But Mom, It's Art Now!

The Museum of Modern Art recently announced that they will be adding a selection of video games to their collection. This would seem to counteract the most vocal critics of video games, who claim that such frivolous products could never be considered art (I attempted to link to a particularly prominent example, but every time I tried to find a specific article, my browser crashed). I'm a pretty passive gamer myself - although I do concede that recently I've been playing a lot more than I frankly should be. Still, I thought I'd take a look at the list, just to see if I have any thoughts on these games.

Cuz, you know, I thought it would be possible that I not have an opinion on something.

vib-ribbon

Umm... is this a game or a 9th grade geometry tool?

Passage

At least this one looks like a video game.

Dwarf Fortress

That... sure is a lot of squiggles.

Canabalt

Seriously, I haven't heard of a lot of these.

Another World

I... don't know what I'm looking at.

Pac-Man

Well, finally!

I don't know that I'd call Pac-Man art. It certainly inspired art, but, other than being a cultural phenomenon, I don't know that there's much substance to it.

Now, Ms. Pac-Man is another matter altogether.

Tetris

"Tetris Effect" describes a condition where a person spends so much time absorbed in an activity that they begin to visualize that activity while their eyes are closed. It's especially prominent when people play Tetris or similar games right before going to sleep. "Tetris Effect" is about the worst thing ever.

Myst

I remember this game was a pretty big deal back in the days of CD-ROM. I remember that the story had something to do with creating new worlds by writing about them, which is a concept that I'd probably find even more appealing now.

I also remember that, if you know how to beat the game, you can finish it in, like, thirty seconds, which is kinda lame.

SimCity 2000

I played Sim City once. I remember thinking I'd have just as much fun playing around in MS Paint. Of course, some of us manage to have more fun with MS Paint than others.

I don't really have strong opinions about SimCity. The Sims is another matter entirely...

The Sims

Well, okay then.

I played The Sims once back when I was in college. Actually, I think it was The Sims 2. My Sim was a university student. He studied English and had good grades and a girlfriend. That last point made him more successful than me. I stopped playing.

Katamari Damacy

Now, this is an evocative game. I felt a real surge of emotion when playing Katamari Damacy.

Well, provided that "What the ffff...?" counts as an emotion.

EVE Online

EVE Online is what we call a MMORPG (pronounced "memoporgah). I don't play MMORPGs, because I don't like spending that much time online. All I know about EVE Online is that it's played host to some of the most ridiculously cruel online pranks ever.

Portal

Portal is in the running for "Best Game of All Time" (and comes pretty close to actually leading the pack on my list). It's got clever writing, subtle yet effective storytelling, and fantastic gameplay.

Also, there's something about lying... and a cake... or something.

flOw

I've not played flOw, but I played Flower, which is a game by the same company. Super pretty game, that one. flOw is probably good, too.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

JUST kidding. I'm the only one who thinks this game should be in the museum. For being AWESOME!

Persona and the Power of Love*

Can I do this? Can I blog about a video game? Can I talk fondly about a Japanese role-playing game without looking like a complete anti-social nerdbag?

...

...

...

I'ma do it anyway.

Back in my teenage years, I played a lot of Japanese fantasy role-playing games. I felt like revisiting the genre a few months ago, so I picked up Persona 3: FES off the Playstation Network. Persona 3 is the story of a student whose school turns into a massive dungeon at night full of monsters which he fights with the help of a robot and a bunch of different monsters that he collects and then summons by shooting himself in the head.

It is, without a doubt, the most Japanese thing I've ever seen.

Truthfully, I've been enjoying the heck out of this game - not so much for the gameplay as for the story. And, I guess, I'm not enjoying the main story as much as the side story. See, the monsters that you collect throughout the dungeon actually grow in power as you strengthen your relationships with the people you meet in your day-to-day life. That means that you are literally fighting evil with the power of friendship.

Did I mention this game was Japanese?

Every day, your character goes to school and has the option to interact with several different types of people, usually inspiring them to make some real positive changes in their own lives. A lot of these stories actually wind up being far more interesting than the main plot.

There aren't necessarily a lot of original stories here, per se, but there is a lot of emotion. I'm always surprised when a video game gets an emotional response from me, so I tend to dig it. My favorite stories from the game (so far) include:

• Kazushi, a track star whose nephew is suffering from a debilitating physical injury. The athlete makes a deal with his nephew - if Kaz wins at a regional tournament, the young boy will go in for physical therapy. When Kaz develops a knee injury of his own, he has to decide whether to honor his promise to his nephew or drop from the tournament to take care of his own health.

• Bunkichi and Mitsuko, an elderly couple whose son taught at the high school until he died in a car accident. The school moves to have the tree commemorating their son's death cut down to make way for a new expansion to the school. At first hurt by the decision, the couple decides to let the school expand without raising any complaints, as their son would want his students to have the best possible educational opportunities available to them.

• And then there's Mutatsu, an old monk who drove his wife and son away by putting his work ahead of them. Over the course of the game, the hero wears down his callous attitude and convinces him to ask his family for forgiveness and try to win them back.

