Showing posts with label navel-gaze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label navel-gaze. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Horror Off-Season: The Quiet Ones
The Quiet Ones is a new horror release from the resurrected Hammer Film studio. It's director John Pogue's 2nd feature as director. John also served as a writer on the 2nd draft of the script, originally by Tom de Ville (who served as writer on episodes of Urban Gothic and Lexx), alongside Craig Rosenburg (The Uninvited) and Oren Moverman (Rampart). It is sometimes worrying when a script has this many hands involved. A single writer or a pair with solid history seem more likely to produce a horror film with common vision, while multiple writers tend to work by committee which results in a film that ultimately relies more heavily on well-worn tropes in order to keep everyone in agreement. At least in my experience.
Set sometime in the early 1970s the story is told through an interesting combination of Found Footage-style and traditional omniscient camera. It centers around an Oxford professor played by Jared Harris, 2 student researchers, and a student cameraman recruited through his class on the paranormal. Dr. Coupland believes there is no supernatural and the paranormal is just science we've yet to understand. He believes there is no such thing has haunting or possession and that these are just deep psychological conditions that can be cured through extreme therapy. Initially describing a failed attempt to cure a young child referred to as "David Q.", he then tells the class about his current experiments on a young amnesiac foster child named Jane Harper (Olvia Cooke), who claims to be possessed by an entity she calls "Evey"
In some strange combination of The Philip Experiment and Psychoplasmics from The Brood he hopes to deprive Jane of sleep and subject her to hypnotism sessions and isolation in order to expose Evey as some sort of secondary personality or hallucination and allow Jane to confront and get rid of her. After being evicted from their original location near the university and having the experiment's funding cut by Oxford, Coupland takes his students and Jane to a house in the country where they'll be able to continue their work. This is where the bulk of the action takes place.
I do want to go over the end and some, but that will be a spoiler tag so I'll just give my impressions.
This movie is pretty good. I'm not as impressed by it as I was other Hammer Revival flicks like Woman in Black, but I consider this solid and I'm glad that Hammer is back. That said, I have some criticism: Despite having a cast of only 5 characters, there are some who are so poorly developed I feel like the movie could have done completely without them. The non-camera students, Harry and Krissi, seem incredibly superfluous. They deliver lines, yeah, and things happen to them, but I don't think a single thing they do is integral to the main plot. They reveal no information and only seem to serve a b-plot that contributes nothing to the main one. Also Coupland's character is just confusing. We get some reveals during the ending sprint that do help to explain some of his motivations, but there's a lot he does that makes no sense. And his continued insistence on following the preordained path of the experiment despite mounting evidence of occult involvement makes him a crappy scientist. And I know it's petty, but the bit of dialog where they name-drop the title of the movie makes about as much sense as nipples on a duck.
I feel like the movie could've also added some psychological weight to its action to up the creep factor, and favor slow-burn lead ins more. In the hypnotism/seance scenes, it would've been incredibly unnerving to have long, slow shots of unbroken dialog with creepy shadows and unexplained noises instead of short lead-ins to jump scares. A final weird point is the use of a train-chugging sound effect. It had a few points where it was effective at tension-building, but it wasn't related to anything...it just happened to be a tense and driving sound effect.
I know it sounds like a lot but everything I just talked about I felt would have made the movie better, not were needed to make it good. It doesn't do anything egregiously wrong in my book and does a fair amount right, it just missed some opportunities to do some things really right.
That out of the way, on to the ending:
I feel like I "got" the majority of the ending, but there are a few sticking bits. The way I took the story of the movie, as revealed by the final act, was that it's not really the Philip Experiment at all despite the face-value similarity and that lots of other reviewers mention it. The key to the Philip Experiment is that the spirit they conjured through seances didn't exist at all, he was a complete fabrication. However, in The Quiet Ones, the experimenters don't invent Evey, they basically prod Jane until she invents Evey. Also, there is evidence that Brian finds of Evey actually existing when he researches the occult symbol that burns into Jane meaning that unless the power of belief retcons the spirit into existing, Evey can't be a fabrication. After the final act reveal I think it's very clear that what actually happens is that Evey Dwyer was a real little girl who is in some way a conduit for a cult's deity/demon. This is a bit of theory, but I think the original attempt to manifest the demon fails due to some part of Evey that was not willing to be sacrificed. This persona becomes Jane, the amnesiac. However, the experimenters torture and break down Jane until she loses the strength to control Evey and Evey re-asserts by re-branding Jane.
When the experimenters move out to the country and Jane reveals the name Evey, she's gathered 4 other people in a single house who believe in Evey and want her to become manifest. She's effectively recreated the original cult, this is further evidenced by the cult mark being burned into all the experimenters during the final act. Then Dr. Coupland kills Jane, and Brian resurrects her causing Evey to be fully reborn. Evey, rid of Jane's persona, self-immolates which gives birth to the demon.
