damn, my sock is wet

I’ve seen a couple tweets, read in various comments and message boards about how characters in Heavy Rain are mispronouncing “origami” in a variety of ways. I’ve also noticed this while playing, particularly with the newscaster.

It’s one thing when some stress “ori-GAH-me” while others are peppy with “ori-GEH-me”, and it’s another when the entire cast mispronounces the word the same way every time. The former is realistic; the latter is lazy.

Point your friends to this word:

Acai

Ask them to pronounce it. Chances are you’ll get at least three variations.

“In a new interview with Industry Gamers, SCEA’s senior vice president of publisher relations, Rob Dyer, shared a candid view on platform-exclusive titles — particularly when they’re on that other platform. “Look, we’re not going to get the exclusive games,” he said. “The Mass Effects, Gears of Wars and Left 4 Deads aren’t going to happen nearly as often. But we have our own first-party development and exclusives like Final Fantasy XIV and Agent. Exclusives just aren’t as commonplace as they were during the PS2 days. What is going to be the driving force is either exclusive ad campaigns, like the Madden campaign, or exclusive content like we had with Batman.”

Yeah, that’s right. Sony does have first-party exclusives like Final Fantasy XIV and Agent.

…the hell is Agent?

I think that makes sequels more interesting. Experiences change people. If I’m going to invest in a series that deals with returning characters, I want a level of believability in the fantasy. I like the comfort of a returning character’s plateau, but sometimes I also want to climb and slide on their troubles.

And if done well, making a character different than their first outing can give you a Sarah Connor.

"I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite blog on the Internet."

I loved the first Mass Effect despite hating certain design decisions: driving the floaty Mako to collect rocks that had insignificant money and xp values; playing Simon Says for rocks and lockers; unlimited ammo; the utter lack of variety in non-storytime quests, and the overabundance of items and navigation of items. With the exception of Skip Dialogue still being the same button as Confirm, all of this has been addressed in the much superior sequel.

Combat: ammo count is the big change here, and what I find most satisfying is the feedback when baddies are hit with firearms. In the first outing, shooting a baddie was like shooting a wall. Not only do the weapons in ME2 feel considerably heavier, the weight can be seen when baddies are pushed or stunned with each well-placed bullet. The submachine gun is a welcome addition; good as a fallback weapon or for killing swarms of baddies that don’t drop ammo since this gun has the highest max ammo count of the bunch. Plus, I’m getting sick of shotguns even if accompanied by the space adjective.

The biotics (haven’t used tech yet) also seem much more useful this time around; faster cooldown, and now with attacks differentiated by effectiveness against a defense type there is another combat tactic with utility – mainly because biotics don’t consume resources.

My only complaint is one I have with all cover-based games: it’s easy, to the point of tiring, to see an upcoming battle simply by the presence of cover. If I’m running down a hall that contains nothing for me to hide behind, that’s a guarantee I won’t be attacked.

Equip: strange not to have an Equip screen in an RPG yet the absence works. The first game had way too many items – as does every Bioware game. The lack of any true item collecting in ME2 means you spend less time in the Pause menu. In fact, even though the layout of the Pause menu is the same, the only reason to ever bring it up is to save and load. The majority of missions can now be seen on the galaxy map (Christ it was annoying tracking quests in the first game), and all upgrades are done through another menu.

No Mako: I mean, come on. Who the fuck actually liked driving this pile?

Space Dungeon Variety: the game is a lot more segmented. Gone are the elevators, the backtracking in missions. Missions are separate from hubs – unlike the first where, for example, you arrive at Zhu’s Hope only to have to walk to the Mako so you can drive to the Exogeni HQ. If this mission were in the sequel, you’d land on Zhu’s Hope, talk to the quest-giver and then the game would load Exogeni since the HQ would be a different map. I guess the game pampers you, but Christ, I’d rather sit through a loading screen than walk, which is just a poor attempt to invoke a grand adventure.

And what ties the experience together is the ability to import your ME1 saves. Sure, nothing you collected carries over. And yes, importing also makes checks for certain decisions you had made. Yet for me, the look of my character plays a big part. I spent a lot of time customizing my Shepard, and I invested a lot of time into both genders. I’m playing as my Shepard, not the Shepard Bioware created. Customizing appearance is important to me and even more so since this is a space opera, even more so since you see your Shepard from the front more than you do from behind (I never understood the point in changing your char’s appearance in Oblivion or Fallout 3). Usually I’m indifferent about character designs for protagonists – even with Bioware’s Shepard: Marketing Version. Perhaps indifference is too weak; it takes a lot for me to like a char design. The less flash the better. I’m not an adolescent – a woman who covers up can be just as sexy as a woman exposes.

