Rant - The Strangers

The Strangers is a horror movie that’s recently come to DVD in Australia. Starring Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler with Brian Bertino who’s previous work (according to IMDb) includes Gaffer and Smoking Guy in Xtracurricular.

This is the type of horror flick your English and Cultural Studies teachers warned you about. It’s bad. Bad with no compensating factors. The soundtrack feels like Scary Movie without the rock singles. Liv Tyler gives a great performance that only draws attention to Scott Speedman’s trademark horrible performance. The ending is a cockslap of ‘it was all a dream’ proportions. The victims are idiots and the villains are evil.

I might want to watch this movie again without my grumpy-pants and detective/thriller-hat on just to see if the bile settles, but this seems like it was designed to annoy people like me who were there for the plot. It’s a story about some psychos who kill some people. I probably should have called *Spoilers* there as that is seriously the entire movie. There are no plot twists. No big reveals. No motives for the killers, ulterior or otherwise. The victims are given a brief but ultimately unnecessary backstory. It does a lot of apparent foregrounding that goes nowhere, and there are subtleties between the lines that have no trade-off. It’s essentially a shit idea, poorly executed.

If you’re into horror for horror’s sake this could make for an ok night in, but the enjoyable part of horror for me is picking apart the story. A horror technique I love is when a story misdirects its audience; making me predict one ending with absolute certainty then turning it on its head. Admittedly, The Strangers did this but it doesn’t really pull it off, it just drops a clichéd ending for a completely unsatisfying one. About halfway through there’s a turning point that almost crosses into intriguing psychological thriller territory, but the movie seems to realise this and throws its arms up, runs in the opposite direction, and eats some shit.

If nothing else, The Strangers is an ambitious film, because it’s trying to scare the audience without just using gore and shock tactics. Unfortunately it still falls short here because the protagonists are impossible to empathise with and the killers are hard to take seriously. Keeping the killers motives in the dark can make them more terrifying, but it’s a tricky thing to do well. Here they just make me want to shake my fist and yell “get off my lawn you cheeky kids!”

I’ve heard it argued that this type of movie could inspire people to become psycho killers because it makes it look easy, but I’d be more inclined to think it’d inspire established psycho killers to go out and get their dignity back.

Recent Release Ruckus

So I picked up my mindless action fix on Friday in the form of Gears of War 2. A night of playing indicated that it should tide of cravings for at least the next few months, even if there’s more story in the first 10 minutes that than in the entire first game.

I only bring this up because the back of the case sported this sticker:



Ignoring the missing full stop after 2008, release dates have been an interesting issue in games over the last few weeks. Before I go any further let me just clarify that this is definitely where this becomes a blog, not legitimate journalism. The only sources I have on any of this are direct conversations with retailers that were on a casual chat basis and in no way recorded. K? K.

So October 23 was to be the start of the pre-Christmas releases in gaming, marking the first major console releases since Grand Theft Auto 4 (April 29) and Metal Gear Solid 4 (June 17), neither of which I had much interest in anyway. Three major releases were to dawn that day: Fable 2, Dead Space, and Far Cry 2. However, on Friday 17, Kmart Western Australia broke street date on Fable 2, arguably Xbox’s biggest release since Halo 3. On the Monday, Microsoft contacted Kmart and fined them $1000 per copy sold before release date and informed them that their next big release (Gears of War 2) would be given to them a full month after other retailers. The next day other retailers were allowed to break street date and begin selling the game. It could well be argued that this is overly malicious business. Holding the next release would have been sufficient penalty – I have heard of Valve doing something similar regarding the release of Half Life 2 – but the added $1000 fine seems like a fairly low blow, considering how little mark up there is on games to begin with. However as much as an industry member may have stepped in, to me it seems unlikely that someone would lock legal horns with Microsoft.

Then an interesting thing happened, Far Cry 2 broke street date and was released a day early, leaving only Dead Space chilling in the green room. Also, if you remember my last post that was predominantly a censorship fight the power rant, I briefly mentioned that Fallout 3 was my most anticipated game release for the year. It also broke street date. Not that I could buy it being neck deep in uni work, but apparently in this instance vendors simply told retailers to put it on the shelves early.

