The Fractal Hall Journal

Dead Space

Holy crap, is this game terrifying. And that’s just the intro. Sure, the creepy nursery rhyme theme is a little derivative but I think that’s something computer games are actually really good at. You take the really good bits from genre work (films mostly) and you squish it all together (see Halo, amongst many others). It’s not art, but it’s fun. And this game is packed full of blood-squirty dismembering fun.

The only possible hiccup is that like Condemned and Call of Cthulhu before it, it may be too scary to finish.

Why yes, I am a scaredy cat.

Fallout 3

Depending on what mood I’m in, I could well call Oblivion my favourite computer game. It’s certainly the game I’ve spent the most amount of hours on, by a hee-uge margin. I got it years ago, and because of the finding time thing, I still haven’t completed it. So I’m very much in the target market for a post-apocalyptic version.

Not spent loads of time on it yet because I really do want to finish Dead Space, but I should imagine a lot of ‘09 is going to spent on this one. And, hopefully, Elder Scrolls V in ‘10.

The Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire

I’ve been meaning to get this one for a while. The follow up to Deadly Genesis (reviewed here previously), and like the previous story an entertaining yarn. Brubaker’s an excellent writer, and very good at doing a Claremont-style story in the modern Marvel house style. I feel like I’m damning with faint praise, but that’s not the intention. To be honest, it’s nice to read a superhero comic that doesn’t irritate me on any level.

Lovecraft’s Haunt of Horror and Cthulhu Tales

Sorry, that last one got a bit catty.

A couple of Mythos comics were added to the haul this year, and although I haven’t had chance to read them yet I’ve skimmed through. The MAX title is the hardcover of Richard Corben’s straightforward Lovecraft adaptations, and looks gorgeous. The second is the first paperback collection of BOOM! Studio’s ongoing anothology title. BOOM! Haven’t made a single misstep yet with their Cthulhu titles, and I doubt they’re going to start here.

Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary edition

Really needs a post to itself. In short: brilliant, better than I remember it. Unfortunately the good bits were all left in Morrison’s original script, so this is the first version I’ve ever read that makes a damned bit of sense. A flawed masterpiece.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Late to the party on this one, as I’ve only just upgraded to a graphics card that can handle the game. I assume we’re all geeks here, and we’re all familiar with the Games Workshop property that is, perhaps, nerdness incarnate.

Let’s just say, if Fallout 3 doesn’t suck up all of my time, then Dawn of War will be getting the rest. Hoo boy, I hope you’re all ready for another dip in productivity. Damn shame I’m fucking awful at RTS games.

The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan

Britain’s best SF writer tackles fantasy. Half way through this, and it’s very good.

The Birthing House by Christopher Ransom

Picked up at random for being a haunted house book on the cheap at Asda. Last book I got from there was Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box, and that one was fantastic.

Again, only half way through it. Good points and bad points and I haven’t made my mind up about it yet, but it’s entertaining and it cost about three quid so I shouldn’t really complain either way.

That’s that faint praise thing again, isn’t it?

Anyway, turns out there’s a competition running in connection with the book, and the first prize is a weekend in that haunted hotel in Ludlow (Ludlow?) that’s been mentioned here before, more than once. The town’s obviously cornering the market in this kind of thing.

     Feed

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Krypto the Superdog. Always seemed a bit of a stupid concept, even when I was little, with the thought balloons and the powers and everything. I quite liked Ace the Bat-Hound though, so it wasn’t just an anti-Silver Age story thing.

I wasn’t keen on Krypto’s modern-age return, even though I think Jeph Loeb’s take was interesting (namely, that a dog with Superman’s powers would be an absolute disaster), but that’s mostly to do with the really shitty Return To Krypton storyline that was running at the time. And then I read Morrison’s All-Star issue with Krypto in it, and finally understood the concept.

I get that a lot with Morrison. Sometimes it takes a writer like him to make sense of otherwise crappy ideas. I mean, as Superman stories go I’m far more of a Golden Age fan than of the chubby Silver Ager, and I usually loathe the shoe horning of Sixties goofiness into more recent runs (like Return To Krypton, in fact), but All-Star really did make something brilliant out of something a bit crap.