Again, we're probably not going to win any Emmy's here, but the side stories in Persona 3 offer quite a bit of complexity to an otherwise straightforward "Them monsters - kill dead!" plot.

Of course, there are a few problems with some of these side stories.

• My fledgling feminism is slightly provoked that seemingly all of the female characters you encounter are really only made happier by however strong their romantic connection with the male lead is. So far, the emotional resolution to these plots is ALWAYS a fade-to-black PG scene in the girl's bedroom. And that's just... well, it's kinda ridiculous.

• Oh, man. Then there's this guy. TV Tanaka, a prominent shopping network personality (think Billy Mays, only creepier) tends to hang around malls at night, trying to talk underaged boys into modelling in their underwear.
  
  No, I'm not stretching anything. Within the context of the game, that's actually what happens. Guy's a creep!


• Of course, the biggest problem with the game MIGHT just be the fact that, after completing nearly 50% of the whole thing, my Playstation decided to wipe my save file, meaning I have to start all the way from the beginning if I want to find out how the rest of the stories play out.

And, truthfully, I'm considering it. I mean, it's an enormous time sink, and it'd probably be December before I actually finished the game ("MELLY CHRISTMAS! YOU HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT GAME. AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE. NOW GO AND REST OUR HEROES!"). Still, I find myself actually wanting to know what happens to these characters.

The writer in me sees something really important here. Well, obviously. Otherwise, the writer in me wouldn't have WRITTEN ABOUT IT!

I've been drawn in to the world of Persona 3 not because of the gameplay but because of the characters. I want to see them achieve their goals, and I want to see the struggles they go through. With NaNoWriMo looming on the horizon, I think it's time I gave some thought to side-characters and motivation. Even the most peripheral of characters deserves a bit of development.

It's kinda like how those high school drama teachers spend so much time trying to get all 100 members of the ensemble in the annual musical production to write a page-long biography of their character. Turns out that attention to detail really is important.

*Originally, I'd titled this post "Happy Friendship Time: Ultimate Persona Monster Fighter Okay!" I thought that'd be a little culturally insensitive.

Ico - The Best Video Game Ever?

I haven't had much time to play video games for a long time now, what with one thing and another, so I don't really talk about them much. That, and talking about how many hours you logged last night doesn't seem to impress too many people. Except, surprisingly enough, if you're talking about Angry Birds, which... whatever.

But, seriously guys, Ico is one of the best darn games I've ever played, one of the first games I'd ever point out to Roger Ebert and say, "THIS is art!"

Ico is actually pretty old news - the game's over ten years old now. It got a new lease on life when it was re-issued as part of an HD upgrade collection for the PS3. I'd heard a lot of the hype surrounding the game, so I decided to give it a go.

As far as video game stories go, it doesn't get more basic that Ico. It's a pretty standard "rescue the princess" story - a young boy, Ico, must lead a girl through a crumbling castle full of shadowy monsters that threaten to capture the girl and drag her down into an inky black pit.

Part of what makes Ico such a surprisingly emotional experience is the character designs. Both Ico and the princess are crafted to appear a bit weak and insecure. Ico himself has horns growing out of his head (yeah, I thought it was a helmet, too). He moves about like a growing boy - that is to say, a bit clumsily. When he fights off the shadow monsters, he does so by flailing at them wildly with a stick.

The girl is a bit taller than Ico himself, which makes for a bit of a change from the usual princess-rescuer dynamic (depending on your power ups in Super Mario Brothers, I guess). She moves about a bit clumsily as well, often stumbling over her own feet and requiring assistance to make it over some obstacles. She definitely gives the impression of someone who needs rescuing.

Truth be told, she's a bit of a feminist's nightmare, but you still feel for her.

The story of Ico unfolds simply, with minimal cut-scene interruption. As a result, the bulk of the story is left pretty open-ended. Hints are dropped throughout the game as to the nature of the shadow monsters you fight off and who exactly this strange girl is, but nothing is really made explicit. The player is thus able to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, which is ultimately quite a bit more powerful.

The single strongest aspect of Ico is the emotional relationship that's forged between the characters and the player. There's a relatively simple game mechanic at work here - to grab the princess's hand, you have to push and hold the R2 button. Thus, Ico guides the girl through the many dangers of the castle, all while holding her hand. That one little tactile requirement of the gameplay somehow makes the connection feel more personal. Ico manages to take a pretty standard requirement of playing a video game - pushing a button - and turns it into an emotionally loaded event.

Pretty impressive stuff.

Best thing about Ico? It's short. About four hours of gameplay, total. Given the constraints on my time, a short video game is a better one.

Why I'm Still Single Valentines

We're a couple of days away from the biggest celebration of love acknowledged by the greeting card industry, so I thought I'd take a minute and help everyone out by creating a couple of cards of my own. Give one of these babies away, and you'll never have to worry about a Valentine's Day present again!

Ten Favorite Video Game Moments

I’ve been looking pretty seriously at getting a new video game system for the sole reason that I keep hearing about all these awesome games that aren’t coming out for my PS2. It’s an extreme case of “Me, Too” Syndrome (which I’ll call M2S, because I like how that looks) that’s easily treated by exposure to my current bank statements. Anyway, all this thinking about video games has caused me to look back and reminisce about the great moments I’ve had with the games I’ve already played. I decided, for what amounts to no good reason at all, to write profusely about my favorite moments from video game history. Guess that means I don’t actually WANT a date this weekend.