In some cases, video game release dates seem like pointless withholding of a product. They’re not exactly like movies or albums that are all released on Thursdays and Saturdays respectively. In the case of games based in an online community, I could understand needing to manage which regions receive a product first. Blizzard would probably want some idea of which servers would be busiest when during addon releases of World of Warcraft, plus having a world wide release for such games would mean that countries like Australia would get the game before it was the same day in the States. This chain of broken street dates has piqued my interest though. Maybe Australian retailers have just gotten the shits with doing midnight sales for games they receive up to three months after the rest of the world, but I can’t help but think this is a big fuck you to Microsoft.

Fallout 3 Pre-Release Thoughts

I'm still alive. I just fell under a sizable pile of uni work for a while there. This Friday I'll hand in my final assignment after four years of study, but in true geek form, that day I’ll be more excited about picking up a copy of Fallout 3.



Fallout 3 has all the elements to potentially be my new favourite game. It employs elements of RPGs and shooters, follows an open world storyline in a post apocalyptic electro-punk setting, and includes the voice talents of Liam Neeson, Ron Perlman and Heroes' Malcolm McDowell. It's definitely my most anticipated game release of the year, and a distant second to The Dark Knight for my most anticipated release of 2008. Unlike The Dark Knight however, Fallout 3 was at risk of not reaching Australian shores at all.

On July 4, Fallout 3 was refused classification by the Australians Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), effectively banning it in the land down under. Admittedly when these screenshots were released I had my doubts that it would make it past the censors, however it wasn't the violence that caused the ban. While our classification system is in need of an R18+ rating, that’s a debate for another time. An adults only rating would not have saved Fallout. The OFLC's gripe was that the game contained real life drugs (referred to as chems) that basically performed the function of say, health or strength potions. These were depicted a realistic manner, which in their view pushed the boundary of science fiction drug references to real life drug references. Because a game may not offer incentives for using narcotics, not only was the game not to be advertised or sold within Australia, it was illegal to own a copy that had been obtained overseas.

By August 7, a toned down version of the game was given an MA15+ rating by the OFLC. This version had substances such as morphine given fictional names and removed the short animations of them being injected or ingested. For Australian gamers this basically meant that it was no longer illegal to own Fallout and so it was safer to import it. However, on September 10, Bethesda Softworks announced that the changes made to the Aussie version were to be applied to all versions of the game. If I hop off my games-are-art and censorship-is-the-devil soapboxes for a second, I think this is actually a better game mechanic. In any given game if I want a health hit, I want it then and there. Waiting for an animation to play out can be the agonising seconds delay that usually ends in death. The kicker is, that our broken classification system has now bled over to the rest of the world's gamers.

This isn't the first instance like this either. Earlier this year, Australia was given a trimmed version of Grand Theft Auto 4, and to prevent mass imports from New Zealand, they received the same version. Anyone who was going to the trouble to import that game would have known that the only difference between the Kiwi and Aussie versions was the sticker on the front saying "18+" and so they ordered from the UK, who share our region code but received the full version. So the main people at a disadvantage were New Zealand gamers who, at no fault of their own classification system, received a toned down game. This was eventually was revoked and New Zealand retailers now sell the unedited version.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think being able to see the drugs being taken and having realistic names is a crucial part of the game experience. Especially if they'd renamed the drugs something like Michael-Atkinson-is-a-scare-mongering-douche-bag. What bothers me is that our broken classification system is affecting the game content in countries where adults are allowed to buy adult things. Imagine if the say no to drugs theory was applied to all forms of media. Off the top of my head you'd lose movies from Requiem for a Dream to American Beauty. Not to mention that Super Mario Brothers didn't result in a generation of shrooming plumbers.

