Cuba has its first horror film, but I’m waiting for its first Jennifer Anniston romcom. The whole movie looks like it was shot in front of a green screen, but the political subtext of Cubans killing American zombies could make Juan of the Dead a novel take on the zombie genre. It’ll be running in October at a Spanish film fest, but there are no North American screenings scheduled yet according to its official website.

In an attempt to completely destroy any reader interest the headline of this post may have generated, let’s start with two facts about myself:

1) I am a fan of dorky fantasy RPGs in the Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age vein.

2) I am arachnophobic.

It’s a source of constant frustration that the above two facts aren’t really reconcilable with one another. In fact, I often feel like they are constantly in conflict. One of my most vivid gaming memories occurred during the opening hours of Dragon Age: Origins, a game that, aside from its generous helping of spidery bits, seemed designed specifically to push all of my nerdiest buttons. Unfortunately, this memory was not a pleasant one and almost made me put the game away for good.

I was ready to become a new world’s champion; its saviour. I would solve all of its problems from the looming threat of nefarious invaders to the petty bickering between a barmaid and tender. I would blaze a trail through the fantastical countryside, gaining priceless loot and leaving a trail of dead in my wake. I had a staff that could shoot fire and lightning. I had facial tattoos. I had just outwitted and then defeated a fucking demon. I was ready.

I had completed my apprenticeship and was a full-blown mage. I was eager to get out and explore, but first I had to deal with some niggling tasks. “No matter,” I thought. Any problem could be quickly solved with a well-placed blast of lightning from my staff and then I’d be on my way. I jumped into a cellar with vigour. I would clean up someone’s mess, find some items and gain some valuable experience before my true adventure began.

But then, oh no, the illusion is broken. Suddenly I’m no longer the sprightly young elf with ridiculous looking robes. Instead I’m a grown ass man who just had to pause the game and look away from the TV screen while I recomposed myself after coming face-to-face with a giant, nightmarish spider. Even a completely artificial rendering of an eight-legged horror is enough to make my heart jump through my skull and my limbs to uncontrollably pull themselves closer to my body.

Nonetheless, I pulled myself together and burned that fucker to death. I moved on cautiously thinking that so long as I saw them coming, kept my feet tucked safely away from the gap under the couch and silently repeated a mantra that it was a just a game I’d be okay. Then one of the damned things—at least as big as my avatar—dropped on me from the ceiling. This time I let out an audible gasp, paused the game and again looked away from the screen. I could feel sweat forming on my brow. My heart felt like it was seconds away from bursting. My breathing was clipped. I rode it out, returning to the mantra and reminding myself that soon I would graduate from spiders and vermin to Dark Spawn, Blood Mages and Highwaymen.

Eventually, after frequent pauses to regain my breath and curl myself into a tighter ball I got to a part of the cellar that my map assured me was the end. Unfortunately, before I could leave I had to deal with the last of the spiders. While I had made it most of the way only having to battle one or two at a time, in perfect video game fashion, the last area was populated by a horde of four or five. Once they saw me they advanced, their many legs scurrying them towards my now fleeing elf in a sickingly realistic fashion. I continued to run, throwing fireballs and lightning bolts over my shoulder sporadically. The creatures soon caught up to me and I was forced to make my stand. I looked somewhat above and to the right of the screen and tried to remember which buttons corresponded to which attacks. Foolishly I returned my gaze to the screen only to see the mandibles and errant legs of one of the spiders thrash at me from behind. Again I was forced to pause and look away. Minutes passed before I let the scene resume, this time not even trying to keep part of the screen in my peripheral vision as I urgently cast spells.

LA Noire came out on Tuesday, and has been heralded as both the Game That Cures Cancer as well as a stultifying slog. With its groundbreaking facial animation tech and somber, slow burn story, it certainly seems to be a different animal than most video games about a man who professionally caries a firearm (ie: if you do everything right, you almost never have to shoot it). Here are some thoughts on the first few hours.

First thing’s first: it works.

