Wi-Philes

Watching Across the Universe on DVD was not on the top of my list of things to do recently. It wasn't even at the top of the list of movies I wanted to watch. As much as I love the Beatles, this movie just didn't seem like it'd be all that special, and there were so many other flicks to catch. No Country for Old Men. There Will Be Blood. Eastern Promises. My girlfriend (and I suspect many other guys' girlfriends), however, felt differently.

So, I watched it. I guess my biggest gripe with the movie is that it doesn't really work towards anything. The story is there, barely. The music is there, at times just to be there for the sake of it. I would think that the two should work together to push the story forward, but sometimes it's almost as if you're watching two different flicks here. Some songs (like Come Together, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite) are placed into the movie in ways that just make you question what the point of having them at all was, other than to just have them there or to create some crazy visual scene to fit them. Some songs may have been twisted in an interesting way, like the "I Want You" part of I Want You (She's So Heavy). But for every one of those, there's a part that seems twisted in a contrived and stupid way, like Let It Be playing on the backdrop of violence, or the "She's So Heavy" part of I Want You (She's So Heavy) with soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty.

Visually, the movie is nice, and that makes for some entertaining scenes (Strawberry Fields Forever comes to mind), but in the end it just reinforces the idea that the songs are too distant from each other. Maybe I don't know how musicals are supposed to work or something, but the movie ends up feeling like a bunch of music videos that are loosely connected to one another. I get this feeling from other musicals, too, but they seem to have a stronger bond between their numbers. Ultimately, Across the Universe feels too much like it is its parts rather than the sum of them.

When it comes to the actual music, surprisingly, I liked more of the covers that really had nothing to do with the story than the ones that did! Come Together and Mr. Kite, though pretty stupid within the context of the movie, were nice enough to listen to. I Want to Hold Your Hand was different. Helter Skelter did grate, however.

In the aftermath, the most surprising thing that happened was that the movie got my girlfriend (who actually ended up not thinking highly of it, either) more interested in listening through my catalog of original Beatles songs than she was before. It's been Beatlemania ever since. I guess if Across the Universe gets more people into the Beatles, I can not care as much about its mediocrity.

I just won't be watching it again.

In between work and school, it can be hard to find the time to play videogames sometimes. I've been trying to keep up with a play through Earthbound during this time (brilliant, by the way) and Professor Layton (pretty good, if strange) for the Nintendo DS. Since I am home for a week now and Earthbound has been left behind during this time, I've been playing a charming little game called Knytt.

In Knytt, you play as a little creature who's been abducted from his home by an alien spaceship, which happens to crash land on a foreign planet. The Knytt and the alien both survive, but the spaceship is in terrible shape. What do to? Why, find the pieces that will get it working again, of course!

That's about it when it comes to set-up and story, but Knytt is essentially about exploration and atmosphere. Sure, there are the parts you'll need in order to fly back home and finish the game, but collecting them almost feels secondary to taking in the game world, seeing all the sights and creatures, and discovering all the caverns and niches you can. The world of Knytt is vast and beautiful, with areas I won't be surprised to know that I'll probably never locate. The minimalist music and sound design, meanwhile, help in making you feel like the areas you travel through are really special.



Knytt is not a very difficult game. In fact, rarely will you come across creatures that can harm you, and even when you do, it's even rarer for those enemies to actively go after you. Most of the living things just seem to ignore you and go on with whatever they're doing. Falling into a pit doesn't kill you; it simply takes you deeper into the landscapes. When it comes to finding the ship parts, a beam of light can help point you in the general direction you need to head in, and the Knytt itself can climb pretty much anything it can reach and moves at such a brisk pace that it really helps keep what I feel is a rewarding experience from becoming a tiresome slog.

Some aspects of Knytt remind me of Shadow of the Colossus. The general outline of the story is laid out to you and then you're given free reign to explore a vast, giant world while searching. The beam of light. The quietness. More significantly, I like that both are essentially devoid of the trinkets that seem to bog down the exploration aspects of other games. Think about a game like Okami, which wants to reward players for every step they take and every small task they do. Titles like Knytt and Shadow stand in stark contrast to the idea of exploration for reward and seem to focus on exploration as reward itself.

Personally, I like the idea, though I can understand why others aren't as keen on it. Both can be well-done, I just think that lately "exploration for reward" has gone a bit off the deep end.

What I'd like to see more of in "exploration as reward," though, is an attempt to raise the level of interaction. Because that seems to be the big difference between these two ideas that I'm not even sure exist outside of my head. In Okami and Zelda, you are out in the world, actively manipulating parts of it. Blowing up walls, overturning rocks, and other things like that. In Knytt and Shadow of the Colossus, these aspects are there, but definitely not to the extent that they are in other adventure games. So, I think it'd be interesting to create a game built on the idea of exploration as reward that also allows you to interact with the environment in a way that we haven't been able to just yet. I'm not exactly sure what that would entail, but I think it's a game I'd like to try playing one day.

