Sort of.
It’s my fervent hope that those links will start becoming active in the upcoming days, because many of those Let’s Plays are works of true brilliance. The amount of work required to properly archive them all is daunting, so I’m chipping in by sorting out the nearly 3,000 images in my own RHEM and Suikoden series. (Which is why today’s update is just this blurb, and not me kvetching about Metroid or whatever.)
Until the real archive working you’ll have to make do with the official Archive and Rules Thread.
I’m still not sold on Metroid: Other M. First of all the title is stupid. Second of all, the marketing blitz surrounding the game (such as it is) is heavy on showing us clips from cutscenes rather than actual gameplay. Which is like… who plays Metroid for the cutscenes? Does anyone care about the tortured brooding past from which Samus Aran draws her motivation? I mean besides the creatures at fanfiction.net.
When you start thinking seriously about the Metroid series your brain tries to stack each one up alongside some nebulous “Metroid formula”. You plug in the variables and if they don’t add up it’s easy to make two neat little piles labeled “good Metroid” and “bad Metroid”. This is an illusion, though; there is no “Metroid formula” and there never has been. The series as it stands has one breathtakingly stellar game at the peak, and the slopes on either side. On the run-up you have the series learning its lessons, refining its tricks and laying its groundwork. And on the downhill you have sequels scrambling to catch up, or attempting to reinvent themselves.
I may or may not play Other M. I’m still undecided. I thought I’d take some time out, though, to organize my thoughts on the series and what it’s really meant to me over the years. After all, can you really call yourself a fan of a series if you’ve disliked more of its entries than you’ve enjoyed?
Metroid
There are two things you need to understand about the original Metroid. First of all, it’s a highly experimental game. There was no other platformer quite like it back when it came out — even its “sister game” Kid Icarus is a different animal entirely. Exploring the map was the point of the game, you see, and if you couldn’t wrap your head around it than Metroid wasn’t for you.
The second thing is that the game pretty much sucks. It sucked enough if you tried to play it when it was new. It definitely sucks if you try to play it now, in 2010.
The game most similar to Metroid, back when I was playing it as a kid, was The Legend of Zelda. In each game you would walk into a new room and see a dead end. But you know there’s really no such thing as a dead end, so you start systematically looking for the hidden door. In Zelda this meant setting fire to every tree on the screen, then moving to the next screen and starting over. In Metroid this meant rolling up into a ball and placing a bomb every sixteen pixels to see if a passageway opened up. The difference between the two experiences is that in Zelda you are relatively safe, and there are easily accessible faeries to refill your life if the monsters get too thick for you. In Metroid you are always under attack, and the only way to recharge is to farm critters.
When you start the game you do so at only a fraction of your health. Every time you turned on Zelda, you took a few seconds and went to the faerie. Every time you turned on Metroid you spent ten minutes killing bugs for purple pills. I’d be lying if I said that spending your first ten minutes with a game being bored can’t unfairly color your perception of it.
Metroid II: Return of Samus
Pretty completely terrible. Pretty much all the problems of the original game are still here, plus a few new ones to spice up the pot. There are save and recharge stations now, so farming purple pills is less of an issue, but in its place are gigantic multi-screen rooms you don’t explore so much as… poke. Metroid was all hallways and shafts; if you bombed the floors in the hallways and the walls in the shafts, you knew you’d checked everything. Metroid II has huge, empty, featureless rooms, which meant screens and screens of bombing and checking everywhere. Plus it was on Game Boy, so you didn’t even have differently-colored tiles to keep the areas from looking exactly the same.
Then you had the spider ball, a special item that allowed Samus to stick to walls and ceilings. This was a fantastic idea on the design table, but made for a truly horrid gameplay experience. The spider ball was slow, see, and getting hit dropped you out of it. But because this is Metroid you couldn’t afford to not explore every single nook and cranny along every single enormous ceiling of every single featureless, cavernous room. So you’d spend three minutes spiderballing three screens up and two screens over — then you’d get hit by a bee or a crab and have to spend three more minutes spiderballing back from the opposite direction.