What I don't fully understand is why the demon/fire deity now requires possess of Brian at the very end of the movie to begin the Apocalypse. If the demon simply needs a body, why not use Jane/Evey's? Maybe it needs to destroy the original body to be manifested but then needs another body to work? That just seems counterproductive. Frankly, I feel like the whole thing is derailed by the stinger at the end that shows Brian being interrogated for the murder of Jane and the rest. If that wasn't there the movie would've ended with the demon breaking out of J'Evey at the camera, presumably to kill Brian and wreak its havoc. So maybe one of the several writers felt like they needed the stinger, and wanted to have the cool similarity of using the clap gesture Brian used as the camera man to begin the movie to call the end of the movie, but then never answered the questions it raised?
--PXA
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The Beerening: Beer 101
I had originally begun writing a much different article to follow up my last beer op-ed about the problematic aspects of exposing non-beer people directly into the previously insulated internal conversation of the beer geek community. As a quick summary, I felt that as nerds in love with the flavors of beer we tended to gravitate the conversation towards extreme styles with the current trend being extreme degrees of hop aromas and flavors. This, coupled with the popular myth that hoppy == bitter, can lead people dipping a toe into the ocean of craft beer we're producing now getting a really skewed impression of what good beer is.
I once saw someone refer to Heady Topper as ho-hum because it's just another West-Coast-Style Double IPA, like any produced by a dozen other local breweries on that side of the country and the only reason it was being paid attention was because it was produced in Vermont instead of San Diego. My own feelings about the beer aside, we have to admit that Double IPA is an extreme style and there are people complaining that this beer is not extreme enough to stand out in its category and warrant as much praise as it gets. I can't even begin to imagine how I would have reacted to something with that much raw hop power 6 years ago, but now I'll gladly sip a can of it and pick it apart and feel like I know what I'm talking about.
So anyway, I began writing a follow up, setting out to educate the non-initiated about the whats and hows of beer. Thinking it would be a great idea to try to talk in a clear and easy way about how what goes into a beer affects what it tastes like, that knowing about these things would help people nail down some flavors they liked and find other beers with similar builds. After all, everyone knows that wine is made of grapes and no one thinks twice about ordering a wine while out for dinner: "I like red wine and robust seems like a good word, please give me this red wine". But after reworking that about 3 times I felt like I was at an impasse. And I think that's because I forgot to answer something very important: Why beer?
Because beer is cool, and I like it.
Alright so that's a cop out, but the fact that beer exists at all is pretty amazing, given the process. Especially when you consider that people have been making beer intentionally or not for some 7000-9000 years and the act predates the written word. There is a lot of cool history that follows the making of beer. But really drinking it is what makes it fun. Beer is a phenomenal confluence of so many little details that produce an incredibly tasty beverage, and there's so much variety in beer that I really think there's something for everyone. Nothing tastes like beer and one beer can not resemble any other beer at all.
Beer is a simple thing that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Beer is so simple that in the late 1400s the Germans were able to decree that only 3 ingredients were to be used in the brewing of beer: Water, Hops, and Malted Barley. Yeast hadn't been discovered yet, we just knew that beer fermented. But that's it, and for the most part these ingredients still make up the majority of any beer brewed in the world.
And that's the beauty of it to me...that I can decide on any given day that I would like to drink a beer that tastes like sweet orange zest and go to the store and buy a Belgian Witbier. The next day, maybe I want a beer that tastes like caramel and toffee and get a Scotch Ale, or maybe I've decided that I'm an adult so if I want to, I can have an entire wedge of brie for dinner so I go out and buy a bottle of a Rauchbier (a German style known for using heavily smoked malts, giving the beer a profoundly smokey and meaty flavor) which pairs great with creamy cheeses.
That variety is why I think beer and the associated community is such a great thing to be part of, but also what makes me a little sad when people get turned off to beer because they're not aware what they're drinking is actually an extreme representation of one facet of beer. There's so much else going on that I feel like so much focus on the one style does beer a disservice. And that's why I wanted to do a Beer 101 post/series, to talk simply about the "how" of all the different kinds of beer and hopefully give people an idea of beer beyond simple styles.
So that's why. See you in another 12 re-writes.
--PXA
I once saw someone refer to Heady Topper as ho-hum because it's just another West-Coast-Style Double IPA, like any produced by a dozen other local breweries on that side of the country and the only reason it was being paid attention was because it was produced in Vermont instead of San Diego. My own feelings about the beer aside, we have to admit that Double IPA is an extreme style and there are people complaining that this beer is not extreme enough to stand out in its category and warrant as much praise as it gets. I can't even begin to imagine how I would have reacted to something with that much raw hop power 6 years ago, but now I'll gladly sip a can of it and pick it apart and feel like I know what I'm talking about.
