The Two of Us: Part 2: Killers

Let's talk about murder for a second.

Video games are well-tread territory for general kicking and screaming over violence in the media, and I'm not going to touch that. But I can see how the accusing side gets up in arms over it, especially as graphics have come to the point of photo realism. In fact, when we were playing Tomb Raider, my wife and I were both physically taken aback when Lara Croft gunned down her first cultist, just as she was onscreen. It looked every bit as brutal as a killing would be, and both our reaction and hers showed the weight of actively choosing to take another person's life. The Last of Us is a different kind of game, and doesn't pussyfoot around that. In Joel's bleak post-disaster future, violence is mandatory for survival, it seems, and the first few hours are making a clear implication that the rest of this story is going to be chock full of it, and it's going to be nasty. A man was killed in cold blood by someone I can only still assume is a NPC protagonist very early on, and Joel didn't flinch as other innocuously nice guys would (the Nathan Drakes and Lara Crofts of the world). I can also only assume that this person's execution is a sign that violence and its horrors are part of the point of this whole experience, especially since it's obvious that Joel doesn't exactly shit rainbows while figure skating. But that's not what's interesting about our first controllable moments after the intro.

There was lots of talking, and obligatory tough guy posturing. Joel and his female companion snuck out of whatever quarantined encampment in the beginning stages, which serves as a useful enough tutorial for the stealth and combat functions. Joel can crouch, aim, punch, switch on his flashlight, and "listen" (which is this game's term for his very video gamey sixth sense that lets the player know what's around the corner) without any sort of context. The triangle button does close to everything else when it pops up on the screen; it's the catch-all button for boosting your friend, sliding open a door, and picking up handily placed med kits to keep him healthy. All of these movements and more were dolled out a steady pace which wasn't overwhelming, but was certainly a lot file away, even for me. Typically when this happens, though, I feel reassured that the game will force me to use all of these tactics as it moves forward, so I don't spend a lot of time trying to practice and re-learn each individual technique. But this doesn't change the fact that The Last of Us is a complex beast, and definitely more convoluted than Tomb Raider's early hours.

At first, I was just fine with it. The Last of Us is a tough teacher; there's a lot to learn and seems cruel to the student if they don't pick up on it fairly quickly. Sort of like violence, there's plenty of talk in gaming circles that modern games over-train the player before setting them free, and I like that Joel was not treating me, the player, like an idiot. On the other side of the couch, though, was someone just a little bit baffled. Previous to this moment, my wife would dispatch her gaming nemeses by jumping on their mushroom-y heads. Eventually, she moved on to pumping them full of cultist-killing arrows. Joel, though, could punch, shoot, throw a brick at a guy, and strangle them if he was clever enough, and he could do all of this from the word "go." To me, it was an embarrassment of riches. To her, it was a tidal wave, and one that washed over her one doubt at at time. Do I shoot that dude? Do I punch him in the mouth? Should I pick up this bottle and break it over his head? Is it worth it to me to try to get around him? It was simply too much too soon. Killing by itself was no longer an issue. "Which way should I kill" had turned into the question.

This lead to the point of today's entry. Joel and his trigger happy friend had enemies, but they weren't stupid. Being outnumbered and out-gunned in this game was the last situation you wanted to find yourself in. Dialog between the two frequently prompted the player into sneaking around adversaries, and if the scarcity of ammunition and medical resources were any indication, then this was the preferred method of dealing with opposition. I found that it made perfect sense (especially since friends of mine had told me that it was more of a stealth game than a shooter), but not for my wife.

As she walked right up to a guard and clubbed his head into gooey mush with a wooden plank, I was nonplussed. We were just told to avoid these guys! What the hell are you doing?! I kept it to myself, but it didn't take long for two things to dawn on me: First, she was just given an arsenal of ways to kill an enemy. While she probably couldn't reliably toss a rock at a guy's head, she can sure as shit shoot him in the chest and finish the job with a baseball bat. I can only assume that this was empowering. Second, and more importantly, is that this is a matter of programming. Certainly not by Naughty Dog, but my wife's gaming vocabulary doesn't include Metal Gear, or Deus Ex, or Dishonored. An enlightened way of pacifism was never a concern before, only to throw the pickaxe, toss the fireball, and knock the bow. You can't blame her for such a binary response; she saw bad guys, and bad guys needed to see the business end of the stick. It was all against her earlier-set conditioning.

Joel was quickly, and unceremoniously, gunned down by these guys. Lesson learned. Even on the Easy difficulty, it's better to avoid than to engage, but that will take a little bit of unlearning for it to completely sink in. My wife, the butcher, received some early comeuppance, like trying to swipe honey from the hive, but I have a feeling it's going to take a little bit more reminding that you know, we should probably leave those dudes up ahead alone. Now that we've gotten a little girl to protect along for Joel's ride, it's probably going to be safer that way.

The Two of Us: Part 1

Tomb Raider was an experience. Not the emotionally draining, perception-altering Experience that a developer or publisher would want you have with such a large budget major release (those few and far between), but a quiet, sometimes meditative, and often humbling experience shared between two people: myself, the practiced-hand "core gamer," and my wife, the silent observer and rare participant. I never truly understood her motivation for wanting to play the Tomb Raider reboot, really. I guess I never asked, now that I think about it. But what would have been a routine week or two controlling an English woman through a terrible coming-of-age ordeal (but a good one, the game was pretty great) became a study of, in my mind, game mechanics, accessibility, interactive storytelling, and in it's own way, marital politics. It was frustrating -on several levels- to watch my wife, a person unaccustomed to controlling both an onscreen avatar and the camera which dictates how that avatar operates, struggle to come to terms with modern game design.

There was an obvious cycle of development happening right in front of me not unlike a child's own evolution; mechanics were learned in a safe environment, were then tested, and consternation would set in right before abandonment, then followed by a noticeable mustering of drive to relearn and overcome the obstacles. My wife, in her own way not dissimilar to Lara Croft, didn't leave the Island of Misfit Cultists a pro, but there was certainly some self-discovery happening there from campfire to campfire. If there wasn't, she wouldn't have immediately requested to play The Last of Us.

So, it seems like she's into the more cinematic, big budget stuff out there. I'm chalking that up to being a gateway drug (I hope). Months had passed from completing Tomb Raider to now, but she was consistent in her interest in playing the game, which I found a little surprising. I honestly thought that it would be out of sight, out of mind and that if I didn't bring The Last of Us home, her interest would have waned. This wasn't the case, and now that it's close to the end of the year and every video game website on the planet is arbitrarily choosing what "their favorite game" of the last twelve months had been, we've finally started to play what will undoubtedly wind up being one of the contenders. The opening sequence did enough to show us why.

Yes, I suppose that in the spirit of full disclosure, this first entry does reflect our first time playing the game, but we've played it more since. It was a few weeks ago, late at night and ready for bed, when we decided that we would at least go through the intro to the game after I assured her that action games like this never have multi-hour opening sequences (like the dozens of JRPGs stacked around our apartment). We were not quite prepared by how hauntingly affective it was, though, which is something I choose not to spoil for you if you haven't played it yet.

These first 45 minutes or so did little to show us what the rest of the game would be like, though. Protagonist Joel could only mosey slowly through environments and interact with the occasional door or key item. For us, this was a good method for re-introducing my wife into using both thumbs in concert with what's happening in front of her. Occasionally, I could hear an exhale of exasperation until I would offer a gentle reminder that she should adjust the camera (we'll come back to this), but this fell by the wayside quickly enough in this first sequence. It was a fast 45 minutes with everything going on in the game, but it served its purpose, and the stage was set for what our next few weeks would become.

Like Tomb Raider, we're playing the game in short chunks of hour-long increments. Tomb Raider was, basically, a short season of Lost for us, and The Last of Us will probably be no different. It gives us a chance to play a little and regroup afterwords. During the day, we can send each other messages to parse through radical theories about the plots of the games and what the next sequence might be like, and this is a feeling I haven't had since, well, Lost left the air. It can make the wait agonizing for the next time we both have the opportunity and energy to play together, but the act of playing the game is all the more sweet because of it. That is, until you actually get into the game.

But let's talk about that tomorrow since this is getting long. Your homework is to read Playboy's interview with Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto mastermind Sam Houser. It's safe for work and fun read, if a little less illuminating than the first interview with a total recluse should be. Still worth it, though.

Your Homework Is...