Favorite Moment #1 – “Still Alive”

I’ll start off with the game that most makes me WANT to buy a newer system: Portal. If you’ve played the game before, then the above screenshot should make you giggle in pure childish glee. If you’ve never played the game, you might as well kill yourself. Seriously, you’re life’s pretty much over. (Well, I GUESS you COULD just play a friend’s copy, but whatever, man.)

While Portal in and of itself is a great game – fun to play and entertaining throughout – it wasn’t until the very end that I decided the game belongs on the list of “best things ever.” Your main adversary throughout the game, a sadistic AI named GLaDOS, sings a rather touching and thoroughly delightful farewell song as the credits roll. I watched my college roommate beat the game and loved the song so much that I played the whole thing through myself just to hear it again. Of course, thanks to the magic of YouTube, that isn’t strictly necessary.

If you consider yourself to be a gamer of any kind, you owe it to yourself to experience the magic that is “Still Alive.”

Favorite Moment #2 – “Katamari Damacy”

I’m not 100% sure WHY I decided I should pick Katamari Damacy up for the PS2, but I haven’t regretted it since. The gameplay’s bizarre (and maybe a bit repetitive), but the flashy visuals and charmingly cheerful soundtrack make this game a shot of endorphins straight to the brain. While that may actually kill you, you’ll die happy.

The opening sequence of the game made me drop my jaw in amazement and stutter, “Wh-wh-wha…?!” Seriously, the whole thing looks like a magic mushroom snorted clown paint and vomited up happiness. And only THEN do the ducks start singing.

So why do I love this so much? I DARE you to listen to it and not sing along. Just try it.

Favorite Moment #3 – The Fallen Woman

Now for something decidedly less cheerful…

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly may well be the greatest horror game I’ve ever played. Okay, I’ve only played three different games in this particular genre, but, still… Holy crap! This game scared me spitless!

Gameplay’s pretty simple – you fight off ghosts with the help of a magic camera. When you take a picture of a ghost, the camera’s exorcismal effect weakens the spirit until it eventually disappears. And, no, I did not make up the word “exorcismal.” I think they use it in the game.

Of all the enemies you face, my personal favorite is “The Fallen Woman.” Yes, I’m well aware of the connotations the phrase “Fallen Woman” carries. I think they’re applicable here: “The Fallen Woman” does appear to be a woman of… looser morality. She crawls around in a crabwalk and attacks you from below. Why, you might ask, is she in such a ridiculous position? Well, after you snap a picture of her, she immediately vanishes. You hear a high pitched scream. If you look up immediately, you see the red-clad hussy plummet from the top of the room and land on the floor with a sickening thud. So she literally IS a “Fallen Woman.” Delicious, delicious double-meaning.

Favorite Moment #4 – Chernabog

If you’ve never heard of Kingdom Hearts, then allow me to introduce you to the reason the phrase “WTF?” was invented. Kingdom Hearts is a role playing game combining the incoherent narratives of Final Fantasy games with beloved Disney icons, including Donald, Goofy, and the man himself, Mickey Mouse. The real surprise is that the game DOESN’T suck ostrich eggs.

I love the game probably a little more than it deserves, actually. Still, I love watching different Disney stories play out with that insane Japanese RPG twist, usually involving giant monsters that have absolutely nothing to do with the source material (Clayton, from Tarzan starts riding around on a giant, invisible lizard). The real treat, for me at least, comes near the end of the game: a surprise boss fight with the devil himself, Chernabog.

Up to this point, we’d had characters from all sorts of Disney films: Peter Pan, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin... heck, even Bambi has a cameo. The demon monster from Fantasia came completely unexpectedly and was undeniably awesome.

Favorite Moment #5 – The Opera

Final Fantasy VI may be my favorite game of all time, period. The storyline is epic, the characters (all 14 of them) distinctive and memorable, and, best of all, the bad guy is an evil clown.

I love any video game that can evoke an emotional response. My personal opinion is that video games have potential to be as viable an artistic medium as movies are. Final Fantasy VI has several such moments – although, for nostalgia’s sake, I’m going to pinpoint the opera scene as my favorite. Celes, a general in the Imperial Army or some such pretentiousness, has to pose as an opera diva and sing a series of arias about smack-dab in the middle of the game.

The emotional response – I laughed the entire way through. Absolutely delightful!

Favorite Moment #6 – Riding through the Fire

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often rightly considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time. I KNEW the game was going to be awesome right from the opening sequence. After traipsing around Fairy Town conversing with the babbling yokels that made up the village, you’re brought before the Deku Tree, an ancient being of wisdom with an enormous tree-moustache. He tells you about Ganondorf, a fierce warrior or demonic sorcerer or some other staple villain of fantasy stories, who rides across the nation on his thoroughbred of sin… Wait, I just started channeling Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Anyway, as the tree spins its tale, a short cinematic plays, showing the dark-clad Ganondorf (who’s really a great villain, despite having a horrible name) riding against a dark sky as flames shoot up in the foreground. Now, remember, Ocarina of Time came out for the N64, so this is the first time I’d ever really seen fire rendered so effectively on a console. The game got an emotional response from me, and that emotion was “Woah!”

