It all started when I made this weird, rambling post complaining about Samus’s characterization in some new game I hadn’t even played. Basically I feel there aren’t enough awesome female protagonists in video games. I took an inventory of every console game I’ve purchased in the last ten years and made a list, and was shocked to find that there have only been five really memorable heroines who aren’t sultry sex kittens and who don’t have to share their spotlight with some dude. Oh, and there are other topics to cover as well. Thanks for reading!

Supplanted Heroines

I readily admit that I am naturally attracted to games that star women. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is simple, and a bit shallow: women are pretty, and I like looking at them. Certainly no one will begrudge me that, yes? The second is a bit more complex: women are rare in video games. Games with ensemble casts usually feature them as a minority, such as every fighting or role-playing game you’ve played since 1990. Create-a-character or pick-a-hero style games often have a female option, but a blank avatar you pick off a menu can never be as interesting as a real character written from the ground up.

It’s no real surprise that male is the default option for video game heroes. What I’ve come to realize is that female protagonists are only used when the hero of the story requires some traditionally-feminine traits to work properly. This can be anything from sex appeal to a motherly instinct, really, but the end result seems to be that simply by moving away from that default option, a more interesting character is crafted.

Essentially, a girl hero is more interesting than a dude hero for the same reason that a homemade spaghetti sauce is tastier than one you pick up off the shelf. Simply by passing on the default option, the writers are saying, “We’re putting time into this character.”

Upon occasion, though, I will get blindsided. Some new game will come along that catches my eye for daring to have a lady lead, only to quickly replace her with some dude before I’ve even gotten the hang of the controls. It’s like the game designers tried to take the road less traveled, only to chicken out at the last second. Today’s entry looks at three such women, and why their games would have been better if they’d been allowed to stay in the spotlight.

—

Polka
(Eternal Sonata, 360/PS3, 2007)

I should start by explaining that Eternal Sonata was not a very good game. It had a lot of really great elements to it, but they were kind of just stirred haphazardly into much too large a pot. The setting of the game was phenomenal: poetic and dreamlike, all soft colors and gentle piano music. The cast was quite endearing, having been comprised mostly of cherub-like kids with bright clothes and named after musical terminology.

The rest of the experience kind of falls apart, though — illogical plot graph, sorta-fun but mostly-broken combat system, unbelievably forced meta-story about some old composer nobody cares about. The heroine, though, was one element that really clicked. Polka was a bittersweet character, and the most frustrating aspect of the game’s story is that it didn’t do enough to really explore her.

The game opens on this teenage girl, Polka, who lives in a house by the ocean with her mother. She has an incurable illness, and has a nonspecific but assuredly short time left in the world. Her illness makes her somewhat of a pariah with the townsfolk, but it also gives her the ability to cast magical healing spells, so she has devoted what little time she has to alleviating the pain of the sick and infirm.

She’s in a JRPG though, which means she eventually gets swept up in world-changing events involving monsters and pirate invaders and magic crystals and whatever else.

She’s replaced by…

…these dudes. The kid in the front with the silver anime hair is Allegretto, who takes Polka’s place as the game’s map exploration character the moment he’s introduced. In the background, with the top hat, is Frederic Chopin himself. All of Eternal Sonata is his fevered dream, see, as he lays on his death bed in Polishville, Kentucky. (Or wherever. Who cares about Chopin.)

As JRPG heroes go, I quite liked Allegretto. He and his partner Beat are adorable thieving little scamps, and I was impressed with him for the same reasons I was impressed with Zidane, back in the day. Allegretto isn’t mopey or angsty — in fact, no character in Eternal Sonata really is. In fact, if this were any other game, I would admit that I’d like to see more JRPG heroes like him. There’s not much to Allegretto, really, he’s just all generic courage and helpfulness… but he’s also free of the tortured soul and demon-filled closet that traps so many of this genre’s protagonists.

Frederic I was… less enamored with. I never felt like the meta-story of Eternal Sonata did it any favors. The plot was confusing and trope-heavy enough without having to explain it in terms of a dream within a dream. I liked him as a supporting character in a light-hearted RPG, and I’m certainly not going to argue with his stylish hat, but overall the game would have been better without him.

