The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (movie, ***)

I saw Hitchhiker's Guide last night, and my reaction is that it was... fine. It was... good enough. Didn't love it, didn't hate it. I'd heard that it wasn't great, so I had to decide to just relax and enjoy it.

My wife asked if it was "true to the book" and I told her there was no such thing as "true to the book." You've got the radio series, the books, the TV series, the adventure game, and now the movie. They're all different. There is no such thing as continuity in the Douglas Adams universe, there is only what seems to be the funniest choice at the moment.

And often, to its credit, the movie did the right thing. The whale scene was absolutely perfect. Marvin was a great character, delivering everything I would have expected. The other computer personalities were great too -- the sighing doors were funny and Eddie the computer was dead-on (although they left out his "Jewish mother" personality, no big deal). Slartibartfast struck the right note, and the scene with the planet construction warehouse was just awe-inspiring, and I think it did justice to Douglas Adams' likely vision of what it should have been like. And to be honest, the scene where Marvin shoots at the Vogons with the point of view gun -- a scene which was not in any of the other versions as far as I know -- was hilarious.

So the movie was "good enough". There was not anything I saw that was really, seriously wrong with it. Having said that, there were very many things in the movie that just seemed like uninspired choices, as in "They're free to go with their artistic instincts, but I'm not sure I would have done it that way."

For instance, the romance between Arthur and Trillian? I don't feel that it was anathema to the books, but it was just a waste of time. Arthur really did like Trillian a lot, enough to challenge the god Thor to a fistfight in book three, and I think they spent some quality time together near the end of that book, though I'm pretty sure they never slept together.

But I suspect that Douglas Adams wouldn't have given that much credibility to sappy emotional scenes. The theme of his books is, "These characters are all alone in a vast uncaring universe, and they're trying to do things that will make their lives mean something, and that's just so pathetic that it's funny." Hence, the whole scene where Arthur whines "The only question that matters is, is she the one?" just seemed out of place in the story, even though it was just the setup to another joke. Plus, you know, she's actually NOT the one, since Arthur falls in love with (and loses) Fenchurch later in the series.

Then there was the scene with Humma Kavula (John Malkovich). Amusing. Gave them an opportunity to use some keen looking special effects. But just not necessary. As far as I can tell, the entire point of having Humma Kavula at all was to set up the punchline of the movie. Humma tells Zaphod to find the point of view gun, and that winds up in Marvin's hands, and Marvin shoots the Vogons. And like I said before, that was really funny. But I'm not sure it was funny ENOUGH to justify the set-up to the joke. Also, I don't really understand what Zaphod's reason was for wanting to visit Humma in the first place. Just so he could tell him "Don't call me stupid"?

Then of course there's Zaphod himself. Okay, so they did something different with his two heads. Could have been worse. But for the first half of the movie, the personality was right. He was the right combination of arrogant, dim-witted, lovable, and nuts. Then for some reason that I just don't understand, they took away his personality in the second half and basically wasted his character for the rest of the movie. Why? I just don't get why they would take one of the best characters and throw him away.

So, what worked:

• Marvin. DEFINITELY Marvin.
• The Guide.
  
• The whale.
• Zaphod during the first half.
• Marvin shooting the Vogons.
• Planet construction.
• The shipboard computer.
  

What didn't work:

• Zaphod during the second half.
  
• The emphasis given to Arthur and Trillian's romance.

What was "good enough":

• The improbability drive.
• Humma Kavula.
• Towels.
• The mice.
• The dolphin song.
• The Nutrimat making the substance that is "almost but not quite entirely unlike tea."
• Vogons.

Interesting to note, the Vogon bureaucracy was not as big a deal in the book, but it does fit in with the Douglas Adams universe in general. When Douglas Adams worked with Infocom to make text adventures, he produced a game in 1986 called "Bureaucracy." The plot is, you have to get some mail and catch a plane. The comedy is, nothing goes right and there are all kinds of difficult bureaucrats in your way, and many forms to fill out in triplicate. The Vogon scene felt like it was pulled straight out of that game.

Final score: *** out of 5.

The Grudge (movie, ***)

Situation: Strange, scary noises are coming from a creepy old house. While investigating, you walk into a dark room. You flip on the light switch, but nothing happens.
What a normal person might do: Leave; go get a flashlight and come back.
What a horror movie character always does: Flips the light switch off and on at least three times. Finally stumbles around blindly in the dark, feeling for whatever they were looking for until they touch something horrible.

Situation: It's the middle of the night. You are all alone, and you think you are being chased by something you can't see.
What a normal person might do: Run to a crowded, brightly lit location and stay there for a while.
What a horror movie character always does: Runs to a deserted stairwell. If no stairwells are available, runs into a closet.

Situation: You visit the house of a recently missing person. You discover an injured little boy and a wall collage made by a person who clearly suffers from severe mental derangement.
What a normal person might do: Immediately leave, optionally taking the kid with you, and call 911 as soon as you can reach a phone.
What a horror movie character always does: Walks past the kid so he can get a really good look at the collage. Spends time hanging around a maniac's house to find more clues. Cleverly leaves fingerprints on every available surface (not that it matters in the case of the soon-to-be-deceased).

Situation: You have been cornered by a very slow moving monster. While fleeing, you stumble and collapse against a wall next to an open door.
What a normal person might do: Stand up again and exit.
What a horror movie character always does: Stares at the monster while scrabbling his/her hands against the smooth wall for no reason -- rather than, say, pushing up against the floor. When the monster arrives, just sit there stupidly. Don't bother to do anything like land a punch or a kick, just assume that won't work.

Situation: You expect something terrible to jump out at you. Sure enough, something jumps out at you. Luckily, it's just a cat.
What a normal person might do: Run away anyway.
What a horror movie character always does: Visibly relaxes. After all, now that you know there's a cat in the house, nothing ELSE could possibly be in there.

Half-Life 2 (PC, ****)

Half-Life 2 was an especially rare shooter for me, in that I finished the game 100% legitimately, with NO turning on cheat mode to temporarily get past a difficult section or just whiz past the endless monotony of blasting people over and over again with different machinery. This is partly thanks to the fact that the difficulty was just about right for me, with no one section getting me so frustrated that I just wanted to ignore the game and see what came next. But it was also a testament to the fact that it was incredibly varied in gameplay, for a FPS. I never really felt like skipping ahead, because what I was doing at the moment always seemed interesting to me.

A few months ago, I posted that playing Doom 3 is like riding on a Disneyland ride, in which all the events are scripted but they give the illusion of freedom.

That is still the case here; HL2 is quite linear and there is definitely one path for you to follow all the time. At one point, I was driving a car along a coast of beach, and I thought "What happens if I jump in the ocean and start swimming?" And the obvious answer was: you get eaten by an infinite number of piranhas, stupid. There's a wall there, it just doesn't look like a wall. Tricks of the Disney Imagineering team: make it look like there's a world out there when there's not.

And yet, when you come down to it, I had much more fun playing Half-Life 2 than Doom 3, or even Half-Life 1. Why?

Because HL2 does something really slick, and really rare in a shooter, which is make each segment of the game have a (mostly) different feel from the other segments.

Examples of the things you will be doing (MINOR SPOILERS):

• Standard FPS gun and run levels; a few mini-bosses.
• Levels where you must drive really really fast and dodge all over the place to avoid getting hit by gunfire, mines, etc. Also jumping ramps.
• Levels where you must drive and blast stuff with turrets.
• Fighting with a personal army at your back.
• Going for long stretches with no ammo drops at all. You need to use a specialized weapon and pre-laid traps cleverly to avoid dying.
• Sneaking across beams on a roof where the floor is swarming with headcrabs.
• Fighting in and out of a building with a squadron of independent players.
• Blasting an unlimited supply of guided rockets at a pilot who dodges a lot, before he kills you first.
• Using an uber-powerful gun that makes it feel like you are in god mode even when you're not.
• A puzzle level where you have to create your own path through dangerous terrain.

There's just an awful lot of different things to do here, and the pacing is excellent. Every time I started to think "I'm pretty bored of this sequence" a guy would come out and say "Park your car, Dr. Freeman, we have to hurry inside before the Big Bad arrives."

I think I liked Doom 3 more than most reviewers, but here's how a typical game goes:
Shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, simple puzzle, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, easy puzzle, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, boss.

Although both games are linear, you can feel the difference in what you are doing between the two games.

I think the difference can be summed up by the fact that HL2 had a lot more entertaining ways to get killed than D3 did. In Doom, if you die it's pretty much because a monster attacked you until all your hit points were gone. And sometimes, you fall down.

In HL2, you can die while trying to pick up a grenade and throw it back to the owner, become lunch for the aforementioned piranhas, total your car off a cliff, get hit by a train, not notice the land mines, make a wrong move that brings in an unbeatable swarm of enemies, step into the wrong transport and head for the incinerator. Idiot.