When I sort of restarted this blog a few months ago, the plan was to not only give me the writing practice (you know, it's a blog), but also celebrate what I think are compelling or well-written stories from the internet. Many of them wound up being from similar sources because, well, I like specific writers and certain web sites do very good work (the features on Polygon, for example, are consistently good). Sometimes this slips away from me, and sometimes I just don't update for weeks at a time, but that just means that there should be plenty of stuff to look back on and point you toward. Typically, I would never include the location of today's homework.

Gametrailers.com is a website built initially for exactly what you'd expect; trailers for video games. Over the years, they've launched quite a variety of original content of what I can diplomatically call varying quality. Most of it really skews to taste; there's some fun industry stuff like Pach Attack and wacky talking head opinion-spewing like Final Bosman, and your interest in either example will depend on the kind of content you'd like to watch.

One of their "flagship" shows, though, is The Bonus Round hosted by games journo black belt/ lightning rod Goeff Keighley. Usually a panel discussion show (Wedbush Securities smartypants Michael Pachter is a regular guest), it's often filled with guests that range from industry analysts and insiders to camera-friendly seat fillers. It's usually a mishmash of softball questions, and while a lot of it is fun, it's rarely informative.

Not lately, though. In what I can only possibly think was the perfect storm of guests, Keighley tapped Pachter and also Naughty Dog co-founder and ex-THQ president Jason Rubin, as well as Seamus Blackley, a current mobile developer and one of the men instrumental for creating the original Xbox during his time at Microsoft. The first episode of the series (linked) takes place just as the PlayStation 4 was about to launch, and these three guys have an awful lot to say during it and subsequent chapters. The last of which will be on GT's site this weekend.

Again, it's all a matter of taste, but this particular panels is chock full of inside-baseball, and I love that shit. All three guests have very clear, yet often differing opinions about the nature of the big video game machine and the models that large companies need to adopt to be relevant in an increasingly gaming-diverse future. Keighley barely even speaks for most of the first episode. It's genius.

Happy Thanksgiving, my people.

I Don't Know Why You Say Goodbye

So after more than a week with my shiny new PlayStation 4 (it it certainly is shiny; I almost never want to touch it), I find that I have very little to say about it. Honestly, you can probably hit ever corner of the nerd internet over the last few weeks and find all of the opinions that confirm whatever stance you have about Sony's new console. None of what I could say would be particularly new or shocking, so I suppose we can just leave it at that.

But I pretty much never turn it on.

Weird, right? Not really, and it's mostly of my own volition. It's become common knowledge over the last several cycles that launch games are typically mediocre at best. Usually all of the good stuff can be had for older machines or wind up being elaborate tech demos banking on the promise of future fulfillment. Yes, the first Xbox had Halo, the Wii had Wii Sports, and we didn't even know any better when North America was blessed with Super Mario Bros. when the NES dropped in '85, but I call those singular examples. I have bought all of Sony's home consoles on (or close) to their launch, and every time I do, I find myself waiting about 6 months to buy something worthwhile. Neither the Sony gaming juggernaut nor me personally are alone here (it took me more than a year to buy a game for my 3DS, which I now play just about all the time). It's just the way these things sort of work.

But it's been a particularly long console cycle, and that makes the kick in the pants of so-so launch games more like a shove into traffic. No, I'm not exactly huffy over it, but I still find myself wishing that there was something really dazzling for me to take home and boot up after that midnight launch (which I arrived to drunk. The only way to do it). I'm certainly not looking the gift horse of Contrast, Warframe, DC Universe Online, or -especially- Resogun in the mouth, but none of those games have any real weeks-of-my-life-swallowed-whole meat to them. I finished Contrast, a better game than some of the reviews gave it credit, in less than a day. Warframe is fun, but awfully redundant. Resogun is wacky and beautiful, but it's five brief levels don't exactly make me want to call in sick to work and live on Chinese takeout. Next year certainly has some good stuff on the way, but like the rest of my early adopting brethren, I bought this new machine for the sake of promise, not instant gratification.

Ironically, in the days before the November 15 launch, I spent my free gaming time playing what I considered the high water mark of the previous generations, and completely independent of the fact that I knew I wasn't going to be blown away by the brand new stuff (ok, subconsciously, I probably did). I tore through the HD remake of Clover/ Capcom's Okami, which is still one of the best Zelda knockoffs you can find, if not the absolute king of them. Granted, it was the beautiful up-rezzed rerelease, but it's in my top 10 PlayStation 2 games, and was on sale a few weeks ago for a song. I loved playing it again so much that I even went through the rigamarole of obtaining the platinum trophy, too, which is something I think I've only done a few times, and I think it says something to its staying power.

But not nearly as much as Demon's Souls; unquestionably my favorite game of the last eight years. I'll concede that Dark Souls is a much better constructed game with it's interlocking environments, but DeS spoke to me on so many more levels than all of the other games that I claimed to enjoy over the last console cycle that I've gone through it close to 10 times, if not more (I've lost a few PS3s along the way). It's funny how the game has changed for me within that time. Originally, I slaved over 75+ hours of it, observing every crack in the wall and conversation with an NPC to help me through all of its punishment. It wasn't so much the need to finish as it was the will to win, which are two totally different things. When I finally hit the summit, I retired the game with my head held high, but weary. I've said this before, but going through this game the first time makes you feel like you've gone through some shit and came out the other end of it a different person. Repeat trips are different, though. The second trip became a matter of experimentation: How radical are the differences in play style? Will it make X location more easily traversed under Y conditions? How will I adapt under weaker or stronger scenarios? It was shorter, but I was smarter. Now, after so many runs through the game (with only one small section routinely giving me problems), I can successfully bum rush it in 8 hours or less depending on circumstances and a few very minor variables. It's become less of an exhaustive challenge and more like an elaborate puzzle. Almost Nietzschean, really. Since I know where the real dangers lie, the difficulty and joy is in figuring out the best way to become stronger faster. Last week, I took the grunt-level Royal and turned him into room-clearing warlock in no time flat. In comparison to the Wanderer that struggled through those first hours of my initial time with DeS and evolved into a walking wrecking ball after what felt like years of growth and learning, this new Royal was like third grader that could split atoms. Now that he's successfully helped to lull the Old One back to sleep, any further plays with him would simply exist to push his stats toward the ubermensch that brings that earlier, shakier metaphor home.

But that was over a week ago, and even after requisite weekly time with my old flame Third Strike, I needed something else. Last night, then, I convinced myself that it was time to go back to Skyrim, if only briefly (for now). See, I liked Fallout 3 an awful lot, but in general, I wasn't so much a Bethesda believer until my time with the Elder Scrolls V. Everything in their games seemed just undercooked enough that while the worlds were huge and fun to explore, they just seemed like empty husks populated by talking heads. Skyrim, to be fair, isn't that much different, but enough care went into making it that I'm still in awe of the majesty of its scope. Hundreds of hours drifted away while my High Elf Garbanzo Bean and I explored its frozen tundra, and it's always intimidated me to go back into it knowing how easily the time can slip by while I skin a freshly shot bear or dive into yet another spider-infested mine. But after yet another character build in Demon's Souls, I felt I'd try the same approach with Skyrim, so last night's Wood Elf will, hopefully, become next week's stealthy Robin Hood.

Of course, this could all change. I'm at the mercy of my patience at this point, and with holidays coming and family/ friends willing to give me the gift of interactive entertainment, there's every possibility that I'll be knee deep (or putting up) with Assassin's Creed IV or Need for Speed Rivals. Do I really want to play those games? Not especially, but I sure would like to put this new supercomputer sitting under my television through its paces.

Step 2: Inks Complete

So here it is with finished inks:

The picture robs you of some of the minute details, but I think you get the idea.

As usual, all of the tighter stuff pencil-wise wound up looking pretty good like the upper arm and the face. I pretty much wing it when it comes to cloth with a lot of black (as in the cape of this wizard/ ghost/ thing), but I think it looks fine here. I might go in with a whiteout pen and place in some cracks or little details in there, but I'm trying to let go and just let it live on its own. The ink I was using is pretty old, though so you can spot a lot of inconsistencies with the value of the blacks, but whatever.

I guess the only thing that really bugs me is that the swirling vortex of evil- sort of background wound up being a little bit busy and takes away from the foreground a little bit, but that's all because I decided to live on the edge and do that on the fly, too. Originally, it was just going to be blank back there with some detail lines and some sweat/ blood spurts to make it look like they were really going at it, but I thought that might be sort of chickening out. Not that this is the most elaborate background, but having nothing there at all seemed kind of weak.