Anyway, I've gone on for a while now, so I'll start wrapping this up. I think Knytt is a pretty awesome game that nails what it wants to do, and I think you should try it out. I'm interested in what you guys think about both the game and exploration in gaming if you're still reading, so any comments about what you prefer or otherwise would be more than welcome.

The scene is set!

I used to play and finish every game I bought. It used to be something I liked saying about my game playing habits: that when I threw down some cash on a game I was going to at least get through to the end of it. I never even used to buy two games at the same time, and the one time I did I refused to touch Beyond Good and Evil until I had thoroughly dominated P.N.03. What will power I used to have!

These days, I don't have so much.

I'm not really sure what happened. All I know is that now I have a collection of unfinished titles ranging from games that I liked and want to go back and finish one day (like Devil May Cry 3 and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (the latter probably being my favorite platformer of the last generation!)) to games I know I‘m probably never going to touch again (like Final Fantasy X and Okami). Maybe I'm just not as interested as I used to be. Maybe I'm just buying too many games and not letting each one settle in. I think I've just become less patient with videogames in general, which I guess can be good or bad. Either way, right now it feels like there's no going back.

So what I've been itching to play more of these days is Electroplankton, which I've finally been able to experiment with. I can't finish Electroplankton even if I try to, but it's a pretty amazing piece of work. Playing makes me want to write something horribly pretentious about it, but I'll probably spare you all and not do that. I will say, though, that I like it because it's about enjoying the now. There's no save feature; you create sounds and together they form music and maybe you'll like it. And maybe you'll try to recreate that music again, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to. Perhaps you'll stumble onto a different arrangement that clicks, though, and you sit back and enjoy that.

What I also think is interesting is that Electroplankton is a videogame developed by a man who deals with things outside of videogames, and Nintendo's gotten a few of these guys to work with them: neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, whose involvement with Nintendo brought forth some pretty good brain games, writer Shigesato Itoi, whose Earthbound I've just recently begun to delve into and may very well be brilliant, and now with Electroplankton, media artist Toshio Iwai. I hope they keep up stuff like this in the future.


And now, an interlude!


Scurge Hive is a terrible name for a videogame. Exhibit A:

Christine1249: Have you played anything on the DS lately?
JrMammo: hmm
JrMammo: my roommate got scurge hive
Christine1249: Is he OK? Not feeling too good?
JrMammo: what
JrMammo: scurge hive is a videogame

Christine went on to say that Scurge Hive sounded like a disease. I gave a hearty laugh and thought she had a point.


The rousing finish!


Games like Dynasty Warriors bug the shit out of me. I will say right now that they bug the shit out of me because I don't get them. I don't see what there is to like about them. I mean, I get why people might like the idea of the whole thing, but really it's so goddamn boring I just don't know how people can make it through a couple of missions, much less entire games involving multiple characters.

Samurai Warriors 2 is a videogame published by Koei. It's a sequel to Samurai Warriors, which is basically another Koei game called Dynasty Warriors, but set in Japan. This is, apparently, enough to differentiate it and make it worth creating. In a past issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly in which they compiled "The Top 50 New IP's," a game called Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War, also from Koei, was described as Dynasty Warriors but in Europe, and the "cool factor" for it was that it was "not set in Asia." Is this for real? And this is the game listed above such titles as Blue Dragon, Contact, and Dead Rising? The mind boggles.

Samurai Warriors 2 is a game about running around areas that look like barf and hacking the attack button until you down countless armies of men. One of the combos I saw a friend of mine buy is executed by hitting the square button on the Playstation 2 controller about nine times in a row. I'm sitting there and I think, "This is what you're doing anyway!" He likes the game, though. So does his brother. They're both my roommates.

One day the two of them were playing the game cooperatively and I was starving. In the refrigerator we had a lot of nothing and a pack of hot dogs. I throw one into the oven, sit down and watch the two play. I ask how far they are and they mumble something that I can't recall. So, I watch. The two characters run around the screen slashing the crap out of anything that moved. Brian is not talking. Christian is not talking. I guess they're looking at the game map and just going where needed. Maybe. Minutes go by in silence, and eventually even my eyes are transfixed onto the television screen. Enemies attack in endless streams and they go down one by one; environments that never change drift by as fast as the enemies do, and I get lost in the pattern. Before I know it, the smell of burning thrusts me back into reality, and I realize my jaw has dropped a little. I wonder how long it's been like that, and dart into the kitchen where I turn off the oven.

The hot dog looks like charcoal. You burned my lunch, Koei. But I kind of get it now.


Anticlimactic ending!

Hello, my little pixies!