And I have to say, I wouldn’t have invested as much time as I have if the voice actors for Shepard were less than stellar. Jennifer Hale in particular – mesmerizing.

I just created a Goodreads account, slowly started to add books to my profile. And while rating books, I realized that I remember very little with the majority of them – the exception being books I’ve reread, which even then, I’m nowhere near as photographic as I am with movies. A self-inflicting dilemma: read a wide range of books or be intimate with a few. Doesn’t help that I’m a slow reader. Or a slave to Time and financial responsibilities. Or that I’m easily distracted.

All this is is a balance between reading for entertainment and for research (information from a non-fiction, structure and the like for fiction).

wonder if this movie will have a "salt the wound" one-liner

Dark Horizons – one of the better movie news sites – has over the past month been posting a Notable Films of 2010 feature, and recently Garth Franklin posted the last part (11 in total). This is perhaps the only 2010 movie release guide you’ll need. It’s well-written, is fact-heavy since the site isn’t concerned about celebrity gossip, your eyes aren’t getting murdered by ads, and the feature (and the site as well) has a clean format – I can’t stand movie news sites that have more images than words. Everybody can post movie stills and paste from a press release. Franklin saves us from bad copy and presents us with his analysis.

Dark Horizons’ The Notable Films of 2010

Let me first get my complaints out of the way because there are so few. THIS POST IS ALL SPOILERS:

-The hammerhead creature: when Jake encounters this rhino, there is an angled profile shot of it stomping and growling. It looks out of place because it looks like something you’d see in a museum-produced documentary.

-20 mil a kilo: Selfridge explaining to Grace the reason they are on Pandora. It sounds like an info dump for us made more apparent because she’d already know the reason for the party.

-Last Shadow: Neytiri tells Jake that they nickname the greater banshee Last Shadow, and he follows up with “cuz it’s the last shadow you’ll ever see.” Seems like an unnecessary line since we already know this particular kind of banshee is king predator of the sky.

-Rally Call: wasn’t feeling Jake or Quaritch’s call to arms.

Now let’s start the love:

+Playful flying: my favorite scene is the sequence following Jake bonding with his banshee, particularly when him and Neytiri are diving full speed along the mountainside.

+Badass: the scene where Quaritch is escaping from the exploding Dragon, and when it crashes behind him when he lands. In the hands of a lesser director, the display of badassery would be Quaritch walking away tall from the explosion. Instead we get a cut to a close up of a cut up Quaritch, mad as fuck at Jake.

+Hometree collapse: very Titanic.

+The cut from the cremation of Jake’s brother to the shuttle diving through the clouds of Pandora.

+Concussive forces: the missiles that fire from the Scorpions, I love how the people and environment react. Bad special effects is when the only reaction from the actor is simply turning away. Explosions are not just fire. There is a violent rush of air. Not only do the Navi get thrown, debris gets blown outward also.

+The first time Jake runs in his Avatar. Awesome.

+The first time seeing Grace in her Avatar. Sexy.

+Neytiri has her hair loose in the mating scene. Awesome sexy.

+You’re like a child: and then those seedlings float towards Jake, who flicks one away. Neytiri grabs his hand. Jake then uses his free hand to smack another away. And later as he follows her, he smacks those bioluminescent petals.

+When Jake falls off the horse for the first time, his expression when Tsutey gallops in.

+When Wes Studi (forget his char’s name) has Jake and Grace bound. The scene ends with Jake closing his eyes, the Navi hollering because they are going to attack the sky people and show them how much damage a Navi war party can deal. And then it cuts to a squadron of Scorpions and Samsons led by the Dragon.

+Jake-Grace relationship: I like how she keeps having to force him to eat because all he wants to do is run around in his avatar. whoo whee hee.

+AMP design: the last movie I saw that got this concept right was Aliens.

+Hold your breath: during the final fight, Jake wakes up in the pod because the research base has a hull breach. He struggles to hold his breath. He finally closes his eyes, but before the camera cuts to Jake’s avatar, there is a quick cut to the tunnel of light that indicates transfer.

+The fact this movie doesn’t have a moment where the damsel is in distress. Sure you could say Jake saved Neytiri when the thanator is killed, but the moment is never drawn out long enough for it to matter. Actually, Jake is probably the one who could be labeled the damsel since Neytiri saves him more than he saves her.