So what’s wrong?
Eternal Sonata needs Allegretto because someone has to fall in love with Polka. This does in fact happen over the course of the story, and the subject matter is treated a little more gingerly than is often the case in JRPGs. Theirs is an innocent, delicate puppy love. A doomed puppy love, of course, because of Polka’s illness. That’s the subject that needed more screentime: how Polka explores these new feelings and relationships knowing that she’s so close to death. Allegretto’s trials simply aren’t as interesting, and it’s enough of a shame that the game was so quick to shuffle Polka off into the background in favor of him, let alone trying to shovel the Frederic meta-plot in on top of everything else.

This story should have been about Polka, through and through, start to end, happy beginning to heartbreaking conclusion. Instead it was about Allegretto having adventures in a dying virtuoso’s dreamworld.

—

Karin
(Shadow Hearts: Covenant, PS2, 2004)

I have never played the first or third game in this series, but part two is definitely one of the most inventive RPGs avaiable during the PS2 generation. I don’t mean the plot — hell no. Geez. Poorly chained logic and overused anime pap as far as the eye can see. But the inventive combat and insane character skills just couldn’t be beat. Some of the dungeon puzzles were pretty good, too.

The real draw, though, is the cast itself. This game features (among other things) a geriatric puppetmaster, a vampire pro wrestler, a friendly white wolf and Anastasia Romanov. I never got bored watching this freakshow on the stage. The game barely had a plot, at least not one worth mentioning, but I never got tired of the way the player characters interacted with each other, with the villains, with the equally-entertaining supporting cast or even with game mechanics.

A cast like this doesn’t really need a main hero to work well. (Remember Final Fantasy VI?) This isn’t One Person’s Story, after all. Still, I was impressed when I saw that the protagonist was a redheaded German swordswoman named Karin Koenig. I mean, heck, forget the fact that she’s a woman; a German protagonist in a game set during World World I is ballsy enough.

You can tell she’s the game’s main character too, because she’s right there on the front of the box. Alone. Lookin’ all hot and fiery with the short-cut skirt, the badass disposition and the rapier at the ready. Jesus. I might need a cold shower.

Karin has a strong tie to the game’s plot, but it’s not something that really gets explored until the ending, and it’s a twist that isn’t worth spoiling in my goofy little “I like girls” series. Her main job is to be a more-or-less neutral observer… someone for the story to happen around. She’s a well-balanced character who the player can appreciate being at the lead of his party. You know what? Except for the fact that she has curves and a voice actor, I’m willing to call her “female Crono”. Red hair and everything. Let’s go with that.

She’s replaced by…

…the guy on the back of the box. No, wait, scratch that. The guy on half of the back of the box. Which is to say, the guy from the first Shadow Hearts game.

Yuri is a fine hero. He looks cool enough, I guess, and while his demonic-transformation mechanic is nothing earth-shatteringly original in the broader scope of JRPG heroes it does put a fun spin on Covenant’s already great battle system. What I like best about Yuri is that he is consistently unflappable. No matter how powerful the foe or how devastatingly bad the odds, Yuri does not allow himself to be threatened or intimidated. He shrugs everything off with a smarmy aloofness that I found refreshing after ten years of JRPG heroes cutting themselves in dark closets.

Yuri and Karin comprise the core of Covenant’s cast. The writers weren’t shy about stretching everyone else into extreme and ridiculous directions, but the two main characters were left pretty well-grounded, all things considered. They are representative of the basic anime hero, each with a few quirks to help flesh them out without defining them completely. Where Karin finds the middle ground between the lovable schoolgirl and the scantily-clad bimbo, Yuri finds it between the ox-like strongarm and the dirty old grandpa.

So what’s wrong?
I don’t know enough about the overall Shadow Hearts storyline to say whether or not Covenant really, truly needed Yuri. Having never played the first game I still had no problem following the plot (such as it was), so the developers got at least that aspect of things right. I kept getting the sense though, as I played, that the game wanted Karin in the lead, and that Yuri was only included for the sake of tradition.

Few JRPGs can parallel the fantastic storytelling of the first two Suikoden games. Like Shadow Hearts, the second game is a direct sequel of the first, going so far as to inhabit the same world and feature many of the same characters. The hero from the first game returns in the second as well, and in the classiest way possible: as an easter egg. Hero1 was acknowledged as being part of Hero2’s world without completely overshadowing him the way Yuri does to Karin.