Also: nice soundtrack. I don't remember any music in Doom 3 at all. If there was some other than the obligatory thrash metal ballad for the closing credits, I must have missed it. Half-Life 2 has mood music all over the place. Not music all the time, but when you're doing something important, you'll definitely know. This makes the game far more cinematic.

Also, lots of HL2 takes place outside. Definitely a good thing. And even when you're inside, you don't just looking at the same boring office textures over and over again. There are a lot of different indoor environments.

Also, good NPC's who don't show up only on TV monitors or when they are about to die. There are people whose only role is "cannon fodder #53". But you also have friends, and you'll feel bad if you let them die.

Also, an interesting villain.


So to sum up my objections to this game: very long load times, and only illusory control over the story or the sequence of events. But overall, thumbs up.

One other thing: people will likely complain about the ending, which feels like a cheap way to not resolve things so that they can leave it open for a sequel. I can't say I disagree, but I read that this was coming, so I didn't care too much.

Classic game review: A Mind Forever Voyaging

Written in 1985 by Steve Meretzky (author of many other Infocom classics such as Sorcerer, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Zork Zero), this was Infocom's big attempt at doing serious science fiction in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World. Like those stories, Meretzky imagines a future where the world has gone horribly wrong and spends lots of time carefully examining the details of that future society.

The game suffers from many flaws, including an interface that is difficult to understand at first and fairly skimpy interactions with most NPCs. Ultimately where it succeeds is by presenting big ideas through a very large and lavishly described game world that changes over time.

There is a gimmick to this game. You are PRISM, the world's first truly intelligent computer. The manual explains some of your origin story. The year is 2031. Years ago, PRISM's creator, Dr. Abe Perelman, decided to raise the computer under the illusion that he was really a human. PRISM inhabits a Matrix-like virtual reality for most of his life. Believing himself to be "Perry Simm", he experiences a human childhood, growing up from a baby, experiencing bad breakups and the death of loved ones and typical human existence. When PRISM is a young man, Perelman wakes him up and tells him his true identity.

PRISM was created with a purpose. Not only can he simulate a life in the past and present, but he can also extrapolate life in the future. The world is in a political crisis, and a charismatic senator has stepped up with the Orwellian-titled "Plan for Renewed National Purpose". Your job is to simulate a world ten years in the future where this plan has been implemented, and see how things turn out. Based on the recordings you make in your simulations, the Plan might be put into effect by Congress. This is where the game begins.

Part of the reason the interface is difficult is that you are expected to act as a computer in multiple roles. In communications mode, you can "turn on" your own interface outlets and instantly visit different parts of the lab where you live. You can enter interface mode and talk to other "dumb" computers that manage the facility. There is library mode where you can review your assignment, read up on current events, learn about your creator, and study the bullet points and popularity polls of "The Plan".

Once you enter simulation mode, the game becomes a fairly standard "walk around and look at stuff" adventure game. However, your goal is not to collect treasures, but to collect recordings of interesting sights in the future. In part one, when you are getting the hang of your identity and the point of the game, you are given specific events to record (i.e., talk to a church official, visit your house, eat in a restaurant).

BEGIN BIG SPOILERS (skip ahead to end spoilers if you want)






Once you win part 1, things get more interesting and fun. Your processors gradually collect enough data to simulate the future in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and finally 50 years. It is then up to you to use your judgment about what to record. As you travel to the future, you watch society gradually crumble and fall around you. The government becomes more and more totalitarian. Weird religious cults sprout up as the decades pass. The people in the world become more close minded and cruel. This is where the game really shines. You get to explore the same map in each time zone, and the changes that occur are subtle at first, but start accelerating. For instance, in 2041 and 2051, you can visit an ordinary supermarket and buy groceries. In 2061 you notice that the shelves are sparsely stocked with unappetizing canned goods. By 2071, you can only buy a crummy soy patty and you have to show your "ration card" to get food once every three days. The library pops up a list of banned books. The zoo holds "monkey taunting" events. The courthouse hosts increasingly sinister trials for more pitiful criminals each decade.

The final year, 2081, is very creepy. No matter where you go you can experience a different violent death, and if you simply wait around, you'll die of starvation.

In part 3 you engage in a fairly short and slightly anti-climactic political struggle in the real world to stop the senator from passing the Plan. The game ends on a fairly up note as you skip ahead to the far future of a world where the Plan was never implemented.

END BIG SPOILERS







From a political standpoint, the game has a definite liberal slant, even more so now than it must have looked during the Reagan years. Some have called it "preachy", so factor that in to whether you would enjoy playing it. Richard Ryder is clearly a right winger, and religion and hyper-patriotism are two of the big boogeymen that the game presents for the future. Still, the game does get a little balance from the implication that the Plan is an almost understandable reaction to a recession caused by high taxes and liberalism run amok.

The future that is presented is clearly a bit of a caricature, but then again, so was 1984. The best part of this game is not seeing the author's idea of a dystopia, but in watching the logical procession of a healthy society toward that dystopia. On the whole, the game is one of the best attempts I've ever seen to introduce serious ideas into interactive fiction, and it remains one of my favorite game stories ever.

World of Warcraft (PC, *****)

This is an early review. I did not get in the WoW beta, but for this week only they accepted a massive number of new participants to see how their servers handle it. I get to play until the week is up and no more, until the retail version comes out, or until another round of beta keys get sent and I get lucky.

Full disclosure: I am very, very biased in favor of anything Blizzard puts out. For further disclaimers and apologies about that, you can see the beginning of my Warcraft III review.

More disclosure: I haven't played Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, or any of the other "new" crop of massively multiplayer online games. Until City of Heroes came out and I personally convinced a bunch of Fools to buy it. Lately people have started dropping out of CoH, and I understand why. While the game is very fun in the early and middle stages -- designing a hero concept and costume, exploring the first few skills, and so forth -- the mid to late game is lacking in variety. Lots of repetition in the types of enemies and indoor quests; way too much gameplay emphasis given to fighting wandering monsters, so it's not too important to experience the game's story or content. Once you hit level 14, it takes a very long time to gain additional levels and there's not much variety to look forward to.

I started the game by creating a fighter, figuring this character would have the easiest time advancing as quickly as possible in a week. I decided a dwarf would be the most appropriate race. I started off in a dwarf village, surrounded by other newbie dwarves and gnomes. At first I was struck by the game's similarity to Diablo. As you walk around, some people have exclamation marks pop up over their heads; you go to them and get a quest. Some tell you to kill monsters; some tell you to visit new places. Each quest has a lengthy and well-written block of text which you can read or not read, depending on whether you care about story or not. Power gamers can easily ignore the flavor text -- the objectives are clearly summarized at the top, and the reward you will get for finishing it is noted on the bottom. However, the content of the game is interesting, and if you enjoyed reading the history of the Warcraft universe in the manuals of other games, which I did, then you will want to pay attention to this as well.

Unlike Diablo, there are no attribute points to distribute. As in Warcraft III, your heroes automatically get boosts of strength, dexterity, mind, etc that is appropriate to their class. This is fine with me, as I hate having to figure out exactly how many hit points I'm going to need in exchange for attacking accuracy. This is also the case with City of Heroes.

Unlike City of Heroes, questing is important. I've spent periods of time both fighting wandering monsters and running errands, and I definitely feel like I gain experience much faster when I complete quests. And there are tons of quests to be had all the time. In just about every building of every city you find, you'll meet someone with an exclamation point. I have around five quests in my log most of the time, and they are conveniently sorted and color-coded to let me know if I will take a beating when I attempt to do the quest. Questing is a full-time job in World of Warcraft. You can certainly choose to fight wandering monsters, but mostly what you'll want to do is identify particular monsters that tend to give you stuff you want and fight them until you have all the stuff you need.

For example, I'm a novice cook, and I only know a couple of recipes. One of them is cooked boar meat. To practice my cooking in the early stages, I pretty much have to fight a lot of boars. I don't do it for the experience, I do it for practice.

See, in WoW, trade skills and the level treadmill are kind of like two separate games. Trade skills are the traditionally "boring" MMORPG activities such as cooking, sewing, smithing, and so on. As you gain experience and level up, you will get skill points to spend, but you can go to any trainer in town and learn whichever skill you want. The earliest levels of each skill cost relatively few points, so it doesn't hurt much to dabble in different skill trees before deciding to build one up to high levels. The online manual even gives helpful hints about which skill trees are likely to be useful to each class, but these are guidelines only.

But training a skill only gives you the ability to practice it. Once you train cooking, you will get a couple of recipes (cook boar meat, cook wolf meat, cook eggs) and a proficiency that is somewhere around zero. To improve your skill, you simply cook a lot of these meals, which you can then sell or use to boost your health later. Once your skill is high enough, you can buy more recipes from the trainer. So basically, you only need to practice the skills you actually find useful at the time; you don't have to waste a ton of time practicing skills just to get them to the level where they can do anything useful at all.

