Dose 9/12/2011

Hey guys i just wanted to make a new post with a few videos, so yea I hope you'll enjoy and i'll try my best not to ramble on too much before the vids


I have immense respect for anyone who can do comedy for a living,either as a classic stand up or one of the more modern interpretations. The art of make people laugh and have a good time is by far the most noble, as a comedian your success is based off a basic human emotion and Thats incredible!
But more then that comedians are becoming modern day philosophers,They tap into that human element and they see us at our basic level and again this is amazing.
Today Ive gained tremendous respect for one of the Best,Out of the blue while looking around at Fail compilations, and video game demos I found One of the greatest speeches ever made. I give you Charlie Chaplin's last speech in the Great Dictator


Going in a little bit of a different direction I found Ign's playthrough of skyrim at pax so I figured i would link the three vids, even though im sure all my buddys who have been waiting on this game have already seen it :D (still my treat to you guys to see um again )

More The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Videos

More The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Videos

Then I thought we could finish completely today completely on the other side of comedy as where we started and look at some MMD / japanese guys doing backstreet boys... yea we've come a long way from Chaplin... O well its still funny

That is all that I wished to share with you guys today, I hope it was enjoyable, and enjoy the rest of your day, till I see you at your next dose
_dom
Treats ( god i spoil you )

Double Feature Part 2: The Magician King

A while back, I reviewed The Magicians, which it turned out had a sequel coming out (The Magician King). I was immediately excited because I realized it when I was double checking some facts about the book while I was reviewing it (aka, I saw on wikipedia). I enjoyed The Magicians, up until the end, so the fact that "the end" wasn't actually "THE END" made me very excited to read this new book...which I literally just finished about an hour ago.

Truth be told, Lev Grossman did it to me again. I hate reading books when I don't know there's going to be more. Once again, the ending left me hanging, which means a sequel, which angers me in many ways. I dislike having hanging endings. Even Harry Potter, which you knew was going to have a sequel, would leave off each book in a way that made you hunger for the next one, but there was still a somewhat clear "end"--he was back with his Aunt and Uncle for the summer, and he would be bored stiff and want to go back to Hogwarts, just like the rest of us. Grossman is not so good at endings, I'm realizing. Without spoiling anything, essentially what happens at the end is the textbook "third act crash", setting up the next book and essentially making everyone rage face that the next book won't be out for another couple of years most likely.

That being said, the rest of the book had me hooked the entire time. That's why I was so mad about the ending, I felt like there wasn't a payoff. Besides that, Grossman writes with a humor I can truly appreciate, with personality that most editors make you throw out the window. There are many references to Hogwarts, hacking, hobbits...if you're a nerd and you wanted a freakin' letter to a magical school, this book knows how to play to your feelings and experience, while also saying naughty words.

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE MAGICIANS

This is just so I can have some space and no one accidentally reads spoilers. Carry on. 

The book picks up the plot two years after the ending of the first, with Quentin, Julia, Janet and Eliot all living as royalty in the once-thought fictional land of Fillory. Quentin has become restless and wants to go on a quest, which you just know means bad news. Soon enough, he gets one (or what turns out to be a beginning of one), and takes Julia along with him, feeling a need to help her with her life. Readers of the first book will remember that Julia learned magic on her own, instead of attending a magic school like Quentin did, but not a lot was revealed about how she went about doing that in The Magicians. Well, it gets revealed in this book, that's for sure. Roughly every other chapter switches over to Julia's perspective, and takes you through how she learned magic, and eventually why she's acting so weird. The pay-off in this area is spectacular, though the resolution seemed a little too perfect to me. The journey was what I enjoyed.

That seems to be how I feel pretty consistently when it comes to reading books by Lev Grossman--good god I love the journey, but I hate his endings to no end. Most of it stems from sequel rage, but in addition it feels almost abrupt when he ends his books. I would suggest reading this book, but I would wait two years so that perhaps the final (if it is only a trilogy) book is out, and you can continue on reading, without feeling a need to rip your hair out.

Double Feature Part 1: Gods Behaving Badly

Hello everyone! Sorry I've been away so long yet again...and sorry that I will be away again, but to make up for it, there's going to be TWO reviews coming at you this fine evening. I'm hitting a bit of a busy streak from here until the end of the month, which is going to make reading a little difficult, but I'm trying to make it up to you fine folks with a double dose of good ol' book readings.

Gods Behaving Badly was the first book I read after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In this case, it was a book I had found entirely on my own. So far, nearly everything I've reviewed has been from a class, or recommended to me--not this time! Truthfully...it's not a very hard book to read. Very simple, not too long (just over 300 pages, but a little larger than average font size), and I'd never heard of Marie Phillips before (although I still don't know her now...I may have had to look up the author...)