I think we've really lost a great platform for comment here. In my opinion science fiction and fantasy are the greatest genres to get a message across in as it allows something to become so fictionalised that it becomes more relatable. Take X-Men 3 for example. Sir Ian McKellen approached his character's motivation against a mutant-cure with the same attitude that he has towards the idea that homosexuality can be 'cured.' This could be applied to many groups of people who find themselves alienated or oppressed by modern society, while if the movie had been about an actual cure for homosexuality, while problematic on many levels, would speak only to a queer, already converted audience. Science-fiction and fantasy allows a level of comment not achievable in more realistic genres. It also means that the drug use was contextualised, as the protagonist has to put their moral objections aside and take what they have to in order to stay alive. More over the nature of the game itself, particularly in first person, gives the potential for insight into the issue that I don’t feel is as accessible by other mediums.

Essentially I don't think what we’ve lost in this game will deter from the experience, but I do feel that a great platform for comment is being cut short by a conservative and outdated rating system. Maybe I never got off my soapbox at all.

Rant - Batman: Gotham Knight

If I’m a hopeless fanboy of anything, it’s Batman, but like Two-Face’s coin (or Two Face himself for that matter), that’s double sided. With anticipation comes expectation. So Batman: Gotham Knight was just enough to tide over my geeky glee until the release of The Dark Knight.

Gotham Knight is a series of six short anime features with interlocking stories and different animators, writers and directors for each story. We get some of Batman from a distance, the urban myth, part as the vigilante, the Bruce Wayne in training throughout the world, and, of course, the hero. The impressive thing about this is that Batman is one of those characters who is such a cultural icon that everyone has a different idea of who he is, so to do six subtly different interpretations of the character back to back is fucking bold, and worth a standing ovation that they pulled it off. Granted Kevin Conroy voiced all six and, wishing no disrespect to Mr Bale, anyone other than Conroy pretending to be Batman as a voice performer is doing just that: pretending. The life that he is capable of breathing into an animated character is masterful

My only criticisms are based on what we were promised and what we got. In the original production teaser a lot of footage was spent establishing the villains, who all play a small part. Large amounts of screen time are spent explaining Killer Croc, then he is dispatched in a few seconds. It almost feels as though they are overcompensating for his cartoonish nature, and trying too hard to justify that he could exist in a storyline grounded in reality. Scarecrow makes what could only be called a cameo, and Deadshot is contained in a single episode. Also as far as leading into The Dark Knight, very little is even insinuated. There were two hitherto unknown detective characters who I assume will make an appearance in the upcoming film, and Scarecrow is now leading a cult in the sewers which might be brought up too. Some of this might make more sense once I’ve seen The Dark Knight, but that could be put down to trying to make this, and the upcoming feature film, stand alone narratives. As a segway Gotham Knight wasn’t as effective as say, The Animatrix was, but now I feel really geeky.

If you’re into anime check this out as it’s a rare hybrid of western and eastern animation. For me it’s very likely to get me into anime but also appealed to the side of me that never outgrew cartoons, and it was great to have a Batman cartoon aimed closer to my age group. Nevertheless, in three sleeps I’ll be ordering a long island ice tea and sitting down to watch The Dark Knight and the universe will be at high risk of imploding on its own fucking awesomeness.

Rant - Deus Ex: Invisible War

I never really cracked the original Deus Ex as I couldn’t get past the first level, and while this is just me making excuses for sucking at the game, I feel it failed on the same grounds as many action shooters. I’m asked to believe that I’m playing as some highly trained covert agent who’s also getting his badass kicked by random goons. This could be tagged ‘realism’ but it made it hard to find the game engaging, which is the point of the opening level. Fair enough I can choose what he is highly trained in but that just makes it stranger as he ends up either barely competent with one gun, clumsy with a handful, or completely useless with all firearms but pretty handy with computers. All this begs the question of what the fuck these guys were teaching him at government badass school. Apparently if I got over this hurdle the storyline is mind blowing but I find that hard to believe when the main character is the cyberpunk saviour of mankind named JC with his offsider, Paul, both of which are subtle as a bible in the face. I may get into this game one day and return to repent my sins, but in the meantime: Deus Ex 2.