Still, for the first pinup kind of thing I've done in a couple of years I think it wound up being ok. Now I have to decide if I'm going to color it, and I'm not so hot at that stuff. I can probably lay down some watercolor or marker and make it look ok, but I just don't have a lot of skill any more and I'm too afraid to blow it this far in.

Mighty

A few (read: many) years ago, a couple of musicians that I worked with decided that they would record a prog metal EP. Mostly, this was an ironic joke: all of them were trained jazz musicians (and pretty good ones) with the only earnest member of the ad hoc trio being a classic rock tone poem enthusiast as a kid, which found its way to inform his choice of profession. As you may have guessed, he was also the writer. So I how was I involved in this? Since I have pretty much zero talent for music, they thought it funny to have a sort of over -the-top Manowar-style sword and sorcery cover for the five or six discs they were planning on burning, so they asked me to throw something together. Here's what came out:

Yes, there's some strange anatomy going on right there. Since this is pushing 15 years old at this point, and everyone's their own worst critic, I don't think it's unfair to say that this is one of the butt ugliest things I've ever seen. Still, it was my way of learning some of the basics of Photoshop (many of which I've forgotten), and they really dug it, so it wasn't a total loss.

As another kind of gag, I put together two or three redone covers for the writer guy. The music industry of the late 90s/ early 2000s just loved to repackage recently released material with special covers, so I jumped on board and did this:

I liked this one better, but probably because it was just separate scans of other stuff I sketched out that I cobbled together on a computer. The guy in the back was colored with markers and the spiky haired dude in the foreground was all magic wand and paint can. Except he doesn't have any ears. That's a little strange.

Anyway, so I haven't even thought about these since I made them and they've recently kind of resurfaced. Me being a dope that just can't let go, I've been a little inspired in the last week to do a sort of weird follow up. Let's call it the art for their never-to-be-released anniversary boxed set:

 

I wish I would have taken a pic of this in its primordial sketch form. I'm not really a great inker to begin with, and penciled images just seem to have a different dynamic to me; they're more exciting. This isn't the clearest picture, but I was about half done with the inks before taking it. Since I don't have a ton of time on my hands anymore, I sometimes doodle this stuff out during my lunch breaks, which gives me a solid hour to nail down a composition and decide where things need to be tighter and which parts can be looser. The sketch happened on Monday, and the beginning ink section went down on Tuesday. I finished inking it yesterday, so I'll put up a pick of that sometime later today or tomorrow.

Batusi

I was recently in a conversation with someone about the Genesis/ Mega Drive version of Sunsoft's Batman, which is something close to my heart. This sparked some interest in further dissection of the game, which is what we'll do this week.

Let's get one thing out of the way, first: Batman is a shitty video game. Often unimaginative, most of it has to do with running from one end of a playfield to the next while punching bad guys dressed as street thugs and mimes. Some light platforming is sprinkled in to break up the running and the punching, but most are obviously out of place (like the pits in the museum level). A few stages break the monotony and turn it into a scrolling shooter as you take control of the Batmobile and Batplane, but these levels wind up being more about attrition than skill as you stumble through the lousy collision detection while deciding when it's the best time to break out those precious missiles you've been stockpiling. It's really not a difficult game, and it's fairly short, so if one were interested in playing through it you wouldn't kill a whole afternoon. You can probably buy it for a dollar off of eBay if you're so inclined (and still had your Genesis laying around).

But like a lot of Sunsoft games of that era, and especially like it's NES counterpart, the Genesis/ MD Batman is best remembered for its sound design and music. In comparison to the contemporary SNES, the Genesis has taken some heat over the years for having inferior sound, and much of that is probably true, to be fair. Still, I'm a big believer in great art overcoming restrictions, and a lot of the best Genesis music is a testament to that (Thunder Force IV, Streets of Rage 2, etc.). There seems to be agreement that the really good music that was composed for the system was percussion-based, and I suppose I agree, but a lot of Batman's music sets a different tone. While the more driving compositions from the first level and the museum stage are probably the best remembered, a lot of the percussion is more subtle than some of the more contemporary proto-electronica of 16-bit game music, and the opening and ending themes are really eerie and atmospheric. When I sit back and listen to it again, it seems more like the score of a television series than a video game in that it's not too hard rock (also like a lot of other games at the time), but clearly not as faux symphonic as much of the industry to would go one generation later.

All of this was scored by Sunsoft super genius Naoki Kodaka, whom worked on not only the NES Batman game, but also classics like Blaster Master and Journey to Silius (which, I'll admit, I've never played, but it's also supposed to have an amazing soundtrack). Sunsoft was was never really a major player in the 8- and 16-bit eras, but was respectable enough in hindsight. Their composers developed a method of making the NES's meager sound capabilities sing like Aretha, though. Essentially tricking the machine into using the percussion channels to play a bass sound, they coined a method supposedly called "the Sunsoft bass" for a lot of their output, which, again, were only above average games with music that was better than it deserved to be. A lot of it is probably floating around the internet if you're curious.

Enjoy a quick sample of some Batman tunes to get your weekend bumping.

Well, That Tears It

After leaving Don Jon (which was kind of a letdown, but we saw Gravity earlier that day), my wife and I wander into a Lucky store on our way to the parking lot of the outdoor mall. After some quick glancing at merchandise:

Clerk: Hey, man. How's it going? You ever shop at Lucky before?

Me: Yes

Clerk looks quizzically at the Gap jeans I am wearing

Me: No, not these

Clerk: Ah, right. What size do you wear, man?

Me: 33x32, but I'm just kind of poking around

Clerk: (slightly disgusted) Right, okay. Well if you change your mind, the right jeans for you that I recommend are the loose-fitting or standards.

Clerk wanders off, finds my wife

Clerk: Oh, hey. What's up.

Wife: Hi.

Clerk: Is that your boyfriend over there?

Wife: Well, husband, yeah.

Clerk: Oh. He's not into jeans.

Wife: Okay, we're leaving.


There you have it. I'm just not into jeans

Mix Tape: SMTIV

After reeling from the blow taken by my adopted home's baseball team last night (the postseason is a fickle mistress), I came to this morning feeling like I need a win. As a non-sports guy that's finally beginning to understand what the fuss is about, you might think that my adopted home's gridiron squadron is what I should now be paying heed to, especially with a game tonight. Alas, they will only let me down if recent history is anything to go by. Is this pessimism? No, it is Cleveland; a higher power's playground when it decides it needs to just kick something (pro sports-wise).

So let's return out our first love: Video games. A few months ago, I wrote about the songs that would creep into my noggin during my time in Skyrim. People seemed to like it. So, since I'm fairly deep into another long game with a very distinct aesthetic, Shin Megami Tensei IV, I thought I'd go back to the well a little bit, but in a more expansive way. Maybe I was strangely inspired by this week's Retronauts episode (your homework, BTW). Regardless, I present to you the SMT IV Mix Tape:

"Ode to Isis"/ "Will You Smile For Me Again" by ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
This one is guilt by association, actually. When Trail of Dead released the album Worlds Apart in 2005, it was only about four months after Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne was released in North America. These two opening tracks sounded like, well, the world was about to end, which is exactly what happens in the numbered SMT games. Every time I play a game in the series now, be it one of the "proper" ones like IV (and even Strange Journey) or offshoots like the Digital Devil Saga or any given Persona, these songs always come to mind. A short symphonic arrangement with dramatic chanting, "Ode to Isis" sounds very apocalyptic in that sort of traditional Hollywood way, and makes for an appropriate kick off to Trail of Dead's fifth album; one that played a little faster and looser with style and genre compared to other indie rock bands of the time (it's also seen as their first "prog-like" record). It leads well into "Will You Smile", a song that lives and breaths on its fierce guitar/ drum attack intro and conclusion that bookends something of a quiet, but unnerving midsection. It's a pair of tunes that never really pop to mind unless I'm playing these specific games, and I think that says something about how well they couple with SMT.

