The Conan Video Game

I'm not reviewing the MMO, for reasons I stated earlier. Instead, I'm reviewing the game for the 360 and PS3.

When I found it used for twelve bucks at GameStop, I wasn't expecting much. I thought it would be some vague attempt at creating a fantasy game with the name tacked onto it, something completely un-Conan with orcs and elves and crap like that. I expected awful graphics, awkward controls, and a storyline that stuck to the source material about as closely as Conan the Destroyer did. Which means not at all.

But I was surprised to find that wasn't the case. The game actually stuck more closely to the original stuff than the books did. Conan looked and acted like Conan should, even throwing out brash quips when he kills his enemies that sound like something straight out of Robert E. Howard, such as "Let Crom judge you" and "I'll cleave your skull to the teeth!"

The storyline was vaguely Conan-esque. My only complaint was that Conan, like many heroes in video games these days, loses his powers after the first mission and has to use experience points to recover them. For some reason, the pieces of his armor are also imbued with magical spells, which he can use as he recovers them piece by piece. As any fan will know, Conan never uses magic. But really, magical power (let's just call it mana) is very rare and the spells aren't much more effective than a good piece of steel, so that does make up for it somewhat.

If you've played God of War, you don't need to know anything to play Conan. The control system is ripped directly from the other game. It's derivitive to the point that it can hardly even be called a different game; the only 'difference' is that Conan can pick up and use the weapons of his enemies. Everything else is precisely the same as God of War. Don't get me wrong; I love a little Kratos action, but Conan could have used his own control system, something more reckless and swashbuckly. Most of the time, the camera behaves and the controls work, but they do sometimes get awkward. Particularly annoying is the need to tap a button to climb walls, and if you don't tap the button quickly, you casually release (and usually fall to your death).

Ron Perlman does the voice of Conan and Claudia Black does the romantic interest, which really lends the game a leg up. Sadly, the graphics don't match; despite this being a PS3/360 title, the graphics don't look any better than many PS2 games I've played.

The stages feel nice and Conan-y, from savage-infested jungles to sand-swallowed cities. At one point, Conan seems to travel to ancient Greece, which felt completely wrong because the Hyborian age is thousands of years before Greece ever existed. But hey, even Howard borrowed from time periods up to the age of piracy, so it's hard to be critical of that. (Conan even appears in one story wearing a buttoned coat and a tricorne hat.) A particular joy was a demon-worshipping cult in a cave that kept killer gorillas. (Howard included gorillas as villains almost as often as he used snakes.)

One surprising pleasure was the boss fights. Apart from the interminable final fight in which you have to repeat the same process four times to defeat the end boss, the boss fights are all unique and interesting. Half the time, it's more about solving puzzles than about button mashing. The game does incorporate push-button cutscenes, which I hate, but you can't have everything.

Because of the gratuitously topless women and the over-the-top gore, the game will appeal only to a limited number of fans. Robert E. Howard himself was never above making a buck from his own creations at the price of the world's 'integrity,' so I can see him approving of this game. Though it's derivitive, there are worse ways to spend ten bucks.

Christmas Wishes

To everyone and the whole world, I wish you a very happy Christmas. Despite the religious associations of the holiday, I'd like to think that it has become rather secularized. Some might think this as a shame, but I like to think it means everyone can enjoy it equally, as it means something special for all of us. Joy, gratitude, peace on Earth, and good will towards everyone are universal, and so I hope we will all have just that. My favorite thing about Christmas is that it gives you an excuse to be happy for no good reason, and that is reason enough to celebrate.

So no matter what your condition or situation, I wish you great happiness this Christmas. And hey, happiness every other day, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with just being happy and glad without any reservation. So go ahead, be happy. You have my blessing. :)

Airing of Grievances

Two of my friends have posted on Facebook that, according to Seinfeld, Christmas is the time of an airing of grievances. I think this sounds good, but I don't have any grievances that are light enough to post merely on Facebook. I thought I'd post here instead, to write how I really feel.

After all, though I may have petty grievances against all sorts of annoyances in my life, my biggest grievance is against myself. No one has harmed me or disappointed me more than I have this past year. It's a sobering thought, but there it is.

I'm not angry or miserable about any of it. In life, we fall but we get back up, and so shall I. There could be no joy without sorrow, no success without failure, and so I look forward to doing even better with all I have learned from my shortcomings. And that, maybe, is something to be grateful for this Christmas.

So, this Christmas, my biggest grievance is against myself, but that's not so bad. Merry Christmas.

Spam email is POETIC!

"Aloha, my gentleman

Two souls and one thought, two hearts and one pulse.Honey, I came here almost hopeless to find you. I am waiting for you for such a long time that I already feel your soul, but I still can not meet you. I know that we are both imperfect, but somehow we will perfectly match together. I do not know what the life has in store for us, but I hope that we will share it together. (link) I will bring you tenderness and happiness, a feeling of deep and everlasting love. I will take you to a place of colourful world and crystal dreams. You are my life and my love, I can feel that you are also somewhere here also looking for me.