+Zoe Saldana is fucking fantastic. Her expressions: when she meets up with Jake when he’s about to bond with a banshee; her wide-eyed relief after she and Jake escape from the Last Shadow; her mixture of anger and defeat when she decides to take on the chorus line of soldiers and AMPs; her petulant growl when her mother orders her to teach Jake the ways of her people.

ooh, just thought of a complaint: where’s Bill Paxton?

Twelve years I’ve been waiting for the next James Cameron movie. Two years I’ve been waiting for his vision of a scifi epic adventure in a time where, hell, I can’t name you the a recent example of its kind. Did Avatar live up to the hype? Is the technology behind the movie a game changer?

It sure is. And man do I fucking love this movie.

I’ve probably lost some of you already – sometimes a man with an erection for a director and his/her films is just not attractive. I’m passionate for only a few things, and when it comes to James Cameron movies, I don’t fuck around. So let me stroke one out for you because there are now four of his movies in my top five.

…Star Wars! There’s that scifi epic adventure example I was hunting for. Not really fair to compare Avatar and the original trilogy (because of their eras, not because geek culture says I should guard the pedestal), but the prequel trilogy is a recent example – and also one that went big for the computer-generated at the expense of everything else.

Both Avatar and the Star Wars prequels have excellent computer generated effects. Given enough time and money, the prequels could look as great as Avatar’s. What separates the two is the blending of what’s real and what’s post production. Computer effects that involve people, for the most part, looks awkward in the prequels; look at Episode 3’s opening space battle and then watch Count Dooku somersault off the balcony to fight the Jedi. The photorealism in Avatar is fantastic, but if people and objects don’t move like they should, then the whole presentation looks dooku.

And movement is where Avatar dances. What Avatar, what The Volume, have given us is a new kind of prosthetic – one that can be anything, one that imposes nothing on the actors so that they can do what they excel at without worrying about dress. We believe in Pandora because even though it’s a world created by designers on their machines, beneath the Navi are actors, their performances captured.

I’ve ranted about the motion-emotion capture in previous posts, and what we saw in the trailer aren’t even the highlights. Despite Cameron’s need to push technology (and not just on the computer side, because remember, for Aliens Stan Winston’s company built the fourteen foot tall Alien Queen; and even though Digital Domain and ILM generated the effects, an actual full-scale Titanic was built albeit a functioning interior) he knows movies are not just about extravagant sets and explosions, that if you don’t give the audience a believable story and characters, then what’s the point? Every other director says character drives their movies, and most of the time we either don’t care for the performances or the story or both. With Avatar, performances are even more important because while the actor’s movements and expressions have been captured, for the most part they look nothing like their character. For us to care about them we need something familiar to hold on to. We see movies to be entertained; to see people act.

And nothing looks like Avatar because no other movie has had The Volume to work with; in short, The Volume allows Cameron to view a rough rendered world the actors perform in, meaning he has complete freedom to adjust shots instead of unnaturally shifting actors or effects in post. Another way of looking at The Volume – think what Peter Jackson did with Gollum, but on a larger scale. Nothing looks like Avatar because the shots Cameron sets up doesn’t have to conform to what will be added later; a scene’s environment is already created on the computer, so while in production he already knows what the actors will look in relation to what is actually not there on the set. Everything looks uniform. If there is one thing I desperately want to get across, this is it. Know the reasons for Avatar looking the way it does and the reasons for Cameron pushing this technology.

Cameron has always been a clean director in terms of speed and camera angle. His action tends to run at normal speed, and the rare slow motion is used to heighten tension or a mood instead of allowing us a frame-by-frame as though the projectionist was working the machine like Quicktime. Look at how he uses slow motion in T2, when both Terminators have found John at the Galleria; look at how nothing slows down in the Operations scene in Aliens. As for the camera, Cameron doesn’t go for the artsy or gimmicky angles, which pleases me to no end, and he also doesn’t go documentary – for the most part I’m not a fan of this style because I like to see action framed clean and clear.

Put aside the technical. Avatar is just a goddamn fun movie.

So what if the story is space Dances With Wolves. So what if it has action movie tropes, particularly the kind where a gunpowder civilization abuses the tree-hut warrior culture. Sure it’s reductive to say all action movies are the good guys versus the bad. Broad strokes does not equal blah story. What makes Avatar exciting is the way it’s executed; the way it looks; the way the actors emote despite their appearance. The writing might not be as sharp as The Dark Knight’s, but Avatar doesn’t fall apart in the third act because of a convoluted plot and characters whose motivations flip flop in the absence of a rationale collision. Telling is more important than story.