Because beer is cool, and I like it.
Beer is a simple thing that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Beer is so simple that in the late 1400s the Germans were able to decree that only 3 ingredients were to be used in the brewing of beer: Water, Hops, and Malted Barley. Yeast hadn't been discovered yet, we just knew that beer fermented. But that's it, and for the most part these ingredients still make up the majority of any beer brewed in the world.
And that's the beauty of it to me...that I can decide on any given day that I would like to drink a beer that tastes like sweet orange zest and go to the store and buy a Belgian Witbier. The next day, maybe I want a beer that tastes like caramel and toffee and get a Scotch Ale, or maybe I've decided that I'm an adult so if I want to, I can have an entire wedge of brie for dinner so I go out and buy a bottle of a Rauchbier (a German style known for using heavily smoked malts, giving the beer a profoundly smokey and meaty flavor) which pairs great with creamy cheeses.
That variety is why I think beer and the associated community is such a great thing to be part of, but also what makes me a little sad when people get turned off to beer because they're not aware what they're drinking is actually an extreme representation of one facet of beer. There's so much else going on that I feel like so much focus on the one style does beer a disservice. And that's why I wanted to do a Beer 101 post/series, to talk simply about the "how" of all the different kinds of beer and hopefully give people an idea of beer beyond simple styles.
So that's why. See you in another 12 re-writes.
--PXA
Monday, March 3, 2014
Horror Off-Season: Devil's Due
Devil's Due was released in early 2014, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett who did one of the more fun shorts in V/H/S, it's writer Lindsay Devlin's debut film.
It's a found-footage movie focusing on newlyweds Zach and Samantha McCall, who become pregnant after their honeymoon. The initial camera is a small handheld bought by Zach so he can document their new life together, but is then upgraded to a multi-camera setup hidden throughout the couple's house.
Before I dive in, I should say that this should probably be read with a spoiler warning in effect. I don't know how much of this movie was intended to remain a mystery since the trailer was pretty front-and-center, but I don't want anyone mad I spoiled this so...be warned.
What goes on in this movie is basically: While on honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, the aforementioned newlywed couple wind up in an underground party where they're taken and some ceremony is performed on the wife. Waking up with severe hangovers they assume they partied too hard and hurry to make their plane home. A few weeks later Samantha discovers she's pregnant. Strange things begin to go on and she has a lot of issues somewhere between "rough pregnancy" and "insane demonic possession things are not alright why am I carving symbols on the floor and beating up my cousins?". As things progress, a cult inhabits the abandoned house at the end of the street and places multiple hidden cameras in the McCall's house to monitor Samantha as they wait for her to bring the anti-christ to term.
In a lot of ways I feel like Devil's Due is like a modernized, really crappy take on the Rosemary's Baby-type story. The found-footage aesthetic being one of the things most responsible for bringing down the movie. All the individual pieces feel like they could have come together into a decent story. The Rosemary's Baby story is a really good place to start from for a horror movie because it is an alien and scary thing. You'd need to trust people who've done this before, but what if you feel like they're not on the level? Devil's Due does get points for a minor plot element where the original OB/GYN is replaced after the first appointment. While it's cheese stuffing added to the cult plot, it definitely ramps up the wife's paranoia and it's nice to have a reason for the woman's increasing paranoia in a horror movie. Some of the character and relationship beats are a bit over the top, but it doesn't stick with me nearly as much as the execution.
All the elements present are pretty stock and glossy, but it feels like the movie was never planned to be a found-footage movie, or at very least whoever decided to do it that way didn't really feel committed to it. The problem is that found-footage movies, when they work, work by bringing the audience into the small world of the characters. You stay set in a smaller location...a room, a single house, maybe the town.. When it feels natural that this could be someone's home movies happening to catch something going horribly wrong, found-footage works. This is why Cannibal Holocaust worked, this is why Paranormal Activity worked, why Europa Report worked, etc.
When found-footage doesn't work, more often than not, it's because something's broken immersion. This tends to be the "Why is he filming that?" or "How is he still holding the camera up?" moment where you tend to wonder why any rational person would film certain really uninteresting or awkward things, or you're amazed at this person's dedication to holding a camera up at eye level and facing forward while running for dear life. Also, found-footage movies almost always have some pretext under which the footage was actually found. However, in Devil's Due the footage comes from wherever it needs to come from without rationalization. The footage sources in this movie are:
- Husband's camera
- "Adventure Camera" mounted to husband's chest
- Hidden cameras placed in the house by the cult
- Security camera in a grocery store
- Interrogation camera in a police department
- Some random kids' camera
- Another vacationing couple's camera
All the questions just make it feel like they were lazy and wanted to do it as found-footage because it's cool and not because of any of the advantages the style gets you.
