Warobouros

THOUGHTS ON CALL OF DUTY: INFINITE WARFARE

Whoever decided to make Call of Duty into an annual franchise is a madman.

The most interesting thing is how Activision-- in conjunction with three different studios-- has persistantly forced themselves into making the simple art of murder into a new and fresh experience year after year. Considering the rivals they seem to have left in their wake (and the rivals that seem to struggle to compete year after year), it's amazing that we're still here, in the year of our Lord 2016 still talking about these dumb games. Plus, Osama bin Laden has been dead for years, so trying to tap into whatever anxiety college-age males have about society is also an interesting endeavor in amatuer psychiatry.

With that said, I am a madman, as well. I've played through every single one of these games since Modern Warfare in 2007 (in fact, it's the primary reason that I bought an X-Box 360). As often as I say "I think I'm done with these games," November rolls around every year and I find myself with a six pack of Kirin Ichibans staring at a Red Box.

So here we are again. I played through Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It's pretty good. Here are more thoughts about it-- Then again, maybe I'm not the guy to consult. After all, I'm the idiot that liked Ghosts.

In space there will be generic white dudes.

SO SAY WE ALL

I didn't think that Battlestar Galactica would be the direction Call of Duty would head in, but I'm glad they did. Because Battlestar Galactica is dope as hell.

Instead of ripping off Tom Clancy or the exploits of Richard Marchinko, this time around, they've decided that late 2000's sci-fi is the way to go. It's a good fit. Space is an appropriately dangerous and grim place. It's an environment where a pin-prick hole can kill you just as quick as automatic gunfire. But also there's both. There's no room to fuck around. . .  But also space is a really fun place to fuck around in. While BSG was never about the joy of duking it out in space, Infinite Warfare does convey the high-stakes thrills of pulling off something as impossible as not dying from literally everything at once. . . in space.

Unlike BSG, Infinite Warfare actually has a strong ending. A poignant one. Maybe too poignant. I haven't felt this way about the ending of an FPS since Medal of Honor-- Again, that is a distinction that nobody else has probably drawn about this game or any other. There is a grimness to Infinite Warfare that goes beyond the previous CoD games. Yeah, they've nuked you and shot you and shot you and blown you up and shot you again, but there is a diminishing returns to all of that. Infinite Warfare is different. Like BSG, the horror of war in space isn't set dressing, it is a thesis. It says, in a way that needs to be restated, emphatically, ever so often, that war, war is a real son of a bitch.

So say we all.

IS THAT APPLESEED?















Yeah, that's an Appleseed.

Good work, Infinity Ward.

Good work, Ethan.

Anyways, I mention this because the art design of these games has been all over the place. Specifically, Treyarch and their Black Ops series (especially II and III) seem to have all of the wit of a mid-90's CGI football commercial. Everything is all bulk and pads. The few robots that they had in BlOps II and III were ugly, boxy messes in the same vein (personally, I thought the robots in BlOps II looked like the juggernauts from the Warhammer universe, but without being some kind of hell-rhino, which, arguably, is the entire appeal of the Warhammer juggernauts).

Even the knives are needlessly complicated. Just look at how dumb these things look.

Who decided to complicate what knives look like?

I mean, besides the bad guy from Cobra.

Also, how come nobody had fucking sleeves in Black Ops II? Ugh . . .

Infinite Warfare* is a break away from that. They went whole hog into the future and they designed a world that both makes sense on an aesthetic level and makes sense on a mythological level. It's a consummate world that looks really neat. It's a world that fits in more alongside something like Deus Ex than it does Modern Warfare.

I'm also glad that I get to talk about Appleseed in public.

Next up: My opinions about Battle Angel Alita.

GHOSTS OF GHOSTS

As I said earlier: I was the guy that liked Ghosts. If anybody ever asks you "What kind of an asshole liked that game" you can tell them "It was James Kislingbury. It was him. Let's go stop him."

I liked it. But, again, see above: I'm a madman. But, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out (I mean, you've come this far)--

There are two main things that I liked about Ghosts. The first is that it took place in Southern California and the American West.

Maybe it's a masochistic kind of narcissism, but it's cool to fight a bunch of enemy militia members in a location that's less than a mile from my work. It's also nice to see Santa Monica get blown up, because fuck Santa Monica. Also, that game had a dog. You had to drag that dog to a medevac. I loved that little guy.

What's interesting is that it presaged the direction that first person shooters. Games have moved on from the "modern warfare" end of things.  The market has been saturated for a good ten years and groups like ISIS are too real to have fun with (and, again, we shot UBL years ago and it was awesome). Less successful imitators like Spec Ops: The Line and the Medal of Honor reboot have also probably pushed developers into safer markets.

So, they've gone in two directions: The Future (see Titanfall 1 and 2, Destiny, DOOM) or The Past (Battlefield One, Verdun, Wolfenstein: The New Order) or both at the same time (see: Black Ops II). This isn't a perfect analysis, but you see my point?