Oh, and the map overlapped. You could draw the original Metroid up on graph paper, if you were so inclined, and see just how the world fit together. Metroid II had areas of the world that should have occupied the same physical space, but didn’t. So if you weren’t using a pre-drawn map it was easy to convince yourself you’d made a mistake when you hadn’t, and since every room looked exactly the same it was nearly impossible to go back and check your work. I bet a lot of players wasted a lot of time on that.
Super Metroid
This game is perfect. It solved all the exploration problems of Metroid by giving you an in-game map screen and by coming up with an ingenious set of block symbols to delineate how Samus’s weapons could interact with the world. There were still areas you had to be systematic with your searching, but you now had tools that could check the game world a screen at a time rather than a block at a time, and since the map was so comprehensive you could usually make educated guesses about where the secret paths would be — and be right.
It solved all the exploration problems of Metroid II by not having a spider ball.
It’s no mystery that I hold this game up as some kind of platonic ideal of what a freeform platformer should be, and I’m not alone. Super Metroid is magic not just in its gameplay, but also in its animation, its background ambiance, and the quality of its storytelling. There had never been a game like it, and there have been precious few since.
Metroid Prime
I was one of those people who really wanted to hate Metroid Prime. There was just no way to shoehorn the majesty of Super Metroid into a goddamn Doom-clone, you know? Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion were due to be released right at the same time, and it wasn’t uncommon in those days to see hardcore Super fans salivating over the upcoming 2d entry while ready to dump on the FPS.
Joke was on us. The FPS was better.
I was pretty amazed at how well they managed to translate Super’s sense of exploring a hostile alien world into 3d. I spent a lot of time studying my in-game map, looking at how rooms were connected, or might be connected. And, just like in Super, my guesses were quite often correct. When they weren’t enough, my path forward was carved by careful use of my bombs and my visors. The actual experience of taking the game apart was very, very similar to my beloved Super… probably closer than any other game in the series.
It has something Super didn’t, though: high-octane action sequences. I tend to be bad at FPSes, and Metroid Prime was no exception. I only very narrowly won the game on its hardest difficulty, and only after a great many deaths. Exploring a world is something that is done at one’s own pace, and the controls of a game tend not to get in your way much as you’re doing it. Fighting monsters, on the other hand, is rooted firmly in reaction and reflex, and I never quite felt I had a good handle on how I was supposed to go about it in Prime. Now I know better than to play FPSes on the hard setting, of course, but I was pretty resentful of Prime for a while because of my own shortcoming.
Metroid Fusion
This game was supposed to be everything great about Super, but better. Instead, it was everything great about Super, but way way worse. It’s easy to look at every single aspect of Fusion and describe it as “Super, except it sucks now.” And while you’d be totally correct if you did that, you still wouldn’t arrive at the real heart of the game’s issues. Fusion isn’t just bad at being Metroid, see; it’s bad at being a freeform platformer, period.
It just gets everything wrong. Upon entering Area D, Areas A, B and C become instantly and irretrievably closed off to you. A computer natters at you to collect items not for their own sake, but because it promises to re-open the unlocked doors once you’re done. The game doesn’t let you experiment, doesn’t let you try things. You’re only allowed to go off the rails once, and only when the plot dictates. Indeed, when the time comes, there’s no choice but to go off the rails. All other options are removed except the one way forward.
I could spend all night articulating how intensely I dislike this game. Playing it, you get the sense that the creators really couldn’t decide if they should try to stay true to the series’s roots, or let it branch off and do its own thing. Either of those options would have been fine, but since Fusion doesn’t successfully do either one you’re left with this kind of awkward, ill-fitting frankengame.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Whatever force allowed Fusion to take everything wonderful about Super and warp it into something twisted and ugly was very strongly at work in Prime 2. If the first Prime could be described as a Metroid game with FPS controls, Prime 2 could be described as an FPS with slight Metroid trappings.
The best fun to be had in Prime was exploring the world and examining how it fit together. Prime 2 introduced two amazingly bad game mechanics that prevent you from doing that. First, Samus’s guns now use up ammo. So if you’re bad at aiming (like I am) you will burn through your powerful guns and be forced to fall back on your weak little pea shooter. Even if you don’t burn through your reserves, the counter is always onscreen, threatening you. Do you need to conserve resources? Are there more crates in the next room? Should you play it safe? You can never be sure. Whether the threat of running out is real or imagined, it’s there, and it’s stressful.