There were some unresolved issues from the first Shadow Hearts that Yuri needs to tie up in Covenant, and that’s fine. But in light of the new cast and the new combat and the new… everything else, his story really felt like a subplot. I think that’s what it should have been. There’s a lot there, and it was definitely worth exploring, and Karin is included in it. But it should have been the other way around. Players had already seen the adventures from Yuri’s point of view. The chance to look at its eventual conclusion from another angle would have done more service to both of the characters than what was put in the box.

—

Krystal
(Star Fox Adventures,  GCN, 2002)

No, really, stop laughing. You know how when Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out, and they revealed Wolf as the third Fox-clone, and everyone was like, “That’s lame, but at least it’s not Krystal.” I was the guy who was like “Dammit, that should have been Krystal.”

Krystal is a tragic character, in that it’s tragic that most of her fanbase seems preoccupied with objects going into and out of her nethers.

I immediately liked Krystal for a lot of reasons. On the most primal level I’m just a sucker for cute anthropomorphic characters. I’ve always thought it was too bad that I’m not any good at rail shooters, because I’ve always loved the cast of Star Fox even if I couldn’t much stand to play as them. So while the rest of the world is united in a severe distaste for Star Fox Adventures, it continues to be a guilty pleasure of mine since it lets me interact with that cast regardless of my inability to do a barrel roll.

Of course I knew going in that Krystal wasn’t the hero of Star Fox Adventures. Indeed, I didn’t want her to be. At least, not at first. The very first time I played the game, I couldn’t wait to get through the single level where she’s playable.

She’s replaced by…

…Fox McCloud. He’s the man I came to this game to see! Years of playing the first two Smash Bros. games had really caused me to fall in love with Fox, so when they announced a Zelda clone starring him I knew I had to sign up. In Smash Fox is defined by his agility and his awesome blaster. In Star Fox he’s defined by his brashness and cunning. I thought for sure all of this would translate well into an action-adventure game.

For the most part, I was not disappointed. Star Fox Adventures has its flaws, but it’s still a fun game, and it was fun to make Fox scramble across the world of Dinosaur Planet. Unfortunately some of the most fun traits attributed to him by Smash failed to surface. When he’s first dropped on Dinosaur Planet, Fox’s blaster is disabled. No shooty-shooty run’n'gun. What can he do, then? Well, he can stick-fight. With the magic staff dropped by the blue lady in the prologue.

So what’s wrong?
Star Fox Adventures isn’t Fox’s game. It wasn’t conceived that way, it wasn’t planned that way, and it sure as shamrocks wasn’t written that way.

What I came to realize, over the course of a couple playthroughs, was that there was nothing about his character that couldn’t have been handled equally well by Krystal. His entire skillset was defined by magical rituals and by his dino-buddy Tricky. The quick, lithe fighting style he adopts with the staff was very reminiscent of what I was used to seeing in Smash, but it would have been portrayed better by the grace of a female hero. Even Krystal’s character design is a much better fit for the exotic, primal world of Dinosaur Planet. Fox is the alien here. He’s the one who is out of place.

As much as I loved spending time with Fox outside of his Arwing, I have to say that his fun little action-adventure game would have been better served without his franchise attached to it. The game as originally conceived, with Krystal firmly in the lead as the fairy-like catgirl she was intended to be, would have gone down smoother and not left such a slapdash aftertaste.

Besides, I hear that the addition of Krystal to the Star Fox universe made for some of the most embarrassing moments in its storyline, later in the series. But I wouldn’t know anything about that first-hand. See, I can’t do a barrel roll.

—

I mentioned that there were only five really good female heroes in my entire console collection, and that’s true. All three of the ladies in this week’s article are of course disqualified, since they were forced to give up their spotlight because some focus-testing pencil-pusher didn’t think it was worth alienating part of their demographic. Next week I believe I’ll start in with #5 on the list. I just have to replay her game first.

And then the swirling nature of bananas, milk and ice cream caused my brain to dig up this old memory. Buckle in dudes, this is some straight-up Wonder Years shit here.

I wasn’t always the godless heathen I am now. Back in high school I was actually pretty involved with my church, and especially with the youth group. When I wasn’t in school or at church, I was working at a local ice cream store a couple miles from where I lived. This was before I had a car, so I used to rollerblade to work every day. One day, as I was sitting outside the church strapping on my skates, one of my youth group leaders came strolling up, with several of my church friends in tow. She asked if I wanted a ride.