Then there was Ghosts. Ghosts came out on current gen and previous gen systems. It was split. So were its themes. It couldn't break away from the series' previous trappings, having neither been futuristic enough or stripped down enough to really matter. It was a game that

Infinite Warfare completes this loop. We're finally in the future. Black Ops II and III didn't quite do it and Ghosts was too trapped in the past. Now here we are: Space ships. Space marines. Orks. Mars. Lasers. You know, the future-ass future. And it's kind of neat.

THE TITLE

It's a really good title**.

Fight me.

SHOOTING PEOPLE IS FUN

Yeah, some ten years since the first Call of Duty, it's still fun to murder fools over the internet. It's also fun to murder robots. And robots pretending to be people. And people pretending to be robots. . . You get the picture. As a shooter, Infinite Warfare comes through and delivers the kind of top notch polish and shine that you expect out of a Call of Duty. While that sounds like damning with faint praise, consider how tight Modern Warfare felt when it first came out. It still feels good.

As much as I love Titanfall 2 (which is my go-to for multiplayer this season), that's a game that just doesn't quite have the fine sheen that this game does. Which doesn't so much ruin one game or make the other as it does make me appreciate just how much money Activision poured into this game. It's there. It looks like it. It feels like it.

If nothing else, the economics of Infinite Warfare should leave an impression.

SO, WHAT ELSE?

What I think is going to be fun is seeing what the hell they're going to do with the next installment (which falls on Treyarch this time around). It isn't like they can go even farther (further?) into the future and any half-steps at this point better be well thought out, because nobody is going to go back to the farm after they've done a double-jump into a wall run.

Personally, I'm hoping for some kind of historical remix weirdness. Sending soldiers through quantum tunnels to fight in alternate historical time lines with modern weapons. Like William Gibson's The Peripheral, but vastly dumber. Or go back to Nam. I'd be okay with that. Or cyberpunk. You know, like those other William Gibson novels. All of this works. I'll even take a game with a difference engine in it.

Gimme that dumb stuff, Treyarch. I know you can do it.

Give me Space Reznov. And, for that matter, Infinity Ward needs to bring back Captain Price. Space Price. Thawed out to beat up the future, because they don't build MEN like they used to. Or mustaches. The aliens took our mustaches and we need 'em back Price.

At least somebody give me that dog from Ghosts back. Can't be that hard. . .

James Kislingbury writes, draws, and makes podcasts. He also hates updating his log line. That's what this is, right? Aw, who cares?

*The more I think about it, the more I realize how cool of a game Advance Warfare was. That game did a lot of really neat things that I don't think people appreciated. At least not that I noticed. I tend to stay off of the internet, because it's a freaking full-time nightmare zone.

**I mean, yeah, it's kind of a "Fuck you" to Sledgehammer and Advance Warfare, but what are you going to do? Infinity Ward was there first and it's a really good title.

So, You've Made a Huge Mistake.

I decided to enter into the glorious future that has been promised. I bought a Playstation for.

I made a big, dumb mistake: I bought a Playstation 4.

God help me, I bought a Playstation 4.

Now, now, let me explain myself. There's a confluence of factors involved. First of all, I had some Amazon gift points burning a hole in my pocket from an unrelated charge that I had to make on my credit charge. Secondly, The Last of Us is a game that I desperately wanted to play that I never had the chance to (and it was just re-released on the PS4). Then there's Destiny, a game with so much money and hype behind it, that it actually generates its own gravitational field. That seems like a good way to avoid my responsibilities (and in space!). Lastly, buying a Playstation 4 is but one mistake in a long line of mistakes. It's not so much a silly decision as it is a pathological one.

Now that it's all said and done and hooked up, you know what impresses me most so far about this whole thing?

The menus.

I bet this thing is just bleeding radiation.

They're so cool. They're slick. They're easy to use. They're all right there in front of you. They aren't hidden behind “blades” and you don't have to swipe through nine of them to get to what you want. Mot importantly, they move at the speed of a button press. What a concept! It's nice and it's a little thing like this that makes me think that I made the right choice. I mean, it has to be. It just has to be.

Having said that, I can't tell if it's an indictment of the system's features (and lack there of) or if it's an example of how I'm allowing the littler, dumber things in life to bring me pleasure. I mean, two years ago, before my retail job completely ground my dreams into dust, all of the little things in life were just that: Little things.

It's finding a dime or seeing that the show you like has a new season on Netflix. It's finding out that your bank account has twenty more bucks than you thought it did. It's a baby or a puppy showing up at work. Two years ago I wouldn't have batted an eye at these things. But now? That's the only thing that's keeping me going.

The big things don't quite cut it. They often come with big disappointments. You invested all of this time, money, and effort and then you find out that its defective. Or its slow. Or that one feature you were really looking forward to is busted as hell. And all of this knowledge cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of five-hundred dollars. Free things, the little, every day things that you find around your life do not do this to you. They can't.