Makes me sad.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
The Last of Us experience
Ok, so this isn't the video game writing I normally do, but I felt like I needed to write something about my experience around this game. I'm still working on another beer article, but motivation is scarce. This has been on my mind a lot lately and I wanted to get it out there quickly, so this is a barely editing accounting of my experience buying and playing The Last of Us. I'll admit to not being very far in the game, but there's a reason for that.
So The Last of Us is a Playstation 3 exclusive game developed by Naughty Dog, and it was released in the US on June 14th. I ordered the game on June 15th via some odd configuration of eBay and newegg which I saw posted on reddit.com/r/gamedeals. I'm generally a patient gamer but the hype around the game and the fact I could get it for an entirely reasonable price made me go for it. I got the game on the 18th with plans to play it the evening of the 19th.
Knowing the game was going to need to be updating immediately, I put the disc in and told it to download and install the patch. My 6 months of PS3 ownership have taught me that the PS3 is now going to be absolutely useless until it's done which could be upwards of an hour from now. So later that night I went to check on the status and it was done. It was too late to play, so I turned off the console.
The next day, I went to play the game after work only to discover that my PS3 controller had run down its battery. I'm told that keeping a USB hub near your sofa to charge your PS3 controllers is all the rage nowadays, but I've apparently not kept up with the times and the closest place for me to charge my controller is the PS3 itself using the 3 foot cable that ships with the console. My hopes dashed, I plugged the controller in to charge and played some Mass Effect on Xbox.
The next day I went again to play using my freshly charged controller. Starting the game yields a loading screen for a few minutes before bringing up the menu which was peaceful, yet sparse and showing signs of decay. Selecting new game yields another loading screen. This one is all black apart from some sparkles that look like they could turn into the PS3 main menu at any point. After a minute or two some "Loading..." text appears in the bottom right corner with a percentage that slowly climbs. When the percentage finally reaches 100%, the loading screen starts it again. A few more 0-100 runs of the "Loading..." text and the opening cinematic finally begins.
So I play the game, and it's pretty well done. A little heavy on the cutscenes, but still not bad. Then I start to get into the main part of the gameplay and realize I'm really bad at this. But I'm not bad at this because I don't understand what to do, I'm bad at this because the control scheme is fucking me up. I feel like the game really demands I know the controls pretty immediately. I find whenever I try to be really stealthy I'll be trying to sneak up on a guy and then football victory-check a brick directly into the ground or lunge at the empty space next to someone. It's pretty frustrating. And if there's more than 2-3 bad guys I'm generally better off just starting a huge fight and beating everyone to death with a board instead of taking them out one at a time. I tried to take out that fucking Clicker in the beginning of the MBTA station level right before the Goldstone building like 4 times and failing at it before I just shot it in the head a few times then Molotov'd the mob that ran in. That pissed me off because that is not how I want to play this game.
Rewinding a bit, a few hours before that point I decided I want to save, in case I was about to do something totally boneheaded and I didn't want to restart the entire section. Now I stare at a message saying "Autosaving still in progress" for a minute, then an unresponsive options menu for a bit with several messages about Autosaving before finally being allowed to select a savegame file. It's around this point that my girlfriend casually quips, "This got 10 out of 10?"
I want to bring this up in relation to a 9 out of 10 game that I played on the Xbox 360: Batman Arkham City.
I bought Arkham City several months after release date from a gamestop and brought the disc home. I put it into the Xbox and turned on the controller. I don't think the controller had been dead, but if it had I have plenty of rechargeable batteries around because I use them in: My wireless mouse, other Xbox controllers, digital cameras, digital scale, TV remote control, my brewing thermometer, and a few other things I'm sure I've forgotten.
I intend to play the game tonight, but am greeted by an update screen. Which is no big deal to me, I know that historically the Xbox will finish updating in under a minute. My experience has not led me astray and the game is ready to play and at the menu before I can think about how uncomfortable my couch is. I start a new game and with less than 30 seconds of loading, the opening cinematic starts. I then proceed to play the fuck out Arkham City and continually revisit the game.
This experience also applies to every Xbox 360 game I have played: Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed(s), etc, while a similar "Oh Gods I hope it doesn't need to update" scenario unfolds every time I try to play something on the PS3.
