Snowpiercer

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Snowpiercer is the closest thing the world will ever see to a Bioshock movie. And in all likelihood, it works even better than a straight adaptation ever would. Director Joon-ho Bong presents forth a fairly straightforward journey from the tail of a train to the head of it that's never less than visually fascinating. Meanwhile, the simplicity of that forward momentum provides plenty of room for a story that is at turns gruesome, darkly funny, infuriating, and heart-wrenching.

Seventeen years after the world's botched attempt to reverse climate change, the last of our species is stuck aboard a perpetual momentum train, traveling across a dead and frozen Earth. A long, steel box houses a few drops of human decency struggling against the most corrupted, degraded tendencies of our species. The difference between the two factions doesn't even have the courtesy to be distinguishable by class, which, while clearly demarcated, does not necessarily confer morality or decency on one side or the other (the citizens of the tail come off slightly better, if only because they have the misfortune to be aware of their miserable lives while the well-off citizens of the head thrive in ignorance of those consigned to the rear cars). These would be somewhat less bleak equations, if the occupants of the train didn't also happen to be the last of humankind.

Chris Evans' Curtis leads a team of rebels to take the engine of the train. Car by car, they fight for the dignity of their comrades in the tail and the children that are, now and again, taken to help run the engine. They bloodily force their way out of the slums of the tail, through the kitchen (where they learn what their food is made from), and into the opulent digs of the upper class, which includes a terrifying indoctrination center for the children of the head, where Curtis guns down a delightfully repugnant Tilda Swinton.

I'm not sure when exactly I started thinking that Joon-ho Bong was perfect for a theoretical Bioshock adaptation, but by the time Curtis and his surviving rebels are making their way through the upper class cars at the front of the train--decadent, beautifully-appointed, totally at odds with the way people in an enclosed and delicate ecosystem should be able to live--I realized this was that adaptation. And it's not too long before Ed Harris' Andrew Ryan Wilford shows up, completing the parallel. Snowpiercer, happily, chooses to end not long after killing its mad god-king.

Instead, it turns out that Curtis' revolution is just the most recent in a long line of orchestrated uprisings to maintain the delicate balance of population and resources. Curtis, at least for a time, was being led by the very forces he was trying to undermine (would you kindly...). Realizing that there is no future for the people in the tail, or any hope for any interruption to the rotten status quo, Curtis opts for the last best hope. And instead of a scavenger hunt and a disappointing boss battle, we get an uplifting sequence in which the train crashes and a couple of surviving children stumble out into the cold, spying a polar bear in the distance (which I think symbolizes good eatin').

There's a balancing act to a story that relies on humankind being its worst. In particular, it's difficult to stick the landing in a satisfying way. It can be all too easy to close out on a hopelessly bleak note or go for the contrived and improbable hopeful ending. Bioshock gave players a choice between the two. Snowpiercer wisely opts for the least crushing finale possible. Yona and Tim (seventeen and five, respectively, with little-to-know working knowledge of the planet they've never set foot on) are not set up very well. And it's only a few lines of dialogue spoken twenty minutes before the end that gives the audience any hope for the Earth itself having any hope for survival. But they've survived the train--no great environment for a kid--and, if Curtis' uprising represents anything, it's that a chance of a hope is better than giving in. At least there's some humanity in that.

Grade: A

Batman: Arkham Origins

WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS

It would be easy--if accurate--to complain that Warner Bros Games Montreal has done nothing new with the Arkham franchise. On the one hand, Batman: Arkham Origins does give the impression of stagnation, as though the series has already become afraid to try anything new. On the other hand, more Arkham is fine by me.

Given a new studio at them helm of this installment, a brisk change of pace may have been unnecessary, anyway. It might even have made a great big glowing target of WBGM (God, the acronym is somehow just as cumbersome as the full name) because any significant change would've proved--at best--controversial among the fan community. So in Origins, it appears, the studio chose to prove they could deliver the same beloved product, plus a couple more things. In that, Montreal succeeds.

And Origins does tempt fate, allowing Batman to glide and run around "old Gotham City," which players will remember as the setting of Arkham City. And it looks here exactly the same as it did in the previous game if a bit less, um, decayed: same courthouse, same steel mill; a few buildings missing, a few more added, and Batman cannot interact with this portion of the city precisely as he did in the previous game. But it's undoubtedly Arkham City. The player can explore this area (and a brand new half of a city, as well) using the exact same orgasmically-intuitive game mechanics they've become accustomed to. If nothing else, it would be ballsy to remind players of a game they love while giving them a game they don't. Not going to lie: I smiled a bit, reliving old memories.