And today? Today I saw a French bulldog puppy and I petted it and it was the best day I've had in a long, long time. I petted the hell out of that dog.

I realize that's more or less the size of the future: It's a whole lot of little things, adding up to you eventually dying.

That's all this sort of thing ever is. It's putting a brand new telephone in your house. It's trying out this gramophone thing. It's making sex movies with your home 8mm. It's playing the song you want in the order you want to listen to them in! It's the incremental additions that actually make up the future. Rarely ever is it some revelation that changes everything. And that revelation certainly isn't going to be a box of plastic that turns mathematics into distraction (because you are still going to die).

Behold, puny fleshbags! The future!

Yet, it's neat to have something new in your life. The Playstation 4 is neat, and as dumb as video games are, as pointless as killing digital zombies is, as regressive as screaming at a TV because I was “killed” by an illiterate 12 year old, as little as this progresses me in either a professional or financial way, it's still kind of neat. Just a little bit.

It's grabbing the future by the horns because you can. It's seeing that as expensive and as slick as it all is, behind it is the same, comforting, familiar ideas that you've always seen. It plays movies. It plays games. It runs out of batteries. It can't connect to the internet. It breaks. It impresses your nephew. It's the future. It's here, it's kind of fun, and it isn't scary at all. And that's kind of neat.

Right?

Well, for four hundred bucks it damn well better be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get beaten up by some aliens for a couple of hours because I'm working towards getting a new scarf.

ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH TO RAUSE!?

Have you ever seen The Salton Sea? There's a sequence in it-- this sequence-- that basically sums up the entire experience of Luftrausers.

As a game, it's a madhouse cocktail of Hotline Miami and your best memories of Raiden II. It's everything a videogame should be and shouldn't be. It's fun, addictive, and I walk away from it feeling that my brain is just a little more fried than it should be. It isn't the diversion that Papers, Please or even FTL is.

I'm seeing it when I close my eyes. Just dozens of pixelated planes flying back and forth shooting bullets bigger than their entire ship. I can't remember the last time that I've experienced that from a videogame before. It was maybe with Tetris, but probably with Hotline Miami. Which, you know, makes sense.

That game was like some kind of crack. But not Luftrausers, though. That's pure lady crystal, through and through.

Oh God, I need to rause right now.

Bottom of the World

When Bioshock Infinite came out there was quite a lot of talk. There was praise, there was debate, and there was also a lot of misplaced umbrage. It was a game worth considering, though, for many reasons. It was big, beautiful, and it was trying, if not succeeding, at a lot of very big, very weird ideas. Burial at Sea: Episode 1 will give birth to no such debate.

On the whole Burial at Sea is. . . alright. It's Rapture, it's vigors plasmids, it's Elizabeth and Booker on a new adventure (but not really), and Sandor Cohen shows up, and it isn't much else than that. By featuring these characters and featuring this world 2K has created a world that seems to say "Hey, here I am!" and not much else. Good for it. After the explanation of the title "Infinite" to go back to a city (albeit a well loved city) is anti-climatic to say the least.


While this incarnation of the Elizabeth/Booker/Comstock relationship has a particularly brutal origin, it fails to do anything with it (again: this only gets worse when you consider where our heroes were left at the end of Infinite). By the time the big twists of Episode 1 are are made, the game is over and you're left with a distinct sense of confusion. Why is Elizabeth here? Why is she kind of a bitch all of the sudden? Where are the twins in all this? Why is this so by the numbers?

It happened. It's over. The end. See you next time! (Because you know you are going to play the next episode and that's one of the more frustrating things about this DLC. They've got you and you know it.)

Though, the game isn't an abject failure. The combat is still enjoyable (and with samurai warriors, for some reason) and Rapture, as overplayed as it might be, is still a beautiful, amazing place. One side-quest even hints at the highs experienced in Infinite. In this quest, you're made to follow a man who, after designing the department store/prison that the action takes place in for Andrew Ryan, was then abandoned by his employer to the men he sought to condemn. It's the old Bioshock chestnut of "It wasn't supposed to be like this!" Yet, like Rapture's art deco designs and Big Daddies, it's an old tune that works. And it works in this case because that trope is played well all the way to its conclusion, which reminded me of one of the more tragic quests you would get in a Fallout game.

Of course, that mission comes to an end about half of the way through the main game, leaving you with three or four other storylines that don't seem to go anywhere (or do they? And do I care?).

Burial at Sea: Episode 1 fails to deliver either the highs or the lows that the game proper delivered when it first came out. It even fails to match the quality of Bioshock 2's much lauded DLC, Minerva's Den. As much as Minerva's Den played and looked like an expansion pack of a better game, it had a complete story that was worth seeing to the end. They tried to do something with this second-tier sequel and they succeeded. In this case, what we have is  an episode that doesn't work because it failed to reach for something bigger, weirder, bolder. It just aimed for the expected and it hit it. What were are given instead is something that is acceptable, pallatable. And I suppose that isn't the worst thing in the world.