Now the point:
I firmly believe that the strength of a console lies in its games. Graphics and capabilities are generally equal and have been for a generation or two, so the exclusives and online services are where the difference is made. I am not a Xbox fanboy or part of the PC master race. But, I find the PS3 and incredibly inconvenient console to use. It seems like there is no such thing as deciding to play a game and then playing it on the PS3. The console feels replete with loading screens and saving progress bars. If there is an update, you might as well cancel your plans. And the lack of replaceable batteries in the controllers will never fail to aggravate me. It's a wireless freaking controller, it feels like it's missed the point if I have to plug it in to use it.
I firmly believe the experience of The Last of Us is being hindered by its console exclusivity. I think the PS3 is holding me back from really enjoying the game and that sucks. I'm not going to say I'd be able to control it better if I were on a PC or Xbox 360, that's unfair. But the time and waiting I had to put into playing the game at all, and the time I need to spend waiting for the game to be ready for me to play it every single time I want to really saps the enjoyment. This is compounded by the fact that the platform seems to continually pull me out of the game whenever I save.
I'm hoping they eventually port this because I'd like to see how it fairs without the PS3 getting in the way because it really feels like it does.
So The Last of Us is a Playstation 3 exclusive game developed by Naughty Dog, and it was released in the US on June 14th. I ordered the game on June 15th via some odd configuration of eBay and newegg which I saw posted on reddit.com/r/gamedeals. I'm generally a patient gamer but the hype around the game and the fact I could get it for an entirely reasonable price made me go for it. I got the game on the 18th with plans to play it the evening of the 19th.
Knowing the game was going to need to be updating immediately, I put the disc in and told it to download and install the patch. My 6 months of PS3 ownership have taught me that the PS3 is now going to be absolutely useless until it's done which could be upwards of an hour from now. So later that night I went to check on the status and it was done. It was too late to play, so I turned off the console.
The next day, I went to play the game after work only to discover that my PS3 controller had run down its battery. I'm told that keeping a USB hub near your sofa to charge your PS3 controllers is all the rage nowadays, but I've apparently not kept up with the times and the closest place for me to charge my controller is the PS3 itself using the 3 foot cable that ships with the console. My hopes dashed, I plugged the controller in to charge and played some Mass Effect on Xbox.
The next day I went again to play using my freshly charged controller. Starting the game yields a loading screen for a few minutes before bringing up the menu which was peaceful, yet sparse and showing signs of decay. Selecting new game yields another loading screen. This one is all black apart from some sparkles that look like they could turn into the PS3 main menu at any point. After a minute or two some "Loading..." text appears in the bottom right corner with a percentage that slowly climbs. When the percentage finally reaches 100%, the loading screen starts it again. A few more 0-100 runs of the "Loading..." text and the opening cinematic finally begins.
So I play the game, and it's pretty well done. A little heavy on the cutscenes, but still not bad. Then I start to get into the main part of the gameplay and realize I'm really bad at this. But I'm not bad at this because I don't understand what to do, I'm bad at this because the control scheme is fucking me up. I feel like the game really demands I know the controls pretty immediately. I find whenever I try to be really stealthy I'll be trying to sneak up on a guy and then football victory-check a brick directly into the ground or lunge at the empty space next to someone. It's pretty frustrating. And if there's more than 2-3 bad guys I'm generally better off just starting a huge fight and beating everyone to death with a board instead of taking them out one at a time. I tried to take out that fucking Clicker in the beginning of the MBTA station level right before the Goldstone building like 4 times and failing at it before I just shot it in the head a few times then Molotov'd the mob that ran in. That pissed me off because that is not how I want to play this game.
Rewinding a bit, a few hours before that point I decided I want to save, in case I was about to do something totally boneheaded and I didn't want to restart the entire section. Now I stare at a message saying "Autosaving still in progress" for a minute, then an unresponsive options menu for a bit with several messages about Autosaving before finally being allowed to select a savegame file. It's around this point that my girlfriend casually quips, "This got 10 out of 10?"
I want to bring this up in relation to a 9 out of 10 game that I played on the Xbox 360: Batman Arkham City.
I bought Arkham City several months after release date from a gamestop and brought the disc home. I put it into the Xbox and turned on the controller. I don't think the controller had been dead, but if it had I have plenty of rechargeable batteries around because I use them in: My wireless mouse, other Xbox controllers, digital cameras, digital scale, TV remote control, my brewing thermometer, and a few other things I'm sure I've forgotten.
I intend to play the game tonight, but am greeted by an update screen. Which is no big deal to me, I know that historically the Xbox will finish updating in under a minute. My experience has not led me astray and the game is ready to play and at the menu before I can think about how uncomfortable my couch is. I start a new game and with less than 30 seconds of loading, the opening cinematic starts. I then proceed to play the fuck out Arkham City and continually revisit the game.
This experience also applies to every Xbox 360 game I have played: Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed(s), etc, while a similar "Oh Gods I hope it doesn't need to update" scenario unfolds every time I try to play something on the PS3.