The disembodied head of this first person shooter is Alex (if that’s a bible reference I didn’t pick up on it but I’m guessing it’s mostly just being versatile for the sake of the gender choice). Alex is a badass agent in training who is transplanted into a facility in a different city after his/her hometown was destroyed by an anonymous threat. This facility works well as the training grounds and has a good grasp of the player’s assumed knowledge, so it doesn’t waste too much time. As soon as I emerged from the ruins of this establishing mission I was asked to side with either a global corporation or religious extremists and clocked onto the moral of the story being ‘everyone is evil.’ However, while replaying, I discovered the game’s strongest storytelling element: the ability to kill anyone. If you blow a main character’s brains out as soon as they’re stupid enough to step out from behind bullet proof glass, the story will adjust itself to their absence. Suddenly instead of being a bitch to larger powers, Alex treated as a loose cannon with a “cavalier attitude towards human life”. While deciding which faction would ultimately save the day I even get a message from cyborg black marketers to the effect of “You hate them, Alex. You hate them. They are weak and made of flesh.”

Whichever extremist group you side with the ‘everyone is evil’ theory stays intact and there’s some solid dialogue in there, even if the flow of conversation makes any attempts at comedic timing clunky. The gameplay gives the player space and means to play either stealth or gung-ho and both are challenging and make good use of the biomods element. It’s a thought-provoking game that doesn’t slap me over the wrist if I decide to go clocktower on it, although I still can’t figure out why the box art went through three different episodes of Cyberpunk Makover.

Rant - The Zoo

The Zoo is probably my favourite live music venue. I’ve never been to a bad gig there. It’s closely followed by the Tivoli, which I’ve also not had a bad night at but is a bit more dependent on the big name acts it brings in. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s playing at The Zoo, whether it’s Aussie folk royalty The Whitlams or a local act I’m previously unaware of. Tim Freedman tastefully described it as “just the right size; like a finger up a bum.”*

Size wise its main competitor would probably be the Arena, who are more than capable of putting on a bad gig. However size isn’t everything as shown by the Brisbane Entertainment Centre which is an outright ugly venue, poorly located and gives the feeling that they’ve just put a pro wrestling show or the police auction on hold to let [international act] in for the night.

So there’s half my dream gig worked out, the Zoo as the venue and The Fumes as the opening act. As much as the Fumes are more than capable of headlining, if you’re not psyched up after bearing witness to how much noise these two can make chances are you’re that charming deaf guy who sells origami. Now I just have to work out the second opener/first headliner and headline act.

Really this place spews forth good vibes and indie credentials as if there’s a hint of morphine transferred when they stamp you. Drinks are reasonably priced and the ‘you have entered a please and thank you establishment’ at the bar makes me smile every time. It’s enough of something new to stay interesting and enough of something old to measure the guitar solos by how many audience members pick up an instrument the next day.

*Can’t remember if this is exactly what he said but he was more than a few wines into his set and it definitely involved fingers in bums with relation to the Zoo being a perfect fit.

Extended Rant - Mass Effect

When I first bought my 360 the salesmen’s exact sales pitch was ‘Get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect.’ Then it turned out that he didn’t actually have a console to sell me to play it on so I left wondering if his brain worked the way it was supposed to, but still, it was enough to pique my interest.

My only other experiences with Bioware were Balder’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights both of which I really enjoyed. I overlooked Knights of the Old Republic as I never really got into Star Wars, but I was interested to see that with Mass Effect, Bioware had dropped the Star Wars universe for one of their own creation.

I rolled a female soldier and got stuck into it. Right about the time the combat was about to get started I was waiting for a tutorial to pop up and tell how to point at the enemy I wanted to kill and watch the game do the rest. Then an odd thing happened: nothing. Gears of War being the last game I’d played and game play looking fairly similar I reverted to gung-ho instincts and aimed at an enemy and tried to shoot it to bits. Oddly enough, that bloody worked. The combat isn’t turn based. Sweet mother of Betsy it’s not turn based! Maybe they figured out that all the RPG fans who love repetitive mundane tasks were now on MMORPGS, whatever the case they’re now making real time combat so I’m prepared to look over a few first time insecurities and clumsinesses. There’s a cover system you’ll never use, and if you want to take a weapon out there are four buttons to help you (if it doesn't happen automatically), while if you want to use any of a stack of powers you have to pick from a wheel or a hot key all controlled by the same shoulder button.