The really nice part is that you can't destroy resources by practicing with a low skill. If you have the right objects (such as meat) to practice with, you will succeed. The reward for improving your skill is not to improve your odds of not screwing up; it's to make better stuff at higher levels.

Let me recall my experience with being a blacksmith in Ultima Online many years ago. First I had to spend hours mining ore and, more often than not, not finding any. Then when I had a bunch of ore, I had to smelt it. If I failed my skill roll, I didn't make any metal bars AND I lost the metal. Then once I had a stack of metal, I had to decide what to make. If I failed to make it properly, I didn't make any armor AND I lost the metal. So frequently I put in a whole lot of work and had nothing to show for it.

In World of Warcraft, the emphasis is always on exploring, not sitting around clicking one thing over and over again. As a miner you get a skill called "find ore". This skill is always on if you want it to be, and the effect is that ore deposits which spawn randomly will be visible on the minimap. If you find an ore deposit, you just walk up to it and right click, and you hack out some copper ore. Guaranteed. Then you go back to the forge, smelt the ore, and you get copper bars. Guaranteed. Then you open your blacksmithing skill, choose a "recipe", and make it. Guaranteed. In the process, your blacksmithing and mining skills both go up.

That may sound like it's too easy, because you can't lose your materials. Blizzard decided (I think correctly) that it's not fun to watch an hour of work go down the drain because your skill is not high enough to craft anything without destroying your stuff. But, you can't get experience forever by making the basic stuff. At first you can craft copper bracers for the cost of two copper bars. But you only improve your smith skill for a little while doing that. Once it starts to drop off, you need to start buying higher level recipes, such as copper chainmail vests. That will cost you six copper bars, and some "flux", which you buy to remove impurities in the metal, and some linen cloth, which you get by fighting certain monsters. As you improve, you rely on more elaborate materials, and that requires you to go out and fight or explore. The emphasis is never on repetitive tasks; it's always on going through the world and discovering things.

There are really three kinds of points you get. Standard experience points get your character to higher levels, which improves your stats and allows you to train new fighting skills. Trade points allow you the POTENTIAL to learn any trade skill you wish, but you only get good at these trades by finding materials and practicing. (Note added later: This is no longer accurate in the retail version. Trade skill points were removed and a cap of two skills was implemented. Learning trade skills costs money, but not points.) Then when you get to level 10, you start getting talent points. These work in a manner similar to the skill tree on Diablo 2; you get three talent trees where you must acquire some abilities to acquire others.

For instance, my warrior has offense, defense, and fury. But in practice, it looks like I'll only be able to effectively choose ONE tree to develop. This is because the items in the offense tree all work in harmony with each other; to get the higher offense talents, the requirement is "Must have at least 20 talent points in offense". So if you divide up your points among the three trees, you'll be unable to get the really good skills.

This forces you to specialize your character. You can have a powerful offense fighter or defense fighter, but not both. Fury, I think, is the tree that allows you to buff your party with warcries and things like that. I don't know what talents are for the other classes because I'm not level 10 yet.

One thing I find smart about the game design is that you aren't offered choices until you know what you're doing. As I said, craft skills are cheap at low levels, so you can experiment without permanently nerfing your character. And because the talent points don't come until level 10, you should already have a feeling for what kind of abilities you can get, which means you probably won't make a big mistake picking talents for things that don't interest you.

Finally, the architecture is impressive. All the races start in their own training town, but as you get out into the world you see gradually larger towns until you finally get to your race's big city. When I played a human mage, I found Stormwind Keep for the first time. This may sound cheesy, but it was literally awe inspiring. I was like "Oh my God, that is an enormous friggin' castle!!!" Then you get inside and there's an entire city inside the walls. Guards are posted everywhere, and you can ask them for directions to anything you might be looking for (trainers, merchants, inns, etc). And believe me, you'll need them.

For the dwarves, there is Ironforge, a tremendous subterranean city with a giant anvil in the center for blacksmiths, stores and classes arranged in a ring all around the edges, and an enormous moat of lava dividing the inner and outer rings. I have played an orc character, but I haven't seen their city of Orgrimmar yet.

So far in the game, there's so many things to try that I often can't decide what to do. My quest log is always full -- you not only get quests specific to each map region, but you also get class-specific quests (warrior, mage, etc) and quests that are based on your trade skills ("We need to supply the war front with six copper axes and six copper bracers, pronto!") You can run around practicing skills, collecting resources, and levelling up without questing. You can even join large parties who are running to raid the nearby orc cities. I went with a team of about 30 characters and we beat off several high level guards before I gave up and went back to town. Tip: if you're going to attack a city, bring lots of characters with resurrect abilities.

I probably have only a few days left to play, and the game's not out until around Christmas time. It's going to be a frustrating wait. The game has a lot of minor bugs right now. Sometimes a monster will be standing around but won't attack anyone and can't be attacked. I fell through a crack in the polygon ground once while mining in a quarry. I fell for a few hundred feet, got to see the underside of the landscape, and then when I went below a certain point, I was instantly teleported to my home town. Still, apart from the regular server crashes (this *is* a stress test after all) the game was remarkably stable and smooth, and I could go about my business for long periods of time without noticing any major problems. Someone who joined my party said, "If this were Everquest, this would be the retail version."

Final score: ***** out of 5

Zelda: Windwaker (GameCube, ***)

Legend of Zelda: Windwaker is over a year old now. Recently, Ben has frequently been badgering me to play so he can watch, so I've played through it and I'm almost done. It's only the second time I've played through it, and I relied heavily on a walkthrough this time so I could find most of the secrets.

I think there are some very serious problems with the game, many of which don't show up until you've played over half of the game. No, I don't have a problem with the cartoony graphics or the childish themes. What bothers me is that there are a lot of gameplay elements that are not only not fun, but actively annoying.

Many of the elements that I loved about previous Zelda games are present through most of the game, and I will list them here:

• Starting out with a relatively weak character and gradually growing into an unstoppable badass (even if it's a badass with adorable puppy-dog eyes).
• Getting a growing arsenal of toys that you can use in various situations.
• Lots of puzzle filled dungeons, filled regularly with rewards in the shape of maps, hearts, and new toys.

The last one, I think, is extremely important. I know the dungeons were the best part of the game for me. The first time through, I would often have my older stepkids watching and giving me advice on what to do next. But whereas most previous installments (especially Ocarina of Time and the SNES game) had eight or nine major dungeons, this one only had five or six. So while there is still lots of puzzle solving to do in the game, an awful lot of the game is done in non-dungeony activities. Which brings me to the horrible, HORRIBLE overworld navigation system.

As a novelty, it was fun for a while. The world you live in is a giant ocean dotted here and there by islands. You get a boat, you sail between them. Eventually, you get warping capabilities that jump you to selected islands around the map. You use the wind waker, a conductor's baton with a small skill game attached to it, mainly to warp around the map and change the direction of the wind.

But travelling between the islands is tedious and should be kept to a minimum. It should have been more like a mini-game, not THE ENTIRE GAME. Travelling from one grid on the map to another takes around 3-5 minutes. Each time you use the windwaker, it takes another 30 seconds of fumbling around. In order to get to most locations, you must go through all of the following steps:

1. Get on the boat.
2. Figure out what square you're aiming for.
3. Select the wind waker in your inventory.
4. Play the "warp" song.
5. Identify a square near where you want to be.
6. Wait for the warping animation to finish.
7. Figure out which way the wind needs to blow for you to get to your final target.
8. Pull out the wind waker again and play the "wind" song.
9. Wait to finish sailing to the next square.
10. Get out of the boat.

How often are you willing to do all these actions? I reckon about once every thirty minutes is my limit.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the game, every square is unreadable on your map until you track down a fish somewhere in the area and get him to fill in your map. It is technically optional, but pretty much necessary that you visit the fish in every location. That's 7x7=49 times when you must repeat pretty much repeat the same action in a different place.

In the beginning, inter-island travel is kept to a minimum and all is fine. As you approach the end, you have to island hop more and more. After you do a surprisingly small number of dungeons, the game switches over completely into full-time travel mode, and the amount of time you spend doing this is roughly the same as the amount of time you've spent on the entire game before.

There are eight triforce pieces, NOT hidden in dungeons, but hidden under the water. To find each triforce piece, you:

1. Travel to a location on the map, using all the previously mentioned steps.
2. Solve a few easy puzzles to get a new treasure map.
3. Go to the island where your maps get deciphered.
4. Figure out which square the treasure map points you to.
5. Sail to that square, using all the previously mentioned steps.
6. Use the map to get you to the new location.
7. Look for the precise location of the triforce piece, and get it.

These steps are the same every single time, for all eight triforce pieces. For those of you keeping score, that's three trips for each of eight pieces, for a total of 24 island trips. Each trip has ten steps, but the deciphering island is located on a warp square, so let's cut one of those tens in half... 25 steps times 8 squares is still 200 mostly uninteresting steps you need to take -- and of course, that's after you visit the fish 50 times.