(Also, what's the proper title for this DLC? Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea: Episode 1?)

Too Tired to Die: Road Trip Journal Part II

Right now I'm missing E3* and watching a reality TV show about a gay couple looking to buy a silo. I don't know if this me hitting rock bottom or if this is the moment that my entire life has been leading up to.

Every single person in every single bar is the exact same guy. It's like they minted them sometime in the late fifties and they accidentally broke out of their government-sponsored matrix. I don't know what it is about living in a dead-end town in the middle of nowhere interesting that just makes you want to hang out a bar a one in the afternoon. . .Oh, wait, I see it. Good work, Idaho townies.

Sorry if this is a lackluster blog entry. There's just something about sitting in a car for ten hours that makes me feel like I just got over a bought of malaria. It's nine at night and it's still light out and I want to pass right the fuck out.

I feel like I need to take a nap before I go to sleep. It's terrible.

Maybe I can score some benzadrine. This is meth country, right, so I can probably get some sweet trucker speed for a song. Maybe the cop who owns this motel will know.

We did another five hundred miles today. Tomorrow we drive up along Idaho's border with Oregon and then head east towards Montana. Hopefully my body will have adjusted to its vigorous regime of sitting down and reading Ledfeather.

Anyways, if you don't hear back from me make sure they bury me in real America.

*I did manage to notice that the next Metal Gear has STEALTH HORSE ACTION. That was a nice surprise.

Skull bashingly good!

Hotline Miami is a videogame as much as it is an interpretation of what a fight between the spirit animals of Gaspar Noe and Nicholas Winding-Refn and it plays somewhere between the original Grand Theft Auto, Dead Souls, and maybe a little bit of Condemned thrown in to boot. It's an incredible game at what I'm saying. At ten dollars, it also might be one of the best games I've played in a long time-- at the least it is one of the best values I've had in a long time.

It's simple, it's brutal, it's quick and to the point and it's this boiled down intensity that makes it work and it is what makes it work despite being a game that is built entirely around trial and error. Having sweated my ass off trying to figure out algebra for much of my youth I realize just how terrible trial and error can be, so it's amazing that this game is as fun and as addicting as it is. It also manages to give you a feeling like you've actually got the game beat and not just that you played until the end.

The aesthetics remind me of being somewhere between this washed out faux-VHS look that we've been seeing lately (I'll blame Drive, it's also made its way into things as varied as Max Payne 3 and this interview with Emma Stone in Interview magazine) if it was filtered through the kinds of custom made playsets we all used to make with Legos. It's looks have been mentioned in every single little review I've seen of it, but it's something worth agreeing with, because it is the core to understanding this game. It's hard to say it without both sounding and feeling like a pretentious asshole, but the visuals of Hotline Miami are the game.



There is nothing superfluous to it and it's this strict aesthetic style that makes something as simple as a smoking cigarette or a pool or blood or a hot-wired door frame seem so cool. The look is as stripped down and no nonsense as the game play. If you want to rap about game play not jibbing with the rest of the world, Hotline Miami is not that game. The only thing that thing resembling gilding is the soundtrack and that is as integral to the tone of the game as the spurts of blood and globs of brain flying everywhere-- but that's what I mean by nothing being pointless.

Hotline Miami is a game that seems to achieve everything it set out to do. From the through back visuals to the wonderful soundtrack to the gameplay, it is a game that wastes very little effort, even though it must have taken quite a bit to make something as well formed as this is.I really, really like it.

Play it.

Max Payne: The Post-Modern Shootmetheus

Max Payne 3 is a mighty fine video game. It's been a long damn while since the last installment of this series has come out

This entry really isn't going to be about that. It's really just going to be about things that it reminds me of. I'm going to glaze over things I learned in my film classes and I won't nearly have an appropriate amount of references. If that sounds fun, then let's go! Let's do it!




 Lost in a Payne Hole--

This game triggered something deep inside of me. It is something that I can't even put exact words to. I can only ramble. . . but rambling has taken me this far, so I figure I'll just figure out where it wants to take me. With a lot of things ans with this game in particular, it's practically subconscious and I can testify to this because it has made me pine for Michael Mann films, which are films that I have complained about again and again ad nauseam. It's also made me think of a lot of other nonsense.

If that's what you want to read about, then come along! Seriously! Last warning!

What it's made me think about, though, are mostly subjects that are just on the periphery of the game. Everything from the storyline to the tone to the setting to the game play reminds of me a heap of movies an TV shows (and those things in turn remind me of other TV shows and movies). Most specifically Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days (at least in some ways, but I'll get to that in a moment.).

