time, and this trip was no different. One of the unexpected highlights was the “Gran Fiesta Tour” in the Mexico pavilion at Epcot, formerly “El Rio del Tiempo.” It’s still not an E-Ticket, but it’s got exactly the right touch and tone: still all the charm or the original ride but without feeling embarrassingly dated, and still a tourist promotion for Mexico but without feeling too dry. Plus they brought the characters back, which is something Epcot’s always needed, and they did it the cool way by using the Three Caballeros.
The Main Street Electrical Parade isn’t new, but it’s back, and it still does a great job of making me feel like a six year old again.
I finally got to play through all of the missions in the final version of the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure, and it’s pretty cool, and it seems to be pretty popular. It also gets you into parts of the pavilion you haven’t seen before. In the Japan pavilion, I found the other new-for-me thing, an exhibit called “Spirited Beasts.” It has a display devoted to different types of Obakemono (creatures of Japanese folklore) with representations from traditional art, toys and anime. And it’s the perfect kind of exhibit for Epcot: it teaches about Japanese folklore by making it relevant to the audience. I was very impressed.
Plus it was the first time I’d ever seen the hotel I stayed at, and they let you take a riverboat to Downtown Disney. And the only advantage to going alone: they’ve got single rider lines all over the place, so I got to ride Expedition Everest like five times in a row. That coaster gets better the more I ride it.
So I still recommend everybody take an extended trip to Disney World, just take a buddy. And deodorant.
Favorites from YouTube
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