But wait, there's more.

Deciphering a map (step 2) costs 400 rupees, which is incredibly expensive. Once you've tapped out all the money you had, the only efficient way to get more is to use still more treasure maps to find still more underwater chests -- some of which contain heart pieces, and some of which contain 200 rupees, so you need to locate 400*8/200 = 16 more chests in 16 other squares, plus more maps if you want all the hearts, or if you were looking for money and got the hearts anyway.

I'm just READING what I wrote, and my God I'm bored.

I cannot emphasize enough the fact that using the wind waker itself is a dreadfully tedious experience once you've figured out how it works; I'm betting (without exaggeration) that you have to use it at least 500 times throughout the course of the game, if not more. Not only to get around the map, but to shift the wind so you can float in the right direction; to control your friends' actions inside dungeons; and to change the cycle of day and night.

And then, of course, every single island has some kind of hidden secret (the usual stuff -- hearts, extra bottles, a seemingly endless number of treasure maps, and other trinkets that have limited use in the game). So if you're going for completeness -- which I thought I would, but I've changed my mind -- you have to visit all of the 49 squares, often multiple times. And that means two uses of the wind waker and some sailing each time.

Previous Zeldas didn't do this to you. In Ocarina of Time you can use the ocarina to warp to many different areas, but you can usually find a shortcut from where you are that will jump you around the map in about a minute or two. And then there was the horse, which was an awesome way to travel. More importantly, there was a much more limited number of important locations, say 10-15, where you could find most of the things you could ever be looking for.

I finally got the triforce together this morning. On balance, given the choice between the completed triforce and the time I spent getting it, I wish I had the time back.

Doom 3 (PC, ***)

Playing games like Doom 3 makes me feel like I'm on a ride at Disneyland or Universal Studios.

Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- I happen to really like Disneyland. Last time I went there was with my wife, about seven years ago, and I'm really looking forward to my toddler being old enough to enjoy the experience of going back. When you spend a day on the rides at Disneyland, it doesn't take very long to figure out what the formula is.

The rides that have been created in the last 15 years or so -- let's say since "Star Tours" was created -- have a fun but predictable design pattern to them. They're trying to make a cinematic experience that sucks you in as much as possible. So they talk directly to you, the guest, and make you feel that you are somehow involved. When you get in the stationary car that jiggles around a lot, they tell you it's a spaceship, they cut off your view of the real world, and have a little animatronic robot pilot tells you "Hey, you guys are the first people I've flown with since they gave back my license!" Indiana Jones appears on a video screen to let you know that, while you're on your pleasure safari in the jungle, you should keep an eye out for the lost artifact of Wambooza, or whatever. When you go to a 3D movie, an attendant hands you "safety goggles" that must be worn during the presentation for your protection.

Then, as the formula dictates, Something Goes Wrong. Tie Fighters are attacking the ship! You looked at the idol of Zamafu and now you're cursed! Ladies and gentlemen, we've had a catastrophic failure in the core and aliens are loose in the theater!

A bunch of stuff happens to the audience. The ship shakes. A giant rock starts rolling after your car. Water is sprayed on the audience at just the right moment, or a little mechanical thing embedded under the seat touches you on the leg or something. Of course, the audience is never really in any danger -- imagine the liability costs. In fact, the same sequence of events happens to every single customer who gets on the ride, in the same order. You're on rails and can't control where you go; the movie playing is pre-recorded. But it FEELS LIKE something is happening to you, as long as you can willfully suspend your disbelief.

Now I can certainly do that. I like fiction. But I'm not a kid, and most of my brain is telling me that there's nothing to worry about. I focus on the way the experience is designed. Where a kid might be thinking "How does this event make me feel?" I'm thinking "How did the developers want me to feel when they created this event?" Then I just roll with it and have fun.

So that's Doom 3 for you. Technically it's very interactive. You decide how fast to move through the corridors, what weapons to use, how much time to devote to searching for hidden ammo and health. But you're STILL on rails. There is still a predetermined sequence of events that will happen in a certain order. You can get through the game most effectively if you're approaching it with a mindset of "What do the developers *want me* to do now?"

Rarely are there any kind of serious decisions to be made. You go from point A to point B, monster spawn to monster spawn. See that locked door? Let's see if there's a security panel to click nearby. If not, it's not important and there's nothing behind it. Otherwise, there's a key or a code somewhere later on, and we'll be coming back here in a minute. There are "puzzles," certainly, but only of the "Read this note to learn the security code" variety. In fact, surprisingly often, the note is placed practically right next to the door. That's ridiculous. It makes me wonder why they bothered having a locked door at all. More than anything else in the game, this jars the suspension of disbelief and reminds you that you're not really there; you're on a thrill ride and it's time for this door to open so something scary can jump out at you.

Also contributing to the feeling of being on rails is the regulated placement of items and its ratio to monster spawns. I found a big cache of plasma gun ammo, so I KNOW that some high hit point monster is about to rush me. What to do, what to do? Oh I know, I'll use the plasma gun. If I've just had the tar beaten out of me in a room where 5 imps spawned simultaneously, I just smile and keep going, knowing that there is a full cache of health and armor just around the corner. After all, I'm not a terrible gamer; surely SOME people handled that fight worse than I did, which means they're at lower health than I am, which means they need some extra help to keep having fun. I can think this way because I know that the experience is designed to happen roughly the same way to everyone.

There are times when I don't know what to do, but usually that's because I'm running through corridors to find the next door. Most of the time, that means I'm running through empty halls. When a monster appears from a dark corner while I wander around, I think "Aha! I'm going the right way!" instead of "Oh my Asmodeus, I'm gonna die!"

Now all of the above may make it seem like I don't like the game. Certainly a good online game of Warcraft 3 against a human opponent contains many more surprises. But I do like fiction. I like somebody taking the time to tell a story that they thought I would enjoy (and incidentally, pay $50 plus tax to hear). As cinema (if that's not too pompous), there are moments in the game that work. Somebody had to say "You know know what would be cool here? If you hear noises and see spooky shadows in front of you... and then something jumps you from behind." When you meet a really ugly new monster, there's often a cut scene to introduce it. For instance, you see one of those big pink chomping gorilla demons roar at you from behind a window... it charges the glass, can't break it... then it goes away for a second... then suddenly the door bursts off its hinges. That's fun.

Of course, the game certainly does startle me many times, but that's not the same as scaring me, as any Alfred Hitchcock fan will explain to you for hours if you let them. Tip: DO NOT play this game in a house with cats who like to jump on your lap. Also, there is a general feeling that things in the story are getting worse as time goes on. I took a playwriting class in college once, so I know this technique is known as "raising the stakes." Whereas in a game of Warcraft, if things are getting worse for you instead of better, 4 out of 5 times it probably means that you're going to lose, which I don't enjoy.

Still, I'd like to think that there's a way to improve on the formula, so I don't have to feel like somebody else has planned my every move. I don't have a way in mind; I'm all talk. If you were to get off your ride at Disneyland and walk around behind the trees, of course you wouldn't find yourself in uncharted jungle; you'd find a bunch of gears and stuff, and the back of the sets. What's behind that unopenable locked door in Doom 3? Well, I don't have to guess, because I can activate the "noclip" cheat. Then I know that behind the door is the outside of the model. It's a whole lot of nothin' at all.

Score: *** out of 5.

City of Heroes (PC, *****)

I'm recovering from staying up till 12:30 AM playing City of Heroes, then got up to play it again from 7:00 to 8:30. What can I say? I'm hooked.

I hooked up with my friend Jeff, who was in the beta and plays "Captain Liberal". (Basically his origin story is nearly identical to that of Captain America, except that he was created in the 50's to fight McCarthyism rather than Nazis in the 40's.) As the newly created character "Seculo", I spent a tremendous amount of time designing my cosume, then went through the tutorial, and finally hooked up with Captain Liberal to fight bad guys in the neo-Nazi district.

If you have the chance, it's definitely a good idea to start playing the game with a higher level friend who can show you the ropes. Your first few levels will probably go more smoothly.

Costume creation

Before you start playing, you get to build your character, starting with height and build (a slider from "burly" to "athletic" - meaning "skinny"). You will also be choosing what kind of origin your powers have: magic, mutation, science, technology, or natural. Seculo is recovering from being an evil lawyer, so I chose a natural origin -- meaning he wasn't born or mutated into powers, but trained himself up like Batman. I made him kind of short and wiry, with glasses and a goatee. Then I gave him a blue and gray themed costume, with a "scales of justice" symbol on the front. The only major flourish I put on his costume was a striping style on his boots that the game described as "tiger", but since they're mostly gray, they just look like slightly funky boots.