It doesn’t take much, I find, to have my opinion changed on something. Usually, all the bits are there, it just takes a single key to unlock everything. Maybe not a key, maybe a lockpick. You know, like in Elder Scrolls, or Splinter Cell, when you’re in that mini-game that stands in for picking a door lock, where you kind of jiggle the right-hand stick until the tumblers slot into place, and you get that satisfying click-thunk that opens the door. It’s like that, but in real life.

When it comes to Krypto, all I needed was to see a young Superman playing catch with his dog, but on the moon. Just a boy and his pet, but on a huge, epic, Superman-type scale. Click goes the tumblers, and suddenly I understand the point of Krypto. Also, this Krypto cover is awesome, and I want it as a poster really badly.

It’s not just comics this happens with. More than once, there are songs I hear that I don’t quite understand until the lock gets picked. Like “Feathers”, a Coheed and Cambria single from the last album. At first, it seemed just like an alright kind of record, and I didn’t get why they chose it for a single release. Then I heard it live, and it was awesome, and it’s really one of the best tracks on an excellent album. Or maybe I’m just easily influenced. Or fickle, perhaps.

I’m not sure how I feel about how English literature is taught in schools, and I tend to think that it just didn’t quite suit me. I know a lot of people who really appreciate the things they learned in their Lit classes, and the tools it gave them to understand what they read. A conversation I had with a friend a while ago still sticks with me, because my mate was so glad she did To Kill A Mockingbird at GCSE as she wouldn’t have appreciated it otherwise. See, I couldn’t disagree more. It’s one of my favourite books, and analysing it in school would have killed it for me. Shit, there were books I used to like that I hated once we were done with them in the classroom.

The problem comes down to keys, or rather how we find the keys. English Lit just works for some people, but it didn’t for me. Take Shakespeare; now, there’s one writer who just cannot be appreciated from being pulled apart and scrutinised by a classroom full of bored thirteen year olds. Up until recently, as in last year, I still had no appreciation whatsoever of his work. Then a couple of things made the tumblers rattle over.

First of al, I read about a Canadian comedy drama called Slings & Arrows over on Siskoid’s blog (think it may have been this bit) that sounded interesting, despite being about The Bard. And it’s really good. Really well written, very funny. But more importantly, the main character (played by Paul Gross, who was Fraser in Due South) speaks so well about Hamlet, that I actually started to understand where the heck the play was coming from.

As an aside, this is how the real information revolution will work. Not from big changes and social phenomena, global trends that make everyone love particular brands, although that’s always going to happen, but from more people being able to connect with smaller things they would never have found otherwise. A short run Canadian comedy from a few years ago? I never, ever would have found out about that in any other way than in the haphazard mode things are distributed over the internet.

About the same time, I went to see an open-air Everyman production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at St Fagans, the Welsh folk museum. And it was hilarious, seriously funny, and I realised that Shakespeare’s work is almost completely reliant on the delivery of the actors. Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect. These things together picked the lock, and I understood the man’s writing far better than I ever had before. I watched the Ian McKellan Macbeth from the 70s, and was completely engrossed, even though the exact same thing had bored me to tears at school.

All that said, I doubt anything will make me want to read about Streaky the Super-Cat.

     Feed

A quick note on something I read about after posting yesterday’s entry, via a comment at io9 and confirmed by (I know, I know) Wikipedia. Michael Biehn was so pissed off at how Corporal Hicks got canned off-screen in the third Alien film that he asked for (and got) the same amount of money he was paid for Aliens to allow his likeness to be used in one scene. Ah, Alien³. Occasionally good, mostly disappointing film. Brilliant Sega Master System game. How frustrating is it that the studio refused to put the clips of David Fincher moaning about studio interference on set onto the Quadrilogy DVD? Unsurprising, maybe, but frustrating.

And now for something completely different.

I don’t know how other scribblers out there feel about it, but there’s a certain difference between blogging and, er, fictioning. I wouldn’t say working on one necessarily steals attention or focus from the other, not for me, anyway. But the former is a little easier than the other in certain ways.