I accepted, not only because it was really hot and I kind of didn’t want to skate anywhere, but also because I really liked this lady and very desperately wanted to impress her. I thought an excellent way to do this would be to show off how hard-working and responsible I was. I was very proud of myself. I was absolutely beaming when I climbed into the back of her van with the other kids, and she said, “Hey, maybe we’ll all get ice cream while we’re there.”

So we get to my work, and I zip in the back to clock in and affix my official ice cream store apron. I distinctly recall this part: the aprons only got laundered once a month or so, and I spent what seemed like way too much time very carefully selecting the cleanest one. I clocked in, went out to the lobby, made a big show of grabbing my ice cream scoops and said, in the most nonchalant-I-am-totally-just-doing-my-job-and-not-trying-to-impress-anybody voice I could muster: “Okay, what can I getcha?”

She said, “I’d like a banana, and a glass of milk.”

I was devastated. It’s like, we didn’t have milk, and we didn’t really have bananas. I mean, we had bananas, but they were for mixing into ice cream, not for just selling to people. And I had to explain this to the nice church lady, with everyone standing there watching me. I told her I could sell her a banana for forty-nine cents (which should only have gotten her half a banana, but I was feeling pretty bad about the whole thing), but milk was outside of the realm of possibility.

She said, very politely, “That’s okay, I don’t want the banana if I can’t have milk.”

Then she took the kids and left. They didn’t get ice cream either.

I was understandably bummed after that. I felt like I had let her down, and that in doing so I had embarrassed myself in front of my friends. I was really mad at my boss for not selling milk and bananas. It really seemed to me that milk was a thing we should be selling. Ice cream is made of milk. Milkshakes have milk right there in the title. You can flavor milk with chocolate or strawberry syrup, and probably a bunch of other things we had on hand.

Looking back, though, with some real adult life experience etc., I’m just really mad at that nice church lady. I didn’t think about it at the time, but why wouldn’t she at least buy ice cream for the other kids? Those kids didn’t leave the store thinking, “Wow, what kind of shitty ice cream place does Brick work at? They don’t even have milk. Let’s walk away from here, and laugh at him forever.” They left thinking, “Hey, wait — weren’t we supposed to get ice cream? What happened to our ice cream? We didn’t want bananamilk. We wanted ice cream. Ice cream? Ice cream!”

The least she could have done would have been to accept the forty-nine cent banana. That way we both could have saved face.

Which is another way of saying that there are no female Generic Space Marines because there’s no specific reason for a Generic Space Marine to be female.

I wondered if maybe I was overthinking this, so at work the other night I started making a list of every female protagonist I could remember playing in the past several years. I wasn’t that surprised to find that most of my fond memories were actually of characters that didn’t exist. My propensity to gravitate towards girly avatars in MMOs or other create-a-character games skews that particular list of results. I’m the type of player that, if given an absolute cipher to pilot through the game world, will start attributing personality traits to that character. I mean, hell, my gnome warlock had her own blog for a number of years.

Of the ones who were real characters, a surprising amount were simply menu options. By which I mean, they shared their spotlight with other heroes, most of whom were male. Often these were games told from multiple viewpoints (like Folklore), or games that simply let you pick between a sprite with long hair or a sprite without (like Mega Man ZX). I feel like this is kind of a trick; presenting the lady lead as an option isn’t the same as writing a story with her as the star. Sometimes the trick works well, and sometimes it doesn’t… that largely depends on the quality of the game and how well it uses its dual-character setup to tell its story.

There were several “should have beens”. These were games which started with a female lead, were often advertised with a female lead, and could have very well been carried entirely by that female lead… but which supplanted her for a more traditional male hero only a short time in. I will never forgive Shadow Hearts: Covenant for replacing my hot redheaded swordswoman with the boring fanny-pack guy after a single hour of gameplay. (And besides, she remained a much better character throughout the entire rest of the story.)

Of the games where the heroine really was the singular star of the whole game, they were pretty evenly split between sex kittens and generic action girls. These characters were often fun to play as, but their games didn’t really demand much depth or complexity from them.

Two were already-established characters who were simply getting their own game for the first time. I mean, come on, Super Princess Peach barely counts.

Exactly one was a little girl. I don’t own many games where the hero is a little kid, but the ones I do almost universally star little boys or give a “pick your gender” option. This actually surprised me a little bit. I must have purchased hundreds of games in the past ten years, and only one was a story about a little girl?