While we're tempting fate with a new studio trying to replicate near-perfection, we've gotten new voice actors to replace the near-unreplaceable Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. But happily, Roger Craig "Ezio Auditore" Smith's Batman is a reasonable facsimile with a flawless criminal-intimidation voice. Meanwhile, Troy Baker (who you will not recognize from here) ratchets Hamill's unmatchable rendition into a younger, more eager Joker. Both are solid enough and talented enough that I almost wish they had been allowed to break free with their performances rather than imitate what's already been done. Origins gave me that feeling frequently.

At this point, I realize I haven't gotten to the Batmanning. But that aspect is mostly the same as it was before. Crime scene reconstruction is a fun, only occasionally tedious, addition. And the Batplane quick-travel is a nice relief when having to traverse a game world that verges on over-sized. Otherwise, no big surprises here. Players who didn't like the Riddler's scavenger hunts still won't like them, and still don't have to do them. And players who love fluid fights and challenging predator sections (that is, every player) will still love those. It feels good to be back in the cape and cowl again. 

Side note: a brief jaunt into the challenge rooms left me disappointed, coming off as more a series of structured stunt-performances requiring none of the creative criminal-bashing I loved about the previous games' challenge rooms. Maybe opening up a few more rooms will improve that experience.

Joker aside, Origins opts to showcase the more obscure segments of Batman's rouges gallery. From semi-knowns like Black Mask and Deathstroke to out-of-left-fielders like Copperhead (now a chick!) and Anarky (whose inclusion is worthwhile solely for Batman's walk-out on a mopey manifesto). Bane, in a pleasant surprise, is a decently well-constructed villain: an enormous, hyper-intelligent tactician with a mercenary focus on killing the Bat. However, it's tarnished slightly by reverting him to the over-muscled, lumbering Bane we know from past games for the climactic battle, which is somewhat more thrilling than previous final Arkham boss fights. On that note, boss battles are decent this time around (special mention to the Mad Hatter section), but nothing like the spectacular Mr. Freeze fight from City.

True, Batman's early years--being hunted by cops, the slow-building trust with Gordon, his first meeting with Joker--have been done before. Sometimes better than this. There's nothing new or canon-shattering here. We even get a brief Knightfall retread. Montreal is not trying for the road less traveled here. But if it works, it works. And Origins works.

If Rocksteady never gets another shot at the franchise, at least Arkham is in steady (hm...) hands at Montreal. If it ain't broke, yadda yadda. This can get old quickly, and Montreal will need to do something of their own eventually. But so long as future games avoid the trap, I can live with evolutionary lull for one installment.

Grade: B+

More Thoughts on Bioshock Infinite

(Image courtesy IGN)

A few more thoughts that didn't quite fit into my review.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

--On whether Comstock is a true-believer or a charlatan: he's pretty clearly (to me) the former. Exploiting tears and choosing a future based on all possible outcomes may be cheating in the Prophet game, but it doesn't reflect anything about how Comstock sees himself and his faith/delusion. He in fact may view his access to this ability (albeit granted by the science of the Luteces) as evidence of his Prophet-hood. Notice he doesn't let a lot of other people use his technology. The angel Columbia came to him and bestowed this gift. If anything, Comstock is a pragmatic true-believer. Remember: he has a mission in mind (to "drown in flame the mountains of man") and in order to reach the universe where he pulls that off, he needs to navigate the choppy waters of the infinite universes. Maybe "the Prophet" thing is seed for the marks, but the man still pretty clearly believes in the destiny he sets for himself.

--Speaking of the Luteces, how were they luring Booker into their universe to stop Comstock? Presumably, Booker's debts had been paid by selling Anna/Elizabeth, right? Unless he found some more in the intervening twenty years, which he well may have. But how do they reach Booker with their offer and why doesn't he recognize them the first time he runs into them in Columbia? And who was the body in the lighthouse with the warning about not disappointing them (one of the 122 Bookers that failed, maybe)?

--And what's Rosalind Lutece doing in Columbia in the first place? We know that she and Robert were killed as a result of their plan to stop Elizabeth from fulfilling Comstock's prophecy, so it's safe to assume that neither is a dyed in the wool Comstock-ian (Robert, having only been pulled into Columbia because his counterpart was already there, threatens to leave if Rosalind doesn't help in this mission). Combined with being scientifically-inclined and British (right?), they don't seem perfect fits for Columbia's racist, nationalist, hyper-religious society in the sky. Maybe it gave them a chance to work on their quantum mechanical discoveries that they never received on the ground, so they put up with the ideology as background noise and rebelled when things started going too far?  That makes the most sense to me.