Second, half the game world naturally drains Samus’s life. It’s supposed to do that, too; there’s nothing you can do but slog through it. No time to explore each room, no time to consider the pieces of the game world. No time to do any of the fun things from the first Prime. You run from checkpoint to checkpoint watching your health like a hawk and praying for ammo crates.
You know, just like Doom. I hated Doom.
Metroid: Zero Mission
This was a tentative remake of the original game, but it’s obvious it was trying to be more similar to Super than Metroid. The best way to describe Zero Mission is: they tried to make up for the sins of Fusion by making a game as similar to Super as they knew how, without really knowing what made Super so brilliant. The result was a great game, don’t get me wrong… certainly one of the best in the series. You can see where the cracks are, though, if you look for them. And any Super fanboy worth his salt is going to look for them.
My biggest beef with Zero Mission is that it resists attempts to replay it by having a long, boring, way-too-difficult stealth section smack dab in the middle of it. Playing the Zero Suit segment of the game is incredibly fun, but only the first time you do it. On replays, and especially on harder difficulties, you’re just going through the motions. You can’t find anything new in this part of the game, and there’s only one way to play through it, so you either push through to the other side of it or you get bored and quit.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Hmm… haven’t I blogged about this game in detail already? Why yes I have. The condensed version is that Prime 3 has a lot of what I loved about Prime 1, but you have to play through a huge length of Prime 2-flavored bullshit to get to it. The game tries too hard to be Halo and not quite hard enough to be Metroid Prime, in other words. I only started enjoying this game after I got to the point where I had enough life to play it recklessly, which doesn’t say much for its balance or its design.
So of the entire Metroid series, I’d say I’ve only really, truly, unreservedly enjoyed three of the entries. Just going by sheer statistics, Other M is more likely to irritate me than not. I’m going to really have to scrutinize the reviews on this one, especially considering this is already going to be one of the more expensive gaming seasons in recent memory.
Everyone brushes my concerns off with, “Oh, he just wants it to be Super Metroid again.” While I certainly wouldn’t turn my nose up at another Super Metroid, I know it’s not forthcoming. I like seeing my old favorites grow up and be explored in new ways, even if the directions they take bring them to strange places. The Final Fantasy game I played this year bore only a very distant, passing resemblance to the Final Fantasy I played as a kid, and that’s true with pretty much every video game series that has been around that long.
I’m not carrying a torch here. Other M doesn’t have to be Super Metroid, but it does have to be a good game. The series’s track record isn’t great in that regard, so I’m approaching it cautiously. I admit the videos look fantastic, but hey, it’s 2010. The whole game will be up on YouTube within 24 hours of street date, so if the reviews and recommendations are sour I’ll just queue a playlist and be done with it.
Then I’ll go play Super Metroid again… and maybe the first half of Zero Mission.
As I expand my LP videos into new territory beyond simply running a 10-year-old Nintendo emulator, I’m discovering a weakness with the recording software I have access to. I’ve jiggered the scraps into working, but none of my options seem ideal.
I’ll start by spelling out what I want, I suppose. I want a big red button which, when I push it, records whatever window I point it at for however long I want. I also want this program to record audio from my stereo mix. (Ideally I’d like it to record the game audio and my mic input as separate tracks, which can be adjusted individually later, but one thing at a time here.)
Camtasia is fairly resource-intensive, especially when you try to record lossless video like I do. It inexplicably doesn’t record some programs properly, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with it. The program’s worst quality, though, is that it doesn’t record in real time. When you’re done with recording and you press the stop button, it chugs along rendering a proprietary video file. If this process is interrupted in any way, say by a sudden power flash or random software glitch, chances are good that all your work is flushed. I’ve lost 45-minute-long recordings this way.
Camtasia’s editor is absolutely perfect for my purposes, certainly better than anything else I’ve tried to use. So the good news is, if I can get some other recorder to spit out an .avi or something it’s easy to load it up and work with it.
On the other hand I have FRAPS, which records great lossless video but absolutely crap audio. When I try to record narration through this software it sounds like I’m at the other end of a tunnel. I’d usually go in and start finnicking with settings at this point, see if maybe something’s wrong, but FRAPS doesn’t have any settings. Your options are limited to “record sound” and “don’t record sound”. So while FRAPS is chugging away getting my image I have to use some other program to get my sound, then stitch the .avi and .mp3 together after the fact.