Favorite Moment #7 – Die, Pikachu!

Here’s another of those concepts that really shouldn’t have worked: Take every popular character from Nintendo’s various franchises and put them together to duke it out. At the time, I was in the middle of an embarrassing preoccupation with Pokémon, so I went in sure that I’d love playing as Pikachu. Turns out I do much better with Samus, the iron-clad space mercenary.

My favorite, FAVORITE moment from this game is a bit of a cheap shot: whenever a character tries to jump across a pit, I immediately jump over them and knock them straight down to their deaths, proving that I am a competitive jackhole.

Favorite Moment #8 – The Pok Stick

If you need further proof that I’m a competitive jackhole, look no further than Battletoads for the NES. When my brothers and I would play this game, we’d immediately race to beat up the long-legged robots found in the first level. After defeating them, you could pick up one of the legs and use it as a weapon. We called this weapon the “pok” stick, after the sound it made when you hit someone with it. Of course, by “you” I mean “me,” and by “someone” I mean my brothers. Good times :-)

Favorite Moment #9 – “Tell Mike to Dip My Letter in Water…”

Yes, here’s ANOTHER concept that just plain shouldn’t work, and yet… Startropics features a young boy on vacation in a chain of tropical islands. He learns his uncle’s been kidnapped by aliens, so he goes off in search of clues, armed only with a yo-yo, which he wields expertly to defeat giant snakes, octopi, fire monsters, ghosts, ancient statues, and a vomit-spewing space-monster. And, man, was this game fun!

By far the most memorable moment involves a chance encounter with the uncle’s lab assistant. He tells the protagonist to find a clue to his uncle’s whereabouts by dipping his letter in water. My brothers and I spent the better part of an hour pressing the A button while standing our character next to the ocean, trying to figure out HOW exactly to dip the letter in water. We then decided that, since we didn’t actually HAVE a letter in our inventory, we somehow missed it, so we reset the game and trekked back through the last level we’d played – an enormous maze inside a whale (fun!). Finally, we figured out that the letter was an actual, physical object enclosed with the game cartridge. Dip the letter in REAL water in the bathroom sink, and you’ll reveal the secret code you can use to track your uncle down (which is “747.” I’ll never forget that).

Favorite Moment #10 – Crystalis

Don’t ask me which moment of this game is my favorite. If you do, I’ll probably sit down and think about it for a little bit without coming to any definite conclusion. Frustrated, I’ll then rise from my chair and pace the room. Maybe I’ll start mumbling to myself. Eventually, I’ll curl up in a ball, suck my thumb, and whimper, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” until my owner finally decides that I’m worthless and has me shipped off to the glue factory.

Wait, since when do horses have thumbs?

The point is that Crystalis was and is by far my favorite game for the original Nintendo. I grew up with this game and loved it. You play as a hero specially engineered to combat the forces of the evil Dragonia Empire, armed with magical swords controlling the four basic fantasy elements. Throughout the game, there’s a sense of urgency and despair, mingled with just a bit of hope that your protagonist provides. While I now recognize that the storytelling is clunky compared to what modern video games are capable of, for the old NES, this game was a masterpiece. Try to tell me any different, and I swear I’ll trample you to death.

Wait, since when am I a horse?

Braddy vs. Tekken. Fight!

Some of my close friends describe me as a cauldron of boiling hate – probably because I toss the word “hate” around like the name of a famous friend. The list of things I hate is nearly as long as Santa’s naughty/nice list: snow, fishing, The Fray, etc. Women tend to hop from the “hate” list to the “tolerate” list and back again. You’re on my good side right now, ladies, so watch yourselves!

(In case you’re wondering, “boiling hate” is bright pink and has the consistency of tar)

But as much as I use the word “hate,” there are very few things that make me angry. I mean REALLY angry – not angry where we hear about genocide in Darfur, shake our heads, and then go back to watching House. No, I mean beat-the-walls angry, scream-obscenities angry, rip-off-your-clothes-down-to-your-purple-stretchy-pants angry (hereafter referred to as “THAT angry”). I don’t get THAT angry often. Not because I’m cool and level-headed, mind you. It’s probably just because I don’t care. The only thing I can think of that makes me THAT angry is – of all things – a video game.

Specifically, it’s a genre of video games – fighting games, epitomized for my generation by titles like Street Fighter 2. This single video game was (and I think still is) so popular that it’s been repackaged, shipped out, and re-sold multiple times over the past two decades. The most recent version, I think, is known as Hyper Street Fighter 2 Plus Turbo Grand Ultimate World Championship Fighter Xtreme [sic] Edition, or SF2PTGUWCFXE, for short.