"Idle Hands" by The Gutter Twins
It's hard to not to think of songs that associate with religious imagery when you're playing through a game that takes place in a Tokyo already overrun by angels and demons. This song, taken from a superb Greg Dulli/ Mark Lanegan side project rife with these images, finds itself being very stirring boss battle music, if only for its very straightforward rock sound perhaps. Produced to make the synth and string arrangements sound just as surface as the Dulli's lead guitar, it was a very apropo single for the duo's band, maybe even the best example of how both musician's tastes gelled into a cohesive whole. While the majority of the album seems more in line with Dulli's Twilight Singers work (which is not a detraction), "Idle Hands" is a driving, snarling stomp that feels satisfying when you're doing just that to a cyclops whom just told you to fuck off.

"Big Time" by Randy Newman
This is a little bit of a new one, but still sort of an old fave. A cover by Newman for his end of the Peter Gabriel Scratch My Back/ I'll Scratch Yours covers project (and only one of which is what we can consider pretty good --sorry, Pete), Newman's "Big Tim"e adds something a little sinister to Gabriel's ode to greed. While the original, something of a classic from Gabriel's most commercially successful album (So), had a wry smirk its way of poking fun at the Gordon Gecko mentality of the time when it was written. As with all great covers, Newman takes this concept and makes the song his own, singing it with the tired groan of a man that might have felt that hunger for more than he needed at one point. I feel as though this song fits in with much of the music already found on SMTIV's soundtrack with some of its jazzier tracks. While I certainly wouldn't consider this song completely in line with that, it seems to fit, and comes to mind when I'm wandering the Tokyo "overworld."

"Between Sun & Moon" by Rush
Yes, I swear a Rush song dug (clawed?) its way out of my subconscious. And it's a Rush song from an album that, from what I understand, is deeply maligned by the hardcore Rush set, AND it's something I probably hadn't heard in close to 10 years. Way to go, video games. You always let the weirdest shit percolate. Honestly, I have nothing to say about this song; it's an okay album track, but after digging it out to listen to it after all these years, I can't even say it's one of the tunes I remember liking. Still, SMTIV decided that I needed to stroll down the most nerdy alley of memory lane. Let's all take a moment and be glad that it's not in a subdivision of something potentially worse. And no, that's not another Rush reference.

End of Side 1.

Agents of S.H.R.U.G.

I won't spend too much time on this, but let's talk about S.H.I.E.L.D. For being born from a medium that's thrived on serialization for close to a century, I've probably only seen one superhero television show that's ever worked, and that was Smallville (but only the first handful of seasons; talk about outstaying your welcome). S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't Smallville. I tried to keep my expectations low, and I wasn't even planning on watching it last night at all, but you know, people get bored. I was bored, and S.H.I.E.L.D. bored me further. These fragmented sentences should probably mean something, but they don't. Let's also blame that on S.H.I.E.L.D.

The bullet points (without actual bullet points): I thought it was predictable, unoriginal, and had that incessantly quippy Joss Whedon dialog that makes normal conversation sound overly dramatic and insufferable. I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with any of these people, let alone 43 of them for 24 weeks. You shouldn't, either, because you probably watched all of this go down before on the first season of Heroes.

To be fair, I think it hits a good time slot, though. Kids will eat this stuff up, and at 8pm. it's positioned to do very well with the 8-14 set. Does that mean I should be fairer to it because it might be aimed more for a younger crowd? Nope, I still thought it was a weak TV pilot. Broad appeal is one thing, but it sure didn't appeal to me.

Can it get better, though? Probably. I have a feeling that enough dough will be tossed at it that Disney will at least try to buy it into quality (for better or worse). I'm sure ratings were through the roof, too, and unless the show turned off more people than just me, the old maxim that quality doesn't matter if people are buying it will hold true. It's a good premise for a TV series, though, so part of me is pulling for it in some deep recess that's a sentimental sap for my Marvel reading days. Let's hope that they turn things around over the next few episodes, but I'm just not that psyched for b-list Avengers characters.

But a Gotham Central/ Commissioner Gordon TV show? Yes, sir. YES, SIR.

Concessions and Complaints

Fine, internet. You win. I started watching New Girl not so long ago and found that it's pretty dern funny, just like you kept telling me. Wait, you say, shouldn't blogs that normally concern your typical nerdery talk my ear off about "decent" TV like Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire? Probably, but you'd be unfairly throwing NG under the bus as I have for these past two Schmidt-giddy seasons. Hold your pretense at bay and go enjoy them (especially the first one).

I find that it has a fair amount of heart like a lot of great, enduring sitcoms had, but what really makes it stand out is the writing. Each individual character is very clearly voiced, and none of them stand out as a main character to be followed outside of the titular Jess. But even she takes a gracious back seat to the three male roomies much of the time, whom can riff capably with each other at a rat-a-tat speed. Pay careful attention and you'll get your requisite goofball nerd references, but tossed in with such left field nonchalance from its turbo-douchiest club turd character that it doesn't seem like pandering ("There are plenty of things to be down about; the deficit, air pollution in China, The Hobbit wasn't very good..." -a personal favorite).

But since the third season of the show has started, it's time for me to calmly lay out my objections for its current course. By the end of the second season, NG succumbed to the siren call of all sitcoms by consummating the love affair of two main characters, Jess and Nick. Now, yes, nearly every television show does this, but you can probably count on one hand the sitcoms in which it works. I like NG enough that I don't want it to devolve into the idiotic soap opera latrine that Friends spent ten years digging. While I applaud the fact that the show took two entire seasons to commit to this sort of character development -restraint by many television shows' standards- it's an awfully fine line to walk having two characters become intimate and make that show not turn into a grating shmoop-fest.

Having said all of that, let's examine a couple of the shows that actually pulled it off and why:

Cheers
Seasons: 11
Why it worked: Diane left
Cheers is fondly remembered as one of the most consistently funny television sitcoms in the medium's history. Part of the reason for this is that main character Diane Chambers (played for five seasons and in late-season cameos by Shelley Long) left the series after season five. Womanizing bar-owner and washed out ball player Sam Malone (Ted Danson, the other main character) carried on a long standing on again/ off again relationship with Diane, something of a social class opposite, through most of those seasons, and her leaving the show forced the writers to find a way to reinvent it without sacrificing both the original premise and the clever interactions of several of its characters. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even Long didn't want to rehash the same stories over and over, as most shows where leads share a romance often find themselves doing, and Sam could return to being a bar-owning Lothario. The introduction of Kirstie Alley reintroduced the cat-and-mouse game that Sam played early on with Diane but with an opposite result, which lead to some genuinely funny television.

Scrubs
Seasons: 8 (No, the last one doesn't count)
Why it worked: The writers probably hated each other
Scrubs, to be fair, was a haphazard television show in terms of tone and overall quality. The early seasons were constructed to be reflective of life after college, with all of the uncertainty, fear, and eventual triumph or defeat therein. Roughly around the third season, the series grew closer and closer into a cartoon show staffed by live actors. While still funny, main characters went from seeming like real people with TV-necessary quirks to being neurotic caricatures that needed to be slapped in the face. Among them were main characters John "J.D." Dorian (the star and narrator of the show) and Elliot Reid whom both worked at Sacred Heart Hospital as interns before making a name for themselves later in the series as attending doctors. Throughout the show, J.D. and Elliot would occasionally hook up and even date, but it never lasted to the end of any given season. They even spent entire seasons apart and dated melange of guest stars, something the show was sort of known for. Routinely, the writers would bemoan the "will they/won't they" relationship of the characters (as seen as extras on the DVD sets, sorry I can't find a link), so J.D. and Elliot would often go down in flames in terrible ways, freeing the characters to be interesting in their own right. By the time the show was really winding down in season 7, the writers relented and let the two of them connect, and by the time the proper series ended with season 8, it was perfectly clear that the show was never about their relationship as it was about characters becoming functioning, confident adults. Love was clearly only part of that for them.

Coupling
Seasons: 4
Why it worked: Brevity + narcissism
Coupling was a smart, dirty U.K. sitcom that ran from 2000-2004, with each season spanning a mere six episodes apiece. Unfairly pegged as "the English Friends," Coupling took the premise of its erroneous comparison and bent it just enough to make it unique. Perhaps that two "main" characters of the show, Steve and Susan, got together during the first episode of the series, but the three guys/ three girls dynamic that revolved around love and sex took care of the problem immediately without sitting on the fence about it. Or so you might think; during the third season, the womanizing Patrick began a committed relationship with the vain Sally, and it worked, and partly because the show simply didn't give itself a lot of time to dwell on too many bad stories. The other key ingredient was that Patrick and Sally were completely full of themselves with just enough earnestness underneath to make them seem like people you've probably run into in your own life. Sure, they were more of side characters in the grand scheme of things, but the constant narcissism made for good comedy, even in its weak sauce final season. If anything, they were the Schmidt/ Cece analog that New Girl has been building stories around since season 1.