Not a fat hairy deal, sure, but slightly more complicated than “I want a big red button.”
I’ve tried a few other programs, here and there, over the past few months. None of them are even in the same ZIP code as Bigredbuttonsville, though. As things stand now it’s a matter of using the proper tool for the job at hand, be it the nice flashy program that might lose everything because it hiccuped, or the weird background one that can’t be configured and doesn’t know what audio is. Don’t worry, I’ll make do. Sometimes these things brighten up a bit once you’ve bitched about them.
This is just a very quick post to inform everyone that I’ve started watching Lost. I guess it’s going to become a fixture of Friday game nights; a few episodes of Lost, an hour or two of Rock Band, then whatever game we’re playing until 2-3 a.m.
I realize this show is all about mysteries and questions and plot twists. Part of the reason I avoided it during its run is I was not convinced it was going to be given a satisfying conclusion. I’ve since been informed by fans of the series that the conclusion was satisfying enough to make the whole run worth watching, which is fine by me. I just know better than to get involved in these week-to-week thrillers anymore.
(…says the guy who is counting the hours until the fifth season of Dexter.)
What worries me, though, is that the ratio of real, interesting plot twists and manipulative drama-bomb episode cliff-hangers is going to be skewed too much towards the latter. When it was revealed that Locke used to be in a wheelchair in episode four I didn’t think, “Whoa! Nice plot twist!” but rather, “I wonder if that’s at all important, or if it was just done for shock value.”
These little shock value twists are a great way to end an episode when the viewer has to wait another week to get the next bit… but they tend not to serve the overall story very well. So I hope the series isn’t full of them.
Anyway, wish me luck as I embark on this journey to watch a TV series everyone else has already seen. Maybe when I’m done with this I can go back and watch 24.
After about a month of not gaming, it looks like there’s going to be some of that happening tonight. So the time I was going to use for this blog post got cut short. Excellent news for me, not so much for you. That’s life on the edge, baby.
I had a post drafted about Rock Band 3 that I haven’t finished yet, coming on the news that new DLC for the game won’t be compatible with old Rock Band titles. I hadn’t quite collected my thoughts on it yet. which is why it hasn’t been posted, but the jist was that, once again, I was trying to feel out whether Harmonix was the benevolent company I imagine them to be, or if they’re becoming the kind of double-dipping corporate monstrosity I feared in this here post.
It’s a tough call. On one hand it seems like there’s no reason new DLC shouldn’t work with the old games; just grey out the keyboard, the pro instruments and the harmonies, right? The rest of it should work fine. On the other, there might be a thousand little legitimate reasons why the new plug doesn’t go in the old socket.
Then there’s the consideration of old DLC. Will it eventually be updated to include the new stuff? If so, will we get an upgrade pack, or will we have to re-buy our entire collections? And if we do that, will the new-old stuff refuse to plug into the old game as well?
So today when I saw Harmonix’s official comment on the recent leaked Rock Band 3 track list, I had to laugh. These guys are still very clearly having fun. They could have come out with both guns blazing, doing damage control in a way that would make loyal fans like me turn up their noses. Or they could make a gag of it, which they did. The list is out there, people are excited, no harm, no foul. Laid back and friendly — that’s the Harmonix I like.
In the end, the Rock Band 3 list looks great and since it’s a day one purchase in my house those DLC concerns won’t be no big thang.
I’ve been getting this message several times a day for the past month or so. The date keeps getting pushed back every couple days, otherwise it’s exactly the same. I’ve tried blocking and warning AIM, but apparently they don’t stand for that kind of nonsense.
The whole situation is pretty amusing, honestly. What’s going to happen at midnight tonight, I wonder? Will my AIM program finally explode forever? Or will I be granted another stay of execution? Stay tuned.
Post-midnight udpate: Hahaha, in your face, AIM! I’m having pointless conversations with your old, unsupported software as we speak! Advantage: Brickroad!