It's been a while, hasn‘t it? I hear some new consoles are being released soon. Still no sign of any Wii kiosks around here (which I find shocking), but the local Target had it's Playstation 3 display up. The employee in the electronics department seemed to be very excited about it, or maybe just crazy, as he'd unlock the display case and pressure anyone he saw looking around to lift the system. "It's like ten pounds!" he said to me as I watched my friend play the MotorStorm demo (which, by the way, looked pretty nice), then continued by saying "You've gotta lift it" until I wiped the perplexed look off of my face.

I lifted it. It's pretty heavy.

Meanwhile, the Wii is causing a ruckus on the internet thanks to a little game called Twilight Princess. Apparently, IGN only gave it a 9.5 and some guy at GameSpot trashed it with an 8.8. What a tool, right?

I'm still not sure what to expect from Twilight Princess myself. All I know is that I won't have to deal with those new-fangled Wii controls. Sure, there are some titles coming out for the Wii that I'd like to play, but nothing really leaps out at me except Zelda, and that's coming out for the GameCube anyway. I'm glad to hear the new controls seem to work pretty well, but paying fifty bucks for Twilight Princess is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than paying three hundred.

Plus I don't have three hundred bucks to spend on the system anyway, so I guess none of that other stuff really matters.

In the meantime, I've been playing through the original Legend of Zelda and Contact for the Nintendo DS. Here's something about each that I feel like mentioning:

Zelda: It makes you feel awesome, then kicks you in the junk.

This game is brutal. It's almost hard to imagine how modern adventure games turned into Okami after they started out with this. I've put twenty hours into Okami, have never died, and have been rewarded every step of the way for the tiniest of achievements with "treasures" such as items like Holy Bone S, furniture, tons of money, wooden bears, beads, more items, praise, and other things that I never even use, much less treasure. Do I really need to be given some kind of trinket for every step of exploration I take? Shouldn't I want to run around and bring the world back to life because it feels good and looks nice, not because I'm going to earn something I don't even care about?

With Zelda, I've made it through five dungeons and have died about forty times so far, lost forty rupees at once at least three times, and have been slammed with door repair charges way more than I'd like to be. I'm not saying games need to be like this; I just think it's an interesting difference. It's very hard to find secrets and new areas in Zelda, and when I do I feel awesome. Yet sometimes this game teases you so badly when you finally blow open that wall, feel cool about finding something hidden away, and go inside just to find a stupid old man grinning about the door you just blew open needing to be repaired, taking all your money, and running the hell away, never to return. And it's not like rupees are totally worthless in this game; they're hard to come by, not to mention that they also act as your arrows. I can't imagine many games today taking worthwhile things away from you when you go exploring.

I kind of like it, though.

Contact: It's a wild world!

So I've put a few hours into Contact, and it's pretty good. My roommate says it's "only" like 15-20 hours long. If so, I can easily see this game being up there with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga when it comes to RPG's I've actually enjoyed playing through to the end. I really hate the idea that RPG's need to be at least 40 hours or some crazy-high number like that, and I hate whichever title that started this trend. Just as bad is the notion that you've got to play twenty hours or so before the game picks up or before you decide it's not worth your time. That's total bullshit. These games have neither the gameplay nor the character development to justify the sorts of lengths we‘re seeing. I wish more of them would just do what they want to do and get it over with. They'd be much better off for it, in my opinion.

Anyway, all I really wanted to say was that I thought it was cool how enemies in the wilderness would attack other animals, and vice-versa. I was running through the forest in one area when I heard the sound of someone getting hit. Obviously I wasn't getting hurt, so it had to be something else. And that's when I noticed a blob enemy trying to kill a wild goat. I leaped into action and killed the blob. Then I killed the goat.

As you can see, Terry himself can attack and kill a lot of things. Enemies (of course), innocent animals, even innocent villagers! He can walk by wildlife, slaughter ‘em, and take their meat so he can cook it and stock up on recovery items. When I discovered this I went on a rampage, stocking up on wild game and various meats and cooking food. Then later on in this area, I was attacked by a man with a gun. I was starting to get low on health too, when, suddenly, a cow ran towards me and actually started helping me attack this enemy! I was shocked!

Eventually, we defeated this gun-toting maniac. Then I killed the cow and took its innards for sustenance.

Steven wasn't kidding when he said this was a lonely game.

This is a sloppily-put-together rant about a four-year-old game that, like most of the stuff in this blog, you probably won't finish reading.

I don't know much about Square-Enix; I'll be the first to admit that. I don't really know much about their games and I don't follow their release schedule with much interest, though I will say they're doing an amazing milk-job on Final Fantasy VII. However, I did buy Kingdom Hearts recently and I have to hand it to them: Tetsuya Nomura and Co. said all the right things and made all the right moves while slipping a little something in our drinks, because they had their way with us the moment we all spent our money to play this game.