It is clear that New Girl does not share the qualities that helped these other shows survive the Burden of Booty. While it might seem as though the Scrubs method is the best chance it has, and I would wager more bagels that you can probably eat that it's the route the show will take, the fact that there is no real central character to follow for reflection might make this romantic trip uphill that much harder. I suppose we'll just have to sit back and let Jess and Nick show us on Tuesday evening at a time.

Grand Theft Hair

So are you at home playing GTA V? I am not. That isn't to say that I'm opposed to taking the -day- week off of work to play a monumentally hyped game is a bad idea, but you know, Grand Theft Auto never did it for me. In general, really, open world games don't really seem to be my bag. No one trait of these games -- be it the driving to the fighting -- never really seem built well enough that I could forgive so many other flaws, so I tend to get bored with them quickly. I do like the writing, though, and I used to love watching friends of mine drive aimlessly through Vice City at night while listening to Mr. Mister, but from a raw gameplay perspective, I guess my interests always lay elsewhere.

But I can't exactly say I'm playing better right now. Yes, the emphatic arm-waiving that resulted in the first five hours of Shin Megami Tensei IV has since cooled. It was as hot and heavy as you'd find in a freshmen dorm, now cranked down to conversations about whose turn it is to fold the laundry. Still, I'm plugging along through it in hopes that things pick up now that I'm kicking it in Tokyo, so let's keep our demon fusing fingers crossed. Outside of that, it's been Hitman: Absolution, which is yet another game I would have never played if it weren't for PlayStation+. Stealth murder games are really just large, elaborate puzzles staring bald men in black suits, a concept that doesn't change my life into a Maxell ad. It's fine so far, but, you know.

Anyway, I hope all of you mischief-making bank robbers out there are showing Los Santos what's what.

Summoning

Last night, after much hemming and hawing, I finally began to play Shin Megami Tensei IV. Why the long wait since I mentioned starting it July? Mostly because I'm an idiot, apparently. I only wanted to play through the introduction and found myself, four hours later, finally tearing myself away from it because the 3DS battery was giving me the blinking red Morse code of "turn it off and go to bed." Even now, several hours removed, I want to run right over to my handheld wonder machine and get back to demon fusing.

That's not a feeling I get very often anymore. I find that it's probably because I'm getting older and have had enough video game experiences at this point that very little surprises me. So why the strange excitement to play (and, therefore, expound upon) SMTIV? Maybe I'm like Don Draper and only like the beginnings of things (in that non-infidelity sort of way), I guess. Everyone likes new games that they just start, I suppose. But when I think about it, and remember my mindset last night, it seems as though this new(ish) 3DS JRPG is scratching an itch that I've been having for months now.

Myself, I'm something of a lapsed JRPG apologist. For years I would defend them to anyone whom would listen, and if you took a peak at my library of games, you'll probably find a 60/40 ratio of this specific genre vs. a mishmash of everything else. But the vast majority of them are from the PS1-PS2 era --something of an Eastern role playing Age of Fire. It represented the better part of 10 years of my life where I was learning how to clearly identify the aspects of what made video games good and bad. Nostalgia aside, the trajectory of qualities I appreciated in the games within the genre has followed a slow, steady descent that's basically hit a subbasement sewer system in this current generation. Am I saying that gameplay for a JRPG these days is necessarily bad? No, I enjoyed playing Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy X-2 on the merits of their combat alone. But as the last 10-15 years have gone by, the writing commonly found in these games began to bottom out, and as I get older, I cannot, in any way, justify sinking the time required to play one of them with a story that basically talks down to me. I have felt this way since finishing Final Fantasy XII; not the best, or even most compelling plot in the series, but it was one told in such a way that my intelligence and good taste weren't insulted. Since then, it's been a rapidly drying sea of pandering idiocy.

2009, then, was the year that I basically threw in the towel. BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins, which finally gave me the interactive storytelling I never knew I wanted, and Atlus published FromSoft's Demon's Souls --perhaps my favorite game of this generation-- that stripped away what had felt like unnecessary bullshit for years. Both were meaty, satisfying experiences from different sides of the RPG continuum that, essentially, ruined the traditional Dragon Quest/ Final Fantasy need that fueled not only a large chunk of my video game buying, but almost embarrassingly bigger chunks of my free time.

Last night, as I am wont to do around this time of year, I had a serious jones to play some Final Fantasy XII, but I can't; my (second) backward-compatible PlayStation 3 died on me about a year ago, and I'm stuck looking at around 50 games that are basically doing me as much good as a pet rock. Because I couldn't think of anything else to do with myself, in went SMTIV, and back came the memories. It was a tidal wave that I don't want to stop, and at this point, my expectations for the rest of the game are so high that it can only possibly let me down.

But it's only been about 4 hours, so who knows? Either way, I'm more excited to find out than I have been in years.

Some Friendly Advice about Friendlies

This will sound callous and, well, probably a little on the douchey side, but it is now Wednesday, and I have finally overcome my mangled physical state after a smashing weekend in Chicago. Why would I tell you this? Simple. I like video games. In fact, I like them more than I probably should. But that doesn't mean that I should live my life in sole slavery to them. Man does not live on bread alone, and sometimes, he needs the Chicago Cubs. You gotta get out there and meet people to make this listing boat we call life interesting, and the bleachers of Wrigley Field --that most sacred of a athletic holy grounds-- has turned into my preferred place to do it.

Yes, I suppose that above paragraph may sound strange, but hear me out. I've been to Chicago five or six times now, and I've had a pretty good track record for just meeting random folks and parlaying that into a real weekend hoedown. Case in point, this past Friday through Sunday. Now, before I explain this, let me make it abundantly clear that there is no clear necessity for liking the Cubbies, baseball, or even sports in general. I've found that $100 and an open mind to be a good cocktail recipe for a perfect, albeit boozy, weekend. The kind that should probably be sent away in the effigy of a Viking Funeral- kind of perfect weekend.

See, Wrigley is one of the last of the old guard of MLB stadiums; meaning, it's about as small as a shoebox. People are almost sitting on top of people in the park, so it's not exactly difficult to get to know your neighbor. But as cool as it is to sweat in the noontime sun of the left field lower deck with a large stranger on your dominant beer drinking side, there had to be another way. Thrill to the notion, then, of the apartment bleacher seats right across the street. See, to those not in the know, Wrigley was basically built in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and apartment gawkers could cool their heels on the rooftops while enjoying a free game. The stadium owners, ill content with this kind of arrangement, struck a deal with the local landlords. Now, onlookers have to buy a seat at a premium cost, but this cost includes an unending river of beer and more ballpark food than our left field friend could possibly eat. It's one hundred clams well-spent.

So step one is complete, and all that takes is a couple days off of work and paycheck. The other ingredient here is all internal. Now that you're standing there, two or three beers deep, and some dude walks by and complains that this game is crawling because it's only the bottom of the third inning (also obviously two or three deep), it's time to make some friends. Do you really care about this game? Unless you're a local, probably not, so go ahead and piss and moan right along with him. Get to know the other surrounding Cubs game drinkers. Make some friends. Talk a little shit. Ask stupid bar bet questions (personal favorites: "there are 6 team names in pro football, baseball and basketball that don't end in S, but who are they?" and "In the original trilogy, only 8 characters actually touch a light saber. Name them."). Pretty soon, the game is going to be over, someone is going to hit on that 6'5'' Amizonian princess you've all been gawking at, and then it's off to Wrigleyville for an evening in a bar with old arcade games and a batting cage. Does it matter that that these people think your name is Marvin but are too drunk to recall so they call you "Merlin?" No, and it's a nickname that you want to stick, anyway.

Is it easy for people to do this? Probably not. Will it make your weekend more memorable? Questionably. Will it make you want to go back to Chicago? I have found, empirically, that to be a yes. You have to get out there and live, people. Trust me on this.

