noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

The Games Developer Conference (GDC) ended this week, and while I'm a bit unhappy about how it's slowly being turned into a place to announce big upcoming titles (don't make this E3, please), it was a good show. I got some great books from the GDC books store (Zimmerman and Salen's Rules of Play and a game business/legal stuff book), and Xstine was lucky enough to attend two full days of workshops on staging and normal mapping workflow.

The emphasis by both Microsoft and Nintendo on the importance of the rising wave of micro-developers, a mix of indies, individuals, and small-timers, is a glimpse of what I think will be a powerful trend in the future. I'm excited at what XNA and WiiWare will offer. It is inevitable that as the tools and the venue for games mature, game development will meet extreme democratization. The long tail will grow with the short head, Chris Anderson would say.

So it would behoove all gamers to anticipate that wave, and plays some of the Independent Game Festival's finalists and winners for best independent games. I especially recommend Fez, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Goo!. While I think indie games are a little hung-up on physics based interactions at the moment, it's inarguably a parsimonious flavor of design to make, and it's just great to see these little games eating into the mindshare of triple-A titles with multi-million dollar budgets. It makes this gamer proud.

Speaking of proud gamers, I had the pleasure of watching one of the best documentaries since Murderball. It's a story of good and evil, the American spirit, the meaning of life... and nigh-unwatchable world of competitive Donkey Kong, where grown men's lives revolve around the high score board of an ancient arcade classic. There are priceless lines from characters I'm embarrassed to say reside a bit in all of our inner nerd. And yet the movie was crafted so very very well that even while we are incredulous at how socially retarded these people are, by the end of the movie we are swept up in the drama of it all, and that silly game becomes almost as epic for us as it is for them. You need to watch The King of Kong tonight!

Been a long time since I had time to post.

There is a funny thing about fanaticism on the internet, namely that it lacks temporal coherence. I find it so beyond rational to be criticized for criticizing the early Transformers designs now that the movie is out and the Transformers look badass. One fellow said I had not done my "research." Research of what at the time? The internet preserves your words in stone, forgetting the context of the time so that I can look "dumb" months after I make fair criticism. I think they're just forgotten that polemic can be something besides Whine Vs. Fact.

So anyways, the movie wasn't bad. You could keep the same movie and just swap out the director from Michael Bay to Ridley Scott and I would have declared it a victory, since I just can't support his selfish directing style and how he wraps his two arms around the military's cock, then jumps up and down to stroke out a caricature of patriotism. What, did you think it was an accident the military helped out so much on the film?

ILM's robots were phenomenal in motion, easily the best robot animation work ever done. I didn't like how overdesigned they were, and sometimes couldn't tell which way they were standing/flipping/facing, but it is not easy to make a 20ft robot move stealthily across suburbia. Just... what the fuck was that medic bot doing the whole time? They should have held him down and shoved the magic spark into HIS cowardly go-bot chest. And I still think Megatron could have been a gun... no... a fuck-all rail/satellite gun, that's right. He wasn't all that scary, dunno why any of the rest were hailing him in their Jar Jar garble.

Oh yeah and Megan Fox was damn hot.

If that were all my summer movie quota though, I would have been left blue-balled. I definitely didn't need Optimus Prime's idiotic state-of-the-union address, no matter how bad the liberal media has gotten. But c'mon, that speech would make Bill O'Reilly roll his eyes. Guess something needs to balance Michael Moore's "intellectual" crusade against healthcare in which he shows us that Cuba treats rich Americans when even America does not. Just don't ask about the real Cubans.



Fortunately, Ratatouille marked itself as the next American classic, a perfect animation told with perfect story and Pixar's trademarked ability to engage morals, entertain, and avoid cheap laugh fads. Their work is timeless. I no longer need to go to France now; the city shots were so amazing I fought to not lose my breath to a mere projected image as I sat in a stunned theater. And while the story was simple, Pixar told it the way the peasant dish of ratatouille was cooked in the movie- simply, but with aplomb and passion.