I remember walking down to the grocery store on Saturday afternoons as a kid with my parents and brothers to buy ice cream cones. While waiting for the ice cream, I’d stop and stare at the arcade cabinets by the entrance. I loved to watch Street Fighter 2, mainly because I thought the big, furry monster that electrocuted his opponents was wicked awesome. So imagine the embarrassment my 8-year-old self faced when he actually got to play the game and found out that the character he seemed to best with was not, in fact, Blanka, the extra from Ninja Turtles 2. It was Chun-Li, the GIRL. The ONLY girl in the entire line-up. I guess Chun-Li is supposed to be an agent for Interpol, which could be cool, but… yeah, I can’t get over the fact that she looks like a high-school girl with a closet Hello Kitty obsession. Of course, if anyone made fun of me for liking Chun-Li then, I’d lightning-kick them into oblivion.

Since that time, though, things have changed for me. The fighting games I remember so fondly have become button-mashing, hand-cramping torture. My uncle recently gave me a few of his old Playstation games, so I picked up Tekken 2. I remember playing a version of Tekken and really liking it – I played as a little dinosaur that spat fire. Sadly, there are no dinos in Tekken 2 – just a bunch of generic kung-fu teenagers.

Turns out the absence of Yoshi-knockoffs only heralded an evening of disappointment and frustration unseen since… well, the time I played Soul Caliber 3 a few weeks ago. I chose to play as Heihachi (Hey, Chachi!), an old man with hair like the boss from Dilbert. For the first couple of rounds, I did pretty well for myself. I even figured out one of Heihachi’s special moves – some type of electrocuting noogie. By round 4, though, the balance definitely shifted in favor of my computerized opponents, and that can only mean one thing – the computer cheats.

Sure, mastery of fighting games involves intense memorization of button combos and flawless execution, but even a novice should be able to push one button and watch his character throw a punch or ball up his fist or flex or SOMETHING! This isn’t that hard to figure out – push button, get response. Unfortunately for me, that response was most often “get kicked in the face.” Oh, and when I (inevitably) got knocked down, I couldn’t do anything about it. All the buttons I pushed seem to be part of an intricate combo called Impotent Fish Flopping About.

I’ve got theories as to why these fighting games are so imbalanced: playground bullies, now tired of using physical violence to extort quarters from their victims and now armed with college educations and a basic knowledge of computer programming, decided to use their talents for evil and create brutal video games which require the victim to spend his hard-earned allowance just to make it to the next round. And video games, in general, appeal to the demographic that likely got/gets picked on frequently: those with terminally low self-esteem, few friends, and unbearable body odor (or maybe those who play lots of video games turn into the crumbs swept under society’s rug; who knows?). Many video games offer players the opportunity to accomplish something amazing in a fantasy world: save the planet from destruction, rescue the princess, or play act as a muscle-bound monstrosity and beat the pink tar out of your enemies. If an extra quarter means the difference between victory and utter annihilation, then holding back would just be selfish, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Video game makers are a bunch of greedy hooligans. The whole thing just steams me up. I need to take out my aggression on something. Can’t wait until I get home tonight! I’ll stick in some Tekken and beat the crap out of… WAIT A MINUTE! It’s a trap! THAT’S how they get you! Those devious little buggers…

Well, I’ll show them. Instead I’ll go to the club, hit on a bunch of women. That way, instead of watching some on-screen avatar get kicked repeatedly in the crotch, I’ll…

Umm… on second though, I don’t like where that thought’s heading. I think I’ll go watch some Marx brothers or something instead.

Fear and Loathing in SLC

Still bringing old blogs over from Facebook. Today's entry was originally posted on 10.30.08. Guess what it's about?

Halloween may very well ranks as one of my favorite holidays, although the peace, harmony, and wanton avarice of a modern Christmas do provide stiff competition. Halloween is one of the few great “unchained holidays” – it’s the perfect opportunity for seriously awesome parties. Go ahead, hand out with all your friends until the early hours of the morning! Eat candy until sugar crystals form along the walls of your arteries! If you’re a man, wear eyeliner and women’s pants! No one will think you’re gay!

(Seriously, my emo-rock star costume is probably my favorite costume ever, followed closely by my Euro-trash getup and the year I went as Stupendous Man from Calvin and Hobbes).

So in honor of Halloween, I’d like to compile a list of my top scary movies. Unfortunately, I don’t really watch any scary movies. Case in point: I threw a Halloween party my sophomore year in high school. We had a blast with tons of good food and costumes. We even went to a haunted house some other kids in my neighborhood had put together. It was, if I may borrow a colloquialism, off the hizzook.

(We interrupt this note to inform our concerned public that Stephen Bradford has just had his right to borrow colloquialisms eternally and irreversibly revoked).

The party ran into a bit of a snag when it came time to show the scary movie at the end of the night. I choose the movie closest to a true horror that I could think of: The Mummy. That’s right, our big Halloween scare was watching Brendan Frasier try to act while fighting off badly-rendered CGI mummies. The horror, the horror.

Actually, one of the girls at the party went home that night and had a nightmare about being chased through the halls of a pyramid by a giant mummy. So I guess the movie did have an appropriate scare factor. Plus, I was in her dream, too, apparently, and was the only one smart enough to bring a friggin’ shotgun to fight off the mummy. Any event which leads to me looking like a hero, even if it is only in a dream, must be categorically defined as “awesome.”