--Last point on the Luteces: if the same person from separate universes can be of different genders, what is the mechanic that determines the differences between universes? Booker's decision to get baptized/not baptized and the reliability of coin flips (chance doesn't seem to be affected) would each indicate that choices are the determining factor. Given that Infinite takes place in 1912 and presuming that the Luteces were born forty or fifty years before that, gender choice must be taken out of the equation. So how did one Lutece end up female and the other male? And what implications does that have for other dimensionality differences?

--A grassroots progressive movement calling themselves "the Vox Populi." Ridiculous.

--In his Gameological review, John Teti (in one of several underwhelmed reactions) laments the short-shrift given the political aspects of the game: Comstock vs. Daisy Fitzroy and the parallels with Tea Party vs. Occupy, etc. I partly agree with this, and said as much in my original review, and understand the disappointment. But the thrust of Infinite is Elizabeth, not the Vox Populi. Booker's purpose in Columbia is to "bring back the girl" and only gets drawn into brief confederacy with Fitzroy out of necessity. And Teti even calls the Elizabeth/universe bending aspects the game's "most compelling thematic thread." Infinite could not have given both plots their due focus and done credit to either. Something had to give and Ken Levine and his developers made the right choice in focusing on something so comparatively under-utilized in gaming and narrative forms overall.

--Teti also expresses dissatisfaction with the implied false equivalence between Comstock and Fitzroy, which I agree may have come off a bit ham-handed as Infinite attempted to tie up that arc. However, I'm not sure the game ever implies that these two are on the same level. Fitzroy has too strong an obsession with image and keeping a clean narrative, but her goal (whatever the manipulative and violent means to achieve it) is a freer and generally less exploitative Columbia. That's not the same thing as Comstock's racially pure society with a holy duty to incinerate "the Sodom below." Both are barbarous assholes, but only one is a purposefully evil barbarous asshole. Levine never stoops to calling them equally terrible. Again, Booker has no truck with Fitzroy and doesn't aim to gun her down as he eventually does Comstock. Elizabeth only runs Fitzroy through (with the most intense pair of scissors you'll ever see) after Fitzroy threatens a child. Which, okay, dick move. But Comstock remains undeniably the chief villain, beginning to end.

--For all those interested in narrative construction, especially in games, I highly recommend Kevin Wong's article on the meta-commentary of Infinite. Wong does a much better job than I did of highlighting the differences--and occasional conflicts--between authorial intent and player choice. He also makes some observations about games and free will that do not bode well for even the most vivid game characters. Not to mention the players controlling them.

--Love the touch of Comstock viewing Abraham Lincoln as "the Great Apostate." And a fraternity founded in reverence for John Wilkes Booth. The historical Easter eggs are fantastic.

--Finally, there's probably not any chance of DLC containing new levels or anything like that, is there? Season Pass exists, but it mostly looks like weapons upgrades. Infinite really is too tightly constructed to allow for additional levels, anyway. Which is a shame on the one hand because Columbia, like Rapture before it, is a place I'd happily explore for hours more. On the other, a sequel along the lines of Bioshock 2 that would provide further exploration but little more satisfaction may only prove disappointing.

Bioshock Infinite

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

I finished Bioshock Infinite on Sunday night and I've been struggling for what to say about it since. I'm not conflicted, understand. I loved the game. It's gorgeous, its loads of fun, it's full of little details that the perceptive player will eat up (if you're the type of player who just wants to complete your missions and get your achievements/trophies, you may not enjoy this one), and it's got an ending that's as heart-breaking as it is mind-bending.

Like its predecessors (Bioshock and, to a lesser extent, Bioshock 2), Infinite allows for a lot of reading between the lines. It, in fact, requires the aforementioned perceptive player to engage in some light mystery-solving, allowing you to absorb the details at your own pace, uncovering who you are and why you're there (hint: you are not who you think you are until you're exactly who you think you are). This is a deeply rewarding feeling. For example, when you really start to think about the Boys of Silence and understand all the implications of their quantum mechanical abilities, it's genuinely unnerving, largely because your brain is forced to put the grimmer details together on its own (what exactly is under those helmets?).

Yes, quantum mechanics. See, the game gets rather... complex toward the end and it can take some effort to hash out, first, what the hell just happened, and second, what all of it means. Let me see if I can do it some justice.