Kingdom Hearts is stupid. At best, it is mediocre. How a publisher with a pedigree such as Square-Enix's can release something like this to critical acclaim and amazing reception should be unthinkable, and yet it's not altogether shocking. I see "Disney + Final Fantasy" and I think, "Game finished!" and apparently so did the people behind it, though they probably also heard a "Cha-Ching!" and saw a seizure-inducing amount of dollar bills flash before their eyes. How so? Well, for starters...

The battle system sucks. In the opening tutorial, the game teaches you how to play. It says, "Use X to attack." So I hit X a few times. Then it tells me, "Alright, you've got it!" Little did I know, I really did have it... this is the entire game so far. Well, I shouldn't say that. Sometimes I jump around a bit and hit X in mid-air. It may actually be a blessing that the combat isn't more sophisticated since:

The camera is atrocious. It's so low sometimes you can barely see what‘s in front of you. In battles it's even worse: spinning around all the time, getting caught, and overall just screwing you over every chance it gets. It's as if Square was so intent on showcasing the fact that you're running around with Disney characters that they forgot to make it, you know, functional. Magnifying the camera problem is the fact that:

The controls are horrible. Sora is so floaty and unresponsive that the most simple platforming challenges are a pain in the ass. Using the lock-on features in battle would seem to be a good idea because of the spinning camera, but unfortunately it's a crapshoot as to whether you'll even lock on to the enemy that's closest to you. I have no effective transition to my next complaint, so I'll just say it:

Building your Gummi Ship is mind-numbingly boring. I think most people agree with this, though. Your Gummi Ship basically looks like someone put a few Lego's together and called it a day, so who cares about building one anyway? It's so boring and unnecessarily complex that there's just no incentive to spend time on it, especially when:

Flying your Gummi Ship sucks. These flying sequences are like the ones in Star Fox except they‘re horrible. Sometimes I can just hold down the "shoot" button, not move the ship at all, and still make it through the obstacles with barely any damage taken. I can't even breathe a sigh of relief when I arrive at my destination because:

The level "design" might as well not exist. I don't even know if you can really call the various areas you visit "worlds," as they only consist of a few rooms you run back and forth through. They are, quite literally, boxes with different backgrounds. Sometimes the room is rectangular. Traverse City is virtually lifeless save for about three people at the entrance. When you fight in the Coliseum, and this is after you're told it'll be a giant spectacle where "a ton of heroes are supposed to show up," there's not a soul in the crowd. It's just empty, bland, and boring.

How do people enjoy running around these areas? Would anyone bother if these levels weren't in a game by Squaresoft or if they didn't represent licensed worlds that millions of people around the world remember fondly? When I consider that the game's objectives are just as bad as everything else, I find it hard to believe anyone would play past the second or third level.

I think Square knows that, though, and that's where the crossover comes in.

There's been a trend where many game critics never miss an opportunity to rag on RPG's from Japan, or if you're really hardcore, "JRPG's," for their cliche storylines and cookie-cutter characters. How Kingdom Hearts managed to sidestep this attack is interesting to me, but it‘s (sadly) probably just because of its crossover of famous characters. It's pretty much the same thing we've been seeing in RPG's since... forever? Kids looking out at the world, wondering what else is out there. "The darkness" is taking over. Sora is "the one... who will open the door." *Roll eyes dangerously*

It gets worse because Disney and Square characters come and go with no real purpose. Aerith tracks down Goofy and Donald to talk to them in some hotel room for three minutes before just disappearing. Squall and Yuffie show up to unite you with Donald and Goofy, and sometimes there are no intros because, hell, you probably know who the characters are anyway, right? Isn't that the whole point? That you already love these characters and worlds so much that it doesn't even matter how they're thrown together so long as they just are? There have been a few times where there's a slow, dramatic scene as a character is revealed or walks by, and I suspect this is when Square expects you to whip it out and get to work because, holy shit, Cloud Strife just fuckin' showed up to fight you in a level from Hercules, isn't that totally super awesome and surreal?!?! *Splooge pants violently*

This is how I suspect Kingdom Hearts keeps people playing, because I can't imagine why else anyone would subject themselves to one fetch quest after another, broken platforming, and mashing the X button thousands of times. Nothing stands out except for the fact that Square characters are walking around with Disney ones, and the game exploits this one feature mercilessly. Just like Nintendo knows they can get people to push that block or light that torch a million times over in Zelda because it's Zelda, Kingdom Hearts knows it can make you run around collecting "evidence" or "freeing gorillas," because goddammit people will want to see the next cool sequence where Tarzan meets Yuna and they have a threesome with Jane. And, for the most part, people did all this with a smile on their face. Meanwhile, Square-Enix and Disney can just relax, sit back in their chairs, and laugh gleefully because they know they've stuck it into the butt of every person who purchased this game... and everyone wants more.