As far as the story goes, it’s very Charles Dickens. Not to say it’s about poverty and has vivid descriptions of ugly people, I mean that it’s full of well developed characters and the plot is just an excuse for them to be there. The storyline borrows a lot from The Matrix Reloaded with the actual matrix replaced by the Milky Way, and manages to avoid the generally overdone ‘could we/should we’ sci-fi theme. For the most part, the major characters are deep, believable and conflicted, with the exception of one roughly man-shaped piece of cardboard with a name and some character traits written on it. Kaiden McCardboard aside, the characterisation only hits one major wall. Meet Liara, proof that the departments involved with game play and characterisation never really collaborated. In the cut scenes she’s the embodiment of compassion, in the combat she goes FUCKING BERSERK, going spell crazy and trigger happy in a manner that’d make Vikings blush. Once this crack has shown others start to pop up and I realised that one of the races of aliens look a lot like space bunnies and another are just toads in armour. After that the game had this creepy, space-age Wind in the Willows feel to it which thankfully wore of in time to be saved by the game’s best characterisation element, the hero himself/herself. In each cut scene you’ll be given the choice of how you want to go through it, usually polite, bitchy or too spineless to go either way. It mostly works to the same end but what makes it impressive is that none of it breaks character, which is a props to the voice actors more than anything. Here Bioware have proven that games can make a pliable protagonist without just making them a blank fucking pallet.

So if you play this as a solder it’s the sandbox(ish), story driven shooter that so many others have promised to be that still holds its ground as an RPG. The final level is like nothing else I’ve played, working itself up to the end boss fight by making you feel like the hardest badass in all Hardarseia in a merging of game play and narrative that’s raised my expectations of interactive storytelling.

Hearts and Diamonds

So I have these word documents on my computer entitled Rant – [rant topic] for getting my verbal diarrhoea on for various reasons. Collectively they’re now 3614 words so I’ve decided to turn self indulgence into self importance and put them on a blogspot. I’ll have to trim some down as I don’t want to post more than 500 words and I’m being indecisive about which one to kick off with but here’s ye olde intro post. I’ll introduce myself as a gamer first as Rant – Video Games takes up about 2411 of that total word count.

My first memory of games is of playing Street Fighter II at my neighbours' place. Not that I got this as a four year old button-masher, but this game was Chun Li’s debut. If you believe everything on wiki she’s one of the first heroines in the gaming world and these days I’ll generally write, play and read female roles, so I could credit that to Chun Li but it could also be that I find male hero’s fucking boring, which I could put down to Blanka. To a young boys eyes there really isn’t anything more awesome than a bright green man with spiked red hair who electrocutes people, and every hero less than that just wasn’t making the effort.

By ten I managed to save enough on $10/wk allowance for a Nintendo 64. This held two more bench mark games: Ocarina of Time and Turok 2, with the former being the first story driven game I played and the latter being the most unapologetically violent game I’ve played to date (Bear in mind that these were the nineties when we knew that nothing in a TV set could hurt you. Some years earlier I was worried that Doom would give me nightmares and my Dad basically told me to harden up). As much as I played Goldeneye I didn’t fall for it in the same way as Turok. It had a creepy darkness to it that stuck with me but my main memory of this game is having an enemy jump up through a bridge at me and through pure shitting-myself-reflex I fired my shotgun. Next thing I knew he had a giant, gargling hole in his chest. On reflection that probably explains why my default favourite weapon in shooters is the shotgun.

In grade twelve I bought a GameCube off a mate for $90 and it pretty much went obsolete that day. Resident Evil, Metroid and the new Zelda stopped it from getting sold but I felt burned enough to make the switch to X-Box by the next round of consoles. At the moment I’m swapping between Oblivion and Mass Effect for absolute escapism RPGs and just spent the few sober hours of the long weekend opening The Orange Box.

Outside gaming I’m a third year creative writing student who thinks astrology is a bit of a copout but apparently that’s a very Sagittarian viewpoint. The title Red Goes Faster I thought would be a great name for an indie band who sing about their sexuality but I don’t look good enough in skinnies to pull that off and $15 for new guitar strings is money I could spend on beer and save my neighbours’ ears.