Now the point:
I firmly believe that the strength of a console lies in its games. Graphics and capabilities are generally equal and have been for a generation or two, so the exclusives and online services are where the difference is made. I am not a Xbox fanboy or part of the PC master race. But, I find the PS3 and incredibly inconvenient console to use. It seems like there is no such thing as deciding to play a game and then playing it on the PS3. The console feels replete with loading screens and saving progress bars. If there is an update, you might as well cancel your plans. And the lack of replaceable batteries in the controllers will never fail to aggravate me. It's a wireless freaking controller, it feels like it's missed the point if I have to plug it in to use it.
I firmly believe the experience of The Last of Us is being hindered by its console exclusivity. I think the PS3 is holding me back from really enjoying the game and that sucks. I'm not going to say I'd be able to control it better if I were on a PC or Xbox 360, that's unfair. But the time and waiting I had to put into playing the game at all, and the time I need to spend waiting for the game to be ready for me to play it every single time I want to really saps the enjoyment. This is compounded by the fact that the platform seems to continually pull me out of the game whenever I save.
I'm hoping they eventually port this because I'd like to see how it fairs without the PS3 getting in the way because it really feels like it does.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
The Beerening: On craft beer, beer styles, and how to "get into" beer
I've been thinking about the topic of introducing what I think is good beer to my friends for a long time, however it's very relevant at the time of writing since there have recently been a slew of articles with insider and outsider perceptions of what craft beer looks like and what it's like to get into. The actual points of view range from "Why does beer have to be so fancy, what have you guys done?" to "Craft beer has too many snobs, we need to chill" to a recent article that "Craft beer's obsession with extreme beers is giving craft beer culture a bad rep". But the point is that it's interesting, it's generating discussions which could get people into beer. Advertising and beerfests and brunches and all that, I don't think, get people into beer. Other people who genuinely like beer are what get people into beer.
But specifically I wanted to address some points I had about what seems to have been a pretty contentious style recently: The American IPA.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale, the history of it has a few origin stories, and some conflicting marketing and research complicating things. From what I've heard a great book that straightens the whole mess out is "IPA!" by Mitch Steele. However, I haven't had a chance to read it. Mitch's presentation at last year's NHC was very good though. I don't want to get too historic but basically the strength of the IPA as a style is dependent on the strength of your regions hop plants, and America has done some crazy things with hops between great growing conditions and breeding programs. It was a great way we could call beers "ours", by using our fresh great new American hops that smelled like pine trees and oranges and mangoes (and onions and cat pee depending who you ask). I don't know specifically what the IPA was like in pre-prohibition America but I know that post-prohibition we basically made American Lager and copied a few UK styles (like the IPA). But the IPA of the time wasn't what people wanted. It had morphed into a lower ABV, maltier, more subtle thing and lager was easier to drink. So as Lager became The American beer other beers fell to the wayside, and eventually we hit rock bottom in 1980.
When the US craft brewing scene began to resurrect itself it effectively did it with the Pale Ale and the IPA. A lot of people credit Sierra Nevada with beginning the resurgence, though I've also heard some of the credit go to Anchor Steam. It obviously appealed to a lot of people and now IPA is the most popular style of beer in the country. With that popularity comes a lot of breweries hoping to make themselves a reputation on a flagship IPA. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it flops, but the net result is a lot of creative people doing whatever they can think of the make their mark on IPA. I love the variety and a lot of it is regional which harkens back to a pre-modern notion of styles as beer brewed to the tastes and strengths of a particular region. But where I take issue is that the significant buzz around a single style like this has a tendency to obscure other, just as worthy, beers.
If you follow the larger online beer discussion the most extreme beers continually dominate the conversation. Which is fine since to a degree we're all beer nerds trying to find the next must-have, but when you picture yourself on the outside looking in it's a very different picture.
We're in a position now where craft beer is a big deal. Newcomers are hearing about craft beer and trying to find a good inroad. This is an huge contrast to when I got into beer 7-8 years ago when an "amazing" beer section was 3 shelves in the back of the store. I got into beer by spending a ton of money on beer I knew nothing about, and it was a really expensive way to learn about my tastes and styles. But I was young, just turned 21 and had my first real job so I was Capital-S Stupid with my money. I still spend a ton of money on beer, but I know what I'm getting into now. There are a lot of people who are looking at craft beer who are way smarter than I was and they won't do that, they're the people who want to look around the clubhouse a little and tour the gym before they decide if they want to join. And our club looks like a bunch of folks swimming around in a giant pile of green, sticky, hop cones.