So why did I decide to read this book?

I'm a sucker for Greek Gods, that's why. The plot of the book revolves around the 12 major Greek Gods, living together in modern times, many of them as roommates. Yep, that means that Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Zeus, Hera, Dionysus, and Hephaestus all live in the same house. Poseidon still lives under the sea, Persephone and Hades are in the Underworld, while Eros lives outside the house and has found refuge in Jesus. That was probably my favorite part of reading this book--I may have had some issues regarding how some of the characters were portrayed "personality-wise", but I loved the "modern representation" of the Gods. Dionysus runs a night club and makes his own wine, Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator and Apollo is a tv fortune teller.

Now, the question has probably come to mind as to why Eros is believing in Jesus, when he is a God himself. Well, that's where the true plot of the story starts to come in. The Gods are slowly losing their powers--they're immortal, but their power is still fading, and once it's gone, they'll die. Most likely, anyways. Wrapped up in the Gods quest to restore power are two mortals: Alice and Neil, who are very awkward at admitting their feelings to each other. Their interactions, as well as their later ones with the Gods made for a very amusing read.

Someone well-versed in Greek mythology (like me) would enjoy this book just on that. I particularly enjoyed it because Artemis was given a lot of page-time, which was a nice change for me. She's always been my favorite, and Athena always seems to steal the lime-light. Regardless, the "modernizing" of the myths made me smile to no end, despite the simplistic plot. It's not a "must-read", but if you have it around, and you have a background in mythology, you'll enjoy the book anyways.

NEWS FLASH: Apparently this is being turned into a movie right now. Christopher Walken will be Zeus. But Nurse Jackie is playing Artemis. I am somewhat disappointed by that choice, but I don't know who I'd pick otherwise. Too biased against my favorite Goddess. Also, random thing--changed "Alice" to "Kate". Hooray Hollywood book adaptations!

A Bunch of Stuff That May or May Not Make Sense

This article is going to be very unfocused. I'm working through some ideological issues.

Today has been a hell of a day for my experience as a blogger. I was writing a post about fundamental elements of game design when I tried to look up the name of the first game that Odyssey creator Ralph Baer created for a one-off joke. As I checked the most reputable sources I could (read: Wikipedia,) I started to find essays and articles about video game theory that were very academic and in-depth. Now, six hours later, I have just finished a keynote speech by Ian Bogost about video game ontology that dealt with everything from the ludology/narratology to metaphysics. Its been a bit of a maze.

As I was reading these, I started to think that my career as a theorist was over before it had begun. I was operating on the belief that video game theory was non-existent. In fact, it was flourishing right under my nose and getting into metaphysical discussions about Kant and melting my brain with its awesome academicism. I can't operate on this level; I just don't have the background in philosophy to really get into that discussion. Then I had the realization that they still weren't talking about what I want to talk about, which is the theory of game aesthetics and how to create meaning. They were abstracting video games into a realm which I have no business being in; ontology. I didn't even know the meaning of the word until tonight. It is the philosophical study of being and reality, by the way. I'm more into how art creates meaning, not whether or not art is real. So I can breathe something of a sigh of relief now I guess.

Closer to my realm, Bogost and Jesper Juul (another theorist and designer) have both come to a conclusion I find very interesting; that games are a mixture of the real and the fictional. Every game has a real set of rules imposed upon a fictional narrative and world. No other art form really has this issue because video games have the distinction of having a real person in real time imposing their will on a fictional universe. This is what makes video games as an artistic medium (no matter what some people say) so fascinating. How do you evaluate human interaction artistically? How do you evaluate the play between reality and fiction artistically? These are the questions that video games raise and I would like to answer. Mostly though, I want to help push video games into this cerebral realm so that they can expand as an entertainment system as well as a thought-provoking work of art. 

Again, this is very unfocused and more for me than anyone reading this blog. If anything, this is just to show you guys that its not that I'm being lazy, I'm just working through some heavy shit. Any ideas I have right now are more like dough than wedding cake so I'm working on it. I'll have a review up next week of...something. I swear.

From Dust

I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers, but don't complain if there are.

If The Discovery Channel has taught me anything, it is that nature has the potential to be quite powerful and terrifying. It can kill you in a variety of sadistic and inventive ways and would most likely enjoy the act; like the Jigsaw killer, but without the morals. This is what From Dust, a new God game developed by Ubisoft, tries to convey, though with a much more reverent tone. The makers of the game have attempted to capture the fury of nature as well as the fear early man must have felt in its presence. For the most part, they succeeded.