Having visited Pixar a couple times, I can tell you that the movie was that good for a reason. Stepping onto their campus was like stepping into Disneyland for the first time. Walking past their man-made tobaggan snowbank, into their airy art-filled mega-loft, onto their Segway highways connecting cubicles, past their gigantic theater, and around a workplace stuffed with relics and artifacts of childhood endearment from the Golden Age, you just knew. This was the Willy Wonka chocolate factory of 3D animation.

Xstine and I both looked at each other after the film, eyes tearing with some jealousy. I asked myself why I left a potential route into film fx and animation for the games industry. Then the endless credits came, and I remembered why. Nevertheless, to all the hardworking, brilliant artists and TDs who worked on this magnificent piece, congratulations! You've added something tangible to American culture. And you did it without giant killer robots (no pun intended, they do great work too).

So 300 was amazing. The story and dialogue was predictably trite, but the shots were absolutely stunning, especially the long fight sequence in the first battle. Xstine went nuts over the painterly aspect of several shots, the ones that gave an illusion of no perspective points. I loved the claustrophobic set, complete with static props and painted backdrops.

The cherry topping it all was the total lack of political correctness. Asia! These terrorists are from ASIA! Promise! The film vomits patriotism, and makes no excuse for the need of violence to resolve all problems. While the speeches get long in the tooth, it provided ample ampules of adrenaline. So caricatured and comic it was that I don't seen how there can be a hang-up. I'm just surprised as an liberal an industry as Hollywood even let it reach the public.

As if timed by Zeus himself, God of War 2 comes out this week. Today in fact. In fact I don't know why I'm writing this and not picking up my pre-order from the store. I even prepared myself for this release by playing Golden Axe for the first time in a decade. I'm still a badass with the dwarf. While the AI is terrible, the game is still somehow fun, thanks to the visceral and unashamed action. Kinda like 300.

One last thing to check out is this jaw-dropping but heart-warming new game from the creators of Rag-doll Kung Fu. Most surprisingly, it's coming out for the PS3, not the Wii. While Sony's hodge-podge embrace of card-carrying "indie" developers hasn't impressed me yet, this one looks far more substantial than a Flash in the cell like Flow. Keep this up, and I might actually want a PS3. Provided it plays well. User-created content spawns more paupers than princes, and I've grown out of sandbox-style games. They're usually nothing but ludologized technology, and technology grows wearisome. Hurrah for LittleBigPlanet.

Having never seen his other movies, I still should have realized Robert DeNiro was going to be a perfectionist as a director, as he is as an actor. It's been so long that I had almost forgotten the pleasure of watching a film as nuanced and rich as The Good Shepherd. There wasn't a wasted sequence in the three hours it ran, and the irony didn't escape me that half the theater walked out on a movie whose title implied the blissful masses were the CIA's sheep.

DeNiro's character, based on Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan, once said that conservatives were those who believed people were flawed, and liberals were those who believed people could be changed. DeNiro's film, particularly in this war, is a daring discussion about the motives, good or wrong, for sacrificing liberties (and how much!) at wartime. Wild Bill, who ruthlessly hired socialists, liberals, and even communists in his intelligence battle, was a viciously pragmatic man, and he defended his men to the end when the OSS was investigated by the McCarthyists. He said "We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is that none but he will employ terror. But we will turn terror against him..."

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

Understanding that man goes a long way towards understanding that the movie is about anti-hero Edward Wilson's misunderstanding of the word "truth" in his passage into the intelligence underworld. There is the patriotic truth, where one's country's ideals take precedence and all harm unknown by its defenders are lies, unknowns, and untruths the CIA needs to unearth. And then there is the truth he found after opening his father's letter, the personal truth upon which families, friends, and ultimately all foundational values, America is built upon. When a man decides, as Edward did, that as a citizen the truth you pursue is predetermined, you "ascend" your family and friends, immediate and national, and cannot trust anyone.

Joseph Palmi: You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have their homeland, the Jews their tradition, even the n*****s have their music. What do you guys have?

