Vanquish

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(originally published October 5, 2011)

"Vanquish is stupid. It is fighting stupid with stupid."

Know this: the “rocket-slide” button in Vanquish pulls double-duty as the “smoke-cigarettes” button.

First released in 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Vanquish joins the Japanese developer PlatinumGames Inc.’s expanding back catalog on Steam. We need to celebrate this. Vanquish volleyed forth a tongue-in-cheek counter-argument to a decade of western action design sensibilities in 2010. In 2017, the joke is finally landing.

It turns out this joke began in 1992.

"[The Prestige] is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. . . Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled."

This movie is a Monet. It's impressionism. It's clearest when you stop squinting and you back away and you stop trying to examine it because as you examine it, The Prestige is giving you your answers over and over. Let it. In fact, while you're worming your way around the question, trying to match it up with an answer that must, by necessity, be as equally taut and coiled, you have all the answers you need. It is both question and codex, describing itself, and you, at the same time.

"The Scotsman's heart began to feel faint. He had come so far across so much of Scotland to find the bones of the greatest creature on earth, only to find nothing. Had the giant fox lied to him?"

One thousand and fifty years ago in the furthest, coldest reaches of Scotland, there lived a man whose house faced the western seas. Oh, he was a happy Scotsman with a darling wife and their days were rich and full of happiness. There were days of struggle, like when the whiskey was running low, true, those days were trying. There were days of struggle that perhaps turned into years of trouble, like when the wicked men came in from the southlands, burning houses and stealing sheep and raiding the man's tended peet and berry bogs, from which he drew his livelihood. But amidst all of this, the Scotsman remained happy because he had his bog and he always had his wife.

". . .honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough. . . it is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway."

An interesting conversation happened at the bar last week when we mentioned to somebody that we would never see that movie Contagion because it would only increase our hypochondria and that it was weird that they give away Gwyneth Paltrow's death in the trailers and that she had been an overrated actress ever since Shakespeare In Love, a movie which we had never seen.

"Oh, you need to watch Shakespeare In Love. It's amazing. It's my go-to feel-good movie to watch when I'm feeling down."

"It isn't on drugs, it was just born intelligent enough to choose stupidity over seriousness like a giggling vizier with schemes to poison the kingdom's groundwater... bombast is good-simple."

Three things happened at once. Boombastic, by Shaggy, was on playing off Pandora, Sucker Punch: The Long Version, was playing on mute on the TV, and we had just finished rearranging the bookshelf. Strange to see Othello next to Watchmen next to Paradise Lost next to The Diamond Age. Then we paused Pandora, threw on Deadmau5, and kept staring at Sucker Punch from across the room. What a meaningless piece of background-movie. It's blustery and when it waxes poetic, it forgets how to speak English. That doesn't stop it from tripping over its voluminous bombast and it can't even shoot straight enough to hit that target.

bom·bast
noun
1. speech too pompous for an occasion; pretentious words.
2. Obsolete. Cotton or other material used to stuff garments; padding

The dictionary treats the word like it's a dirty. . . word. It so isn' t! Etymologically, it's cool to see that it comes from an airier / padded definition. Now, bombast can be a bad thing, particularly if a story has been relying on realism for credibility, that story is just flat out fucked and silly if it becomes too bombastic. That said, bombast is buoyant and it can come in a lot of forms.

"[Jane Eyre] That's humanity. It's a time-traveling bullshit-breaking missile, killing insecurities, past and present, with chemical weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions."

This is a creeping story about outdated ideas presented through a modern lens. It's a lady-movie that has a gender-neutral opinion on what it means to be emotionally miserable. Progressive! English countrysides, stupid rules -- mental, emotional, and meta-physical demons crawl the background. It's a chick flick staged as a gritty ghost story. There are old books that were written with the intention to trundle on for months and months, dragging a reader down with them. In many ways, those stories were ahead of their time. You are meant to read them chapter by chapter, digesting them slowly, distancing yourself when you don't have time to read or can't stand the story's boredom or the villains' cruelty anymore. Remember for the entire back half of Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff was donkey-punching every stable emotion he encountered? Urgh. You can only process so much slobbering misery in book-form. As a movie though, you're stuck with it for a limited engagement. Movies are watched in one sitting. You're there from beginning to end -- there's no escape and that's a good thing. You're there, just like characters, bound by stupid rules.

"When the ultimate frisbee sports-club that you're enamored with—which is meant to be the healthy evolution from competition-driven traditional sports—quickly turns into a clusterfuck of LSD and wardrobes of unaddressed sexuality, you've got a contradiction on your hands."

In the grand scheme of personal vices and obsessions, we'd rate Ultimate Frisbee just below World of Warcraft and just above Bible Club.

"If Fred has a tragic death soliloquy at the end of the season, nobody will give half a shit and we would send a box of chocolate iPads to the [Scooby-Doo] writers for doing what we wish the U.N. had done long ago."

Okay, this episode was significantly better than last week's. Witches and zombies are way scarier than a fucking mummy, and don't get me started on the twist that the guy managed to create a concrete mold of himself that quickly. "Which Witch is Which" is a much more down to earth story featuring better narrative structure and actual character motivations for the villains. It also introduces us to Zeb: Frog Hunter and his hetero-life-mate Zeke: Bean Seller.

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

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(originally published July 27, 2011)

"If [Sly Cooper] The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn."

The best videogame in the world is a mixture of Red Bull, vodka, smelly ink, velvety poetry, half of those good notes a jazzman isn't playing, and that one girl across the room. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is several of these things, retold as a music video. It is the best piece of fan fiction that you wrote based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, as edited by Paul Krugman. A lot of the time, you're re-enacting Walt Disney's bold, visionary remake of Shigeru Miyamoto's 1996 platformasterpiece Super Mario 64, and the rest of the time, you're Scotch-taping your older sister's cheap scarf to your lower back and waving a lacrosse stick, shouting: "Broken glass! Broken glass is the gift for the man who has everything!"

"At the most basic moment, I/O (1 or 0) was all they knew, and neither was deemed better than the other -- 'yes' and 'no,' despite being opposites, were not recognized as 'here' and 'gone,' even by the most intelligent code. 'On' was not 'better' or 'worse' than 'Off.' . . .The programs inside the V.i. were infinitely and effortlessly replicating -- humans, and the concept of death, were not a threat."

The earth got really cold when it got knocked off its axis and started free-falling through the heavens. After six years since coming within sight of a star bright enough to call a sun and our race's population falling below 16,000 souls, I didn't think we had a snowball's chance in hell. Another ten years passed, and Pumpkin, I was still alive. I think I should make the most of it.

I feel like I've been piped into the V.i. for a really long time. This isn’t the case though. It's been less than six hours of research today. I think it’s my age, honestly. Nowadays, whatever, I was 16 when I started writing this, and I'm only 22 now, time is finally slowing down for the first time in my life.