Ok, A Gun Was Not Held To My Head

Ultimately, a nefarious madman sporting a curled mustache and a top hat did not magically appear in my home to tie me down, so the fault lies squarely with me. All the same, I did watch the VMAs, and whole, tangible chunks of my soul were burned away in the process. It is not inaccurate --and I am certainly man enough to admit-- that the quasi-concert-masquerading-as-a-terrible-award show is not (and perhaps never was) for me at my age and range of tastes. But that precludes that events such as the much ballyhooed *NSYNC reunion, the worst kept secret in the music bizznass this year, should not have been watched regardless of the fact that things like that are targeted to my age group. Never mind the fact that it also precludes that the other quasi-concert-masquerading-as-a-terrible-award show (the Grammys) is more my wheelhouse, even though it is the telecast joke that it is. I'd almost go so far as to say that the VMAs are more respectable than the Grammy Awards if only for the fact that they never had enough respect for themselves to lose to begin with.

But enough about truth. Let's briefly run down the events that stick out to the best of my recollection. The only way to watch the VMAs is to make sure you forget it, so I was good and drunk through most of it. I'm just going to list things as I recall them.

I'm sure Lady GAH! GAH! would approve, because her extreme close up in the beginning was made to be absolutely hilarious. Don't believe me? After the show was over, MTV immediately reran it with no break, so I graced myself with another helping of the LGG performance whily My PlayStation loaded. You don't have too look that hard to notice that she was fighting back a smile in the worst way through that idiotic nun walk to the stage. What I took away from the whole thing is that she is no longer heavy set, or something. Of course, I had Kevin Hart to remind me of this intermittently for the next two and a half hours, but whatever.

Evidently, only 10 people made it to the show this year, plus Throngs of Assholes (ToA) to make up the rest of the crowd: Will Smith and co., Rihanna, 1 Direction (whom count as a single person as they are hive mind), GaGa in her seat, Justin Timberlake's parents, Taylor Swift, and the supreme idiot that agreed to accompany her to the show. (Come on, man! Don't you know you're just fodder for another bullshit breakup anthem? Every other dude in that arena knows it; she dated them all! What's wrong with you?!)

I know it's one thing to cram as many people together on stage as possible, but I kind of feel cheated when each person only gets to sing about a third of one verse of whatever song they're currently famous for/ hawking. However, in the case of Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke, I wanted that shit show finished as soon as possible. Let's break those down individually:

• Miley Cyrus is, and I use this term clinically, fucking disgusting. I don't postulate this because I find her about as attractive as foot fungus. No, it's the waif-ish tongue wagging and forced, putrid "sexuality." I feel bad for child stars trying to make a clean break from their past image, I really do. But I don't feel bad misguided stage productions of teddy bears and faux nakedness. It's not exactly classified information that someone from Camp Cyrus paid off Maxim to secure her place at the top of their yearly list of HOT CHICKZZ, but it's performances like this that are born just to scream "LOOK! I'M DTF!"make me (and La Smith Familia) want to vomit.
• Robin Thicke. Forever the Tony Bennett to Timberlake's Frank Sinatra. But wait! Blurred Lines! A catchy song (grumblegrumbleGotToGiveItUpgrumble) made famous by a video full of nekkid ladies! Is His Thickeness changing the game? Is he the Stones to JT's Beatles? Does pop music need distinctions like that? Too many questions. I like Blurred Lines, even though he was forced to plant his dong behind fucking disgusting Miley Cyrus while dressed like an extra from The Prisoner for the sake of it. Yes, forced. There was a sniper.

That was most understated performance of Yeezy's career. As he has shown me photos of family gatherings where he painted himself like a Maori hunter because it looked best in the lighting scheme for his pyrotechnic-heavy performance of Happy Birthday on his mother's 39th birthday, I think I have some good authority here. I like this trend of yours, Kanye. Let your music speak for itself for a while.

EDIT: Aesop Rocky is a self-serving, dim-witted fuck cheese. I can't believe that I forgot about this earlier, but don't ever stand next to the only openly gay athlete in any of the three major American sports and remind everyone that M'ALBEM DROPZ. Yes, I get the fact that you're introducing the act that won the bullshitty "socially conscious" award, and that's just as back-pattingly self-serving as you are, but that doesn't give you the right to, essentially, piss on everyone else's parade here, specifically the guy standing about 8 inches to your left with four tons worth of courage. I don't mind if the entire world hears your new album, AR. I just want them all, every single one of them, to pirate it off of bit torrents. I was drunk last night, so, naturally, today is a little rough for me. But after I flush my body of its toxins I'll be a new man in a few hours. You will still be Aesop Rocky, supreme ass hole.

Just after his 45-minute medley of hits (which was a clinic on how you Crush It), my wife calmly asked if I thought that JT was an attractive man. This gave me a little pause. In fairness, I don't find him to be Christopher Walken in Batman Returns, but if it was my gut answering, then (provided that I am either female or gay to give an accurate reading, neither of which are true) I would find him to be a good looking guy in a bar, and that's about it. We found ourselves agreeing that it was persona that has given Timberlake his attractiveness, not unlike many stars before him. But star he is, and for a guy that only has three solo albums in the last decade (placing him in respectable circles that include Peter Gabriel and Tool), he proves that quality in no way means prolific. That performance, though, holy cats. That was a lot of booty shaking, friend. I knew going into it that the whole *NSYNC reunion thing was only going to wind up being 33 seconds, much like the Destiny's Child mishmash at the Super Bowl last year, so my expectations for something dazzling from that end were reasonably low. But as a whole, I was pretty impressed, bad sound be damned.

Bruno Mars is a cool guy.

The entire night, MTV was assuring me that Katy Perry will perform her Biggest Hit for the First Time. This sounded dubious. Evidence: She wasn't around when she recorded it? She never rehearsed the song prior to both that, and tonight's main event? A pickle indeed. No matter. It was a song with wholesale Survivor thievery. That bridge in the background was quite a site, I guess.

Sigh. Maybe I'll edit this later. Probably not.

Let's Check In With Tekken Revolution

Stupid Warcraft. Ok, neglecting blog duties isn't entirely Blizzard's fault, but still. Stupid, stupid Warcraft.

Let's rap about Tekken. When I first got down with it a couple of months ago now, I indicted it on counts of being too hardcore to be a successful fee-to-play game, and not exactly easy to recommend in its thin state. But Namco has been fairly active in supporting it since the launch, so I find it ethically compelling in my own way to revisit my thoughts on how Revolution has evolved.

Maybe "evolved" isn't as fair to say as maybe "grew." Since launching, the roster has beefed up by seven additional characters, now topping the whole list off at 18 and counting. Yes, it still takes a significant amount of time and/ or cash to actually unlock them, but if you play at its most base level and not pay a dime, a new character is added to the list close to the same time that you might have unlocked the last one, which keeps the carrot dangling in front of your face. Thankfully, the Tekken universe has (actually) evolved to such a degree in the last few years that every character is completely unique, so you'll never feel as though you were just cheated into getting a palette-swap after weeks of grinding for gift points.

The grinding, though, has probably been the most impressive trait of Namco's constant support over the last few months. By that I mean that they've done their best to make it fairly painless with the constant stream of weekly events. In some weeks you may earn more fight money or experience to boost the levels of your characters, while in others it bestow a 1.5x multiplier on your gift points to make unlockables a bit easier. There have been special events, though, that keep the game fascinating. A few weeks ago, players could go through a special offline 1 player mode fighting only the training dummy Mokujin, which gave massive bonuses to fight money, exp, and gift points for each run through. Entries to this Mokujin mode were granted once per day, but further entries were winnable in online and offline matches at random. Sure, the actual mode was every bit as easy as the standard Arcade mode, but it was easy to unlock multiple character in half the time and test them out while working to open up more.

Clearly, the most welcome addition is the Warm-Up Space, which is a rudimentary training mode. While there's no way to customize it (such as choosing stances and blocking for the AI), an offline mode with no barrier for entry serves as a big leap in solving the main problem I had with the game before. New players can learn their move lists and form combos without the threat of loss and the internal struggle to either shell out for more coins for various modes or wait another 30 minutes for a  shot at the title. It's a great addition.

So, should you play Tekken Revolution now? I say yes; it a steady drip of new content and a way to practice offline solves a lot of issues with it. Learning moves offline will never make you a great player, so getting down in it and fighting in ranked or player matches is still the name of the game. But the gulf between the green recruit and the more practiced-hand can logically be reduced now, if just a little bit. That's good stuff.

Jeebus

It's 9:30 in a Sunday, and God help me, I'm installing Warcraft on my computer again. Ugh.

Tomb Dater: An End Has a Start

Yes, this is coming a little late since we finished the game over a week ago, but bear with me, internets. I wound up having to teach a class this fall, and Life of Pi won't read and annotate itself, apparently.