When holding forth on a particular subject at the Journal, I find usually what happens is something will lodge in the brainpan, spin around for a bit, and then make itself known as a topic worth (for, as always, a given value of “worth”) expounding on. Usually Marvel or DC doing something annoying. Sometimes, toys. On one occasion, a packet of crisps.

After that, it’s just a matter of turning the tap on until the word count gets to something respectable. I don’t find I stop and start, and (it may be apparent) I don’t tend to analyse the process much. Just pure, untainted brain splurge. That said, somedays the tap dries up and there’s no restarting it, hence the occasional cat photo.

Fictioning, on the other hand, is all stop and start. Five hundred bloggy words take maybe a quarter of the time. I’m not hugely clear on why that is, but I suspect it’s the difference between the processing power taken up by commenting on a pre-imagined world (i.e. our own Earth Prime) utilising only my own perspective, and the processing power taken up by making shit up and sending in a handful of characters with separate perspectives to comment on it. I don’t think even first-person helps with that, because in that case you’re making shit up, sending in the characters, then recording the perspective of one character reacting to the actions of other characters based on their own perspectives of the shit being made up.

Video games, I believe, were created specifically as a fiction-prosthetic that allow us to get the fun experience end of things without taking up our important time with the boring nuts and bolts of having to create something first. This is why Playstation and Xbox are slowly killing the comics “industry” ’s ability to get anything out on time.

     Feed

The rest of this week’s posts will be a little different to usual, but before we get to them there’s something I wanted to mention here.

I don’t write about politics much on the Journal. The count in the column over there on the right tells me there’s 12 posts tagged under that heading, but even then they’re only broadly political and not really about any particular incident or headline. And that’s a deliberate decision on my part. Out in Meat Space you can’t shut me up about politics, certainly not after a couple of beers.

That’s reason one. I know what I get like. If the new Batman cartoon gets me all frothy about the brain, imagine what important things do to me. The Journal is meant to be an enjoyable diversion, for both myself and for you good folks out there. Losing my shit about the latest fuck-knows-what every single day would get pretty depressing pretty fast.

Reason two is that I’m acutely aware that not everything that makes it to your screens is the most thought-out, carefully-worded and insightful passage in the history of the language. Shocking, I know. Now, if I occasionally write something batshit crazy at four in the morning about toy robots, its actual influence on the rest of my life is negligable to say the least. For the moment, let’s put aside the ever-increasing likelihood of a hypothetical potential future employer googling me and then deciding that maybe the guy who gets all het up about the fate of the Tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park III isn’t the competent team-player they’re looking for. An ill-thought-out screed that you don’t really mean about a hot-button political issue, on the other hand, has the potential to seriously screw up your life. And I don’t need that pressure at four in the morning.

Does that mean I don’t think it’s important to have political views? Or to engage in political debate? Of course not. I don’t think a lot of the debate that happens online is always particularly useful, but that doesn’t mean it’s always unimportant. I just don’t really think that’s what the Journal’s for, and believe me if I thought there was something important that I just couldn’t shut up about, I’d bring it up.

Two things have seriously pissed me off recently. I’m not sure I’m able to articulate appropriately why they irritated me so much, but I don’t really want to let them slide without a remark.

The first I found out about via two posts by David Brothers over at 4thletter!, and was also covered in a post by Jonathan Bernhardt at Funnybook Babylon. I have nothing to add but a deep-felt conviction that there are times when the sheer fucking ignorance of my fellow human beings makes me long for the day when the Martians turn up and blow us all the fuck away.

And then the second was the recent rumour that Jake Gyllenhaal will soon be playing the Prince of Persia.

Wow. What great casting.

Perhaps they can black him up for the role. Perhaps he can put on a comedy Asian accent. Perhaps the production company is anticipating that there will be no kind of outcry from the country currently occupying the bit of the world historically known as Persia because they never ever fall out with the Americans, do they?

This is fucking insane. Who thinks this is a good idea? Does anyone not realise that a clue to the ethnicity of the main character is right there in the pissing title?

Bring on the Martian death rays, I say.

     Feed

Mortal Kombat vs. DC

As crazy as it sounds, of all the news to come out of the convention at the weekend this was the one I was most excited about, mostly because it was so unexpected. I had no idea there was another Mortal Kombat game in the pipeline, never mind a comic book crossover.