So with some working, after culling away the bad or boring characters, and the co-stars, and the ones who get supplanted early in the plot… wow. Five. I was left with a list of five really good, well-written female protagonists in my entire console game collection going back a full ten years.

Does that seem a little low to anyone else? I mean, granted, my personal collection is a little small. And it’s unfairly biased towards certain genres. (Then again, it’s unfairly biased against certain genres too, like Space Marine Shooters.) In any case, my own little cross-section might be too small a sample size to base any conclusions off of. Maybe the Big Picture is brighter than I’m painting it.

Still though. Only five really memorable female leads. In ten years. Six if you count Samus, though after Other M you might not want to.

Game developers are never shy about putting wonderful female characters into their games, or even about letting us play as them… but giving them the active spotlight is something that only happens very rarely.

I guess I should point out that I’ve played neither Bayonetta nor Mirror’s Edge. I’m told both of those games have memorable heroines, and are quite fun to play besides. Perhaps a trip to the used rack at Gamestop may be in order.

(Yes, Peanut already had a laptop. But it was too heavy, and not purple. Why do you ask?)

(And yes, I am salivating as I count the days to when I can re-watch Inception with the subtitles on.)

Having seen hundreds of movies with the subtitles turned on, I’ve developed a sense for “good” subtitles versus “bad” ones. Not all subs are created equal, after all, and sometimes you can tell the guys who were just going through the motions from the guys who really care about the movies they’re working with.

I mention all of this because, having seen Rock’n Rolla a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to go back and revisit Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Lock, Stock has a pretty interesting soundtrack, for starters. It’s a good mix of old tunes that perfectly paints you a picture of London’s seemy underbelly. Music almost never gets subtitled, though; if you’re lucky, you get a pair of music notes. Guy Ritchie’s subtitle guy, though? He not only lovingly subtitled all the lyrics, but also identifies the artists.

I’ve seen this convention used before, and sometimes it’s done to the movie’s detriment. Sometimes the guy is so dedicated to getting down every line and lyric that the music ends up fighting the dialogue for subtitle real estate. (Hmm… what movie did I see recently that did that? Pulp Fiction? I don’t remember exactly.) In Lock, Stock the lyrics are considerate enough to get out of your way when the characters are talking over them. After all, it’s not like you can hear the lyrics through the conversation anyway, even if you’re not hearing impaired.

We even get our sound effects subtitled! Now that’s service. The movie is a little inconsistent about this, most likely because (again) you don’t want the sound effects overwhelming the dialogue. The important ones are all captured, though; this adorable “Pop!” is there because the gun being fired is an air rifle, not a regular rifle, and therefore doesn’t make a regular gunshot sound. The distinction is important, and someone watching the movie without the soundtrack might not be able to make it simply by watching.

Anyway, the movie itself is really good too. I recommend watching it. Subtitles on, of course.

The tasks I accomplish best are the clearly-defined ones that are placed in front of me with a nice, relaxed time limit. I know when I go into work tonight I will have about 30 minutes of mail-sorting to do, and six hours in which to accomplish it. I can go in and do it right away, if I were so inclined. Or I could play DS for a few hours first. I could do it in ten minute spurts. I could do it, decide I didn’t like the way it was done, then undo it and redo it. The mailing machine does not care how much experimenting or screwing around I do, so long as the envelopes end up in little piles I can feed to it.

The tasks I’m not good at are the ones that ask me to improvise on a tight deadline. Sadly, another major aspect of my job is to take phone calls. Sometimes the person on the other end of the line will ask a question I have no idea how to answer — but I must answer them, for it is my job. Sometimes this ends up reflecting poorly on me, because I end up responding to a question about elevator safety or valet parking with an irrelevant haiku or perhaps simply the word “elephant”. This sort of thing makes me less valuable to my employer, but man, did you see how awesomesauce those piles of sorted mail look!?

More importantly, this mindset translates over into the subject of gaming, and more specifically into the subject of this new Metroid whatever thing. I haven’t played this game, and I probably won’t, but the over-generalized opinion of it seems to be that they have streamline the exploration sections and made the combat sections more engaging. Or, put another way, they’ve reduced the sections I can take at my own pace and built upon the ones where I need to improvise.