The Max Payne series has always been over the top and self-aware. It's a hard-boiled game series that knows it's in a hard-boiled game series. Not only did the creators know that its audience had their heads chockful of Sin City and Pulp Fiction (not hard-boiled, but you know what I mean), but Max did too. Referencing past works is in the DNA of Max Payne. It's why he moves in slow motion and holds two pistols at once and talks in overwrought metaphors.

While the third installment has been made by a new team and it has stripped away its old comic book noir sensibilities, it's now published by Rockstar, a company that has never felt shame over wearing its influences on its sleeves. If anything, in this case, they want you to remember the things that inspired it.

This game picks off years after the last installment in the series came out and, predictably, the years of murder, mayhem, and drug abuse has not done Max any favors. He's a wash-out and a self-hating addict with a very narrow set of professional skills. In short Payne is exactly the sort of character that I love best.



(Why couldn't they just make that game?)

The Case of Lynch V. Payne--

What Max Payne 3 is what Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days should have been. Where Kane and Lynch 2 is a monochromatic, senseless game with poor controls and almost no plot to speak of, Max Payne 3 has great art design, an entertaining combat system, and a plot that is about as edifying, but much better written (CONTRADICTION) it has greater depths than "LET'S GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!"

Despite being a man of no little education, I like  Kane and Lynch 2. I know I'm alone on this and I know that I shouldn't. It's a complete mess.  From top to bottom it is an unworthy game. Its a shooter where shooting barely works. It takes place in an exotic location that you can't see. Calling the main characters two-dimensional would be an insult to cardboard and worst yet its last boss is literally a dog.

Let me repeat: THE LAST BOSS IS A SINGLE (ONE) DOG.

Payne's boss is a much more impressive encounter, even though both of them take place on an airport. If I had to put my finger on what differentiates these games is that Max Payne 3 is Jack Bauer and Kane and Lynch 2 is just Jack Bauer torturing people.

Don't like these guys? Tough shit.

And yet, I still really like the stupid game.

I cannot think of a game as unapologetic and brutal as that game. One of its trailers revolves around the titular characters running naked from police attack dogs. One of the men is attacked and his partner picks up a plastic fast food tray and starts hitting the dog. Top that off with the "Bowling for Shangai" video, I realized that this is a game that I want to play (plus the demo wasn't terrible. It had potential and some of the guns had the kind of kick that guns in a gritty game like this should have. Unfortunately the finished game is not the demo).

Where it goes a bit pear-shaped is that it's entire aesthetic seems to have been crafted to have been off-putting. From the washed-out You Tube-esque digital grain to the nihilistic storyline and its scumbag main characters seems to have been crafted to get people to not want to play it. Well, IO Interactive succeeded. They wanted to make a game that is as unpleasant and mean as the world the titular wallows in and they hit the bullseye. Good for them, I guess. But maybe they should've wrapped a better game around that whole concept.

Max on Fire--



But general harshness isn't the main thing Max Payne 3 (or the games before it, really) shares with Dog Days.Max Payne 3's non-gameplay sequences is complete with digital distortion and neon blow-outs and every other kind of 21st century film making technique. It's a technique they both use in various ways and to various effects. It's not a direct stylistic aping and it might be that if they both weren't crime-centric third-person shooters I wouldn't have ever thought of it, but here we are.

The one piece of art that's most similar to the third Max Payne is the movie Man on Fire, which not only lends a big, bloody chunk of its plot, but also its frenetic on-screen aesthetics. It's worth noting that Man on Fire is also the only Tony Scott movie where Tony Scott's recent manic style isn't completely terrible.

But it isn't just the odd crime game or Tony Scott movie that's been doing this sort of thing, I've also seen it appear most recently in the second episode of the second season-- 'scuse me, guv, the second series-- of Sherlock. The You Tube era's version of distortion has supplanted my generation's TV snow. I doubt that kids today even know what the hell snow is (And I know they do not appreciate the pleasure of scrambled pornography. We lucky few). In that case I think that was specifically a decision to be clever, but it's Sherlock-- That whole show is a showcase for clever.

In most of these cases, they aren't They aren't statements, they just look cool.And art is in a position where instead of making things look better and have higher fidelity, we're trying to find ways to make things look wonky. In fact, new technology seems to exist specifically to make things look less like regular ol' reality.

Without getting into stuff like indy lo-fi bands or vinyl collecting, I think the best example-- and really the most fun example-- is the newest Star Trek movie.

To Boldly Mess Things Up For a Lot of Money Like Nobody Has Before--

Well, at least the trailer didn't have any Inception sounds.

There probably isn't a single shot in Star Trek that doesn't have some kind of computer effect in it. Not including the green screen, even, what was shot on the set is not the movie that we saw and enjoyed. That movie wasn't made until it was built months later. It's funny, because the Star Trek is a movie that was never actually shot. (I guess in the same way that people say that the Gulf War wasn't ever actually fought).