William Easton is a fictional insurance claims investigator, and in this post I’m going to advocate for him. This is Easton:
And okay, I grant you, this is the douchiest-looking dude on the planet. Nobody is disputing that fact. Before you condemn him, though, consider that this is also Easton:
See, William Easton is Jigsaw’s primary victim in Saw VI. Previous victims included people like apathetic doctors, heroin addicts, loan sharks, murderers and cops more preoccupied with dead criminals than live victims. Now, don’t get me wrong. None of these people deserved to be put in hopeless situations where self-mutilation was the only egress. In the context of a fictional slasher-movie universe, though, you can almost appreciate Jigsaw’s sense of karmic justice. Bad things happening to bad people, and all that.
I’m not saying “William Easton didn’t deserve it” in that context, though. The reason he didn’t deserve it wasn’t because no human deserves to be tortured; it’s because he wasn’t guilty of the crimes Jigsaw was punishing him for.
Easton was the head of Jigsaw’s insurance company. It was his job to approve or deny claims, including Jigsaw’s. It’s easy for modern American society to automatically demonize someone with this job, much in the same way that lawyers are bloodsuckers, politicians are liars and cops are all bacon. I mean, that’s the beauty of Easton’s character. Five sequels deep in an established horror series is not the time to innovate. Only a few characters in this series have survived long enough to develop any kind of personality, and inventing a new one is too hard. But they needed a new victim, and a white collar worker from an industry everyone already instinctively hates was ripe for picking.
Problem is, they forgot to make Easton an actual loathsome figure. He’s in the trap because of his job, full stop.
First and foremost, let’s understand just how hard of a job Easton has. His company doesn’t have enough money to save everyone; that’s just the ugly truth of the American insurance industry. He has to save some people, of course, or his company’s reputation would be flushed and there would be no profit. Undoubtedly, though, there are people trying to cheat his company with frivolous claims, and people who aren’t trying to cheat but neither can actually be saved. Both of these types of people need to be denied coverage so there’s enough money left for everyone else.
That’s Easton’s perspective, anyway. Whether or not you agree with that could spark an interesting discussion the state of modern health care, which is kind of outside the scope of a blog post about Saw VI, so we’ll leave well enough alone.
Jigsaw’s beef with Easton is that Easton developed the profit-maximizing formula by which claims are evaluated. Which means, yes, Easton’s job was to decide which people received coverage and which didn’t. Or as Jigsaw put it to him, “who lives and who dies”. That’s a pretty heavy responsibility, and no doubt there have been people in Easton’s position in reality that have squandered it or otherwise approached it irresponsibly. As terrible as it is to have to stamp someone’s claim denied, though, we are never shown any evidence that Easton is at all corrupt, apathetic or otherwise ill-intentioned.
We get to see two instances of Easton denying someone coverage, and both times it’s done face-to-face. The first is a man with cancer whose claim was denied because he failed to list a pre-existing condition on his application. The second was Jigsaw himself, who wanted to use Easton’s company’s money to go outside the system and seek unproven, experimental treatment not approved by his doctor. What’s interesting about this is not the conversations Easton has with his clients, but that he’s having conversations with them at all. That shows, to me, that he absolutely takes his clients seriously, and is open to rational discussion with them.
In his conversation with Jigsaw, he most definitely is the rational one. Jigsaw pitches a new type of cancer treatment involving gene therapy, for which his doctor believes he is not a candidate. Based on the doctor’s rationale, Easton has to deny his claim. Jigsaw is the one who starts in with the cursing, the threats, and the loaded language. He blames his doctor for not caring enough about his patients; likely true, but not Easton’s fault. (And besides, the doc got his way back in Saw I.) He goes off on a tirade about insurance companies in general, none of which Easton can really respond to. He even claims it’s not about the money. He says he has money. Money’s not the issue here.
If money’s not an issue for Jigsaw, why did he sign a contract with Easton’s company to begin with?
The bottom line is that Jigsaw seeks to punish Easton for crimes committed by the entire industry he works for. This strikes me to be every bit as impersonal and apathetic as many of Jigsaw’s other victims are towards the people they hurt.
Throughout his trials, Easton is forced again and again to decide who in the traps will live and who will die. The perfectly healthy 20-something with no family? Or the smoker in her 50s with a full and loving family? Not surprisingly, when the people in question are his colleagues and not his clients, and his decisions have no bearing on his professional ethics, Easton chooses to let the “less viable” people live. Decisions which, if made on a large scale, would ruin his company and leave the entire industry bankrupt. Jigsaw tries to introduce the element of personal involvement into an equation that has to be designed without that element, or it doesn’t work.