Edward Wilson: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

For the movie as debate of our times, I don't think I need to wax more on the subject. But the film itself, however you may feel about the polemic, was crafted exquisitely. We didn't see characters make decisions, we saw the consequences. We saw the emotional aftermath. We saw them make the same mistakes, fighting their character arc, and suffering for it. We saw his son walk in his steps, believing and not knowing. We saw the anger as Edward's man Ray Brocco, unable to accept the real truth, unable to admit they were all fooled, bludgeon a man with forced confessions, only to fail. And at the end, we saw how the subtle passing of a dollar could be the surface of another world of deceit and misdirection, and the underworld continues stir.

Moviegoers who walk in expecting a thriller will walk out expecting a refund. The rest will be drawn into the irrevocably frightening backstage that James Jesus Angleton, the original good shepherd that Edward Wilson was based on, called the "wilderness of mirrors."

We return refreshed from Thanksgiving in thankless LA with more than turkey under our belt, but a few things learned as well!


- Do not enter the Alterdimension of Wedding Preparation wantonly. Trying to balance our desire for a humble affair with my parents' desire for a sort of go-for-broke-extravaganza-cum-Chinese-cash-machine was a hopeless venture, as if taking the back-end of a No. 2 to the indelible Dorian Gray. I'll end up kowtowing to a much more showy affair... literally.

- Daniel Craig fuckin' rocks as the new James Bond. He's got equal parts soccer thug, rapier wit, and loyalist to the crown, making him the most British of the Bonds. The Bond girls this time are top notch too, the Tanqueray Ten to Brosnan & Co's Tanqueray. Pay the man some respect and go watch Layer Cake if you haven't already.

- The Wii is being marketed in a completely new way. I stood at Target watching the infomercial? trying to decide if they were selling a game console or a sonic toothbrush. The very fact that I hated the approach probably means they'll tap into a geriatric mother lode of casual gamers.

- Democrats may be a good change for Congress, but they're stopping at nothing to be a disaster on the economy. Between the populist minimum wage promises that really affect only 5% of the workforce (mostly part-time teens), the complete avoidance of the Alternative Minimum Tax law (which you'll learn about very soon if you didn't get surprised by it already), the lowering of mortgage interest rates (are they nuts?), and their simultaneous insistence on Republicans balancing tax cuts with budgets cuts while their own tax cuts are being paid by the ghost of Christmas past, we're in for trouble. But that's ok, since they get to blame it on Bush's expensive war, you know the one that made us forget about Clinton's social security scam?

If you've ever watched the classic short film The Way Things Go, you can't help but be fascinated by the frightening fluidity with which a precarious but self-conscious house of dominoes will fall, and how fascinating it is to watch as it unwinds. Car-crash syndrome. It gives us an epic tale of constructions and deconstructions, near-misses and satisfying clunks. It is, after all is said and done, a turning mobile gently emanating musical chimes to the delight of the tot in us all.


This is but a long-winded way of saying, the housing market is FUCKED. And I'm dancing the happy dance in anticipation for a market-bottom in a year or two, which will be followed by a globalized recession as consumption contractions shatter the world of fiat trade. One researcher from MIT said that the people in the best position were young, first-time home buyers who can enter that bottom in a year, and rent for now. That's us!

Following Santa Clara housing statistics and Foreclosure.com, you can see that it's a bloodbath out there with median housing prices diving -$47K in four weeks! In the local paper, I saw a whopping y-o-y six-fold increase in for-sale listings in Palo Alto!

For those of you who want to know more about why a recession is going to smack us in the ass, and not on our lips, I recommend this EXCELLENT article by Nouriel Roubini summing up the situation:

Eight Market Spins About Housing by Perma-Bull Spin-Doctors...And the Reality of the Coming Ugliest Housing Bust Ever...

Indeed, in a matter of months, the gravity-defying housing boom and bubble turned into an alleged “orderly slowdown”; then, the orderly slowdown turned into a euphemistic “soft landing”; and next, the soft landing slipped into a “slump”; most recently, the slump worsened into a hard landing; while the latest data suggest that the hard landing recently turned into a bust. And soon enough this housing bust will turn into a rout and an unprecedented meltdown.