Happy Smiles Review Revisited

I decided to try something a little different for today's update.  I wanted to try my hand at making a podcast.  So I went back through my archives and attempted to craft a more interesting, audio version of my t.A.T.u. review from way, way back.  

Click the Enclosure link below to either download the file to your computer (left clicking in Firefox should automatically bring up a save dialog box) or listen to it directly in some browsers (such as Safari).  You can right click and choose "Save As" or the equivalent option to directly download it in any browser.  

This is an enhanced podcast, with album art and such as visuals to go along with the audio, so playing it using software that can support that format (such as iTunes) is recommended.

Please let me know what you think of this, whether you have problems viewing it, or whether it would be more helpful to make this kind of thing available in other formats (mp3, YouTube, etc.).

I'm not kidding.  Give me feedback.  Please.  

I hope you enjoy my little experiment.

[Edit: YouTube video version is now up and embedded below. Finally. Bloody unreliable iMovie uploader. Oh well.]

Enclosure

A Different Perspective on Twilight

After writing nine days of Dreamcast articles in such quick succession, I rather need to take a break from significant writing chores this weekend.  Rest assured, however, that Twilight: Journey Into the Abyss will return in fine form next week.  

I'll even try to make up for the long wait you've had between articles somehow....

Other, non Dreamcast or Twilight stuff will surely come as well.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd pass this highly enjoyable link along.  It is a review of the Twilight movie from a perspective that, you might say, is not quite that of its target audience.

Kind of like my own take on it, come to think of it.

I don't know whether it's healthy for a writer/blogger such as myself to link to an article that is potentially much more humorous than his own, but I'm going to do it because this is just so damn funny.  I'm going to have to work very hard to even come close to this level of entertainment if I ever get as far as reviewing the movie.

Enjoy.

A Man's Perspective on Twilight

Book Review - Mass Effect: Revelation

You could safely say that I wasn’t expecting much out of Mass Effect: Revelation.

I don’t even remember buying the book. It’s been sitting on my shelf for something like two years now.

I don’t remember what was going through my mind when I bought it, other than, “Hey, Mass Effect is a decent game, let’s see what this hack writer managed to do with it,” not realizing that said hack writer was, in fact, Drew, Karpyshyn, the writer/designer for Bioware, who worked on not only the story of Mass Effect itself, but also on Knights of the Old Republic.

So Mr. Author was not exactly a hack.

Still, I think I could be forgiven for my assumptions. It is a book based off of a video game property.

How could that possibly end well?

Sure the video game property it’s based on has one of the better stories seen in modern gaming. Sure the author of the novel is working on the game itself.

But let’s face it, these cross media transitions rarely result in products digestible by your average human.

I don’t know why I decided to finally start reading it the other day, but whatever the reason, you could say I was a bit surprised that the thing wasn’t utter crap.

Mass Effect: Revelation will not usher in a new era of sci-fi storytelling. It will not go down as a hallmark classic in the genre. It probably won’t even be remembered as a stunningly written example of science fiction.

And for good reason. It’s not any of those things.

The story isn’t original. The writing style doesn’t jump out at you. Some of the plot devices are awkward and forced.

But what the reader is left with is a perfectly enjoyable piece of fiction.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mass Effect: Revelation is related to the reason it exists in the first place. The reason the book was written was to provide an introduction to the massive universe of Mass Effect in the form of a book. It was essentially a peek into the world of the upcoming game prior to its release.

It would be easy to assume that such a work would be more concerned with introducing races and worlds and historical elements than with telling a unique tale that stands on its own.

Indeed, exposition does sometimes get in the way and make the book feel a little clunkier than it might have otherwise. On the whole though, it’s impressive how little it obstructs the flow of the story. I came away feeling that the book was no less clunky than most other average science fiction novels. Considering the burden placed upon this particular title in terms of positioning and marketing, this is a fairly impressive achievement.

The thing that bothered me the most about Mass Effect: Revelation had relatively little to do with the marketing aspects of the novel. The most troubling element of the book’s construction to me is that the author has a rather annoying tendency to spastically jump from one character’s perspective to another.

In a longer novel this might have been acceptable, but a novel of only just over 300 pages does not feel substantial enough to support the number of viewpoint characters that this book asks the reader to follow. Having four or five viewpoint characters in such a small novel felt erratic - as if the author were using this technique as a crutch to deliver information he had no other way of getting across.