My future heroes may have a wilder style, and there's lots of variation to choose from. You can be enormous and lumbering, like the Hulk. You can be bare chested, or your clothes can have all sorts of crazy patterns on them, or fins, or whatever. Your skin can be any color; and it can have blood veins all over, or robotic circuitry, etc. Your face can have features like a cat, or goth eye makeup, or even clown makeup. (Super Gene Simmons to the rescue!) I even saw some superheroes running around who looked like nebulous glowy things. Think of, I don't know, Electro after he lights up.

You can make all kinds of changes to your costume and body, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that you can be absolutely anything you can imagine. The logos are chosen from a list, and although there are a whole lot of them, I was disappointed that you can't design and import your own from Photoshop or something. Also, there didn't seem to be very much variation between face styles, though of course you can customize your hair (mohawks! bald guys!), facial hair, helmets, and glasses or visors. You can also choose to have a permanent grin or grimace plastered on you.

Gameplay

I'll describe how the power and levelling systems work after I tell you about how my game went.

After finishing a quick tutorial and customizing my character's powers (more about that later) I left the training area and went to meet my first "contact". This guy is your Commissioner Gordon, if you will. He says "Hi Seculo, can you go beat up five 5th Column bad guys?" or "Seculo! We need you to investigate this old abandoned warehouse and get some information off the computers!"

Your contact and your preferred enemies depends on which origin you chose. As a "natural", I met with a plainclothes crimefighter who is most interested in having me fight the 5th Column, which I mentioned is a neo-Nazi group. There is one gang of villains for each origin, so magic heroes will be fighting "hellions", which are a demon gang, and science heroes will be fighting robots, etc. At least at first, the contact will usually tell you to go to an area where there are a lot of enemies to match your origin, although you are also free to go wherever you want.

But before I even talked to my guy, I messaged Captain Liberal to let him know I was ready to join him. He said "I'm on a mission, I'll be with you in a few minutes." I waited and familiarized myself with the area. Then he messaged me: "I'm out... I'll come join you." I wondered how, so I right clicked on his name and I got a menu that included the command "follow". Even though CL was halfway across the map, when I clicked follow my guy started running in the right direction and a little arrow appeared indicating that CL is 800 feet in the direction I'm going.

The homing interface is really handy. You can pick your own target on the city map and the target will always be shown on the main screen, and so will the current mission. The game has many different zones where you can go, and you'll only see a target or friend if it's on the same map as you.

Anyway, meeting up with CL was really easy, and we immediately joined up to form a team. Then he led me to meet my contact and get a mission. This then became the team's mission, and he could see my current mission as well as his own. The mission led us to another area of the city, so the Cap'n showed me the way to a subway system. All you have to do is click the subway, choose which zone you want to go to, and your character will hop on the next available train and poof, you're there.

Because there are lots of different servers and many zones within the server, you usually won't randomly meet a lot of other players unless you're specifically trying to find them. Champion City is populated with tons of NPCs, most of them just walking down the street going about their business. But as we travelled toward the mission, we would occasionally see little word balloons appear near us saying things like "Help! I'm being mugged!" or "Quick, finish da job before some heroes show up!" Helping out is optional. You can run toward the sound and fight the bad guys. When you start attacking, the victim will run away. But once you finish off all the guys in a group, the victim will return and say "Thanks!" or "Wow, you saved me!" or "Nice costume!" When that happens, you win influence points, which I'll talk about later.

When you fight somebody, the game automatically targets one of the bad guys and all your attacks are directed at him. You can switch targets by clicking on someone or hit tab to cycle through nearby baddies. Once you have targeted someone, you press number keys to throw a punch or use a superpower. Every action takes some time, and also has a cooldown time, so after you punch somebody you can't punch again for a couple of seconds, but you CAN use a different power right away.

Seculo specializes in mentally blasting people. Currently I have two types of mental attacks, so I switch back and forth between them when I fight, or occasionally punch people if both my blasts are in cooldown. Captain Liberal is a melee brawler and Seculo is mostly a long range supporter, so we complement each other pretty well in a fight.

When you target a bad guy, you can see what level they are. They also have have color coded names, so you can usually tell how you'll do in a fight. A green name means you will beat them handily; red means don't bother fighting them without a huge team.

The Mission

We get to the mission site and go inside. It's some kind of office building, and we're the only ones inside except for lots of bad guys. The game automatically creates a private area for you and your team when you go inside, so you won't be getting in the way of other players to "camp" spots where monsters are supposed to be. The building was a small maze with generous helpings of enemies, some tough and some not. As I've read, the game automatically customizes the enemies in a private zone so that they'll be an appropriate challenge for the level of your team.

I got some levels and items, and then we met the objective and I had to go back to my contact and get credit for winning the mission.

Character building continued

After you create a costume for yourself, the next thing you'll do is choose 1. origin, 2. hero type, 3. skill sets.

The origin does not affect what kind of powers you have, only what kinds of enemies and contacts you tend to meet. The hero type is everything.

There are five classes of hero:
* Scrappers are for players who like to go solo; they have a decent balance of attack, defense, and crowd control. If you made a hero based on Jackie Chan, you would be a scrapper.
* Blasters are ranged, high damage, low defense powerhouses. They can dish it out but can't take it. Guys with guns or energy blasts are blasters.
* Tankers are high defense, high power, but slow. The Hulk would be a tanker. Captain Liberal is a tanker.
* Defenders are your support team. They give buffs and healing to your party, and debuff enemies. In a more traditional game, defenders would be paladins. Seculo is a defender.
* Controllers are heroes who mess with people's minds. Professor X is a controller.

But wait, there's more. Each hero type has six, count 'em, six categories of PRIMARY powers, and six categories of SECONDARY powers. You choose one primary category and one secondary category, and you're stuck with that set of powers for the entire game. Each category has different levels of powers which you can buy after you level up. Presumably no category is useless, or so you'd hope.

A defender's primary powers are mostly about boosting their teammates, and secondary powers are for attacking and debuffing the enemy. Seculo specializes in healing (primary) and psychic powers (secondary). Within each category, there are something like ten powers. So that's five hero types, times six categories, times 10 powers, so I think that's 300 powers in the game, although it's probably a bit less because some types have overlapping skill trees.


Equipment and character advancement
The terminology used in the game is a little bit unusual, but once you get used to it you'll easily see how to make analogies to other RPGs. Here's a quick glossary.

Security level <=> level
Super powers <=> skill points
Super power enhancements <=> equipment (armor, weapons, etc)
Insights <=> potions and scrolls
Influence <=> gold

So here's how it works. By fighting enemies you get experience and influence (money). Get enough experience, and you can level up. On even numbered levels, new powers will be available to you from your primary and secondary trees. On odd numbered levels, you will get enhancement slots for those powers.

Each power has a number of little bubbles below it, like sockets where you can stick enhancements. When you fight, enhancement items will also occasionally pop into your inventory, usually after winning a tough battle. They aren't actually used until you "spend" them by popping them into a socket. Your enhancements can go into any appropriate power; an enhancement that increases flight speed only affects the flight power, and an enhancement that increases healing can only be used on a healing power. There are also all-purpose enhancements that do things like increase a power's damage, decrease cooldown, reduce the amount of energy it takes, and so on. The higher your level, the more powerful are the enhancements you can use.

You can also obtain or buy a limited number of "insights" such as rage, luck, energy recovery, and so forth. They act as potions which give you short term boosts. You can quickly consume them using the F1-F4 keys.

Production quality

As I always point out, this is the very first MMORPG I have played since I quit Ultima Online. So I don't know how this compares to Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot, but I really like the interface and visuals. The game takes place in a fully rendered 3D city, but it isn't a big network of generic identical streets and alleys. The map is very carefully designed and most of the places I've been so far stand out on their own. A short little riff of ambient music will play when you enter a new area, but otherwise there is no background music, just background noises.

There are also gigantic statues of legendary heroes throughout the city. I mean, like, statue of liberty sized. You walk up close to one and you're at eye level with the feet. And they're everywhere.

Sorry, I just have to digress and note something amusing. When you rescue a citizens from being mugged, one of their stock phrases is "Wow thanks, I've never met a real superhero before!" I want to smack them and say "What? The place is called Paragon City, the whole economy seems to revolve around heroes, there are giant freakin' statues of one on every block, there's an entire plaza full of heroes just two streets away, and you've NEVER MET ONE?"

Okay, got that off my chest.

Here's another cool thing: lots of preprogrammed animations you can go through. Bow, cheer, laugh, grovel, sit down and do yoga exercises, flex. There is also a "decision" menu which includes options like rock, paper, scissors, roll dice, flip coin.