The majority of our internal conversation is over hoppier beers. Specifically a very certain type of IPA, the majority of which is produced on the West Coast of the country. Where can I find Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger is about to be tapped. Green Flash puts hops in the beer 8 times. This bar is using a randall (a device which is used to force pressurized carbonated beer through a chamber of hops or other herbs/spices on the way to the glass for the freshest flavor)! I'll never claim that's all there is, because there's also a lot of discussion about new beers, seasonals (especially summer), oaked stuff, wild & sour beers, etc. And that's fine, but from the outside looking in you'd get a very skewed picture.
Further complicating the issue is beer rating sites, beer blogs and people's top 10 beer lists. If you, as a novice, wanting to see what's good you might look at a list of someone who seems to know what they're talking about. Odds are you will find extreme IPAs and Double IPAs. I'm not going to say that this is incorrect by any stretch but there's an element of hype that pushes these highly rated beers even higher on community sites (though personal lists may be more even-handed). Someone with context seeking out these beers because they're rated so highly could have a rough surprise.
While I do agree that the insane hype surrounding the Double IPA is not warranted, I'm not going to say we should stop talking about it so we don't turn people off. Just maybe stop talking about it so loudly so it doesn't look like we're saying it's the best beer in all creation.
Put another way: We in beer have a tendency to think of "beer" as it stands in the public consciousness as pale and bland, while craft beer is flavor. We tend to want to impress other people with the great flavors we have in craft beer and so try to trot out what we think our best flavors are, and a lot of people really like IPAs. But we forget that variety and quality is what makes craft beer something we enjoy, not always amazing and unique flavors. So we bungle the attempt at putting our best foot forward by putting our favorite beer forward, and that's not always the best approach.
So since this post thus far has been mostly reiteration, what do I think is the right way to go about this? Friendly guidance. People need to know that craft beer is about quality and variety, they need to be able to figure out ways to relate the flavors present in that variety to things they already know. Everyone knows that wine is made of grapes, but people have less of an idea of the variety of grains you can make beer out of. When people are interested in our beer we can't be absolute with them since it's all about taste. My favorite beer probably isn't yours. We cannot say "This IPA is AMAZING" to someone who doesn't have the context to understand IPA in the realm of beer, we have to know what flavors they might like and then can point out great beers in those styles. We also need to do away with misconceptions like hoppy == bitter and dark == heavy. But telling people they are wrong isn't going to work. If you're drinking with someone and they say they don't want your dry Irish stout because dark beers are too heavy, offer them a contrast like a black IPA that is generally crisp and refreshing with a touch of roastiness or something lighter colored that they might be more receptive to but still shares some flavors with stout like a scotch ale or an Irish red.
In short, beer is about dialog and for once people outside of craft beer are starting that dialog. We have a great chance not to blow it by setting aside our personal favorites and using our knowledge to find the beer for them.
Drink on!
And, Cheers!
--PXA
(p.s. my favorite beer is Trappist Rochefort #8)
But specifically I wanted to address some points I had about what seems to have been a pretty contentious style recently: The American IPA.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale, the history of it has a few origin stories, and some conflicting marketing and research complicating things. From what I've heard a great book that straightens the whole mess out is "IPA!" by Mitch Steele. However, I haven't had a chance to read it. Mitch's presentation at last year's NHC was very good though. I don't want to get too historic but basically the strength of the IPA as a style is dependent on the strength of your regions hop plants, and America has done some crazy things with hops between great growing conditions and breeding programs. It was a great way we could call beers "ours", by using our fresh great new American hops that smelled like pine trees and oranges and mangoes (and onions and cat pee depending who you ask). I don't know specifically what the IPA was like in pre-prohibition America but I know that post-prohibition we basically made American Lager and copied a few UK styles (like the IPA). But the IPA of the time wasn't what people wanted. It had morphed into a lower ABV, maltier, more subtle thing and lager was easier to drink. So as Lager became The American beer other beers fell to the wayside, and eventually we hit rock bottom in 1980.
When the US craft brewing scene began to resurrect itself it effectively did it with the Pale Ale and the IPA. A lot of people credit Sierra Nevada with beginning the resurgence, though I've also heard some of the credit go to Anchor Steam. It obviously appealed to a lot of people and now IPA is the most popular style of beer in the country. With that popularity comes a lot of breweries hoping to make themselves a reputation on a flagship IPA. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it flops, but the net result is a lot of creative people doing whatever they can think of the make their mark on IPA. I love the variety and a lot of it is regional which harkens back to a pre-modern notion of styles as beer brewed to the tastes and strengths of a particular region. But where I take issue is that the significant buzz around a single style like this has a tendency to obscure other, just as worthy, beers.
If you follow the larger online beer discussion the most extreme beers continually dominate the conversation. Which is fine since to a degree we're all beer nerds trying to find the next must-have, but when you picture yourself on the outside looking in it's a very different picture.