The final hours (but not the Final Hours) of Tomb Raider's reboot were played with both the mentality and head of steam reserved for a Big Ten college fullback with his eyes on a pro career. Once my wife found herself engrossed enough into Lara Croft and co.'s plight to quell the whims of an angry demigod and ditch the Pacific island, the game was played in long stretches and with very little in the way of exploring. Clearly, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and if we stumbled across the extra tomb/ puzzle or two along the way, fine, but there was palpable interest in an English girl finder her swerve as opposed to digging up GPS receivers and Edo-era helmets and wallets. I hopped along with much enthusiasm.

The downside? Playing in shifts gave way to playing toward strengths. She liked exploring, not fighting, and when cadres of samurai and island mooks started to fill the screen, the controller fell quickly in my lap to be the enforcer I evidently am. I'm actually chalking this up as a minor gripe, all things considered, when I consider the grand scheme of things. Be with me here for a second.

In the early game, it was most obvious that the biggest hurdle for someone coming to modern, 3-dimensional gaming for what might be their first time (in this case, my wife) was dealing with both a controller with more buttons than they might be accustomed to navigating their fingers around and a second stick on it that gave limited, though fundamentally important, control of perspective. By themselves, this is a pretty high barrier of entry. Had their been no combat at all, even at its easiest setting, a neophyte to modern console game methodology would have plenty to do. Sure, this toothless experience would probably get boring after a few hours without any sense of threat, but it would still serve to kind of ease someone in to the Tomb Raiders and Uncharteds of the world. Part of me, in all honesty, is happy that games like this do exist in their way, if only for that kind of population. It would have to have a bigger hook than "run around and look at stuff" to keep someone like me interested, but I casually suggested to my wife that she play something like The Unfinished Swan if she were curious about a relatively combat-free experience. I guess I would have liked it if she became more accustomed to the combat now that we've decided to play a little of Uncharted 3 to prepare for The Last of Us (both at her suggestion), but just because I was the only one in the room racking up the body count doesn't mean that all of this wasn't a positive experience.

Until that let down of an ending. But outside of all of the fun we had with the game, the opportunity to play it together, and the fascination of observing someone that does not play video games as a regular hobby, I'll let the dopey "I'm not going home" denouement slide this time.

Your homework this week is to read Chris Kohler's damning of Final Fantasy (it's two worthwhile opinion pieces). REMEMBER: Your gut might tell you to disagree with him, but Kohler's arguments are sound. Don't be an internet dick and yell at him. If disagreement is what you want over discourse, you can head on over to just about any other website for their reactions.

To other things of note: first, and for whatever reason, this blog gets the most consistent traffic from Russia. To which I say "Привет, всем!" Second, and speaking of traffic, I got my highest hit count in months from my time playing Skyrim while listening to the jukebox of my subconscious. I'm about a third of the way through Bioshock Infinite, and I'm thinking I'll just list music that pops in the ol' noggin' whenever it comes up and make a series out of it. Then again, I might be a little too far along for that. The suspense!

Tomb Dater: Picture Perfect

"Pretty," is what breaks the brief silence, one that takes place when the controller is in my hand instead of hers. I reply that yep, this is gorgeous. We both quickly agree that we're not talking about a 3D model of an English actress.

Tomb Raider was an expensive game to make, and it certainly shows. The lighting effects are pretty much perfect, and I bring those up specifically because I don't really give a shit about graphics one way or another until I find a quiet moment when the lighting gives me pause. The way the torch flickers on Lara's face. The moonlight on the icy northern edge of Tamriel. Lightning reflecting off of Batman's cowl. I'm not running anywhere, not killing anything. When I can sit and think and soak in the world around me, how it's lit has become something of a measuring stick for how I perceive a modern game's objective beauty. The brief moments of gleaming sunlight in between rainy mountain climbs and the occasional spelunking diversion are giving my wife and I a moment. Anyone with taste can tell you that graphics, ultimately, do not matter. But there's nothing wrong with taking a step back to admire them for what they are once in a while.

My wife, though, is fine with this superficiality -- at least right now (I think). I play a lot of video games, and she will occasionally watch me play them. Telling me how good they look to her passing eye is not uncommon. I liked that she was willing to make a comment on something I didn't really think interested her, so I wouldn't respond to her in the opposite when I would play something like Dragon Age: Origins (which I love, but come on. That game looks like shit). I'd like to think that by playing through this game, now in its final moments for us, that her standards are higher going forward. But the reality is that it doesn't matter to me as long as she's having fun. Which, recalling our time playing Wii Sports and its simple ball/cylinder character models, is still what she cares about most. It reinforces my stance on the matter, too.

We're close to the final confrontation with Mathias in the temple now, and she turns to me to inquire if The Last of Us is our next game together. Those standards look higher already.

I Could Sleep

As of 4:00pm EST, I will be on vacation for a week. This means that I'll finally have sufficient time to finish Etrian Odyssey IV and maybe start on Shin Megami Tensei IV. It will be saucy and nerdy. Also, I'll probably go to the Zoo.

Hopefully some book-writing will also continue as well since I'm narrowing in on a good method to finish things out. More news on this to come.

So, I suppose I'm saying that I might not post anything, but let's pray that Lara Croft's further adventures through Right of Passage Iisland are not further stymied so I can tell you all about it.

Your homework is to go to a comic book site --any comic book site-- and read about actual comic book news that comes out of the San Diego Comic Con. If you have to ask what I mean by this it means that you read far too much Entertainment Weekly.

EVOh Yes

So the internet is still aflutter over this past weekend's Evolution (EVO for short) fighting game tournament. That Hakan fight! That Justin Wong comeback! Waitadarnminute, someone ran the SFIV finals with Gen?! Priceless.

EVO has it really figured out, and you have to hand it to Mr. Wizard and the crowd he runs with for not only starting a fighting game tournament way back in the early 2000s when nobody was playing fighting games, but keeping it alive for when the genre would return en vogue. This has given EVO a unique opportunity to not only be a battleground for the biggest and best players, but also a sort of semi-conference for the non-competitive fan. Panel discussions take place. Dealer tables are on exhibition. Major game announcements. If you really dig fighting games, EVO is your annual summer pilgrimage to Mecca.

What I found most interesting this year was the unveiling of Ultra Street Fighter IV. While the internet at large knew that SFIV was getting another round of tweaks in the near future, I doubt that a lot of folks saw the addition of five extra characters to an already loaded game coming. I call that a nice package for $15 DLC, but I didn't used to think so. No, this kind of shit used to get my no-nos in a twist.

Here's why: Capcom, smarmy minx that it tends to be, is notorious for nickel and dime-ing its customers. When Street Fighter II was success, they made updates for it. When Resident Evil was at its height, they played the spinoff game until it was close to irrelevance. The point is, Capcom is a great company that has a history of not leave well enough alone. A further update to Street Fighter IV, now four years old on the console side, looks to be the same thing. Former Capcom employee and fighting game czar Seth Killian even said of the v.2012 update that they were done messing with the game, which (by no fault of his) turns out to be a bald-faced lie. So why flip sides and decide that it's a fine plan?

Two things, really: a little honesty and a whole lot of common sense, which are two things that I appreciate more than bagels and coffee in bed. Capcom has not been on its best legs over the past few years, and the last week has shown it. A company restructuring is taking place, and US senior VP Christian Svensson opted to resign amidst the round of layoffs. That could mean a ton of things, but my personal favorite close-to-the-truth conjecture is that lots of past passion projects for the company (like an under performing Darkstalkers rerelease) just didn't pan out like they thought they would, and a company rejiggering will halt development of extensions of those projects, like oft-rumored sequels. It's sad, but that's business. Plus, larger developers and publishers have to get some things finished for the new consoles that are going to drop by the end of the year, so they don't really have a lot of time and money to toss around.

Case in point, this tweet by Street Fighter series producer (and loveable kook) Yoshinori Ono:

I don't have R&D budget and staff who they're just only make USF4.RT @MC_Odd: @warmlettuce Are you secretly working on a SF V for next gen?
— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) July 15, 2013

Straight from the horse's mouth, the company just doesn't have the cash or staff to make a full sequel to one of their largest franchises. Still sad? Sure, but again, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Still, they are throwing resources at updating a four year old game, and it will fundamentally change it. All characters will have tweaks to their move sets, and five new characters (even though 80% of them are taken straight from another game) drastically alters the landscape of any fighting game, especially if even one or two of them is accepted as tournament-level competitive by the fan base. To me, this is a sign that the developer is going through some hard times, but they haven't turned their back on their customers. Sure, it still seems a little dumb from a casual perspective that they're adding on to a game that will be five years old when Ultra finally arrives, but from a different perspective, Ono's transparency buys him a little bit of good will. At least from me, anyway.