It isn’t perfect, and if I had cancer before I started playing I probably still do, but I’m still having a good time despite the fact that I can count on one hand the number of bullets I’ve fired in the first three hours. Like most supposedly “groundbreaking” games, LA Noire plays like an elegant, if somewhat uncreative fusion of proven ideas. The meat of the game is effectively Pheonix Wright in a James Elroy broth, with some GTA thrown in to taste. Where the game really succeeds, though, is in making its crimes feel weighty and consequential.

A lot of that comes down to not letting the player rampage through the immaculately rendered streets of 1947 Los Angeles like Nico Belic, and the focus on bringing bad guys to justice rather than simply putting a bullet through their frontal lobe. Life in this game has value, even if it’s just the difference between a three star rating and a four star rating.

Likewise, I’m impressed by how it manages to let me screw up by botching an interview, or not finding all the clues at a crime scene, but still manage to pull the clearance together at the end of the case via foot chase or fist fight. I haven’t replayed anything to see if what I’m doing is actually affecting the way anything plays out, but to be honest I don’t really care if it does. The illusion that what I’m doing – or not doing – is having consequences is all it really takes to immerse me in the world, and LA Noire has got enough tricks up its sleeve to keep me nodding and clapping along with it.

So, again: it works. I’m not hooked yet and I’ve got some gripes, but this is a smart, polished, thoroughly competent take on the pulp crime genre (I refuse to call it noir, despite the title). I’ll certainly be seeing it through.

Some stray thoughts:

• The music is so, so ridiculously good. It’s a charming little jazz score that swells and falls in perfect time with the action: Quiet and careful during a crime scene investigation, roaring and bombastic during a foot chase. It’s the only part of the game I’m prepared to call “brilliant” this far in.
• I’m finding Cole Phelps, our hero, to be sort of an abrasive prick. I feel like this is partly intentional, but I wish they’d commit to it. The writer keeps throwing in these hacky little liberal anachronisms to get us on his side, like his defense of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a reaction to America cutting off their oil supply. It’s everything short of giving him a dog. That hates segregation.
• God damn the facial animation tech looks hot. There’s kind of a strange dissonance between the very broad pantomime of the body actions and the subtlety of the faces, but this is certainly the most convincing game “acting” I’ve ever seen.
• Like the way the guns feel, when you do get to fire them. Weighty and dangerous.
• No great motivation to explore yet, beyond the incredible detail of the city itself. I’ve found myself using the fast travel “you drive” option whenever I get the chance. The game does nothing to suggest this, but I always imagine Cole narcoleptically dozing off in the passenger seat as they move to the next crime scene or interview.
• Sometimes the evidence required to catch someone in a lie doesn’t always correspond to what they’re lying about. Cole often throws in a little “clue” at the end of his accusation that confuses me into the wrong choice. For example, in one case where I found a pair of home-repaired glasses at the crime scene, I chose them as the contradiction for his wife’s assertion that he “left wearing his brand new pair,” but the game was looking for something else. I feel like this’ll be less of a problem once I get on the writers’ wavelength.
• Those warbly war flashbacks are awkward and boring. Get to the point already.

With another podcast behind us, it behooves me to write something about Brink before I am absorbed into the two-pronged Time Trap that is The Witcher 2 and LA Noire.

Brink is an unusual game for a lot of reasons, though one of the most interesting to me is the way reviews scattered upon release. This isn’t typical of videogames. While it’s common for films, books and music to inspire a broad range of opinions, games tend to cluster. Part of this is owed, I suspect, to the culture of the mainstream gaming press, though a bigger part of it is more likely the result of games existing, solely and purely, to entertain. Movies can but don’t have to be “fun” in the same way that nearly every videogame has to be. I’m allowed to like both Fast Five and The White Ribbon for different reasons.

But am I allowed to like Brink?

I’ll confess a bias. The first videogame I can ever remember getting seriously, obsessively, play-every-single-spare-moment-I-had nerdy about was Tribes 2. It was the first and only game I ever joined a clan for, attended weekly practices, and competed in tournaments. I won’t argue that it was the best multiplayer shooter ev-ar, but its blend of tactical loadout choices, vehicles, and almost chesslike “dueling” latched on to the OCD part of my brain with a death grip.