Fifty years ago a lens flare was considering a flaw in filming. A lens flare is a result of the light of the Sun (or a similarly bright projection like a lamp or a key light) hitting the back of the film stock and projecting back into the camera. Film isn't supposed to work that way and traditionally that was a fuck up. It meant that you filmed a scene poorly, after all, nobody wanted to watch a scene with Humphrey Bogart with these optical spirits dancing around the camera. In still photography that also meant that you would pray to whatever saint was relevant that you had images on your test strip to cover you.

It wasn't until Lawrence of Arabia came around that lens flare actually became an artistic technique. That film had long and important sequences about the Sun and about the heat of it and these flaws in the filming because the means to show the audience just how terrible this Arabian sun was-- After all, we'd never seen a sun so bad before that it distorted a camera, had we?

And that was then. Lawrence of Arabia is considered one of the best films of all time and with reason, so it's funny to see the reboot of Star Trek take that lesson and apply it, not as a reference to Lawrence of Arabia, but because lens flare means the future. It's made a full circle. It isn't an error, it isn't even really an artistic choice, it's ubiquitous.

(I guess it's also worth considering that color opens up the film to a lot more techniques like that, where as in black and white, which is binary by definition, it is a far more glaring flaw.)

There are plenty of other problems that come up with digital filming, but every single piece of lens flare that appears in JJ Abrams' Star Trek has been artificially placed there. What you have then is a film that has spent millions of dollars to artificially mar a film that would have been a disaster only a generation or so ago. What was once a flaw has turned into a stylistic choice and now has just become standard operating procedure. I wonder what David Lean would think.

Hey, Larry? That's a fire hazard, buddy.

Grain Pain and Payne Grain--

And to bring it back to video games this sort of absurdity is only heightened. Digital distortion is now just an aesthetic choice as much as anything. For whatever reason war games have globbed onto this style, as well, because nothing says visceral like static and buzzing noises (and a vaguely disguised Terminator theme, apparently).

(Ghost Recon: Future Soldier also has supertext and words projected onto the world in the same way that Splinter Cell: Conviction, but, again, where Max Payne uses it to get across the concept of grit, Ghost Recon does it because pop-up words means the future. So: More static to think about.)

And the list of games that use the same techniques as Max Payne 3 and Kane and Lynch 2 to get their tone across goes on and on.

Mass Effect 2 naturally had a false film grain effect on it, which naturally kicks it back to the kind of 70's and 80's science fiction films that it's a product of (Aliens, Silent Running, Outland, Enemy Mine). I guess that's another slight break between Alien and Prometheus, which is that one is super sharp and the other is a low-budget genre flick from the 1970's.

Resident Evil 5 allowed you to put multiple film grain effect over the game once you beat it (Since it's a horror game, I don't know why that isn't simply the default. I know it's an HD game, but come on, film grain is cool!). Silent Hill uses the same technique, as well, which is a case where I'd appreciate them taking it out, because, fuck, man, I couldn't even finish Silent Hill 2 I was so upset by it. Tone it down, Silent Hill 2, I just want to play you!

In science fiction seeing film grain makes you think of the future and in horror it's there to instill a sense of something being off (or, again, maybe you just want to reference Evil Dead 2 or something). With fake film grain you can have it all!

(And that isn't anything new either. I remember that the final shootout in Taxi Driver was purposely given a grainy look in order to tone down the brutality. Apparently it worked. Again, you have a director purposely making his film look worse, but in this case instead of it being for fun aesthetic reasons, Scorsese did it to get his movie and R-rating. The same goes for Kill Bill Vol.1. In that case Tarantino made the big sword fight black and white in order to tone down the gore. In both cases, I guess it worked.)

Then, there are video games that now have lens flare a la Star Trek and Lawrence of Arabia or whatever else, but, again, like there being no film to have grain there isn't any lens to have a flare. There isn't even a sun or light. It's all made up!

Putting Dog Days Down--

Alright. Back to Kane and Lynch 2-- Because I have to get this out somewhere--

"Here's looking at you, shitwad."

As dour and on-the-rocks as the whole of Max Payne 3 is, it does allow you to have a good feeling every three hours or so that doesn't involve shooting bad men in the face ten times.

I mean in in that it allows room for actual good guys and maybe lets some people to not be tortured to death. It's not much, but there is something more to this game than Dog Day's main statement on the human spirit than "We're all cocksucking scumbags or Chinese. Or dead." It's depressing.

Max Payne 3 has a discernible story arc as well as an incredible design, and what is more is that is plays like a good video game. There is something that is simple and appealing about diving at people whilst holding two guns that I just can't explain. It's just awesome. It doesn't work as well as it does in the first or second Max Payne, admittedly, but it is a much different kind of game.Thematically Max Payne 3 also works far better as a Michael Mann homage than does Dog Day's (the first game, Dead Men, has a whole level that apes the club scene in Collateral).