There’s not much to say about it at this point, but hell, I’ve only got one other post listed under “Games” over there in the right-hand column, looking all lonely. Even “Manga” has more entries.

Mortal Kombat is a fondly remembered childhood game, a remnant of a more innocent past where me and my friends would trade information on the best way to gruesomely dispatch opponents during the finishing move window at the end of a successful bout. I never really got the hang of Street Fighter, but I was always more of a Sega fan, so MK was my first choice. Like the rest of the world, I favoured the ninjas: Reptile from the sequel, Scorpion in the original. Ah, great times. The more recent entries in the franchise weren’t up to much according to the reviews, so I never bothered with them.

By the same token, while comic book computer games are usually utter pants, there have been some really good ones in the past ten years or so: X-Men Legends was good, and the Spider-Man 2 game was absolutely fantastic. So a great DC comics fighter would be awesome. So yeah, they’ve got me coming and going with this one. In fact, as long as it isn’t utterly unplayable there’s not much chance I’m not going to pick this up. I remember the Star Wars fighter (Masters of Teras-Kasi? Something like that) from years ago that most reviewers didn’t rate, but me and the posse (oh yeah, I had a posse. Believe it) lost hours on, just because we got to use a lightsabre and be Chewbacca.

Final Crisis

I wasn’t expecting to look forward to this at all, what with event fatigue and everything, and oh, I am conflicted. On one hand, I’ve lost all patience with DC obsessively crossing over every single title in their line with a frankly incomprehensible and (worse yet) fucking boring overarching plot. Never mind yet another Crisis.

But. But but but. Grant Morrison.

The interview with him over at Comic Book Resources last week utterly sold me on Batman RIP and this summer’s event, albeit with a few reservations. Obviously, Morrison is awesome and I check out damn near anything he writes, the epic scope of the DCU is never better than when he handles it, and the series promises (really really promises, honest this time) not to cross itself over to destruction. Heck, I’ve not got a huge interest in Darkseid or the Fourth World (one of these days I’ll get round to a post explaining why), and yet Morrison’s got me intrigued between the hints from 52 and the Mister Miracle section of Seven Soldiers.

The reservations: Will Morrison get micro-managed, especially if it looks like the series is already running late? Despite assurances, is it really going to be self-contained? If Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi are on form with their tie-ins (both were involved in the Sinestro Corps War, remember, the best crossovery thing for many a year and a brilliant story in its own right) then I won’t mind dropping some cash on them, but I’m not a huge Greg Rucka fan and I’m not getting his issues so I’m hoping nothing important happens in them, and by important I mean “necessary for enjoyment and understanding of the greater story arc”, not “someone dies horribly”. I recall the fun of DC 1,000,000 being curtailed because of some important points that happened in fucking Resurrection Man, of all titles.

Speaking of the death thing, once again a story is being driven by someone important dying, and seriously, I don’t give a shit. Really I don’t. Used way too many times to be anything other than a cliché, so I really hope Morrison knows this and is going to go somewhere interesting and surprising with it (same goes for Batman RIP, actually). And from the interview, that looks like what he’s got planned, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that he’s going to pull it off. I have faith.

     Feed

Didn’t realise until today, but this week marks six months of consistant blogging. So I’m celebrating. Thinking about it, as the comics industry thinks 25 issues are noteworthy I might start partying every three months.

Transformers fandom is the source of a lot of bewilderment among even the nerdiest adherents of comic shop culture. Part of it is a generational thing (in that if you didn’t grow up with the toys your stunted emotional development is likely focused elsewhere and I’m looking at you, sports fans), part of it is that robots don’t float everybody’s boat. Which is fair enough. I mean, I don’t have the first clue why superhero comics folk go nuts over monkeys, and I’m finding the announcement of Congorilla as a member of a new Justice League team somewhat underwhelming.

Speaking of which, at the Wizard World LA DCU panel writer James Robinson announced that “People are going to love this character by the time I’m done with him”. LXG aside, I rate Robinson highly as a writer, but he’ll have to pull off something pretty fucking special to make an Imperial era Kiplingesque white supremacist appealing to me.