So, yeah, don’t know much about the horror movie genre. After The Mummy, the only other horror movies I’ve ever seen are Young Frankenstein (which doesn’t really count because it’s actually a parody of the whole horror genre) and The Sixth Sense (which only counts because it convinced M. Night Shyamalan that he should make MORE movies).

Okay, there’s one legitimately scary horror movie that I’ve seen, and even this one might be a bit of a stretch. It’s an old silent picture called Nosferatu, and it was the first cinematic interpretation of Brahm Stoker’s Dracula. The director’s take on the vampire is a bit different from the glittery, effeminate, love-monkeys that we’re used to seeing these days (shame on you, Stephanie Meyer). Whatever else goes on in that movie, the vampire is actually scary. Even though, by today’s standards, a lot of the acting, the special effects, and, of course, the screens of text that interrupt the action are outright laughable, everyone will gasp in surprise and shock when Count Orlock first appears with his pointed ears and rat-teeth. It’s a truly frightening moment, and Hollywood should really try to return to the rodent-vampire thing.

Speaking of Brahm Stoker, I COULD take this moment to go over the most frightening books I’ve ever read. I mean, I got my undergraduate degree in English, so I should know a lot about books, right? Sadly, that’s not the case. I read Dracula in eighth grade, and I don’t really remember it being all that scary. Other than that, I can think of exactly three horror writers, and I’ve never really read any of them extensively. First, there’s Stephen King – whose work, to be honest, I’ve never actually read, but if they read anything like the movies based off them, I think I’ll pass. I’ve seen people who are actually afraid of clowns watch the movie It and be cured.

The biggest name in horror fiction may very well be Edgar Allen Poe. And I may have to turn in my English major badge after this, but I have to say I really don’t like Poe at all. Too wordy. Nineteenth-century American literature generally doesn’t age very well. I did once have a lot of fun recording a radio play of “The Telltale Heart” way back when I was in fifth grade. My classmates and I recorded it in the back room of the library. We made the sound of the heart beating by jumping up and down on the ground as loudly as we could. The librarian got mad at us and almost kicked us out. That’s a scary story, right?

The last horror author I have any kind of familiarity with (and I’m pretty embarrassed to admit this) is a fellow by the name of H. P. Lovecraft. This is the man that invented the Chthulhu mythos, if you know what that is. If you don’t know what that is, you’ve probably been on a date in the last month. Chthulhu is some type of ancient, tentacled, alien-God-creature that is so horrifying to look at that anyone who sees him is instantly struck with madness. Lovecraft INVENTED the cliché of the monster that’s too horrible for words to describe. Anyone else see the problem in telling a story about “monsters too horrible for words to describe” in a novel? Lovecraft, unfortunately, didn’t.

So the only genre I really know anything about after eliminating books and movies would be video games. And here I can come up with some scary titles. Like, for example, Resident Evil 4 (this time, it’s not Resident Evil 3). The first quarter of the game has the player running around a dilapidated Spanish village, avoiding villagers who may or may not want to eat your brains/cut your face off with a chainsaw. My money’s on “may.” There’s nothing quite like standing alone in a quiet street, suddenly starting as a maniac with a bag over his head fires up a chainsaw behind you, then watching in horror as he literally mows you down even after you emptied an entire clip from your handgun into his chest. Hopefully, I’ll only ever see that in a video game and never have to live through it in real life again.

The problem with Resident Evil 4 is that, after that first quarter, there’s nothing really that scary again. Sure, you run around a hedge maze while evil, bloodthirsty dogs howl at the mist-veiled moon. But the instant the dogs appear and sprout tentacles, all the fear leaves my body to be replaced by the bitter cynicism rooted in my heart. I mean, seriously, what were the game developers thinking?

“So we’ve got these dogs that chase you through the hedge maze. How do we make them scarier?”

“I know! Let’s have them grow tentacles out their backs!”

“Tentacle-dogs, I love it. Now, we’ve got this maniacal little man-child with Napoleonic delusions of grandeur…”

“Ooh, ooh! He turns into a giant tentacle monster!”

“Oookay, more tentacles. And lastly, we’ve got this mysterious supporting character who wants to help but winds up dying tragically after the cult leader stabs him in the back with a knife…”

“Not a knife! A tentacle!”

“Sit down, Jenkins, or I’ll take away your juice box!”

Who decided that tentacles are scary? Oh, right. Lovecraft. That hack.

My most recent “scary game” acquisition is Fatal Frame 2 (this time, it’s not Fatal Frame 1). I haven’t played very far in it because, truth be told, the game scares the CRAP out of me. The premise is pretty ridiculous – ghosts are attacking you, and the only way you can defeat them is to take their picture. It’s like Ghostbusters on safari.

But, actually, the game is pretty scary. You play as a teenage Japanese girl, dragging your crippled sister around a deserted town. Why exactly you’re in the town, I don’t know. You probably took a wrong turn playing hopscotch. Anyway, there are ghosts, and corpses hanging from the rafters, and yadda yadda yadda, then, “Boo!” – some horrifying beastie jumps out of nowhere and screams at you, and you have exactly two seconds to take its picture before it vanishes again. Or kills you.