Today's homework is for you to read The Psychology of Steam's Summer Sale over on the The Psychology of Video Games (which is a website I've only become familiar with recently). I was just having a conversation with a friend about the horn of plenty that Steam becomes when the weather turns oppressively hot. This turns out to be eerily timely. Stay tuned for more Tomb Dater later this week. I think so, anyway...

Booze Quest

Yesterday, I decided to hunker down and play the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn beta. That's way too much name to type out. From now on, you should just know what I'm saying when I say it.

Anyway, after all of that complaining on how difficult it was to start it, I felt like I should really put the work in to find out if it's worth it. Normally, I probably wouldn't do that. I don't have limitless time to fight with beta keys and sign-ins and other hooey. I've got enough stuff on my plate, and plenty of other games to keep me busy. ARR, though, is all part of Square Enix's fascinating larger character study; they are a company struggling to maintain their greatness by fits and tantrums of quality coupled with many a foot-shooting. They're the complex antihero that has become as difficult to love as it is to hate. I used to think they represented the Lucasfilm of the gaming business for their incessant need to replicate and repackage their goods while strip mining the nostalgia of their faithful. But for as much goodness that's produced and then how promptly they plant their collective head back their ass, I'm starting to think that they're the industry's Don Draper. I'll have to give it more thought.

So, naturally, I decided to play ARR drunk.

It was fitting. After all, the first few times I toyed with the beta, I didn't really get very far and, frankly, it was all very same-y. Pretty as it is (and it really is), the early going isn't that far removed from the structure of MMO mainstays like Warcraft: lots of fetch quests, plenty of "kill five of these" missives, a few dungeons, etc. For some reason, I must have felt the need to spice things up with a bottle of vodka and impending Monday morning shame. It certainly wasn't bad when I was playing it before, so it wasn't like I was going to have a lousy time. With my history of boozing with other MMOs has proven that I don't make the best team decisions, either, so even though it was a calculated move to try to enhance the experience, I knew that it wasn't such a great plan overall. Oh well, whatever.

It turns out that "enhancing" it wasn't even necessary, because by the time I was done with it, I was having a good time playing ARR. Good enough, even that I have some post-beta test sadness that lead to my searching for message boards this morning, which is also pretty rare. The odds of me shelling out fifteen clams a month to play it when it actually releases are still pretty long, but it's shaping up to be a pretty decent MMO for guys like me that don't often play them any more.

This praise revolves around the smart uses of classes in the game. Instead of picking a class when you roll a character initially, you can change your class --called jobs in Final Fantasies-- on a whim as long as you've unlocked it with a short quest and have a weapon in your inventory that's appropriate. Want to be the chief damage dealer? Pull out those brass knuckles. Does your group need a damage-soaking tank? Equip your sword and shield. You can generalize or specialize how you see fit, as long as you know up front that all classes start at the bottom at level 1.

But that's what I found most fun. I created a catman Pugilist initially. Since this is a beta and I really only like solo playing these games (counterproductive to a lot of content for stuff like this, I know), I wasn't really planning on trying any multiclassing because I just wanted to tear through the story content. After a few hours of doing just that yesterday, I took the plunge and picked up some Gladiator (tank) gear to see how it worked. Since you don't do quests over again that you've already completed, I had a darn good time figuring out the most efficient way to power level Fuglypants' into a respectable fighting state without them. If you're savvy with ARR's various monster hunting and open group battle opportunities, it took very little time to go from a low level chump to a character that parties could rely on to sponge up damage when necessary. I never really go for crafting abilities in these games (the time I spent mining copper in Warcraft are hours that I'll never get back), but I'm kind of psyched for the next beta phase to roll around so I can give armor forging a shot.

But there's certainly a downside to this, and it's my chosen ark of gaming choice. Great as it is to play an MMO on my huge beautiful television, it's just not made to be played effectively with a game pad. Exploring and fighting are fine at low level; your shoulder buttons help cycle through decks of commands, and it's serviceable, if anything. Communicating, though, is a nightmare without a keyboard. I was in a dungeon last night with a group of players that I couldn't effectively plan tactics with because I was hunting and pecking at letters on the PlayStation's dashboard keys. Lucky for me, these weren't particularly involved dungeons, but when I step back and look at the larger picture, it feels as though playing on a console is great if you like soloing, but PC will be the platform of choice for those that play well with others.

So yeah. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I'm already sick of typing all of that, but not quite sick of the game. Next time: sober (maybe)!

Tomb Dater: The Hour of Power

"Alright. It's been an hour or so. I think I'm done."

It's a common refrain, now; the steam whistle to end our shift on the island. It's a paraphrase, on her part, for "this was fun, but I have other things to do. It's time for me to do them." At first when we began the game, it was routinely followed up with the permission to keep playing if I wanted, and that I didn't need to wait for her if I was enjoying it. But that wasn't the point, I would reply, and, eventually, she stopped suggesting it. Now, it's a precedent. If Tomb Raider would be played by a wife and her husband, it would be done so in roughly one hour chunks.

Her side of things is perfectly logical: she reads every night before bed. Often times, it's either preceded or followed by something streamed from Netflix on a tablet. While we don't have children, getting home from work, working out, and cooking/ eating dinner leaves little time for a singular activity when there are daily routines that people prefer to keep. Gaming like this is still relatively untested for her, and judging by our television-watching habits, there are still other things that she would rather be doing over adventuring in the jungle with an early 20th century machine gun. Last night, it was three episodes of Archer that took precedent over immediately starting TR after having something to eat.

My side of things is unreasonably skewed: this is straight up insane. Of course I'm enjoying myself, because this is my thing. If you're having a good time, why not just keep playing? There are tombs to raid here. If I were doing this whole thing solo, I would have finished the game twice over by now. After coming home from work, working out, and cooking/ eating dinner, too, my preferred pastime involves a controller in my hand. Aren't we sharing this?

Of course, none of that was said aloud, because that would be a dick thing to do. I have a feeling that she's well aware of my thoughts, though, but this gave me something of a pause a couple of weeks ago after our first few times firing it up. Playing it this way is causing some reflection on how I ingest games and how I feel about them. This blog, I suppose, is part of that, but the understood agreement that we're enjoying this game on her timetable has been nothing but a positive. A frustrating positive sometimes, sure, but I'm beginning to take away a far richer experience for it.

About seven or eight years ago, after I first landed a full-time job at the place I'm at now, I decided to go through Final Fantasy X for something like the third time. On off days from the gym, I would get home promptly at 5:30, cook something easy to eat in front of the TV, and play it until it was roughly 12:30 or later. That was 7-8 hours of playing, a binge by most accounts. As I grew older and gained a few more responsibilities it diminished, but I'll still play roughly 3-4 hours of games on any given night unless I've got plans. To me, this amount of time isn't unreasonable because gaming is probably my chief hobby. Forcing myself to curb that, at least for this one specific game, by roughly a third is difficult. But stepping back and looking at the numbers is giving me some perspective. There have been evenings where I've hopped into bed and read more, or watched more movies, or even done some drawing -something I haven't done consistently in years. The limitations placed upon one activity have reignited interest in others. That can only be a good thing.

As far as TR itself is concerned, it's not for the setting and tone alone do I keep making Lost references. By playing the game for only an hour or two a week, I've found that I'm taking it in like episodes of a great series. I'm always wondering who or what is behind the Bermuda Triangle-like trappings of the island as well as the motives of its inhabitants. When we finish a session playing it, I want to go back to it as soon as I can, but not because that's my routine, but because in measured amounts I remain fascinated by all of it. Outside of TR, I'm finally playing Borderlands 2. It's a good game; far better than its predecessor, too (which I liked a lot). But I'm going through it in heaping spoonfuls and not manageable bites, and I'm just not psyched to get home and turn it on, no matter how much I like it when I finally do. I used to think that it was because Borderlands 2, or any other game was just, well, any other game. Playing games every night to completion and moving on to the next one was my routine.

I guess I need some common refrains, too.