At one point Easton is holding a chain in each hand, his arms stretched near to breaking, the lives of two people he works with laying in the balance. He cries out, “This isn’t how I make my decisions!” It’s hard not to be sympathetic.
That’s my defense of William Easton. Jigsaw doesn’t lock him up because he’s a criminal or because he’s hurting people… but because he has a grudge against the insurance industry. It’s interesting to watch a Saw movie and constantly be siding with the guy in the trap. You’re not supposed to side with the guy in the trap, you know. Especially not the dirtbag insurance guy.
But thanks to the short-sightedness of Saw VI’s writers, who expect you to automatically equate insurance companies with dark-centered evil, you can sympathize with poor ol’ Easton. Poor Easton who, in the end, dies the most horrific death the series has to offer despite having apparently learned all the lessons Jigsaw wanted him to learn. Bum rap, brother. It’s not your fault you look like such a douchebag.
Hi, I’m Brickroad, and I’m a recovering Achievement Whore.
Looking at the achievement list for a game used to inspire me to do crazy things. The day I bought my Xbox 360 and learned what gamerscore was, games stopped being fun for their own sake. There was now this over-arcing meta-goal I had to achieve, over and over again. Time spent playing games elsewhere suddenly didn’t count anymore. I wasn’t playing for the inherent joy and fulfillment of the game, but to hear that cathartic little blip noise and see that beautiful grey popup message.
Gaming used to be an escape. Now it was a Skinner box.
If some achievement or another was too frustrating for me, I’m ashamed to admit, games would end up not being completed. I’m sorry, Kameo. You too, Bionic Commando. But your 100% completion goals were too lofty, too grind-y. I couldn’t power the console on without being reminded that I’d never see you reach 1000/1000.
It took outside intervention to break me of these bad habits. Specifically, it took someone who didn’t know how to shop for video games. I tend to not ask for games around Christmastime, see, because I sort of feel like I can support my own habit. Plus, nobody really knows my gaming eccentricities like me, yeah? The last thing a gamer nerd needs is for people who have no business being in the same room as an Xbox doing his shopping for him.
Explain that to my brother, though. He doesn’t know what a gamerscore is. He’s got no idea the factors that play into deciding which platform to purchase a game for. Hell, he didn’t even know enough to skip the $20 Best Buy software warantee. So when I opened his gift and found Batman: Arkham Asylum for PS3, I didn’t chew him out for picking up the “wrong” version. I didn’t lament over the wasted achievement potential. We didn’t have a fight about how no, sir, trophies are not the same thing. I just accepted the gift graciously, the way you might accept an ugly sweater from Crazy Aunt Edna, and we went on with our celebrations.
The funniest thing happened, though: I enjoyed Batman. No more Skinner box, no more false catharsis, just me, my controller and the Dark Knight. I didn’t finish Arkham Asylum, but when I quit playing it was on my terms. Not some pencil-pusher with a deadline who has a 1000 gamerscore quota to fill. I don’t know how many achievements I would have gotten for the game, if I’d played it on the 360. But it doesn’t matter. I took what I wanted from the game and left the rest on the shelf. It felt good. It felt like… a huge weight had been lifted off my chest.
A few months later when Final Fantasy XIII came out, it was easy to buy the PS3 version. It wouldn’t have been, without my brother’s Batman faux-pas. I knew in my heart the PS3 version was superior. Crisper graphics, no disc-swapping, better controller for that kind of game. If FF13 had come out before Christmas, this would have been an agonizing decision — and one the Xbox would have won. But in March? It was easy to rationalize. It doesn’t matter that I won’t get any points for FF13. I didn’t get any points for Batman either.
I can enjoy games again. I don’t even know what my gamerscore is, right at this moment. My newfound apathy — nay, freedom — took hold very quickly. I was able to play Mass Effect 2 and Super Street Fighter IV without caring about my imaginary number going up. Did Mass Effect even have achievements? Who knows. And now we’ve got Rock Band 3 coming up in a couple months; it’ll be nice to not feel pressured into spending hours hammering away at the drum trainers or trying to nail impossible guitar solos. Achievements damn near made me hate Dear Prudence for chrissakes.