While the story as a whole is reasonably interesting in an “average science fiction/action romp” kind of way, none of the characters are interesting or unique enough on their own to support the book. You really do have to be hooked in by the Mass Effect universe for this book to hook you.

With that said, it’s possible that this book alone might fulfill its intended purpose and suck you into the universe and make you want to experience more of it.

The erratic multiple character perspective may be a detriment to the book’s attempt at storytelling, but it does allow for a more in-depth look at aspects of the universe that we wouldn’t have gotten to see any other way.

Another fear I had when picking up Mass Effect: Revelation is that it would feel outdated and unnecessary by this point in time since the actual game has now been released. I guess I expected it to be a giant, redundant tutorial for the universe.

Thankfully, I do not feel that this was the case. There was plenty of material shared between book and game, but the book did not spend so much of its time on any of these elements that it became annoying. Some of the material was presented from a fresh perspective that made it interesting all over again, and there were plenty of details about the universe I learned only from the book.

Keep in mind that this is all coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played the game in many a long month and, in fact, never finished it in the first place, so perhaps I do not represent your average reader of Mass Effect: Revelation.

The novel does tie nicely into the game’s story line, but in an enjoyable fashion that I didn’t think was jarring It tells an unrelated side story that sets up some key elements for the game to come while at the same time acceptably wrapping up its own plot arc.

Not every book needs to be the second coming of its genre. Mass Effect Revelation is a book I could nitpick to death if I tried, but I won’t because that would be missing the point.

This is a short, somewhat forgettable book, but I had a good time reading it, it presented the wonderfully compelling Mass Effect universe from a different perspective than that given to us in the games, and it provided a decent story of its own. It was a little erratic and told from one too many viewpoints, but was compelling enough to see the book through to the end while giving us a look at how the events in the game came to be.

If I do manage to finish the game, I would have no hesitation in picking up the second Mass Effect novel and seeing where it takes me. From someone who went into the book expecting a cheap marketing gimmick, I’d say that’s decent enough praise.

Mass Effect Revelation makes me curious to see how well it stacks up against other video game to book adaptations. Maybe I’ll do a little exploring and see whether it gets any better than this.

If you are into both books and video games, or have any sort of interest in sci-fi or the Mass Effect universe at all, I’d recommend giving Revelation a shot. It won’t blow you out of the water, but it will likely keep you entertained for the short time it’ll take you to read it and give you a great excuse to spend more time in the world of Mass Effect.

It’s a bit clunky, a bit unwieldy, a bit forgettable, and a bit predictable, but it’s fun. In this case, I think that’s good enough to warrant a recommendation.

Even from a hardened critic like myself.

Fixing a Past Mistake

When first launching Zestfulcontemplation.com, I made a video that I was relatively proud of  - a concise video review of Guitar Hero Smash Hits.

Subsequently, not even one person watched the video.

I was sad.

Until I realized that I had made the video private by mistake, never discovered it, and was never told.

Then I was mad at myself for being an idiot.

I would greatly appreciate it if some of you might have a look at that video now and tell me what you think of it and whether I should bother doing more of them.  I know it's probably far from perfect, but I was still decently happy with the results and I want to know what other people think of my little video experiment. 

Thanks, and sorry for screwing it up earlier.  Hopefully someone actually watches it this time.

Review - Condemned: Criminal Origins

Bludgeoned with Thrills

There are approximately eleventy bajillion genres out there today, but if I were forced to pick just one out of the steaming pile and award it the title of Most Likely to Age Poorly and Become Forgotten and Sad Within a Frighteningly Short Amount of Time, it would have to be the horror genre.

The effectiveness of the horror genre is tied almost directly to the quality of presentation values to a degree not seen in any other genre. Going back and playing Resident Evil on the original Playstation is more likely to make you scream with laughter than recoil in horror.

A great design and a top-notch art style will take you a long way, but once a horror game’s graphics have lapsed into the territory of the aged, it quickly moves from exciting big budget thriller to the gaming equivalent of a laughable B-movie.

That said, I was amazed that a title as old as Condemned: Criminal Origins held up as well as it did.