Anyhow, I tried going solo a bit in the morning and didn't do so well. I think the game is definitely designed to make it easy on teams and tough on individuals. They give you lots of ways to hook up with people, in fact you can ask the game to automatically search for teammates and then other people who are near your level can find you. So far I'm only playing with Captain Liberal or alone. But this morning I was fighting some tough villains, and suddenly another blast of mind-rays came from behind me. Some midget girl came running up and joined the fight with me. Then I said thanks and healed her. That was neat. I know some people have complained that there isn't any PVP action, but the result of that is that everyone is really friendly and helpful to each other. I can see that it won't be much trouble to hook up with other players just to go for a short spin around the city.

Goblin Commander (GameCube, ****)

On a whim, I rented Goblin Commander this weekend. I played many hours, which is basically a positive review for me.

Goblin Commander is a real-time strategy game that has put in a heroic effort to overcome the inherent problems of controlling an RTS with a joystick. Unlike Starcraft 64, which used a PC interface and simply used the joystick as a substitute mouse, Goblin Commander is meant to be played on a console and the gameplay was designed to minimize unit micro-management and fast clicking.

Instead of controlling individual units, you can control up to three "clans" which can contain ten units each. Clans always move together in a group, and they operate on a one button interface. You use the joystick to zoom a cursor anywhere on the map (nice fast scrolling, you can cross a typical map in a second or two) and then you press A, B, or X to move the clan of your choice. Clans automatically "attack move", so they will fight anything that gets in their way.

You can also take direct control of any clan with the Y button, which allows you to move a group of units as you would control any other console character. While in direct control, you can also order other clans to follow you, and they will automatically help fight anything you choose to attack. This is a handy feature, because it allows you to run away. A clan that is fighting will ignore movement orders unless it is under direct control or following another clan that is under direct control.

There are two kinds of resources in the game: gold and "souls". Basically, souls are used to get troops and gold is used to upgrade them. Like Warcraft III with its greatly reduced unit limits, upgrades are extremely important because you want to keeping small numbers of troops alive for a long period of time. To get souls, you capture a soul well on the map by standing next to it with no enemies nearby. Wells provide you with a steady supply of souls as long as you own them, but the rate they give you decreases over time, so you need to capture more wells to keep troop production up, but you don't need to manage them.

Gold, however, requires lots of management. You get gold by smashing rocks and machines lying around the map. This is, of course fun. (Among the most important rules in gaming: smashing stuff is cool.) It does, however, require a lot of work. Your goblins will not automatically target smashable objects, so you need to spend some time clicking on objects or attacking them while a clan is under your control. Of course, the time you spend collecting money is time you are not attacking your opponent or managing your base, so there is a constant tradeoff between searching for money to buy upgrades and just making do with what you've got.

Luckily, base management is also very minimal. There are no build times, there are no research times, and there is no tech tree to speak of. Each clan has five unit types, but only two -- generally one ranged and one melee troop -- are available at the beginning of a game. The rest are locked away, and you can only access them by making an initial gold investment. After that, you can buy up as many available units as you can afford (in souls) and they join your army instantly.

The five clans specialize in different attributes, and their units and upgrades are tailored for that attribute. For instance, the rockcrusher clan has only one weak ranged troop, but it has three types of melee troops -- basic, medium, and heavy. They also have three levels of armor upgrades (bought with gold). On the other hand, the hellfire clan has one useless melee troop and basic, medium, and heavy ranged troops. They have no armor upgrade, but they have range upgrades. So if you have both clans under your control, you'll want to make heavily armored melee troops with the rockcrushers and long ranged, high damage shooters from the hellfires, and keep the two clans together for support. One clan has speed upgrades, another has a lot of spellcasting units that get health upgrades.

In addition, each clan has one type of support unit that provides additional benefits, such as scouting vision, healing, or armor bonuses. You can only have one support unit per clan at any time, and the supporters usually last a long time, so they don't get targeted.

Finally, some levels allow you to purchase "titan" units. Titans are extremely expensive but very powerful and generally have some kind of area attack ability that decimates weaker enemy armies. The catch is that you can ONLY move your titan via direct control. In other words, if you have a titan, you must micro-manage it all the time. If you stop controlling the titan, he flops down like a discarded puppet and takes a couple of seconds to get moving again when you come back. This means that going back to your base to purchase additional upgrades and troops is quite risky unless you are not under attack, or you have lots of armies guarding the titan. It is also a pain to get the titan from one area to another. Unlike regular armies, you can't just click a spot and then go do something else; you have no choice but to very slowly walk your titan from one place to another.

On the whole, the gameplay works pretty well. Because there is no building time, you can lose your entire army and still be in the game -- as long as you have enough souls to buy more, you can pop out a full set of reinforcements in seconds. However, you need SOME troops just to protect any soul wells that might fall to the enemy, because if you lose soul income then you're really in trouble. Gameplay alternates between battling the enemy and seeking out breakable objects to get gold from. However, fighting the opponent carries additional benefits. You also get gold for smashing enemy bases, and you get a portion of the enemy's souls when you kill their troops. So if you have a strong attacking force, it's definitely a good idea to press your advantage.

A few minor gripes I have about the game mainly involve the fact that it's hard to figure out what's what on the landscape. Searching for breakables can be frustrating on an unfamiliar type of map, because some of them just blend in with the landscape. Often the best thing to do is take control of one ranged clan and wander around the map pressing "attack" until they see something they want to target.

Also, the mission objectives in the campaigns are not always clear. For instance, they'll tell you to capture four soul wells, but finding them all is arduous. Even after the fog of war is lifted, it can be hard to see where the wells are without manually inspecting every inch of the map yourself. In one level, the object is to destroy all the trees in a certain area. There are a lot of them, and they can be easy to miss.

I don't know how multiplayer looks, since none of my local friends play this sort of game. I believe there is a split screen skirmish mode, and the X-Box version likely has an online game. The computer is very friendly to you in the campaigns; it does not break objects in your area or steal powerups that you leave lying around. As is standard practice in many strategy games, the computer makes up for weak AI by getting a large head start in army power for most missions.

Goblin Commander isn't the best game I ever played, but it is on the whole a positive step in proving that you don't absolutely need a mouse to have addictive RTS action.

The Passion of the Christ (movie, **)

I saw The Passion with my Ginny and some friends, Jeff and Ashley. Going into the movie, we speculated that maybe the claims about how violent it is might be a little overblown. After all, it's a Christian movie, people probably don't expect much violence at all, so their perceptions are amplified a bit.

Having seen it, I can confirm: this is a very, very graphic movie. And I'm someone who really doesn't mind the occasional violent flick. This movie is practically a celebration of torture. I mean, it covers every detail of Jesus' wounds in loving slow motion. The most brutal scene is when Jesus gets scourged. As you may be aware, a scourge is like a cat o' nine tails with nice big spikes on the end. James Caviezel is turned into hamburger meat in this scene, over an excruciatingly long period of time. Or, as Ginny observed, his latex suit is turned into hamburger meat. But this is not some indie Christmas special done by your local Baptist chapter. This is a professional movie done by big time Hollywood talent, and the special effects are impressive, to put it kindly. Several people in the theater audibly gasped and moaned at the lashing. Me, I may have winced a few times.

In my opinion, if there is one overriding theme in Mel Gibson's Passion, it is "Yes, you'd better believe that this REALLY FUCKING HURTS." As Christ, Caviezel conveys one powerful overriding emotion, and that emotion is: "Ouch."

And on this level, the movie succeeds. I did my best to go into the Passion with an open mind, appreciating it as a dramatization of a famous work of fiction. And boy, does it work hard at being faithful to the book. Some people have criticized the Harry Potter movies for being slavishly devoted to the source material, just going down a checklist of scenes and making sure to include them all. That is definitely the philosophy here.

"Judas, here are your thirty pieces of silver."
"Ah, thank you for my thirty pieces of silver."
"Yes, your thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus."
"Yep, that's why I betrayed Jesus, to get my thirty pieces of silver."

Jesus getting scourged... check.
Crown of thorns... check.
Jewish mob spares the life of Barrabas rather than Jesus... check. (Or for you Monty Python fans out there: "I shall... welease... Wodewick!")
Jesus says "Forgive them for they know not what they do"... check.
Mean guards give thirsty Jesus a sponge full of vinegar... check.
"It is finished"... check.

Not that this is necessarily a criticism. Anything less than scene-for-scene perfection, and I would expect Mel to be crucified (haw haw) by hordes of angry apologists.

However, there's another problem. I believe the original story of Jesus' betrayal and execution takes up only a few dozen pages -- even taking into account that there are four different retellings. To fill a two hour movie, there's got to be a little foot dragging thrown in. There are, of course, a few flashbacks to earlier scenes. (Jesus washes disciples' feet... check. Sermon on the mount... check. And so on.) But even these don't come close to adequate time filler. There is also a little side story thrown in about the devil, who looks like either a very effeminate man or a very butch woman, keeping tabs on Jesus. I'm pretty sure this subplot is a deviation from the text, although the devil gets almost no speaking lines. But this too is quite short.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not a fast paced movie. Ginny was positively bored. Most of what I would consider filler is just more effort to convince you that Jesus is seriously in pain. There's only so many minutes when you can effectively watch the camera linger on a lash mark, or establish that the cross he's carrying while half dead is REALLY REALLY REALLY HEAVY. Like, even a perfectly healthy guy thinks it's quite impressively heavy.