While the only material similarity between the two games is the fact that they’re both team-oriented online shooters, I was reminded of Tribes almost as soon as I first booted Brink. It can’t really compete with Tribes in terms of tactical complexity, but there’s a strong thematic similarity between both games’ hyperfocus on teamplay (Brink doesn’t even have post-match personal kill stats), and the idiosyncratic nature of the violence.

Tribes required players to master a number of skills nested deep within the game’s systems (so deep that they often weren’t even alluded to by the manual) like “skiing” (using the terrain to optimize your jetpack fuel usage) and the even more famously difficult-to-master “spinfusor” (a gun that launched explosive disks at a rate so painfully slow, the game’s many jetpack fights were all about getting the best vantage to shoot where your opponent would land while trying to be slippery enough that he couldn’t guess where you would). Brink’s parkour system and ratta-tat-tat guns don’t have the same learning curve, but in any server it’s immediately obvious which players have considered the advantages they can squeeze from wall running and obstacle vaulting, and which have mistakenly wandered in from Call of Duty.

Where Brink stumbles, I think, is in being overly-prescriptive with its objectives. Each match plays out as a series of sub missions where each team needs to leverage different class abilities in order to progress. So: the Soldiers plant a bomb on the wall while everyone protects them so the robot everyone is guarding can get through, but when the robot breaks down the Engineers have to repair it and when you get to a door your Operatives need to move in to hack the access panel. Succeed in all the objectives, and you win.

The brilliance of Tribes was in how it created a dynamic possibility space around that hoariest of hoary gametypes: capture the flag. You’d have guys setting up defenses, you’d have other guys sneaking in to sabotage the other team’s resources, and maybe you’d even have a few (secret) ladies flying bombing runs on a radar dish. But every single one of those objectives was always situated around grabbing that (God damned) flag and hauling it back to your (God damn) flag. The flag runner was always the focus, but everyone was allowed to find their niche, settle in, and contribute equally.

While there’s a whiff of that camaraderie when Brink’s firefights pick up, and all the different classes start (literally) tossing different buffs back and forth, but it’s arcadey and shallow by comparison. I still haven’t convinced myself that it’s a fair comparison to make, but I can’t help but feel like Brink’s teamplay would feel tighter-knit if its objectives were broadened. With a parkour traversal system as esoteric as Tribes’ jetpack and a whip-smart persistent upgrade system, Brink is missing out on an opportunity to let players feel like they’re participating in a unique conflict, rather than moving from screen-to-screen in the shooter equivalent of Streets of Rage.

Like Tribes, Brink is a strange and wonderful game, and I hope it gets the same devoted group of dorks that helped make the Tribes community one of the strangest and most wonderful I’ve ever experienced. If it’s still around in a year, I intend to hop on a public server just to see what unpredictable knowledge of the game systems has become commonplace amongst the community. Because in a game like this, the software only lays the foundations. It’s up to the players to figure out what the game is.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was released on Tuesday, May 17th – the same day as LA Noire, because the entire videogame industry is involved in a conspiracy to make my cat die of starvation and my girlfriend leave me, probably for playing videogames for so long I forgot to feed the cat. Because the game is way too big and I’m way too employed to play through the thing in the timeframe I’d like to for review, what follows are some general impressions based on, if Steam is to be believed, the first 117 minutes of gameplay.

Which is another way of saying: Not much of the damn thing at all.

Two aspects of The Witcher 2: You’re Kidding if You Think I’m Writing That Awkward Subtitle Out More Than Once that strike me are: 1) this game is big. And 2) it trusts me to explore it in a way no other game on this scale has ever done. These two thoughts, held in my brain simultaneously, produced a feeling through the alchemy of brain-electricity I think some scientists might call “emergence.” This feeling, if vocalized would probably sound like giddy, delighted laughter.