Enough apes. I’m certain that the continuing popularity of the Transformers is due to Simon Furman’s writing. He’s an under-rated creator, and it’s difficult to impart how mind-blowing it was to read his stuff at a fairly early age. Because no one gave a crap about a toy licence, he was given huge scope to write whatever the hell he wanted. Sure, the toys were popular without him, but it was the epic, grand-scale vision he brought to the title that were used as the foundation of all subsequent iterations. A hell of a lot of his concepts have been used in not only the cartoons of the 90s and 00s, but the film itself. The hugely popular film, which wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for the unanticipated success of the Dreamwave revival, greatly influenced and bought in droves by fans of Furman (FoFs? Someone should make a badge. And a fanclub newsletter).

I think the reason for their popularity outside of Furman’s influence is their nature as not only both a toy vehicle and action figure (a two for one deal), but also a kind of puzzle. A way of rearranging and altering elements from one pattern into another that appeals to a mindset of construction and applied reasoning that I’d argue is related to the popularity of jigsaws, Lego and Nintendo Brain Training. Just look at the movie designs; graphic aesthetics were not the first box that needed to be ticked.

Michael Bay’s robots weren’t designed to be simplified or even elegant (compare to the more organic and trimmed down look of Transformers Animated, or even The Spectacular Spider-Man). They were designed from an engineer’s perspective, the emphasis being put on figuring out how one element can be splintered then moved and rotated into a different configuration. The robots are all huge puzzle boxes, and although the busy designs have been rightfully criticised as over-complex and confusing the intricacy of their creation nevertheless impresses.

And that concludes today’s earnest analysis of extra-long product advertisements.

     Feed

As Halo 3 has been released fairly recently, I thought I’d post my thoughts on, er, pretty much every other first person shooter instead.

Perhaps my main claim to nerdhood (at least, non-comic related nerdhood) is the summer I spent as a teenager playing almost nothing but Doom. The weird snorting, crunching noises the demons made and the distinctive clunk-swishes of the doors opening have actually been imprinted on my parents’ memories. Damn, I played that game a lot.

It was the first FPS I’d ever played, and nothing really came close afterwards, not Doom 2, nor Quake, nor any iteration of Unreal. In fact, I’m not even sure the later chapters of the first Doom came close to the atmosphere and mystery of the first, in the Martian base. Nothing, that is, until Halo.

My comrade Marcel is quick (and correct) to point out the subtext of American military supremacy in the series, but in all honest I don’t really care. Political nuances are frequently drowned out by the bloodthirsty adrenaline-enhanced laughter of doom (or, possibly, Doom). Even though the plot is cobbled together from elements of other things (Aliens being the most obvious, others including Starship Troopers and Babylon 5), it’s still easy to get drawn into it, to its grandeur and scale.

Single-player plot seemed less important in the era of Unreal Tournament and Quake III than a funky multiplayer, which made Halo’s scope for fantastic set-pieces and classic moments a strong selling point. It shares this with Half-Life, the Game of the Year edition of which reintroduced me to gaming only a couple of months before I bought an Xbox (and Marcel’s FPS of choice, as he prefers to empathise with the speccy scientist than the super-marine). On top of the single player campaign, the co-op and multiplayer was also brilliant.

I remember taking time off from work the day Halo 2 came out. It seems harsh to describe it as a disappointment as it’s still a game I love to play; but, perhaps unreasonably, I was expecting more. After a couple of weeks it was obvious that the weapons weren’t quite as well balanced as the first game, and while the plot itself was an excellent continuation of the original, the fact that every alternating level you played a character other than the Master Chief really took you out of the story. It felt disjointed, and I hadn’t put my cash down to play the Arbiter. That’s not to say the character wasn’t a great addition, allowing us to explore the Covenant’s culture, only that it wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been. Halo 2’s greatest achievement was its online multiplayer, and that type of gaming’s not really my cup of tea.

I think it’s still to early for me to deliver a verdict on the last of the trilogy. It’s certainly held up much better than the first sequel, and I thought the story wrapped perfectly. The weapons are certainly better balanced, and the Chief’s original rifle makes a welcome return (watch as my nerditude increases as sentences accumulate). But I think I’ll have a few more plays through before making a final judgement.

     Feed