Cameron described Avatar as a scifi fantasy adventure. And what a fun ride it is. There are no complicated setups or mythologies you have to know beforehand. Even though this is a big budget studio movie, it doesn’t have to please all demographics to make its money back; there are no kids to save-the-day; there are no funny sidekicks to entertain morons. Characters live in the moment, are not troubled by their past or at least there are no dedicated scenes a monologue for sympathy.

So for now let’s stop this essay, and in the next post I’ll talk as though we’re dining after having watched the movie.

Thank you, James Cameron and the cast and crew of Avatar.

sometimes you're unskippable

Over at the Guardian, Cory Doctorow wrote an article about how the movie and TV industry believe streaming is the new and safe way to give us content; safe because there is the transaction between provider and custom, and zero sharing.

It’s this last part that has the technologically naive excited. They assume that because a downloading client can be designed in such a way that it doesn’t save the file, no “copy” is being made. They assume that this is the technical equivalent of ‘showing’ someone a movie instead of “giving them a copy” of it.

Doctorow continues by saying streaming will not decrease downloading, or that when people listen to something on the radio, they will most likely go out and purchase for their personal collection.

I recently Netflix-streamed The Office, a series for some reason I never bothered to torrent – I can’t even remember the last time I watched network TV on a TV. After watching its fifth season and consuming the first half of the fourth, I ordered the DVDs on Amazon – partly because they were a Black Friday item, mostly because I wanted a physical copy. Sure streaming is insta-convenient, but it’s not necessarily the best quality.

And with all DVDs I buy, I ripped the fuck out of The Office so that I can toss the discs aside and never touch them again.

Sure I can torrent, but among other things, this leaves me in the hands of the file’s creator/uploader. My compression standards might be different than theirs; maybe I don’t want their area’s network station to vomit its logo or whatever seasonal announcement after every commercial break. All I ask for is a clean viewing, and ripping the files from the dvd myself is satisfaction. I dictate the resolution; whether or not I want an episode’s commentary as a separate audio track. And more importantly, ripping is convenience.

Name me the last dvd you saw that, after loading the disc, you were taken straight to the dvd’s main menu. Name me a time when you sat and watched those “Also Available on DVD” previews.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but sometimes I just want to pop in a DVD and watch a movie without having to go through a dozen goddamn button presses.

Ripping puts all the files on my hdd, where I can access whatever movie or TV show without the junk. The only “loading time” is the time it takes my computer to open the file. Double-clicking – goes straight to the movie.

So choke on that, studios. I ripped your DVDs so that I never have to be inundated with your bullshit previews and unskippable warnings. I got you, you fucks.

…

Then again, I did buy the DVDs, so they already have my money. A winner is them.

Ever since the theatrical trailer I’ve said I’m on an Avatar blackout. I’ve snuck in a few videos here and there; I’m incredibly picky, limiting myself to the occasional TV spot and not touching any character/creature/vehicle profiles or even listening to the James Horner score cuz I read somewhere that the music titles are spoiler-tastic. Jake’s Avatar Kills Quaritch By Punching Him in the Chest (Piano version).

Yet there is one video I watched that further reinforces my erection for all things James Cameron. It’s a video I watched carefully – which pretty much means that I skipped the first few minutes when the actors started talking (not that they automatically have nothing interesting to say, I’m just wary they might give away story/character bits I’d rather see for myself) and then praying to Christ I don’t see anything that spoils. It talks about the technology behind the movie; the Volume where the actors perform and the director chooses his shots from wherever angles. And even though Cameron, as usual, praises the technology he had to create to make the film, he always says something that proves why he is more than just a technical director.

“What we were most worried about was this [Cameron frames his face from the eyes to the mouth] because this is where movies live and breathe, in the tight close-up.”

Performances are usually what excite me about a movie, but I never realized how much I’m enamored with close-ups. Quickly going through my favorite movie scenes/shots, the majority are close-ups; Hicks shining the light across the crawl space; Ripley tilting her head and having enough when she meets the Queen; Eli’s final shot in Let The Right One In; Murray and Johansson hugging at the end of Lost in Translation; the T-1000 reshaping its head after the Pescadero elevator doors close.

Only 17 more days till opening day.

I’m having trouble embedding, so here’s the link.