It’s good, being able to breathe. I may even go back to Marvel Ultimate Alliance someday.
…well, maybe not that far.
I love each and every one of my blog readers and YouTube subscribers like the brother I never had*, but all the same it’s exciting to get recognized by someone awesome. By which I mean, when your fun little YouTube Let’s Play series gets linked up by WayForward’s official Shantae blog, you get this warm fuzzy feeling inside.
I’ve known for some time that the WayForward guys had actually watched my LP series, which is very cool an and of itself. The weird thing about Let’s Plays is that, really, what you’re doing is putting up someone’s entire video game on the internet for free.It’s not exactly piracy, but it’s in the same ballpark. I’m a big fan of “pro” LPer OverTheGun, and had no problem watching his entire World of Goo series back when that game was brand new. Only, once I’d watched it, I knew I’d never have to buy the game. And to this day I still haven’t.
So silly as it may seem, there’s always that apprehension about what a game developer might think about their games showing up on YouTube. There is no universal answer, either. It’s one thing when it’s Shantae, a game that’s impossible to find legitimately, whose creators are comparatively small fish. It’s another when it’s, say, Super Metroid, which is actively supported, easy to locate and (as of late 2007) commercially available.
In case you were wondering, these personal hang-ups are why I’ve never done Mega Man 9 or Mega Man 10. And probably won’t any time soon.
So to answer the millions of comments, questions and PMs I’ve gotten on my Shante playthrough: yes I know there is a sequel coming. And yes I intend to play it, on account of I lurves me some Shantae. But no, I probably won’t Let’s Play it, at least not right away. The purpose of doing LP videos, as I see it, is to let people experience old games in a new way, or with a unique spin. Playing a brand new game for the first time… well, that’s something you could do yourself.
Also I don’t have a DSi, which complicates matters somewhat. Risky’s Revenge will sell me one, though.
* I have a brother, but he doesn’t read my blog, so I can get away with saying things like this.
The rules for a movie trilogy are thus:
1) Make a self-contained movie.
2) If it’s good, make a sequel. Except break the sequel in half so you can span it across two movies.
End result: three movies, but only two (maybe two-and-a-half) storylines. You don’t have to examine the last twenty years of filmmaking very hard to see this formula used time and time again. There is, however, a third unwritten rule that nonetheless seems to consistently hold true:
3) Nobody likes part three as much as part one.
And there’s a reason for that! Since Part Three is usually just Part Two of Part Two, you don’t feel like you’re starting the story in the right spot. Jack Sparrow is already dead, see? And you’re dropped flat in the plotline of bringing him back. No time for the wind-up; from credits-go you’re smack in the middle of the pitch.
So I want to examine what might be considered the prototype for the modern movie trilogy, which is coincidentally the most recent trilogy that everyone can agree consists of three amazing movies: Back to the Future.
The hook of Back to the Future, of course, is time travel. And good movie trilogies need hooks, don’t they? Something to bind the series together in a cohesive way. The Matrix is about the world being a computer program, see. Pirates of the Caribbean is about pirates (usually in the Caribbean, though that point is negotiable).
What Back to the Future does, though, even in the very first movie, is abandons the hook in favor of its characters. Time travel is the crux of the story, but that’s not what the story is about. The story is about Marty McFly trapped thirty years in the past, having wacky adventures in order to insure his parents fall in love and that his old friend Doc doesn’t get murdered by terrorists.
So now it’s sequel time. The second movie uses the same hook as the first, but has to do it bigger and better. (Because it’s a sequel, see.) That’s why Batman has to fight two villains, or why Jigsaw’s traps have to become more and more complicated. The hook can’t be changed, so it has to expand. That gives us the first act of Back to the Future Part Two: our heroes are blasted into the future, and we get to see what our world looks like in 2015. (From the perspective of 1985. Heh.) Same hook: time travel. Except, bigger and badder.