Hugs
Li"




I know you're not a real person, Li, but with such a touching and heartwarming offer, how can I refuse? Well, I do refuse, since I'm not a chump, but by my word a "colourful world and crystal dreams" is just about as irresistable as it gets.

The "SyFy" channel's "Alice"

From American McGee's Alice to Tim Burton's Alice to the treatment of Alice in Lullaby, it seems like everyone has had a shot at "re-imagining" Lewis Carrol's classic of children's literature, Alice in Wonderland. When the "SyFy" channel (quotes required since it's such a silly name) decided to remake it into a two-night show, they dropped the better part of the title and made it just Alice. Why? The reason soon becomes obvious: because there's no wonder in this version of Wonderland.

The premise is fairly thin. The Queen of Hearts has taken over Wonderland and is using a casino (get it? she's a playing card?) to leech emotions out of humans from our world. She then sells these like drugs to the populace of Wonderland, keeping them within her power. Enter Alice, a girl who is, despite what you may be thinking, actually completely unrelated to the Alice of legend. There's plenty of speculation that she might be "the" Alice, but there really doesn't seem to be any connection. Apparently her only qualifications are that she wears a blue dress and her name is Alice.

Alice in Wonderland is full of vibrant and colorful locations, Alice, on the other hand, seems to take place mostly in dilapidated old hotels. The characters in Alice in Wonderland are quirky yet full of a strange kind of wisdom. The characters in Alice are virtually all human in appearance, and are only connected to the novel's characters by their names. The Mad Hatter, who isn't mad and doesn't make hats, is one of the best characters in the program, as charming and British as any Artful Dodger. Another standout is the White Knight, played by the guy who plays Taggart in Eureka. Another Sci Fi regular making an appearance is Colm Meaney, further proving my theory that the Sci Fi channel doesn't hire actors for certain shows, but just owns certain people. In my imagination, if I spilled my lemonade in the Sci Fi waiting room, Amanda Tapping, Ben Browder, or Michael Shanks would come out in overalls with a bucket and a mop to clean it up. Meaney does a capable job, but his character, the Queen of Hearts's weak-willed husband, doesn't have much to do. Alice herself is well played, but her writing is so dull that she doesn't have much to work with. The Queen is played by Kathy Bates, who is neither very menacing nor amusing, but whose acting rather gives the impression that everyone is just humoring her character.

Apart from traipsing around run-down old buildings and nondescript forests (neither of which have much Wonder in them), the other real set is the casino, which is brightly lit and consists of three fairly small rooms: the casino room, the Queen's throne room, and the third room.

The plot, such as there is, involves the Queen's son falling in love with Alice and giving her the ring which controls the portal into our world (the looking glass of the second novel's title). The Queen needs this to keep up enslaving humans and leeching their emotions, so she's determined to get it back. The rest of the film revolves around the characters evading capture, getting captured, escaping, evading capture, getting captured again, and escaping again to victory. The writing is remarkably lackluster (Alice's big speech to make the humans in the casino remember who they are is basically "REMEMBER! REMEMBER! REMEMBER YOUR FAMILIES!"). Although she's introduced as a karate expert, Alice needs rescuing several times. The March Hare, called Mad March, is described as the queen's top assassin, but gets taken out with one punch by the Hatter, whose combat skills really are second to none in this show, and make me wonder why he didn't just save Wonderland singlehandedly ages ago. The casino is left unguarded at a crucial moment when the White Knight dresses up a lot of skeletons in armor and stands them up outside. Why nobody notices him setting them up, and why they subsequently fall for attacking an army that only stands there, is anybody's guess; I suppose it's because everyone's mad in Wonderland.

The bottom line is this: this is a show about a wondrous place that could have used a giant heaping more wonder. A couple of charming characters can't do much to save a show with a weak script and no eye-popping set pieces. For a story that revolves around imagination, this program is sorely lacking, and that lets down what could have been a fun adventure.

THAT BEING SAID...

I have a suggestion for a new "SyFy" channel special:

"They fed him honey. They broke his house. They stole his tail. This Spring, Eeyore's really pissed... and he's not going to take it any more."

Kleenex, Monasteries, and Vituperation

I was horrified to find the following message on the bottom of my box of Kleenex:
"Say goodbye to the stiff upper lip... [their ellipsis] Tell calm, cool and collected to take a hike. Whoop it up! Laugh, scream, cry and holler! And when tons os stuff stuffs up your nose, blow it loud and blow it proud! Show your heart and show some tears... of joy and sorrow, in awe and pride. Just let it out!"

I don't want to believe that my Kleenex is telling me to behave like a simpleton and a lunatic, abandoning decency and decorum for the sake of becoming an emotional mess and a public nuisance, but I can't help but think that's exactly what my Kleenex is saying. To me, this speaks to a broader issue, one that continues to replace the educated gentleman of previous generations with the rude, ignorant, and utterly reprehensible self-absorbed man-child of the twenty-first century, the kind of willfully stupid Philistine who refers to a well-spoken man such as our president as a "snob," who dismisses the arts and history as "artsy", and who finds a purpose in television and sports.