You are Booker DeWitt, a Pinkerton agent with a shameful past and a significant load of debt to your name. To clear these debts, you are commissioned to travel to Columbia, a literal city in the sky, and return with apparent damsel in distress Elizabeth, whose father, Zachary Comstock, is not only the creator and ruler of Columbia, but something of a godhead as well, hailed as "The Prophet." Except it turns out that Elizabeth is less a damsel in distress than she is a god in human form and Comstock is less your enemy than he is... you... in an alternate timeline. Seems that in order to pay his earlier debts, Booker sold his infant daughter, Anna, to Comstock, who was (re)born when Booker declined an old-time-religion type baptismal and their timelines split. Comstock took Anna back to his dimension and raised her as Elizabeth, who turns out to have inter-dimensional powers because her pinky finger was cut off and left behind during the transition to Comstock's timeline. This all comes as a significant surprise to Booker, less of a surprise to Comstock (who's developed the technology to see into other dimensions, explaining his prophet-ness), and Elizabeth copes with the knowledge rather well because once you've learned that you're an inter-dimensional meta-human, little remains to shock you.

Like I said, a lot to absorb. This is the simplest, most accurate (to my interpretation) summation that I can find. There's more, of course. Turns out that the Columbia we witness is one of an infinite (eh, eh?) number of Columbias, in an infinite number of universes, allowing the game to tie into its predecessors and give Rapture a nice shout-out (note: while some will complain about Columbia looking like a skin swap of Rapture, such callbacks make a lot more sense given the dimensional nonsense). Moreover, Booker's probably been sent to rescue Elizabeth before--122 times, per one theory. But that gets us bogged down in arcane details. The main thrust is the Booker-Elizabeth-Comstock story, an arc that gets more and more attention as the game proceeds and Ken Levine and his team of developers gained more and more fondness for that relationship (and especially Elizabeth) as they went along. This focus forced the developers to drop other elements, to some fans' displeasure, such as Columbia itself and the much-hyped politics of turn of the century American nationalism, each of which seem to wither away about halfway through.

I have some minor complaints about the game's near-dropping of the politics. This particular brand of American exceptionalism is not nearly as strong a through-line as were the objectivist politics of the first Bioshock (likewise, Rapture was more of a character in Bioshock than Columbia is in Infinite). And while it's possible that the writers and programmers could only stomach so much early 20th Century-style casual racism, the sudden dropping of that aspect seems a shame, especially given the contemporary commentary that could be had. But that shifting focus is forgivable because Elizabeth is the real heart of the game. And once you're introduced to her, and the questions her abilities raise, the politics become pedestrian.

Yes, Infinite is technically a game-long escort mission. But, as though anticipating triggered flashbacks to Natalya, the programmers throw up on the screen the eight sweetest words in video game history: You Don't Need To Protect Elizabeth in Combat. Not only does Elizabeth not get in the way, she helps you, tossing you ammunition and health in the middle of firefights. Not always with the most advantageous timing, I'll grant, but because the player can choose to ignore her aid, I usually spared Elizabeth any blame when things went wrong. Better still: unlike Natalya, or Ashley of Resident Evil 4, Elizabeth brings something very rare in games: likability. And a genuine place for emotional investment. Infinite is not about Booker, or even the wish fulfillment of the player, as so many games are. It's about Elizabeth and settling her story. In this way, the game is more concerned with itself than it is the player and seeks to resolve its own questions. Infinite ends on--at best--a bittersweet note for Booker, and while that may turn off some players, the game succeeds on its own terms. You know, the way art does.

Of course the final Booker-Comstock reveal seems to have a pretty serious hole, one that I am not smart enough to explain. However, the hole doesn't hurt Infinite's overall quality too much and gamers have generally forgiven stupider sins in exchange for acceptable gameplay. And, anyway, the Bioshock series should get some points back for striving to be big and grand and important and worth our time. Isn't that what so many of us demand from the medium? Look around the Internet: nearly all discussion of Infinite, a little over a week after its release, is about the twist at the end and the attendant dalliances through multiple universes and alternate timelines. Everyone is generally agreed that the game-play is damned satisfying and the environments damned pretty to look at. The conversation is about the confusing ending, with fans and detractors bouncing theories back and forth in an attempt to dissipate that confusion. These efforts have naturally uncovered some problems with the narrative, as any story that falls back on time travel or inter-dimensionality will have (Looper attempted to diffuse the debate immediately, and still couldn't quite stop the chattering juggernaut from trying to explain it). How many games produce this kind of instant, overwhelming reaction, relying on small, hard sought-after details? Surely, this is what we want from these games.

Awarding brownie points for wanting to do something fantastically mind-blowing while coming a little short is probably jejune. But to brush off the achievements of Infinite over some narrative confusion at the very end of the game is bad for the medium. This is an effort to be rewarded and savored. Because these are the games we've been waiting for.