Now, I’m a perfectionist, so when I play this game, I have to try to get a picture of every ghost. A transcript of me playing this game would look something like this:

Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Holy crap! [Stephen drops the controller and screams. The ghost disappears.] Dang, that was scary. [Pause]. Aw, crap, I forgot to get the ghost’s picture. Gotta reset.

Again, Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Geez, it did it again! [Stephen drops the controller again]. I think I’m getting goosebumps. [Pause]. Crap!

So, yeah, scary stuff. But I get the feeling that I still don’t have many of you scared yet. Maybe I’m just the kind of guy that should stick to the “fun” aspects of Halloween and leave the fear to the professionals and Captain Howdy. Or maybe I just haven’t unleashed the one demon that truly terrifies me every time I see it, the one that, no matter what I do, I can only stare at in mute, speechless fear:

A pretty, intelligent woman with a kind heart and a strong, confidant personality.

Anyone else scared? Just me? Man, I suck at this game!

Cliched Confessions of a Video Game Junkie

This is the third installment of what you could call my "Greatest Hits from Facebook." The following, originally posted as a Facebook note on 7.30.08, deals with my unfortunate obsession with video games. In case you're curious, I'm no longer in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and I do deeply regret using the term "internets."

For the past couple of months, I’ve been heavily involved in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Empress Theatre, which, by the way, is still running for two more weeks. Call (801) 347-7373 for tickets. Now the obligatory advertising is out of the way… Ever since we started performances, I find that I have a lot more free time in the evenings. Of course, with performances every Friday, Saturday, and Monday night, my most “valuable” evenings are still shot. And, as much as I love answering phones and checking my Facebook profile like an OCD hacker for eight hours every day, my job generally robs me of my desire to participate in socially-constructive activities, like miniature golf or playing Frisbee or whatever it is kids do these days. You little scoundrels, you.

Now, I DID spend some time outside this past weekend – I went swimming in a friend’s outdoor pool. It’d been almost 8 or 9 years since I’d actually been swimming (or even been outside without a shirt on), so my ivory-white skin is now… well, I was about to make some crack about how my skin is now redder than Bill Engvall’s neck, but, frankly, I don’t want to encourage him.

So I spend a lot of my time these days playing video games (it’s a good thing I still have the play to keep me busy on Friday nights; after that little confessions, my chances for getting a date probably went down about 63%). Just before graduation, I went out and bought myself a knock-off of the old 8-bit Nintendo system I had from childhood. I’ve got fond memories of our old Nintendo. On Christmas morning, 1988 or so, I got to unwrap the large black box that held the little grey box that played those other little gray boxes and filled my days with vaguely human-shaped sprites and epilepsy-inducing flashes. Yeah, the Nintendo was supposed to be for all of us, but I’M the one who got to unwrap it, and, when you’re four years old, that’s a big deal.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been better off without ever taking up video games as a hobby. I know that NES is supposed to stand for “Nintendo Entertainment System,” but I think it would be better as “NES Eats Souls” (yay recursive acronyms!). Video games have devoured more of my time than almost any other single pursuit. I feel especially driven to this question as I’m currently running on four hours of sleep as a result of staying up until 1:00 trying to figure out how to get my pinky up to that stupid orange button on Guitar Hero…

…which leads me right to one of my major complaints about video games. I imagine myself sometimes at a party, playing against a cute girl in Guitar Hero III, and I totally wow everyone watching (and there is quite a crowd gathered around the telly) as I proceed to get 100% accuracy on “Cliffs of Dover.” The girl, too, is quite impressed, and therefore taken with me, as you all should be, ladies *condemning stare*.

(On a completely unrelated note, comedian Demetri Martin claims that the best way to sound like a complete creep is to just add the word “ladies” to the end of everything you say. Not sure why I thought of that).

Once upon a time, I used to fantasize about being a rock star – a fantasy shared by many mentally-healthy men, I imagine. But now, rather than actually PLAYING the guitar in my fantasies, I’m mashing brightly-colored buttons on a cheap plastic toy in front of grown-ups, and I’m not ashamed of it. Video games are taking over my fantasies.

Now, good storytelling captures the imagination, and I’m all for this. And there have been some very commendable efforts towards turning video games into a real art form. For your consideration, the game Psychonauts, which gets props from me for having a quirky, compelling story with a dozen or so fully-developed and deranged supporting characters. Plus, you get to condemn squirrels to a blazing eternity in purgatory by lighting them on fire with your brain – which I’m pretty sure falls squarely into the “Things that are Totally Awesome” category on the Jeopardy! board. As much as I love the game Psychonauts, the public at large doesn’t. According to that great Oracle of the Internets, Wikipedia, Psychonauts is on the list of the biggest commercial failures in video game history, a little fact which supports my theory that video gamers are all mouth-breathing twits.

But I’m not really talking about “good” storytelling. Believe it or not, there actually IS a plot to Guitar Hero III – something about dueling the devil to see who rocks harder – but that storyline exists solely to give the programmers an excuse to create cut scenes in between song sets, which are kinda funny, but ultimately pointless – like Brendan Fraser.