The game starts off with a small, unnamed tribe of people playing music and calling into being The Breath; a spirit which can control the element which is the closest thing to a player character that this game has. The rest of the game requires the player to use the spirit's powers to guide The Tribe to giant totems left by a group of people called The Ancients. These totems bestow the player with useful powers such as jellify water or evaporate which both do exactly what it sounds like. After The Tribe as settled around all of the totems, they then can leave through a little gateway which leads to the next map. The whole story is building towards a final place where The Tribe can finally settle down. The ending is an anticlimax, but an anticlimax I actually kind of enjoyed. It is surprisingly deep, if a bit lazy. Now, I'm not spoiling the ending because, to be frank, the story doesn't matter. This game wasn't created for the story. It was created for the experience.

Eric Chahi, whom I will refer to as the director of the game though I don't know his actual title, has stated that he wanted to make this game when he saw a volcano erupt. He witnessed the brute force of nature and felt that a game needed to capture this. This is an area the game gets absolutely right. The environmental mechanics in this game are fantastic. The water and the lava move realistically, finding the path of least resistance and turning into rock and steam when they meet. The tidal waves and volcanic eruptions in the game can be truly terrifying and awe-inspiring. There is one map especially where there are two volcanoes in an ocean that is spectacular. You can watch one volcano form into an enormous, imposing, Mount Doom-esque peak while the other one fills with water and becomes a sandbar. The sandbar also happens to have a spring in it, called a source in the game, and this spring forms a river and eventually a delta. I loved playing around with the features of these gorgeous maps by diverting rivers and building giant walls of sand or igneous rock. I'm sure there are a multitude of ways in which this game can be used I didn't even think of in my short time with it (I only played it in two days because the other game I was playing is starting to bore me.) This environmental gameplay is a really fascinating and innovative play on level editors like the Halo Series' Forge Mode.

Now, I wasn't as impressed with the human side of the game. While I liked this idea of The Tribe and the totems, I didn't feel like the AI was there. It was a bold move to make arguably the most important part of the game impossible to directly control. The only way the player can influence The Tribe directly is by choosing which totem or power marker to walk to next. The player cannot pick the route. This becomes increasingly frustrating as the difficulty of each map ramps up. It got to the point where I found myself dumping hot lava on my people because they refused to use a ramp I built them and insisted on staring at a sheer wall and crying for help. It would have been amazing if the AI for The Tribe was as good as the environment. If they could find their way around obstacles or even decide that a flood was probably something they should

run away from, the frustration factor around this game would have been greatly diminished.

As I mentioned before, From Dust is a part of the God game genre. This is an often overlooked genre of game which includes The Sims series and almost every game ever developed by Peter Molyneux, most notably Populous and The Black and White series. I would also argue that strategy games, including real-time strategy games like the Age of Empires series and turn-based strategy games like the Civilization series would also count as sub-genres. They all feature a third-person camera which is pulled back to create a sense of omniscience and lack a visible character for the player. Rather, the gameplay is centered around controlling units of people, animals, magical beings, et cetera to carry out some task, usually war. From Dust is something of an exception because, as noted above, the player does not actively control their units. This lack of control does not exclude From Dust from the genre, of course, as they are still units whether under player control directly or indirectly. Indeed, this lack of control reveals an interesting facet of the God game never considered.

By definition, God games are games where you play God. Whether this is literally or figuratively true depends on the game, but the player holds a God-like sway over the characters of the game. However, despite the apparent freedom these games allow, they are defined by their limitations. God, within the world of video games, means that the player is unbeatable. For instance, the often used "God Mode" which gives the player unlimited health/ammo/shields/whatever else allows them to cheat through a choke point within the game. However, a God without limits is not a game, it's a sandbox. There would be no narrative and no structure whatsoever. So in the RTS genre, you are limited by resource management or a number of units. Turn-based strategy games have similar limitations and much more including economies and other factors that vary game to game. Even The Sims, a game where you can actually delete the windows from your sims' house and light their house on fire, is limited by the amount of money that your sim makes. From Dust's limitation by way of The Tribe makes these limitations very obvious. The only real God in the world of games is the developer.

So, to sum up, From Dust isn't really deep, but it is fun. There is a story mode and a challenge mode I didn't really get into, but there isn't a crazy narrative or anything. It's more of an amazing tech demo with an interesting mythology (I forgot to mention that there are these little stories that The Tribe has in a Memory section that are kind of cool.) It's 1200 points on the Xbox Live arcade, and I suggest getting it if you have nothing better to do.