The visceral appeal of Mann's movies are that they revolve around men being experts at a sort of obscure art. Whether that be a behavioral psychologist, a thief, a frontiersman, another kind of thief, a cab driver, cops posing as thieves, or cops fighting thieves, he makes movies about men being men in very specific ways. I love that. And where this game goes its own way is that Max isn't a professional, he's a fuck up who has been cursed with having professional skills. His skill set is more a curse than a boon and you couldn't say that of somebody like Ali.

None of Mann's character's are cursed (except for in The Keep, but since when has The Keep ever counted for anything?). They execute until they cannot execute any more. Payne is a character who has to execute because he isn't much good at anything else, especially being alive. I like that. I like a down and out character and I especially like that being rammed into the digitally perfect styling of Michael Mann. As much as this game is indebted to Mann (in addition to Man on Fire and Elite Squad and, of course, John Woo) it is also shirking these associations and going its own way. It is being honest with its influences without being a copycat.

I also appreciate that Max Payne 3 had the good taste not to force America through another parkour sequence through a favela (see: The Incredible Hulk, Fast Five, and Modern Warfare 2). At least video games have made some progress with this thing.

To mangle a Joseph Campbell quote, he was once asked why what he studied and talked about mattered and he replied that it didn't matter. He then said that a dog is happy, but it doesn't know about anything that we care about or any of the things we study. But, he added, "It's a dog's life."

Which Brings Us To The End--

So, what's the fucking point? I don't know: If you're going to do something weird, make sure you do it well. I don't see a sense in mucking it up any further than that. I already used the term "post-modern" and that's unforgivable enough without me becoming an even bigger jerk.

I guess, in general, though, I like being reminded of good things. It's more than just that pleasure of recognizing something, which is the kind of thing that Dane Cook thrived off of, I just like seeing and knowing that the thing I like also likes other good things. Knowing that the Coen Brothers love Raymond Chandler makes me like them more and it makes me understand them more as artists. I also like seeing where something as simple and as generally invisible as intentionally grainy footage goes. That's fun to me. If it wasn't I wouldn't have become a media studies major.

Now, okay, I guess that's what makes me the jerk in this scenario

If you've got any input, please let me know. I won't assume that anyone will make it this far down this article, but it is always nice to hear from other people. That sort of thing keeps me sane. My friend Andy said some interesting things about my Prometheus post, so maybe I'll present my rebuttal when it comes out on DVD. I wish I had gotten back to him on that. Anyways, good on ya, I'm off to watch Body of Lies.

Anyways, apropos of very little, here's the best bit of dialogue in the movie Thief--



A FEW RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:
* I think it's pure laziness on the part of the Max Payne 3 writers that there's a gang called the Comando Sombra and nobody connects the dots and calls them "cocksuckers." Get it together, guys.

* While Kane and Lynch 2 is almost uniformly regarded as garbage by both the public and the critical community, the new Hitman looks pretty hot even with stupid shit like videos about killing battle nuns.

* I'll back away from falling any further down the reference hole, but you all should watch Elite Force: The Enemy Within, Mandala Bala, and Senna as soon as humanly possible. They are great, great films about Brazil for completely different reasons.

* Thinking about t now, I realize that Kane and Lynch 2 has one advantage over Max Payne's third outing which is that you can pick up gas canisters and fire extinguishers and chuck them as bombs. That's the kind of weaponization that I'd like to see more of in video games.

*Oh, you can also take human shields in Dog Days. I like that. You can't turn them into bombs though as in Gears of War 3, though.Two steps forward, one step back. . .

* Life imitates art. . . But in Spanish, not Portuguese.

* Here's a link to something better about this game.

* Also: This image kind of perfectly sums up the tone of Kane and Lynch 2.

* I love how many costume changes Max goes through in this game. His hair changes with just about every level, as does his clothing and his various wounds. It's great. It'sa big macho game of dress-up the psychopath. What's more is once you beat the game you can dress him up as Max from the first two games as well as the model from the ending, which includes Max in full-blown tourist wear right down to the flip flops.

* Not to bring up Prometheus again . . .again (again), but while looking for Lawrence of Arabia images, I remembered that movie was featured in Ridley Scott's sci-fi film after stumbling upon this blog.

* I could have totally used the term "mis en scene" to describe the various styles, tones, and aesthetics of these movies because, but I didn't. Because I care about you the reader.

* Also my next entry will be shorter and more coherent then this one so, as you may have guessed, it will be about Chinese history.

AW YEAH

I knew I should've bought it for the PC. I just knew it!

An Excercise in Music Choice

I don't care much in particular for the Assassin's Creed series, but I'll be damned if this video doesn't get me psyched to wreck Templar ass.

And all of this is more or less a result of the "300 Syndrome." That, of course, is the principle that a trailer, especially when backed with a killer song, can not only sell you the unsellable but supersede the work it is advertising as an enjoyable piece of art. You see this with Watchmen and Terminator: Salvation in particular. You simply cannot have in your heart no desire to see films sold this well to you. You want to see it. You want to fulfil the prophecy of this amazing song against these amazing visuals.