That’s as far as most sequels take it, and why most sequels end up feeling limp compared to the original. Back to the Future Part Two, though… well, that’s just the beginning of the story. We’ve now established that time travel is bigger and badder, and gotten it out of the way. Now we can get back to the wacky adventures of Marty McFly. So where does a time travel adventure go? Immediate thoughts are populated with medieval knights and dinosaurs, aren’t they? Well, that’s not where the McFly story is. No, it’s back to 1955 with us — the same setting as the first movie — because that’s where the characters belong. That’s where the interesting things are happening.
It’s kind of a cheap shot, in a way. Second verse, same as the first? But it works. The layers of references and in-jokes that made the original so charming are just compounded here; now Marty is not only dealing with the juxtaposition of 1955 and 1985, but also his past and present self. In other words, the sequel arises organically out of the characters and their situations, rather than just adding more pirates or more matrix.
My favorite of the trilogy, though, is Back to the Future Part Three. This is where the trilogy really gets it right, especially compared to every other Part Three conceived by man. Let’s check it out.
First off, as I’ve mentioned, Part Three is really just Part Two of Part Two. And that is true in Back to the Future Part Three; at the end of Part Two Doc is accidentally sent back to the Old West, Marty is once again stranded in 1955, and heck, we even get a big “To Be Concluded…” message before the credits. The difference between that and, say, the downer ending of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is that the primary plot thread of Back to the Future Part Two had already been resolved. The MacGuffin had been located, the timestream had been restored.
At the end of Part Two you were excited to see Part Three, but you didn’t feel like you’d been cheated by only seeing half a movie.
So here we go into the final stretch of the trilogy. Once again we have our hook: time travel. And once again we have to go bigger and badder. In a lot of ways the Old West setting is every bit as gimmicky as the cheesy 2015 setting. You could also argue it’s every big as gimmicky as how the pirates leave the Caribbean in their Part Three, or how Neo gets magic matrix powers in the real world in his Part Three. You see the trap here: the hook is spreading thin, now, and has to expand in less believable ways. More pirates! More matrix!
More time travel! Yes, that’s true — but. Because Back to the Future Part Two so skillfully avoided being a movie series solely about its own gimmick, it has more room to expand. We’ve had a movie about Marty McFly’s wacky adventures, and a movie about breaking/restoring the timeline. What we haven’t yet explored is our other hero, Doc, and Part Three gives us the perfect chance to do so. Old, off-kilter, eccentric Doc. The poor guy doesn’t really fit in 1955 or 1985. Of course he’d invent a time machine.
In 1885 though? He looks right at home. He has friends, community ties, rivalries and a budding love interest. He’s not just the crazy old man in the lab on the hill; he’s an important, respected member of a blossoming American frontier town. The story here isn’t really about the Old West at all; it’s about Doc being torn between where he fits and where he belongs. It’s about his romantic interests and how they clash with his scientific ideals.
The thing about Doc is, in the first two movies, he talks a lot about the sanctity of time and how important its preservation is. When it comes down to the wire, though, his own curiosity always gets the best of him. He can’t help but read Marty’s note about his own death, any more than he can help bringing Marty and Jennifer to 2015, or striking up a conversation with his 1955-self even when he knows what the consequences could be. So when he winds up in 1855, where he could do who knows what kind of damage to the timeline, his instructions to Marty aren’t “come back and get me before I break something,” but rather “I’m content and you should leave me be.”
And that’s the hook for Back to the Future Part Three; the reversal of Marty and Doc’s roles. Now Doc wants to screw around with time and Marty wants to stop him. By this point in the trilogy the movies aren’t really about time travel, no more than they’ve ever been… rather, they’re about Marty and Doc, and the trouble they keep getting into.
That, right there, is the magic of a great movie trilogy, and why most of these modern ones keep missing the mark. The solution to Spider-Man 3 was to cram Venom into a plot where he didn’t belong, because they needed bigger and badder, and Venom was bigger and badder. The solution to Pirates 3 was to have a French pirate and a Chinese pirate and an African pirate all in a great big pirate fortress with a pirate king and a pirate sea goddess and pirate magic and pirate lore. Somewhere in there were the stories of Peter Parker and Elizabeth Swan, but they were impossible to see for all the spectacle.
You can still see Marty and Doc, though, and it’s because they’re not fighting dinosaurs or medieval knights. The spectacle is them, and always has been. That’s what makes it the best movie trilogy.
|
|