The Witcher 2 is cool. I probably said that dull little nothing of a word half a dozen times in the first hour, because holy shit this game is so fucking cool, you guys. It’s a giant, impressively dense fantasy world with dozens of little intricately designed nooks and crannies that it’s confident enough to let you just stroll on past, if you’re more focused on getting to the next quest objective. I was wandering around one of the starting areas, killing random bad guys and soaking up the atmosphere (and oh god, the atmosph – focus, Kyle!), when I realized that I could walk into any of the adjoining buildings I so chose, and search them for their valuables. It wasn’t indicated on the map, or pointed to by twinkling doors or any of the other standard crutches. Just something left there for me to discover when and if I did.

Which, being Fantasy Hero, of course I did. But then, a little later on, I found some soldiers doing the same thing. They were also threatening some of the female villagers with, to use the game’s euphemism, “soiling,” so while I feel I maintained the moral high ground, I didn’t do so by much. I talked the soldiers down and released the people they were bothering, careful not to take anything that didn’t belong to me from then on. Oh, and the thing about these Rapist-Looter soldiers?

They were on my side.

The game’s opening takes place during a siege by the current king against a town that’s loyal to a baroness who has a claim on the throne because of something to do with the king’s illegitimate children (the world’s politics are elegantly detailed and never over-explained, but also really, really fucking complicated, so I’m not totally up-to-speed yet). It’s ostensibly a way of introducing the core gameplay mechanics, but its attempts to explain even the simplest controls are so cursory that the prologue actually seems more focused toward the story.

Which, if you haven’t picked up on it, I love in the way your dog loves that plush toy he always looks guilty around if you’ve left him alone in a room with it for too long.

Yes, it’s a gritty take on tired fantasy tropes which, yes, I’ve had about enough of as anyone, but the key difference here is that all the grit ‘n violence exists for a reason. It isn’t a layer of grime over a Middle Earth knock-off: it’s the natural consequence of a kingdom that’s been built on war, inequality and internecine royal conflicts. There are no clear good guys or bad guys, and even the monsters, when they show up, feel like Just Another Shitty Thing for everyone to deal with rather than the show-stopping, narrative-overpowering force they usually are in fantasy.

The Witcher 2 wears its grittiness in everything from the dialogue, to the set design, to the physicality of the combat animations. Saying it’s “lovingly crafted” is a bigger cliché than an elf with a longbow, but like the Witcher’s pointy eared scoundrels, I feel like its use here is apt.

Stray thoughts:

• Overwhelming! While the skill tree I can see tells me different, the game has started me off with way more skills than I know what to do with. I feel like once I know what everything does, I’ll probably stop dying so much.
• Pretty! I’m playing the game on my laptop (an Asus G series, but still a laptop), and I had to dial the settings back to “medium” after some choppiness on high. But it hardly matters. Even with the settings lowered, this is the best looking PC game I’ve played… probably ever. And that’s more than just graphical fidelity – characters, enemies, monster and environments are all lavished with beautiful, imaginative detail.
• Agh! Holy balls, this game is hard. I’ve died more times in the first two hours of the Witcher than I do over the entire playtime of most games. But I’m excited to master the slick combat, so I don’t mind.
• Sexism! The first game suffered from a case of Really Poor Taste when it came to your interactions with women, and some of that’s still present here. But I’m willing to forgive most of it as a byproduct of what I was talking about before: In a world built on iniquity and based on the middle ages, women are definitely getting the blunt end of the stick.

Episode 7 of Read, Listen, Watch, Play is now available. In this episode, the whole crew gets together to talk Casanova, Gang Gang Dance, TV on the Radio, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Dollhouse, Thor, Hobo with a Shotgun, Portal 2 and more. Plus Ben comes to the shocking conclusion that a show called 16 and Pregnant doesn’t have much to offer the world.

Mentions in this episode:

Kaboom… Hooray!: Calgary-based stand-up and sketch comedy that is taking Canada’s fourth largest metropolitan area by scattered showers.

Strange Horizons and Lightspeed Magazine: Weekly speculative fiction magazines where you can read about sensitive, well dressed, handsome future men pining after sentient velociraptors.