Grade: A

Video Games and Story-Telling

L.A. Noire came out a couple of years ago to well-deserved good reviews. After running out of Uncanny Valley jokes, the player discovers that the graphics of L.A. Noire are as mesmerizing as they are groundbreaking (how many games can produce gag reels?). And the experience of roaming through post-war Los Angeles is intoxicating--almost enough to guise the fact that the driving seems interminable. And the tone; my God, the tone. Unhelpful though this phrase often is, L.A. Noire is a unique experience.

I like Raymond Chandler novels and a host of other noir-related and -inspired works, so it may seem as though I'm gushing about something I was bound to love (that co-developer Rockstar Games was then coming off Red Dead Redemption was just sweet, sweet frosting). Except... I didn't love it. The above praise runs right alongside my apprehensions about the game, the things that make me hesitant to pop the disk back into my X-Box (and then the second disk... and then the third).

L.A.P.D. Detective Cole Phelps is a miserably dull antagonist, easily out-shown by insurance fraud investigator Jack Kelso. The cases, particularly on the homicide desk, quickly prove frustrating as it becomes obvious that Phelps is being strong-armed by his superiors against the player's will (more on that later). I also don't care for procedurals, which L.A. Noire unapologetically is; this is partly a personal thing, but the best noir-ish pulp fiction is as much about quirky character moments and shaggy dog yarns as it is about the mystery.

This is not a review of L.A. Noire. No one's interested in that in 2013, including me (though I'd probably give it a B/B+). My point is that every so often I play or remember a game that gets me thinking: what makes video games work, from a storytelling perspective? More importantly, what makes the cinematic ambitions of the medium fall flat? And I'm talking specifically about the story-driven games. The Angry Birds and the Fruit Ninjas, for all their addictive properties, can't be properly judged on the same metric.

Literature (novels, short stories... you know what literature is) excels at intimate character-building: motivation, psychology, thoughts. The best novels dig deep into an idea and use slowly-developed details to create a textured whole. Other storytelling mediums can do this, but not as comprehensively. Where a story on the page may relatively lack for immediacy and clear character dynamics, it still reigns as the best medium for case study-type stories.

Television, at its best, takes the long-form format of the novel and uses it to deliver detailed character relationships and paced, intricate plotting. The really good ones explore characters and themes at length and in depth over one or more seasons (Game of Thrones comes to mind, of course, but remember that David Simon conceived The Wire as a kind of "novel for television").

Film combines all of these into a condensed run-time and go to work with rarely subtle manipulation. It rewards spectacle and sweeping scope. Some will moan about the bullying nature of the medium, but when done successfully, it's hard to complain. If the first ten minutes of Up don't devastate you, I'm not totally sure you're human. And while the last 45 minutes of Argo seemed to count off every suspense cliche in the book (yes, there is a book of suspense cliches), damned if it wasn't effective.

Video games can perform elements of all of these but they tend to lack the strong narrative thrust. There is no Dickens or Kubrick to take the player from point A to point B exactly when and how he wants to.

Roger Ebert suffered a rare lapse into ill-informed shooting off at the hip a few years back when he said that video games could never be art. To his credit, he walked the statement back (kind of). And though the original statement was short-sighted, there's some truth there. Games require a certain degree of player agency. Too little agency and the player might as well be watching a movie. Too much and there's little to no room for the developer to tell the story he wants. The developer can add music, but has little guarantee that the cues will sync up as perfectly as they do in film. He can add interior monologue, but the player may choose to skip it (and will complain if she doesn't have that option). He can create a complex, engaging lead character, but at some point the player must be allowed to put her own stamp on that character.

And he can try to force a story in a given direction, but as games have evolved into sandboxes and as they've engineered morality systems, it becomes harder and harder to tell a story honestly. If the developer's desired story needs a character to be a good, upstanding person, it falls apart if the player decides to be an immoral monster, whose only aim was to "dominate the game." To end a story in this fashion, you have to supply a series of potential good-evil-medium alternate endings and every player can tell that that was all you did.

Take the aforementioned frustration in L.A. Noire: when a developer tries to take a gamer for a ride--the sort of emotional rollercoaster ride that might be praised in a good film or book--the gamer may resent it. Not least because she expects to be able to win the game. As far as we've come, we're still limited in our ability to explore the human experience in video games the way we do with other art forms.

Red Dead Redemption gets that compromise mostly right, by killing the main character in a cut scene mere seconds after the player is forced into an ambush (yes, L.A. Noire pulls a similar character sacrifice, and if Cole Phelps were as interesting as John Marston, I'd be talking about that). While we're on the subject of genuinely artful games, Bioshock, another personal favorite, is renowned for it's eye-sexingly gorgeous environments, a surprisingly deep examination of philosophy and human nature, and a creepy atmosphere that relies on the player's imagination to fully reveal itself. It's a refreshing example of show-don't-tell that neatly covers up the fact that 80% of the plot is killing objectivist zombies.