And then there are the images. I’m the type of person who likes to lie awake in bed at the end of the day and, well, “daydream,” if you can call it that when it’s dark out. Sometimes I indulge in a bit of idle fantasizing, like when I imagine myself as a superhero (given a choice of superpowers, I’d pick flight every time). Sometimes I flesh out ideas for novels that will almost inevitably not get written. And sometimes I somehow come up with a great idea for a poem, and that’s generally enough to drag me out of bed to get it written down. This, by the way, explains why I write so many poems in my underwear. Not, of course, that you needed an explanation for why I write poetry in my underwear, because most of you probably didn’t KNOW that I write poetry in my underwear, so… umm… never mind.

Video games don’t allow for free thinking. If I’ve been playing games before going to bed, when I close my eyes, I see nothing but images from the game. If the game’s visually exciting, like, say, Psychonauts (heh, burning squirrels), I won’t be too bothered. But I’ve spent hours in bed replaying, in my head, Tetris, Solitaire, and Bejeweled. And nothing will make you feel like a bigger waste of human flesh than losing at a game of Bejewled in your own head.

I suppose I could forego video games altogether, spend some time outside, get a bit more tan so I don’t have to worry about those redneck burns anymore (curse you, Engvall!). However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from video games, it’s that nature is actively trying to kill me. I could just be walking along, minding my own business, and then, all of a sudden, a Blue Slime, Giant Rat, Ocelot, or some other cartoonish monstrosity will jump out of nowhere and proceed to bite on my ankles. Worst of all would be a bird – doesn’t matter if you’re a ninja chasing drug smugglers through the mountains or the son of a blacksmith in a Transylvanian castle, all the birds in the vicinity will immediately dive at you like (insert your own tasteless suicide bomber/kamikaze pilot joke here).

Besides, there’s still a way to get the social interaction every growing child needs: the second-player controller.

Introduction to Me

So there's this meme going around on Facebook right now - and I swore I'd never participate. Well, turns out I'm a sucker. One of my friends who's been home sick today practically begged me to fill it out.

I've been blogging for a while on Facebook, but I've been thinking about "expanding." I guess this meme gives me a good jumping-off point.

Here it goes: Twenty-five things you probably never knew about S.R. Braddy:

1 – I won my first poetry contest back in second or third grade – basically by rewriting the lyrics to a Sesame Street song performed by *shudder* Elmo.

2 – In high school, I sang bass in a five-man a cappella group called “The Grasscutters.” We got the name from my friend’s mom. On the CD we eventually cut, you can hear my voice crack during “In the Still of the Night.”

3 – To date, I’ve participated in six musicals: Oklahoma!; Kiss Me, Kate; Li’l Abner; Once Upon a Mattress; Anne of Green Gables; and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I love doing musical theater, but I hate watching it.

4 – I also love to sing classical music (especially in Italian), but I hate listening to it.

5 – My first crush was on a girl named Angela Slagowski in sixth grade. As a result, I think everyone should have a crush on someone with a Polish surname at least once in their lives.

6 – I have trouble reading books longer than 250-300 pages. I love stories, and I’m impatient to finish one and get on to the other.

7 – I majored in English, I took an entire class on Shakespeare, I’ve been in Shakespearean plays, and I read Shakespeare for fun… and I’ve never read Macbeth.

8 – My favorite moment in video games is in Final Fantasy III (FFVI, if you’re a purist): Celes Chere, an Imperial general, performs an opera.

9 – I love lighting squirrels on fire in Psychonauts.

10 – I memorized the closing theme song to the game Portal before ever actually playing the game.

11 – Most of the love poetry I’ve written (to date) has been written about one girl. She knows who she is.

12 – I’ve written at least two poems inspired by my mom’s cooking. It’s that good.

13 – I watch The Office almost solely because I love the relationship between Jim and Pam.

14 – While growing up, I was actually jealous of how much our cat, Otis, liked my little brother. Of course, Otis probably hated me because of how often my friend Mike and I would tackle him while screaming, “Murder the cat!”

15 – Nothing makes me angrier than doing poorly at a video game.

16 – I started college as a junior with over 60 credits.

17 – I changed my major and minor about five times and still graduated in four years.

18 – Since my favorite comic book stories have been running since the 60s or longer, I pick and choose which storylines I consider to be “canon,” regardless of whatever the companies themselves say.

19 – I’m secretly glad that Pushing Daisies got cancelled before it ran out of steam, and I hope the same thing happens to The Office.

20 – I actually want to be a Sunday School teacher in my church.

21 – I practice an evil super-villain cackle when I’m by myself – even when I’m outdoors.

22 – The most rewarding thing for me about doing the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was learning to do handstands. I still do them.

23 – During my first year at college, two of my favorite television shows were Blue’s Clues and Hamtaro, an anime aimed at 6-year-old girls.

24 – I caught all 150 of the original Pokémon. (By the way, I must point out that Microsoft’s Spell Check actually caught the accent in the word Pokémon)

25 – I care enough about spelling things correctly to add the accent to the word “Pokémon” when prompted to by Spell Check.