A buddy of mine has recently been playing some Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is a good yes-I’ve-played-that example of what Other M looks like in my head. Much of the game involves exploring the nooks and crannies of Arkham Island, and the game does a bang-up job of just getting out of your way while you go about this. The game doesn’t care if it takes you an hour to find the wall you need to tear down. It doesn’t care if you decide to solve Riddler’s puzzles by carefully examining the clues and thinking about them logically, or systematically taking a photo of every brick of the island from every possible angle.

I still haven’t beaten the final boss, though, because the final boss is just wave after wave of Joker goons. And I suck at killing Joker goons. Arkham Asylum has a very deep combat system involving combos and positioning and long-distance attacks. At any given moment during combat there are three or four things Batman can do, and if you’re the type of player who is good at always picking the right thing combat probably plays out like a very violent ballet.

You’ll note that all I’ve really done here is compressed the timeline. Do you have hours to discover the Next Right Thing? Or do you have a fraction of a second?

I’ve just recently finished replaying realMYST, which is a candidate for one of my favorite games ever. The basic gameplay concepts in realMYST are that you can stand places, and you can click things. Which are also the basic gameplay concepts in Doom or Halo or any other FPS you care to name. The goal in both games is to always stand in the right place and click the right thing to advance, though the “right thing” might be a button panel in realMYST but an alien monster in Halo.

The difference is the timeline. You can stare at a button panel in realMYST for as long as you want, trying to consider what it might mean. In Halo if you spend more than two consecutive seconds staring at an alien monster you will probably die.

That’s the direction modern games are heading, though. They’re being made “easier” in the sense that the player never has to think very hard about what broad goal they should be accomplishing next, but “harder” in the sense that there’s more emphasis in quickly accomplishing the dozens of little goals along the way.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that I’m ready for another round of games that want me to Think More and Twitch Less. It bugs the piss out of me that everyone in the world has finished Arkham Asylum except me… probably as much as it bugs the piss out of you to ask a question about whether your insurance covers homeopathic treatment and receive a response of “Elephant.”

This led to a short discussion about whether or not it was okay for Harmonix to charge you for songs you’d already bought, considering they would have to rework the song with the new RB3 stuff. Which is a topic they have yet to really address.

The issue here is that old Rock Band and Rock Band 2 DLC will continue to work with Rock Band 3, but won’t have any of the RB3-exclusive features such as keyboard charts, harmonies or pro difficulty. I’m actually fine with this. It makes total sense, and I’m just happy my umpteen-hundred dollars of existing music isn’t going to evaporate. Conversely, new DLC released after RB3’s ship date isn’t going to function in the old games. Hilariously, I’m fine with this as well! RB3 songs have a lot of extra features, and the game is much more than just the slight overall upgrade RB2 was. For all we know music tracks are no longer even in the same format. Round peg, square hole.

The question is, will Harmonix go back and re-work any of the old DLC to take advantage of the new features? I have tons of songs that would be a blast on keyboards or with multiple vocalists, and I’m sure the ScoreHero crowd is just salivating to see who can be first to score 100% at Green Grass on Pro Expert Guitar.

But this Boston pack, now. I already bought that. Money spent, content received. I don’t think I should have to buy it again.

I mean, I understand that, if they ever do re-work it, I will probably have to. Indeed, there’s simply no way they’re going to sink the required time and energy into it without some kind of compensation. The influx of new players who didn’t get the pack the first time around may or may not cover it. I don’t know. Even if it does, it would just be irresponsible business not to leap at the chance to double-dip.

The conflict here is the real vs. perceived value of a Rock Band song. A single song is usually 160 Microsoft Funbux, which is $2 in real people money. Now, one way to look at this transaction is, when you buy a $2 song for Rock Band, you are buying the following:

• the audio of the song itself,
• the ability to download it as many times as you want in the future,
• the visuals and animation associated with the song,
• eight guitar tracks (four difficulties each for lead and bass),
• four drum tracks, and
• four vocal threshholds.

This sounds like a good value on the surface, but most players won’t ever see all of these features. I only play one difficulty on each instrument, for example, and very rarely at all on drums. In essence, I paid for a bunch of charts that I never actually use. What a rip-off!

It’s not really a rip-off. I mean, I don’t look at it like that. When I pay $2 for a Rock Band song, I look at it as though I am buying this:

• the ability to play the song in Rock Band.

When viewed from that angle, $2 is a totally fair price even if you never play anything but medium guitar.