So I agree that Mel and Jim both did fine jobs of conveying the impression of a guy in pain. Do I feel bad about how little I appreciate him for taking on my sins? Not really. Do I wish I could help him out? Yeah sure. I would take Jesus off that cross in a second, but I presume that wouldn't be a good idea because then all of humanity would have to suffer the eternity of torment we so richly deserve.

There is one bit of comic relief in the entire movie. Barrabas. I think we were the only people laughing, but I am pretty sure that scene was meant to be funny. When the crowd demands to let Barrabas off the hook because they hate Jesus, Barrabas grins and postures and struts around. Then the camera goes over to Jesus and his raw hamburger skin, and it's not as funny anymore. But the moment was there.

Okay, let's move on to the big controversy surrounding the movie: is it anti-semitic? Well, I'm a non-observant Jew, so my opinion is only semi-relevant. My opinion is that yes, it's kind of anti-semitic. There are some good Jews in the movie, to be sure. The guy who helps carry Jesus' cross is very deliberately identified as Jewish. ("Help him with that cross, Jew!") But every single character who is a powerful Jew, such as Caiaphas and a whole bunch of Jewish temple guys, are portrayed in the worst possible light. This is definitely the version where the Jews have the famous words put in their mouths: "His blood be on us, and on our children."

(Sidebar: According to some secondhand information -- see news story -- that line was actually spoken in the movie, but the translation from Aramaic was not included in the subtitles. Receiving flack from Jewish groups, Gibson claimed he took it out, but only removed the caption. Even if this line hadn't been in there, however, the intent was pretty clear)

By contrast, every character who is a powerful Roman, particularly Pontius Pilate, is portrayed as being flawed but basically decent. Pontius doesn't want to kill Jesus, but he has no choice because of the demands of bloodthirsty Jews. There are some extremely horrible Roman characters in the movie, especially the lashers who take an obscene amount of pride in their work, but as often as not they are reprimanded by superior officers who tell them to crank it down a notch.

So the lesson is: Romans neutral; Jews not necessarily bad; Judaism definitely bad. It's okay to be Jewish as long as you aren't involved in promoting the religious part. All clear?

Here's another angle that Jeff argued. Two of the really bad characters were gender ambiguous. The devil's got this whole "It's Pat!" dynamic going on where you can't really tell what s/he is. And Caiaphas wears eye makeup and froofy outfits, and kind of minces around. According to my friend, it's a very Catholic thing to imply that gender ambiguity is so very evil.

At the end of the movie, there was a conspicuous lack of applause, even though the last scene of the movie strongly indicates that Jesus' skin got all better and then he went on to save humanity. Interesting. I'm not sure whether a passion play should be an "upper" to a largely Christian audience, but the yuckiness of the images before the end obviously lingered. I suppose a few people may have cried at the end, but I didn't hear much of it.

On the whole, I would recommend seeing this movie only if you have a certain mindset, and with a whole bunch of caveats. Do not bring your kids: the R rating is there for a reason. Expect there to be some boring bits, actually lots of them. Don't watch if you're squeamish. On the whole, though, regardless of what your personal feelings about the Bible may be, it IS an enduring piece of literature and this IS a well produced facsimile. You can at least watch it in the spirit of having some Cliff Notes(TM) on the Bible if you don't want to read the whole thing.

By the way in case you wondered: Judas hangs himself. He does not throw himself off a cliff, so obviously that version is not divinely inspired. Glad the movie could clear that up for us.

Score: ** out of 5.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC, *****)

Bias warning: I'm a TREMENDOUS fan of Blizzard Entertainment. They are my favorite game company, and have been since shortly after I discovered Warcraft II in 1996 or so. I was tutoring a kid in programming, and I went to his house one day and he was playing online with his friend. All these colorful cartoon characters were running around the screen hitting each other, and the thing that most caught my attention was how when he clicked on something, everything had different lines of funny dialogue. I downloaded the demo, and bought the game the next day.

Since then, I have bought every Blizzard game I could within a week or so of its release -- Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and all the associated expansion packs. The release of a new Blizzard game is one thing I really look forward to and keep an eye out for its release.

So I chose to go to a special midnight sale at GameStop on the night it was released, July 3, 2002. GameStop was a madhouse. I expected five or ten die-hards milling around the store. Instead, there were about thirty or forty geeks waiting in an agonizingly slow line, clutching their pre-order receipts. I even ran into some friends there, a couple with whom I played Diablo in the past. Collector's Edition for him and regular for her.

The biggest thing new players will notice is, of course, that the game is in 3D. The models look good, especially considering that there are often dozens or hundreds on screen at once. The game loses very littlein translation from 2D sprites, they are still the same cartoon figures that we have come to know. Only now you can rotate and zoom the camera a bit to get a better look at them. When you click on them a bunch, they still make annoyed comments. Orc grunts say "Hey, are you poking me AGAIN?" And after that, "Actually, that's starting to feel good."

The other major change from previous games is the emphasis on heroes. You can have up to three of them, although new players will want to limit themselves to one until they are more comfortable with the micro-management aspects. Heroes gain levels and powers as the game goes on, so eventually they are far more powerful than any standard unit in the game. This totally changes the game dynamic from that of Starcraft, where the focus was "Make a million units and throw them at the enemy", instead forcing you to get experience for your own heroes and tactically decide how to fight the opponent's heroes.

The plot begins right in the tutorial, so first time players may want to play through the tutorial even if they feel like they know what they are doing. At first the game centers on Thrall, an orc hero who was supposed to be the main character in Blizzard's cancelled adventure game, "Lord of the Clans". Players also initially meet Grom Hellscream, who doesn't have quite the same funny screechy voice as in Warcraft II. After completing the tutorial, players switch to the new character of Prince Arthas, a human Paladin. I won't mention what happens to Arthas, as that would be a large spoiler for the game's pretty well written story, but I will say that Arthas will figure in as a character in more than one campaign.

By focusing on heroes, Blizzard made the game more personal. You can't relate to a group of 24 marines facing off against 48 zerglings; but you can feel a personal stake in the lives of your heroes in the game. The Starcraft campaigns had heroes like Jim Raynor and Fenix, but these "heroes" could not be brought back once dead, so they had to sit in the back of the base or fight on the flanks of your army all the time. By contrast, Arthas can be resurrected at the altar of kings; he is a valuable spellcaster; and he improves the more he fights. Arthas actually feels like he is your hero, who leads your army, not a wimp who needs a bunch of bodyguards to do the dirty work for him.

The cinematics are standard fare for Blizzard, which means "Better than anything appearing in other games, and on par with the CGI in many movies." When you first watch the movies, you should notice how detailed people look. King Terenas has beard stubble, jowls, and a very distinctive haggard expression. In close-up views, people who haven't seen Final Fantasy (the movie) will probably marvel and say they've never seen such life-like humans.

As far as gameplay goes, it's the little interface interface tweaks that push this one over the line from a good to outstanding game. Like the way you can order one unit to cast spells while still keeping a large army selected. The way you can cast spells on your own units using the portrait interface. The ability to hotkey multiple buildings and rally them all on your heroes, so troops run straight to the battle as soon as they finish training. Spells with autocasting that can be switched on and off. Small touches, but important.

The battle.net system is quite different from what Starcrafters are used to. You don't get a long list of game names to try your luck on. Instead, the game features automatic matching. You choose what kind of game you want to play -- map name and style (1v1, 2v2, etc). Then it searches for a game that meets your specifications.

With the addition of the "upkeep" concept, Blizzard changes the dynamic of multi-player gameplay as well. Keeping a large army on hand costs you an "income tax", so if you keep many troops around for a long time, you will wind up far behind on resources. The strategy of "turtling" in your base and building up to maximum army size is no longer viable. Because of this, the focus of the game is much more on strategic attacks, and the role of heroes is emphasized, because the heroes tend to be exceptionally powerful in the late game, while armies are proportionally less powerful. The rule of the game is, don't stay in high upkeep: "spend" those soldiers and go fight your opponent.

Single player levels are many and varied. About half the episodes are standard "build up a base and destroy your enemies" type levels. The rest are levels with small armies and no bases. Ordinarily I hate the latter, because I like to build. But having heroes with constantly improving abilities keeps it interesting, and they really feel like RPG quests. The quests themselves differ widely; there are stealth levels, levels where you simultaneously build a base and scout out adventures with a hero party, levels where you have to escort NPC's to a safe location; levels where you get computer-controlled allies, etc.

Overall, Warcraft 3 is a fine strategy game and will give many months of enjoyment.

Score: ***** out of 5.