I'm sure every developer has Earth-shattering ideas for great, cinematic games. Hell, every gamer likely has, as well: this Cracked article showcases seven decent game ideas and explains, with an empathetic quivering infecting the prose, why those games can't happen for various reasons of mechanics and logistics. I also recommend Cracked's take on ominous trends in video games, which ends up focusing mostly on the economics of the industry. Turns out that when you expensively produce distraction-oriented entertainment that'll go to market at $60 a pop, you tend to get stingy about creativity in favor of more a stable model, helping further hinder the role of "art" in the development process.

This isn't to say there isn't art in modern gaming, but there is something eating away at me as I play games that come so close to real art and just miss it.

The Continuing Promise of The Walking Dead

The best part about cautious pessimism is that it leaves just enough room to be proven wrong and not feel too bad about it. The worst part is that the cowardice of the lack of position allows no ability to gloat when you end up being sort of right. So when I wrote last fall that this third season of The Walking Dead had all the pieces to form a really solid action/horror/drama series but it that it might not do it, I wasn't saying much. I had been burned by the show before, but loved the spirit of it too much to bury the thing. And here we are, about to enter the second half of a mostly-terrific third seasons and I haven't a cowardly leg to stand on.

That'll show me. I won't be looking, but it'll show me.

Quick rundown on what went right in the first half: Lori is dead. Carl's growing into a stone cold zombie apocalypse survivor. Rick is half-mad. The Governor is more so. The town of Woodbury is one of the most interesting sociological experiments I've ever seen on television. We now have real inter-character conflict brewing, rather than a dull back and forth "what now?" And Daryl is still Daryl.

The dialogue remains a wet fart in a dark room. Too many of the characters (particularly the female ones) are still wooden and conspicuously bad at decision-making. And come season's end, we might be able to look back on some uneven pacing. But the show has made enormous strides. And for someone who's wanted to be a fan since the first promos back in 2010, that feels great to be able to say.

I've recently been playing through The Walking Dead tablet game. As an interactive, plot-driven story, it delivers a far more immersive experience than the show does. It features characters that the player may not necessarily like, but are developed enough to have what qualifies for pathos, something rare even amongst the more popular characters of the show. And because the plot branches into new directions with each decision from the player, there's much less remove from the events of the story and it's easier to feel the emotional impact of bad consequences. I haven't yet gone back through to play the game with different decisions, but it seems that most consequences are bad consequences.

The narrative differences between television and video games deserve a post or two to themselves, so I won't go too in-depth with that analysis just now. Suffice to say, there are some types of moments that may always fail to land as well as we'd like. But the moments that do are sweet.

A few episodes ago (specifically, "When The Dead Come Knocking"), Glenn was tortured for information about the group and then narrowly avoided becoming walker-chow while tied to a chair. These made for some genuinely harrowing moments, made all the more dire by Maggie's parallel experiences, after which she gave up the desired information in order to save Glenn. I don't know if the writers intentionally chose to put two of the characters the audience likes most in this situation (at least I do; my wife has expressed some misgivings about Maggie), but the episode is better for that decision.

This is what the show needs. They've shed a lot of the--sorry--dead weight. And I look forward to more of the good times. Good times for us... Rick's people suffer for our entertainment, after all.

Assassin's Creed III

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Assassin's Creed's greatest strength has always been its focus and commitment to history in a way that only the video game medium can provide: gorgeous, immersive renditions of historic cities and landscapes, with stories drawn from history--albeit a vaguely alternate universe history. AC at its best is the anti-Call of Duty. Unfortunately, AC's best runs right alongside its worst.

From the beginning, Ubisoft felt the need to give its alternate history lesson some context. This context came in the form of the charisma-less Desmond Miles and the hunt to save humanity from the evil Templars. Also from the 2012 apocalypse, though the Mayans don't appear to be involved (admittedly, I zoned out more than once during the exposition). These cutaways from the historical action have always been a brief nuisance. But in ACIII they cease to be brief, forcing the player to spend more and more time with Desmond and his Assassin comrades in their makeshift cave base. The only plus to this focus is that Desmond ends up dead.