And that’s the heart of the dilemma. If the second viewpoint is right, I shouldn’t have to pay for track upgrades because I’ve already paid for them. I wanted The Song, I gave them $2, they gave me The Song. The Song is still going to work in RB3 with or without the new features, so holding those new features hostage from me when they’re readily available seems like a form of extortion.

But if the former viewpoint is correct, and each individual chart, note and minute of programming is worth a fraction of your $2… then Harmonix owes me money, because I’ve never used up the full $2 worth of any track I’ve ever bought from them. How about I sit down with one of their accountants, and let’s figure it all out. I use four of the sixteen available charts from each Boston song, so they already owe me a $x.xx refund… which I will happily apply to the expected balance of the four or five new charts I’ll use in the future on keyboards and what-have-you. Hell, I’ll even throw in a tip.

So the issue is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface. Maybe the best solution is to just leave the old tracks alone and focus on getting us new material. Yeah, it kinda sucks that we’ll never be able to do that entire Queen track pack with three vocalists, but it’s not like there aren’t another thousand songs out there waiting to be sung.

Let’s say you live near a lake. You know this lake intimately — you grew up with it, you visit it often. It’s in the news all the time. You say, “Hey, let’s go to the lake,” and everyone around you knows precisely which lake you mean. The word lake, to you, still retains that original definition of “a large hole in the ground filled with water”. You understand, intellectually, that there are lakes all over the world of all shapes and sizes. But it is forever tainted by your personal biases. You measure the essential lake-ness of all lakes, everywhere, by the lake you know. When someone outside of your little bubble uses the phrase “the lake” to refer to a lake that is not yours, it seems wrong and weird to you… if only for a moment.

I’m like this with the word “hotel”. Where I live, all the hotels are down along the beach. If someone comes to visit and is staying at a hotel, you have to go down to the beach to visit them. And why not? Our beaches are beautiful year-round, and most of the people who come to visit are here on vacation. It stands to reason, then, that all the hotels would be on the beach.

As a result, I’ve attached certain beach-like qualities to the word “hotel”. When I think of a hotel, I think of sand and sea. Paintings of seagulls in the living room, starfish-shaped mirrors in the bathroom. Balconies overlooking swimming pools, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Names that call to mind seashells or palm trees or ocean waves.

Upon arriving at our hotel in Washington D. C. earlier this year, there was a moment where everything felt very out-of-place. “That’s not a hotel. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not a hotel. There’s no beach anywhere.”

Similarly, there are words in my vocabulary that notably don’t have outside connotations attached to them. Like “river”. There are no rivers where I live, at least not within the radius of a tank of gas. I can’t even name a river anywhere in the state of Florida, if any notable ones even exist. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a river in my life, outside of driving over them from time to time while traveling out of state. So when I envision a river, what comes to mind is a very sterile, textbook image. You know, a map with a squiggly blue line drawn on it.

Ancient Egyptians revered their river as a god. My outlook on the subject would have been more than simply foreign to them; it would have been utterly alien.

The way we mold and shape our language to fit our own daily life happens automatically. You don’t even notice it happening. Thousands of words are rattling around in your brain right now that have slightly different connotations to you than they do to your next door neighbor. Thinking about it in these terms, it’s amazing any of us are ever able to communicate anything to anyone.

I only wanted to do about a week’s worth of these videos, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to use all the requests I got. Still, the series seems to have gone over pretty well and I’m happy with the way it came out. The whole series consists of 15 tracks and is about 57 minutes long. Think of it as me giving you a very special mix tape.

The songs:

1. Soggy Bottom Boys – Man of Constant Sorrow
2. Rez HD – Buggie Running Beeps
3. Mario Kart Double Dash!! – Rainbow Road
4. Requiem for a Dream – Lux Aeterna
5. Saw – Hello Zepp
6. Mega Man 2 – Dr. Wily Stage 1
7. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – Emerald Hill Zone
8. Girls’ Generation – Gee
9. Caramell – Caramell Dansen (Speedycake Remix)
10. Bionic Commando Rearmed – Power Plant
11. Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter – Electric Power Building
12. Super Street Fighter II Turbo – Guile Stage
13. Super Street Fighter IV – Theme of Juri
14. Apollo Four Forty – Stop the Rock
15. Freezepop – Less Talk More Rokk

Enjoy!