Kyle’s “very popular internet article” or whatever the held he called it in between talking about how great he is and the many ways he is superior to even the finest humans. [It was popular by RLWP standards! -K]

While Brandon Graham’s vibrant, graffiti inspired, bursting with detail and oh so hip artwork was what brought me to King City in the first place and certainly kept me coming back, it wasn’t my favourite thing about the book. Nor were the barrage of deliberately awful visual puns he crammed into every crack of his pages, though they certainly helped the grins per page ratio. It wasn’t even that Graham constructed a world filled with cat masters (basically Green Lanterns, except instead of rings that give life to their thoughts they inject their cats with fluid that allows them to perform very unfelinic shenanigans), strawberry loving water nymphs, post-traumatic stress disorder riddled war vets who slowly find their extremities transforming into the drug they’re addicted to, and a variety of similarly high concept bonkersness at every turn. Even with its ludicrous sci-fi setting, boundless playfulness and unflagging hipness, what really drew me into King City was the day-to-day.

Throughout the 12 issues that make up the series, Graham accomplishes something that often eludes even the finest minds responsible for some of the most memorable science fiction settings. He’s constructed a sci-fi world where it feels like it’s actually possible for normal people (for that world, anyway) to live normally. This has been a problem I’ve had with a lot of sci-fi since I became aware that there was a thing called science fiction. Too often (and it’s critical that I stress that this doesn’t always happen) we’re presented with a sprawling, futuristic world where our hero has ample opportunities for exciting adventure, sexy exploits and to overthrow malevolent space dictators, but the sense that there are people populating these worlds who have boring jobs and generally can’t be assed to care about much is missing. It’s all well and good to have a bunch of rebels looking to overthrow the space magic abusing Empire, but without the shlubs who are too lazy to give a shit that the dude in the black robot mask of evil who happens to be second in command of the universe regularly chokes people to death over video screens it can be hard to accept the conflict as genuine. Perhaps all of these normos have long since fallen into the cavernous pits littered throughout their space-age hell because some set designer thought it looked cool. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I don’t have this problem with King City. In fact, the book often feels like it’s specifically about addressing this problem by showing ordinary people living in an extraordinary world. Ordinary people who happen to have super cats, wear ski masks in the middle of summer and fought it Xombi wars, sure, but that’s just how things roll in the King.

What Graham demonstrates is that no matter how far-fetched and fantastical a place might might seem to us readers stuck in the 21st century, with our hopelessly stuck in the past cloud data storage, high definition cell phones and rescue mechs, it’s going to be humdrum to people who live there. If you build a world where evil shadow organizations routinely kidnap aliens, giant Cthullu-like monsters constantly disrupt traffic by threatening existence, and people break into secure facilities using cats, then all of that stuff has to become as mundane to the world’s population as going to a shitty office job and getting paid to look at the internet feels to us.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the book’s ending (spoilers, I guess). After seemingly building towards a climatic confrontation between the aforementioned Cthullu-like monster and a group of cat masters from around the world, Joe, our main character and ostensible hero, merely shrugs it off in favour of sharing some good food with friends. He’s helped out his ex, his best friend has rescued the alien he earlier wronged, he’s finally stopped being a puppy for the femme fatale. He’s done and all he wants is to relax with those close to him, confident that there are sufficient would-be heroes around to deal with this current life-threatening event because there always are. It’s King City, that’s just what happens.

Some might find this ending a cop out, upset that they didn’t get to see some epic cat-fu throw down, but that was never what the book was about. If Graham had gone ahead and named the book Cat Master, as he apparently considered, then people would be right to cry foul. But he named it King City and his ending truly solidifies this choice. King City isn’t really a book about cat masters and battles with various wacky futuro-baddies. It’s a book about living life in an insane world that is perfectly sane to those forced to do so. It’s about hanging with your friends over good drink and grub. It’s about the day-to-day, and as such it’s some damn good light sci-fi.

Note: If you have any interest in purty, obscure comic book art from around the world you should most certainly add Graham’s unmatched blog, Royal Boiler, to your RSS feed.