All this time in the present day helps to fog the dullness of main character Conner, another charisma-less lead around whom things happen (the AC franchise seems to have spent all its likable protagonists; we were spoiled by Ezio Auditore). After some initial stop-start fun playing as Haytham Kenway, we transfer into Conner, Kenway's illegitimate half-Native American son. From there we run around the wilderness hunting animals and learning our way around ACIII's various collectibles (seriously, so many collectibles). Conner later becomes an Assassin, but the allegiance seems little more than a hobby for Conner. And he's slightly more interested in secret society-ing than he is in the American Revolution, which is another thing that happens here and there in a herky-jerky plot that never gains a solid foothold anywhere. The game seems almost aware of the fact that no one mission-type is especially fun and so offers seemingly dozens of different of mission types and mini-games in an attempt to distract players from the creeping monotony. Naval battles, for example, start out tedious, but become genuinely fun with a little practice. Unfortunately, when an aspect of a video game starts tedious, it's not usually a sign of a job well done.

The parkour remains the same as ever, if a little more fluid than past games, though this is broken up by environments that aren't as flush with easily traversed rooftops. This is not to mention the intense attention the player can draw from redcoat guards, who are T-1000-like in their persistence when they get a smell of Conner. When free-running is your second-biggest draw, it doesn't seem a great idea to actively make that harder to do.

It's some small consolation that the main game missions and grinding missions alike take place in some gorgeous environments. 18th Century cities, the open seas, the wilderness areas: all beautiful and fun to explore. I can almost forgive Ubisoft for making the "frontier" stage so large: it can't have been easy to stop painting that canvas.  In the midst of the hunting and stalking in beautiful scenery, I was reminded of Red Dead Redemption, which is good because I love RDR and bad because ACIII is not RDR.

The game features a few additional triumphs. Among others: never giving into the America Fuck Yeah approach that would've been so easy. And neither was ACIII a full indictment of the occasional hypocrisy of early American leaders, which must've been tempting. The game instead opts for a neither totally good nor totally evil that might strike some as CNN-esque false equivalence, but sits reasonably well with my understanding of the period.

ACIII continues to do a few AC-type things well, though it's several less than previous games managed. It is, overall, a dull ride with a few, not as frustrating, high points scattered throughout. With Desmond gone, the franchise may finally be ready to move on to its full potential of historical Assassin-ing in immersive environments that other games never offer: ancient Babylon, feudal Japan, early 20th Century Russia. The possibilities should be endless. Ubisoft has the tools and the care, they just need to throw caution to the wind again.

Grade: C-

Sonic the Hedgehog and Led Zeppelin

Listen to Led Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand." Now, the song stands on its own merits as an example of Zeppelin's formidable awesome-ness just shining through its latter-day bloat. But when I listen to the song--particularly the bridge, when the drums kick in, from 4:09 to 5:15--I can't help but hear the familiar, soothing rhythms of Sonic the Hedgehog. 

I'd draw particular attention to Sonic 3's final boss fight and Sonic & Knuckles' Sandopolis Zone Act 1 (which is also kind of reminiscent of "Kashmir"). And the aforementioned drums make it very clear to me that Dr. Robotnik is approaching.

My grasp on music theory has never been very strong--and it was once stronger than it is now--so I'd like to get a more learned opinion on this, if I could. But I detect some distinct similarities. The mile-a-minute percussive beats and the quick, leaping bass lines; these create the sensation of speed. The melodramatic thumping undercut by zippier guitar overdubs; these invoke fun, but momentarily important fun. And, yes, the repetitiveness; evocative of tunes composed for levels that could be completed in a minute or two, but which gave the player a max of ten. Speed, fun, repetitiveness. Any child of the early nineties should immediately think of the same blue spiny mammal.

Anyway. Something to think about.

"Grandpa, what did you do in the Goldeneye wars?"

"Well.  You had to learn about Goldeneye sooner or later, didn't you?  Your dad, he wouldn't tell you.  He only ever got the knock-offs, the ones that were almost there but never quite matched it.  But, then, what could?  No, what we had was special.  We didn't know it yet--we were just kids, no older than you.  But we'd lose whole hours, days, weekends of our young lives.  Lost in the grip of Goldeneye.

"I don't have a lot of specific memories of the wars--it's mostly a lot of little images: an unaware target running across my screen with nary a crate to hide behind.  Or the crisp, satisfying sound of reloading my KF7.  Sometimes I still see a pixelated explosion, setting off a thousand other, equally beautiful, explosions until the whole screen is nothing but yellow and orange pixels, killing us all before respawning us, back to square one. 