Well, my friends, the raving populace has always been weak to bread and circus, but when I start to despair about the state of humanity in the modern day, I reflect that the world has always been filled with a cacophonous rabble who, among their more heinous offenses, belittle their betters for their knowledge and refinement. Not that I am particularly either, mind, but I do aspire to be. Not only has there always been this noisome crowd, there have always been refuges where proper sensibilities and learning are protected.

Even in the Middle Ages, when the majority of the world ran around burning witches, the wisdom of the ages was preserved in manuscripts copied in monasteries. While there will always be the threat of Dark Ages, whether through the collapse of civilization or, as we see today, through a purposeful preference towards ignorance and idiocy, there will always be a minority of people who stand up against this kind of barbarism and hold out.

Thank you, ancient monks. And thank you to you, too, if you are also someone who loves reading and writing, and all things worth preserving.

Sometimes I take myself much too seriously.

Here's Looking At You, Google.

Just for fun, I decided to run a line from the poem "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" by Tolkien in Google to see what it came up with. I didn't use any Boolean functions (no 'ands' or quotes). The line was "The heart is bold that looks on gold." Google arbitrarily decided that the word "looks" is not relevant to my search and told me so at the bottom of my page. Instead, it filled up my page with ads for things like heart-shaped gold trinkets. Despite the fact that I included the line word for word, Tolkien only appeared on page 4 of the search results. Smartest search engine? Sure. My conspiracy theory is severely disappointed.
I was originally going to make this my Facebook status, but then I realized that would make me the biggest nerd ever.

Borderlands

As readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly of the Mad Max movies, which I think are still the epitome of that world. It's not a stretch, therefore, that I should be interested in the new game Borderlands, which a friend of mine rented for me for the PS3. Before I continue, I should include that my friend and my brother both like the game a lot, so it seems I'm the minority opinion here.

The graphics are cell-shaded and stylized, which makes the game feel like a weird dream. The characters you meet are all varying degrees of ridiculous charicatures, which is a major strike against giving the world the right feeling. A lot of the apocalyptic (the game is actually set on a border planet, but let's call a potato a potato) elements are played for laughs. There are also no conversations: the characters, of whom there are precious few, are only there to give you quests, and shops are just dispenser machines.

The game is marketed as a mixed FPS and RPG, but it doesn't hold up as either. I've been playing FPS since the Doom days, so I've developed a bit of talent, but the game requires none. It's a slog of shooting each other a lot, and hiding when you need your shield to recharge. Since the game is heavily hit point dependent, it translates to just a lot of lead in the air while you whittle down the opponents' health bars. The controls are fine, except for the vehicles, which always move in the direction you're facing rather than turning the direction you're turning the control stick, which just doesn't feel right.

The game doesn't work as an FPS, because you really don't use any skill in fighting, but it doesn't work as an RPG, either, because you can't make any choices in the story or even interact with the other characters. Character customization is pretty flat (you get a tree of buffs like in World of Warcraft, but they're really not that great), and you get a grand total of one special ability. This might change later in the game, but I played to around level 20 of 50, so I'd like to think I at least scratched the surface.

You've seen these characters before. The big brute, the magical slender woman, the standard soldier, the skinny sniper. Hell, apart from the woman, you've got them all in Team Fortress 2, and in that they're actually more fun.

The guns have varying effects, including shocking your enemy, eating through their armor, or setting them on fire. This does provide a level of picking the right weapon for the job, which is nice, but the plethora of guns the game advertises just isn't attractive to me. The guns have a bunch of different modifiers, like the yellow weapons in Diablo, that make them more or less unique, but they're about as consistent and useful as those weapons: just because you can pile a bunch of random modifiers on something doesn't mean it feels 'right', which many of these guns don't. A gun that shoots really fast AND has low recoil AND does fire damage is just... fair, since it really just boils down to raw damage output. If the guns were closer in damage potential, like they are in most FPS games, you could pick the flavor that suits your style best. When it comes down to it, I'm really not that excited about shooting weird guns, particularly when it's shooting them at the same enemies over and over.

Which brings me to one of the biggest downfalls of the game: the enemies level along with you. I don't understand why games these days all seem to have a level-up system. It makes sense in games like Dungeons and Dragons, where it means (or should) that you can fight bigger and more interesting enemies, but what's the use if you never get other enemies to fight, but just tougher versions of the same ones? In a world where most of your enemies are human anyway, it doesn't make sense. Why should one particular noggin take ten (or a hundred) times as much destructive power to go 'splode as another? For that matter, is any one gun really a hundred times more deadly than another?

Now, I know that these complaints can really apply to many games, even games I love, such as Fallout 3, but those games have elements that rise above the rest, elements such as writing and interesting characters and mood. Borderlands lacks all of these. It's a long grind. There were a few standout moments of "hey, that was kind of cool", but really it was hours and hours of slogging through the same enemies with little to make it worthwhile.