Condemned thrusts you behind the eyes of SCU (Serial Crime Unit) agent Ethan Thomas, a man who has just been framed for the murder of two policemen and fired from his job. Seeking justice (and his job back), Ethan must run around the cramped corridors of fictional Metro City (clever name there, guys) and hunt the serial killer that is actually behind the murders, all while trying to figure out why the city’s population is being turned into murdering psychopaths.

It’s hard to find a really original story in the crowded horror genre, and Condemned isn’t one. As with developer Monolith’s other spooky first-person franchise, F.E.A.R., however, a lot of mileage is squeezed from themes you’ve probably seen before, making for an effective plot that serves its purpose of driving you through the game and providing spooky settings to traverse and creepy bad guys to bludgeon.

I will admit that I have played older horror games than Condemned that held up better than I expected them to, Fatal Frame 2 on the original Xbox comes to mind, but Condemned has a little more going against it than just its few year old age. Being a launch game for a console is rarely a good omen in terms of the lasting power of a game’s graphical fidelity (or its gameplay, for that matter), so I was not expecting good things here.

The age of the game certainly shows, mind you, but it also demonstrates how much thrill a game can throw at you while limping along on quickly aging graphics.

This is largely due to the game’s sound design. Audio has an equal, if not greater, importance than visuals in horror titles. Condemned nails this aspect, providing an experience full of convincing atmospheric noises, creepy wails and screams, and audio that really adds to the intensity of the experience. Other games may have done this better, especially since the game’s release (Bioshock or Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. 2, for instance), but Condemned is certainly no slouch and provides the audio quality necessary to really sell the atmosphere of the game.

Condemned uses its premise to provide a couple of key calling cards that it lays on the table to try and differentiate itself from its peers. One of these stems from your role as an SCU forensic investigator. You’ll get to pick up a number of nifty tools and examine crime scenes in order to find evidence and advance the story.

Unfortunately these sequences are usually little more than a virtual equivalent of hide and seek. The game holds your hand through all of them and it often feels as if you’re just going through the motions. That said, I still found them to be a compelling break from the action and a nice change of pace. Even as shallow as they are, I would rather have the information delivered to me this way than in a boring cutscene.

The other, more significant feature that Condemned boasts about is its combat system. This is not your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. Condemned takes the rather risky maneuver of focusing its fighting on melee weapons rather than the use of firearms. Luckily the implementation is largely solid and the combat works terrifically with the game’s close-quarters, suspenseful nature.

Attacking is done with a press of the right trigger, while defending is done by tapping the left trigger. You can pick up any of a wide variety of items that you’ll find scattered throughout the environments around you, and each one of them has different ratings for attack power, defense, speed, and range. A little more variety might have been nice, but there’s enough to keep things interesting to the end of the game. Whacking somebody with the sharp end of the blade from a paper cutter just never gets old.

I do wish defense weren’t quite so clunky. Tapping the left trigger starts an animation where your character raises his weapon in defense for a certain length of time. Timing this block with an enemy’s attack seems more difficult than it should be. I don’t see any logical reason why I shouldn’t have been able to just hold the block button down to guard as long as I wanted to.

Most of the environments in Condemned are tight hallways and small rooms. Wandering through some of these well-realized, creepy environments with little more than a glorified stick to protect yourself really adds to the mood. It’s nice to see guns treated as a scarce item - a rare treat to break up the action every once in a while - rather than a reason for the game to exist.

The melee focus also plays into the game’s gritty presentation, as the bludgeoning is suitably violent. You even have the option of finishing off some enemies by pressing a button on the D-pad once you’ve knocked an enemy down for a brutal finisher.

With these two tricks, Condemned manages to vary the pace of its campaign and keep proceedings from ever feeling tedious or boring, right up to its impressive (albeit more than a little confusing) combat-filled finale. Still, this is a horror story we’re talking about here. The ending may be thrilling, but don’t expect it to make any sense.

Horror stories aren’t allowed to do that.

As I seem to have acquired a taste for horror games recently, it’s refreshing to come across games like Condemned that can give me that horror atmosphere I crave without the tired trappings of the stale survival horror sub-genre. Its story may not make a whole lot of sense and it may be a little dated and a little clunky, but it still manages to provide a tense, fun experience.

Condemned is honestly one of the scariest, most intense games I’ve yet played and it manages to provide this experience largely without resorting to the cheap tricks that have become so common in this genre. For that I give it high praise, despite some pesky unevenness.