"Some of the memories, though...  They're with me even when I don't want 'em.  Especially when I don't want 'em.  I shout, 'Get out!  Get out of here!  I'm not in those Caves no more!'  But all I see is the winding tunnels of the Caves.  The big, open rooms of multiple levels coming out of nowhere, leaving you open from every conceivable angle and from others you didn't know were possible.  Those Caves had the kind of rock formations that don't appear in nature--neat, sloping ramps and horrifying, hexagonal columns.  Some people thought they were programmed by demons; I don't know much about demons or devils but... I think those people might be right.  And then there was the black.  The endless black, broken only for a second by... his face... his hand. 

"It was always so dark in them Caves.  So dark and so endless and so, so cold.  Like the Temple but... so much more circuitous.  No matter how dark it got in the Temple, an experienced player knew where he was, where he was going.  It wasn't the Complex, neither, which had all that light--all the subtle clues giving you some idea where you might be.  Give me the Facility anytime.  That was a clean layout.  Always knew where you were, where others might be.  And those doors, all those doors.  You could always hear them opening and shutting--there was an adrenaline boost for you, whether you wanted it or you didn't: when a door opened in earshot and it wasn't you who did it.  Some said, if you made it far enough through the Caves, you'd come out into a jungle--a jungle that traded endless black for endless green--but we never found it. 

"None of my crew ever liked going to the Caves much.  But, sometimes, when you set your destination for 'random,' well, that's the kinda place a man can end up.  That was a risk we all took.  Even little Rhodie--he always played as Boris, shouting "I AM INVINCIBLE" every time he notched a kill--he knew the risks, and I think a small part of him died every time we looked around and found ourselves in the Caves.  Little guy always wanted to go to the Stacks--said he liked the big open spaces: better for watching the explosions.  He was a remote mines kinda guy.  That was a point of contention between him and me.  See, I liked proximity mines.  You lay 'em and get the hell out of there.  Maybe set the buggers up near an ammo cache or, better, a respawn area.  Rhodie used to say that was cowardly--told me over and again 'that's gay!' back before we stopped using that as a pejorative.  'What's the difference,' I'd shout back, maybe a little more defensive than was needed.  'What's the difference when we're going License To Kill?'  Because that was how a man went to war, son: License To Kill.  When any second you'd be runnin' high, but the next you'd be on the receiving end of somebody's cheaply-found Klobb.  Where body armor meant nothing and every time you picked it up, you snorted a little; yeah, you pretended it was funny, but in that abbreviated breath there was more fear than bemusement--because you knew nothin'--nothin'--could save you.

"One time, totally punch drunk, somebody suggested we do Slappers Only on LTK.  'It'll be fun,' the bastard insisted.  It wasn't fun.  Dull, at first, maybe.  But when the suck set in, the war we experienced wasn't contained in the Stacks.  Not even the Temple could've held the contempt we started feeling for each other.  We had each lost a thousand lives in Goldeneye.  But that day, it took our innocence... our friendships.  I wish I... I wish I could tell Rhodie now that it didn't matter--that it never mattered.  Proximity, remote, who cares?  He wouldn't... I never got to... I don't know how many wars he had after that.  But I like to remember his last round--in the Stacks, where he was always happiest...

"I was almost out of the Caves.  I had to be: I had been running so long.  So long since I had last heard any gunfire, any explosions.  As though I was the only one left alive, and yet the round wouldn't end.  Stuck in my own little purgatory.  And that's when I saw him--the little Asian guy with the bowler hat, jumping out of the shadows.  We had a code, our crew: no one gets the little Asian guy.  But there he was, plain as day, and he was coming for me.  I tried shootin' him; used every last round in my PP7--the only gun I had left with ammunition, the only friend that hadn't let me down.  And I swear to this day: I got the son of a bitch.  I got him, sure as I ever got any man.  But them bullets just kept... flying right over his head.  By the time I understood what was happening, before I could even think to lower the gun, I fired my last and he was on me, hand stretched forward.  Slappers Only.  'That cocky little Asian man,' I thought to myself, just before the blood dripped down from the top of the screen--the wars' way of telling you 'You're Done.' 

"Anyway, I don't remember a lot, son.  But I do remember that I earned my Longest Innings medal.  And dammit to hell, I earned Most Deadly, too!  But no one remembers the awards.  What are they even for, anyway?  We couldn't figure out how we got some of them.  One of my crew--big fat guy, used to play as Trevelyan--he once got Most Honorable and Most Dishonorable in the same round.  The same round!  Explain that to me, God!

"But that's... that's not fair.  For God or for any man.  I'm not sure there is an explanation for the hold that game had on us.  The memories it carved.  The friendships it forged... and ended.  I don't know if your generation will ever know the likes of Goldeneye, boy.  But I hope you get your own.  And I hope, when you do, that your controllers are easier to hold than the ones they gave us."