The problem is that cinema tends to come in at 90 minutes a pop, which is sixty minutes longer than even the most ambitious or indulgent music videos out there. A movie isn't a 90 minute long (or a three hour long) music video, much to the chagrin of morons like Zack Snider.

But it isn't quite because this game will probably be pretty good. At the very least they'll understand that slow motion doesn't a film make.

God I hate Zack Snyder.

Cinecult: In Which I Discuss Despicable Nerd Shit

I don't suppose you know or care who Uwe Boll is. In a way you're lucky, he's the world's worst director.

Way back when he first came onto the scene, I was a young, angry teenager who may or may not have considered himself a "gamer" and I hated Uwe Boll with the rest of them. He made most of his money and infamy making low-budget, hideous videogame adaptations. They're universally terrible and we hated him for treading on the sacred grounds of Alone in the Dark and Dungeon Siege.

Eventually, though, something changed. First off, people weren't even hating him for the right reasons. Most people, having no knowledge or understanding of tax laws or the German legal system started accusing him of being this Goldfinger-like genius who could manipulate tax breaks in his favor. In reality, he was just using a rather silly law-- one that's pretty common in Europe-- that basically subsidized his film. It was perfectly legal and rather mundane, but the internet hated him.

As time went on, I still hated the guy, but he kept on popping his head up and making movies. He must have known how much we all hated him, but he didn't seem to give a flying fuck about us (smart man), he just kept on filming movies.

Later he challenged his detractors to a boxing match. He gave them a chance to beat him up for all of the harm he's done to our precious non-culture. Many accepted. As a result, he knocked the shit out of critic after critic. A bunch of the victims complained that it wasn't fair, that he had been a boxer for years and they were just snarky movie critics. They knew all of that and yet they-- and others-- bitched about how he duped them.

A few years back he appeared at the Penny Arcade Expo-- a gaming convention centered around the eponymous webcomic-- and he appeared to talk about his movie. The entire time he was speaking, he was being booed. Such was the gaming community's hatred for the man. They weren't even going to let him testify before they condemned him to death. The kernel of respect I had for the man-- hack though he was-- was born on that day. He had the balls to stand in front of hundreds of cussing, angry, sweaty people and talk about art.

Eventually I stopped giving a fuck. He was a bad director. There's lots of them, but in a way I respect the fact that he's doing what he wants no matter how many people tell him to stop. And he's not raping children or anything, he's making shitty movies. That's hardly a capital offense. Through all this, though, he never stopped doing what he wanted to do-- which was not to cheat the German tax system.

I really like that interview. Yeah, he's an asshole and a hack, but he's doing what he wants. As a guy who wants to be a professional artist of sorts, I can respect that. Someone is always going to hate you for what you do, but the only real response you can have is to keep on moving forward.

Which is probably the most profound thing Uwe Boll has ever been involved in.

Here Comes a Reasonable Argument!

Prepare to get angry!

You angry yet?

Okay!

We're talking about vidjagames. Not too long ago Roger Ebert started a fire storm among the nerd community by saying that not only were videogames not art, but they could never be art. As a person who has played videogames from the age of five on and has studied art, I can say with some amount of authority-- however shaky it may be-- that the vidjagames ain't aren't. Will they never be art? I don't know. Short of taking the spice poison, I'll never see into the future. There's a pretty good chance they will be. Some day, but not today.

Anyways, here's something he said recently about growing old, art, and videogames:

I didn't want to play a video game. If I should dislike it, I already had a preview of the response awaiting me: I was too old, I was over the hill, I was too aged it "get it." That became the mantra: "Ebert doesn't get it." I disagreed with them about age, which I know more about than most of them, but I had some sympathy about the concept of not "getting it." There are many, many things I believe many members of our society don't "get," but I don't think they're too old or too young to "get" them, only differently evolved.

METAL GEAR?!

Even now, as I read Kafka, Kipling, and McCarthy and watch films like Lawrence of Arabia and Hiroshima, Mon Amor and Fitzcarraldo, I still come back to the low-brow, B-movie, pulp-action sensibilities of Metal Gear Solid as a reference to what I want my writing to look like.

Even though it veers into babel an wankery, I still marvel at the characters and scenarios that game series creates and then injects into a very real world, one that looks not unlike our own. It's a model I wish I was capable of-- minus the drunken staccato, for year long gaps, and bizarre digressions. At their core, the Metal Gear Solid series is fun and still manages to find the time and space to be philosophical. I love Call of Duty, but there isn't a single moments reflection or meditation on morality in that entire series.

If anything Metal Gear Solid is too smart for its own good-- a genius series trapped in a moron's medium.

I'm drawn to all of this because I'm an idiot, inexorably drawn to trash. But I guess there's worse things to be, right?

Right?