Episode 6 of Read, Listen, Watch, Play is now available. In this episode, Ben, Kyle, Jeff and Garth discuss Community, Exit Through A Gift Shop, The League, Pokemon, Weedle, Minecraft, Archer, Chicago Code, Raekwon, Planetary and why you should probably have sex with everything in video games.

The other day a particularly nerdy corner of the internet briefly lifted their heads and let loose a blared, braying klaxon call (the method of communication of choice on the internet) when BioWare Lead Writer David Gaider admirably waded into to the mud to tell an anonymous commenter that his preposterous assertion that BioWare deliberately ignored straight, male gamers in Dragon Age 2 was preposterous. Gaider does a good job of wooshing through the holes in the commenter’s position while delivering some well construed thoughts on majority entitlement and the like. I’ll leave it to you to read Gaider’s comments, because, though the issue provides a nice opening, it’s not exactly what I want to talk about. The commenter’s silly argument aside, his problem emanates from a phenomenon that is completely nonsensical to me: he’s playing Dragon Age 2 as himself, or at least a version of himself that can shoot fireballs or whatnot.

So here’s the deal: when I wake up in the morning I am a white, straight (if we want to use such binary terms), human, male. When I go to bed at night I’m the same white, straight, human, male. When I drop my breakfast toast into a snowbank every fucking day I’m a white, straight, human, male. When I dance around my apartment listening to Robyn and reading about constitutional law, well you get the idea.

I’m that guy all the damn time, whether I like it or not, and frankly it’s kind of boring. Not that my life is any more or less boring than anyone else’s, just that I’ve spent every day of it being a white, straight, human male and not a single one being, say, a purple, pan-sexual, transgendered lizard. Fortunately, there are these wonderful things called role-playing video games that allow me to not only, you know, play a role, but also create a role to play.

Character creation screens are more than just an opportunity to fiddle an avatar into your own, muscley-er image, pick the least terrible of the terrible haircuts and choose whether you want to magic things to death, stab them to death or hack them to death. You’re creating a new being and with even the faintest glimmer of creativity you can figure out a rough guide about who they are, how they’ll react to situations, what their politics are, with whom they enjoy getting sexy, etc. These decisions you make in turn end up becoming the basis for how you play the game and create a fun, dual-author back-and-forth with the game itself as you write the main character and the game writes the settings and situations in which your creation develops.

To me, that is the precise appeal of RPGs, yet the recent online bickering about Dragon Age 2 reminds me that a lot of people don’t share my view and, I suppose, react positively to the feelings of empowerment defeating a big ass demon as digital equivalent of themselves imbues in them. That’s fine, of course, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Aren’t we all hopelessly sick of ourselves? If I’m going to spend 50+ hours running around a robust fantasy environment taking control of people’s blood, I’d rather do it as a morally ambivalent, sardonic cat-thing who exploits gray areas, has an irrational hatred for shopkeepers and is attracted to monks than as a gawky, white, straight, male human with social anxiety issues and arachnophobia. Plus, that way I don’t get annoyed at the game for unwittingly making me compromise my sexual integrity when I accidentally end up in the sack with another dude or whatever. It’s just another element in the ongoing development of  a character.

My New Year’s Resolution was to not waste a single opportunity to talk about Batman, so I present you with the trailer for the new Batman game, Arkham City.

So. How do we feel about the song they use there? At first I was feeling pretty “nyggeh” but then I started feeling pretty “Yes” about it. The obvious route would have been to ape (or at least emulate) the Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard score from The Dark Knight, but I’m glad that Rocksteady decided to go their own way with it.

Melancholic pop is actually very appropriate for Batman, if you give it a moment’s thought. The character transforms a little with every new writer/artist (and more recently actor/director) who touches him, and the icon we have today is an agglomeration of all the different thoughts and opinions various people have had about the “idea of Batman” for decades.

The “idea of Batman” is a topic for a different post (or perhaps a psychological journal), but any of you with an interest in reading about Batman on the internet probably already know what I’m talking about. In the interests of accessibility, however, here’s a thoughtful post by the internet’s preeminent Batmanologist, Chris Sims, on the notion of whether or not Bruce Wayne or Batman is the “mask.” It’s a good place to start.