Dreamcatcher (movie, **) and thoughts on Stephen King

Warning: this review contains small spoilers for "The Stand" and "The Tommyknockers."

There's a problem I've had with Stephen King for many years, ever since I read "The Stand." Very few of his books have ever really worked for me.

What bugs me about The Stand is that the initial story is brilliant. There is a creeping disease that gradually kills 99% of the world population, leaving the survivors terrified and adrift in a world full of corpses. It's brilliantly written, and it can keep you up at nights. My favorite part is a single chapter where the story jumps from person to person, watching the disease get passed along and using descriptive language like "For a tip, he gave the waitress a dollar that was crawling with death."

But after the disease finishes taking its toll, what happens next? You get a group of people having dreams about this sweet old lady, and they gather at her house... and then there's an evil guy who turns out to be a demon or something. Eventually it turns into a ridiculous battle of good vs. evil, and you have something that started out as a very good and disturbingly realistic story, which turns into a comic book.

I also read "The Tommyknockers." Again, scary beginning, with some odd change coming over the people of one town, at first giving them some sort of telepathic powers, and gradually brainwashing them and causing them to turn on outsiders and others who don't get involved in the groupthink. But what turns out to be the cause? Aliens. The hero has to fight on a spaceship. It's silly.

And now we have "Dreamcatcher," which I have not read, but it follows the same pattern. It starts with characters who have an interesting power, and we have a backstory that causes us to care about them. Then we get them trapped in a small town where people are dying and they can't leave, and there's some terrifying wormy things that we get brief glimpses of. Seriously creepy. The first half of the movie is a perverse pleasure to people who enjoy horror movies done right.

But this movie also becomes a comic book, when we get the cliche giant faceless alien and the insane military commander. Ginny and I discussed the movie afterwards and tried to pin down at what point the movie "jumped the shark." We decided it happened the first time the redheaded guy started talking like John Cleese. Sorry folks, somebody should have pointed out to the director that John Cleese is not scary. After that it was, once again, not a horror movie but a comic book.

I have a new theory.

Stephen King really knows how to write good horror. I mean, he is the best known horror writer in America; that has to count for something, right? And I've seen it. I've been wrapped up in his books before. I know the man can write.

I think that King's greatest talent is coming up with a scary scenario. He probably gets an idea in his head, and he thinks "Wow, now that would be seriously creepy." And then he writes a book around that.

But at some point, more often than not, he gets stuck. He has already accomplished the scene that he had in his head, and he doesn't know what to do next. So he starts writing a completely different story. He says "Aw hell, lets just throw some demons and aliens in there." Once he loses the original thread, it shows. But he can't just abandon the book, so he writes the new book, which didn't begin with a great idea. So the endgame of his original story is a mess.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. Misery remains my all-time favorite Stephen King book. King is 100% true to his original high concept from beginning to end. He starts with a guy being held captive by a scary insane lady who wants to keep him. As the book goes on, the insane lady is revealed to be even more insane than we thought. Most of the terror is psychological, seen through the eyes of the main character. No supernatural element is ever introduced. And his victory in the end is over the same scary lady that was imprisoning him through the entire book. It was a satisfying ending.

Ginny tells me that Cujo was similar, although I haven't read it.

One more book that I think represents King at his best is called "Eyes of the Dragon". This isn't even a horror novel. It's more like a fairy tale for young adults. It has scary parts in it, but it's really about telling a story. It has supernatural elements like magic in it, but the magical theme is established from the beginning, so King never violates the spirit of the story that he originally set out to tell.

At first I thought that King is good at writing psychology and bad at writing about magic, but I've come to realize that he's pretty good at both... as long as he sticks to one or the other.

Score: ** out of 5.

Back to the Future DVD trilogy (Movie, *****)

I must confess that I love all three BttF movies and always have. I was a teenager in the eighties, so a lot of Marty's pre-time travelling existence resonates with me. My parents are both scientists, nothing like the wacky Doc Brown, but I still love the character that Christopher Lloyd created. At the base of his manic personality is a deep love and enthusiasm for science, an eagerness to explain his methods to anybody who will listen. He's really not like the usual "mad scientist" prototype who appears in movies. Many movies treat scientists like creepy, amoral figures who tinker with nature and don't care about the consequences. Knowledge bad! Ignorance good! I hate that stereotype. But Doc, by contrast, invents things because he has a love of humanity and wants to help people. When he recognizes the inherent danger of his own invention, he would rather destroy his own work than see it hurt anybody. He's a mentor and a father figure to Marty, the kid adores him. And that's a refreshing portrayal of science.

I have been known to describe a potentially bad situation by saying "Well that might cause a chain of events that would unravel the foundation of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!!!" I've got Doc's mannerism down pat. The movie has become a part of my vernacular.

I also love the whole time travel mythos. Everything about it. Just reading about the history of times long past is a little thrill, and the idea of visiting them has always been interesting to me. Thinking about time travel paradoxes is enough to give most people a headache, but it's not so hard to understand as long as the author sets up a particular set of rules and sticks to them.

The BttF series handles everything very well. It's a human drama, a nostalgic look at the past, a mind-bender about the way time travel works, and it has some great action sequences and special effects. Even without modern computer graphics, they made a lot of effects shots that still hold up well today. And of course, the second and third movies make very impressive use of split-screen shots, where two and sometimes even three copies of the same actor share screen time.

This is not to say that the movies don't have their problems. The direction is sometimes uneven, especially when characters jump onto the screen from nowhere. Some of the recurring gags are overdone and annoying ("Mom, is that you? I had an awful nightmare..."). And I recognize that the second and third movies are not as good as the first. The second movie is much too cartoony, the performances are overblown, and a lot of the sets and costumes are absurd. The third movie is a little too slow in the middle, and it drags through the old west romance plot, until it finally picks up again in the final sequence with the gunfight and the train heist.

Even so, I think they're all great, and they all form one big story arc, without which the first movie would be incomplete. Part II is all about exploring the fiendishly complicated implications of time travel, which the first movie only briefly went into. Part III backs off of the logic stuff and instead develops the characters and brings more of a sense of closure to them. Marty gets control of his temper and his future, Doc gets a soulmate. It's all good.

It's amazing how many special features they managed to scrape together for movies that are nearly 20 years old. Each disc has three pages of menus for the special features. There's two commentaries and two twenty minute documentaries on each disc, pop-up trivia, cut scenes, bloopers, and various and sundry goodies such as music videos, makeup tests, and pages from the original script describing scenes that never made the cut. Pretty much everyone who worked on the movies gives a retrospective on them, although Christopher Lloyd is conspicuously absent.

I know that not everyone is a big enough fan to shell out the $40 or $50 for the entire set, so don't get it. But I would have to say that this DVD ranks high among those in my collection that give a lot of bang for the buck. Right up there with Terminator 2 Special Edition and the Toy Story box set with an entire extra disc. Good stuff. This is something fans won't want to pass up.

Score: ***** out of 5.

Swordfish [movie, *]

Note, 2/16/2007: I just found this in an old message board post which I wrote on 12/31/01. If you are reading on the feed, don't mistake it for new material.

I rented Swordfish last night and I have to say that it is probably the worst movie I have seen all year. And I'm talking about a year when I made the mistake of renting "Dude, Where's My Car?"

It was bad on so many levels. It raised badness to an art form. It had a plot that made no sense and occurred in more or less random order, and characters whose motivations changed so many times that they must have been determined by rolling dice. The action sucked. The chases sucked. The women literally sucked, but that's a different subject.

Of course, for us professional computer geeks, there was a whole other dimension to the awfulness, which was the standard Hollywood treatment of computers and the people who use them. I mean, I have to give Hugh Jackman a little tiny bit of credit. The script was probably not his fault, and for a few minutes on screen when he was walking around muttering to himself, he was halfway believable as a coding nerd. But I just have a few questions:

1. Hugh is introduced by every character as "the greatest hacker in the world." Is there some sort of ranking system? Is there an awards ceremony? Who's the second greatest?
2. The guy is internationally known as a computer genius, and he lives in complete poverty? When the movie was being made, somebody like that could get a job offer for $50 an hour and feel insulted.
3. Who the hell came up with the standard "Movie Operating System"? It never changes. MOS uses a 40 point font, and even the simplest task requires the computer to pull up a giant blue spinning 3d model of some abstract shape. Who can work like that? Real code nerds use VI.
4. Are we supposed to be impressed when John Travolta shows off his giant super mega computer? Oooooo, it can access a whole bunch of different systems simultaneously. Wow, it has seven monitors. I've got news for you, John. For the last fifteen years or so, most of us have been using something called "Windows". Even the Unix guys have x-windows so they don't have to keep walking around squinting at different screens. And they're ALL able to connect to a bunch of different systems at once.

Okay, to end on a positive note: Halle Berry has breasts. Yes, they look exactly like breasts. The shot is very well framed. If half the effort of setting up that shot had gone into writing the script, this might have been a good movie.