We're in a position now where craft beer is a big deal. Newcomers are hearing about craft beer and trying to find a good inroad. This is an huge contrast to when I got into beer 7-8 years ago when an "amazing" beer section was 3 shelves in the back of the store. I got into beer by spending a ton of money on beer I knew nothing about, and it was a really expensive way to learn about my tastes and styles. But I was young, just turned 21 and had my first real job so I was Capital-S Stupid with my money. I still spend a ton of money on beer, but I know what I'm getting into now. There are a lot of people who are looking at craft beer who are way smarter than I was and they won't do that, they're the people who want to look around the clubhouse a little and tour the gym before they decide if they want to join. And our club looks like a bunch of folks swimming around in a giant pile of green, sticky, hop cones.
The majority of our internal conversation is over hoppier beers. Specifically a very certain type of IPA, the majority of which is produced on the West Coast of the country. Where can I find Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger is about to be tapped. Green Flash puts hops in the beer 8 times. This bar is using a randall (a device which is used to force pressurized carbonated beer through a chamber of hops or other herbs/spices on the way to the glass for the freshest flavor)! I'll never claim that's all there is, because there's also a lot of discussion about new beers, seasonals (especially summer), oaked stuff, wild & sour beers, etc. And that's fine, but from the outside looking in you'd get a very skewed picture.
Further complicating the issue is beer rating sites, beer blogs and people's top 10 beer lists. If you, as a novice, wanting to see what's good you might look at a list of someone who seems to know what they're talking about. Odds are you will find extreme IPAs and Double IPAs. I'm not going to say that this is incorrect by any stretch but there's an element of hype that pushes these highly rated beers even higher on community sites (though personal lists may be more even-handed). Someone with context seeking out these beers because they're rated so highly could have a rough surprise.
While I do agree that the insane hype surrounding the Double IPA is not warranted, I'm not going to say we should stop talking about it so we don't turn people off. Just maybe stop talking about it so loudly so it doesn't look like we're saying it's the best beer in all creation.
Put another way: We in beer have a tendency to think of "beer" as it stands in the public consciousness as pale and bland, while craft beer is flavor. We tend to want to impress other people with the great flavors we have in craft beer and so try to trot out what we think our best flavors are, and a lot of people really like IPAs. But we forget that variety and quality is what makes craft beer something we enjoy, not always amazing and unique flavors. So we bungle the attempt at putting our best foot forward by putting our favorite beer forward, and that's not always the best approach.
So since this post thus far has been mostly reiteration, what do I think is the right way to go about this? Friendly guidance. People need to know that craft beer is about quality and variety, they need to be able to figure out ways to relate the flavors present in that variety to things they already know. Everyone knows that wine is made of grapes, but people have less of an idea of the variety of grains you can make beer out of. When people are interested in our beer we can't be absolute with them since it's all about taste. My favorite beer probably isn't yours. We cannot say "This IPA is AMAZING" to someone who doesn't have the context to understand IPA in the realm of beer, we have to know what flavors they might like and then can point out great beers in those styles. We also need to do away with misconceptions like hoppy == bitter and dark == heavy. But telling people they are wrong isn't going to work. If you're drinking with someone and they say they don't want your dry Irish stout because dark beers are too heavy, offer them a contrast like a black IPA that is generally crisp and refreshing with a touch of roastiness or something lighter colored that they might be more receptive to but still shares some flavors with stout like a scotch ale or an Irish red.
In short, beer is about dialog and for once people outside of craft beer are starting that dialog. We have a great chance not to blow it by setting aside our personal favorites and using our knowledge to find the beer for them.
Drink on!
And, Cheers!
--PXA
(p.s. my favorite beer is Trappist Rochefort #8)
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
The Dead Space 3 demo
I know I'm a bit late to the game but I finally got a chance to play the Dead Space 3 demo on Xbox. Most of this post is going to be mentions of things I noticed while playing. Some items will be discussed at more detail, but not all.
The first thing I notice is the interesting change in menu style. Previous Dead Space installments used a menu style evocative of a RIG-style computer interface with a nebulous background of shifting tones and shapes. 3's menu panels are on large cross-sectional slices of what appears to be a necromorph or some other organic thing frozen in a block of ice. I suppose if I were trying to read into it I'd draw a parallel between the more concrete and grounded menu system with the terrestrial basis of the game. Dead Space 1 was entirely in space except for the last level and so far Dead Space 2 has been all in space as well (You can follow that playthrough on youtube). Either way, it's got a lot of motion and is very cool to watch although I can see possibly being annoyed at the length of some of the animations.
Immediately after the menus I noticed the focus on music. The previous Dead Space installments used music as a background element, and they were very effective with it. The menu is subtle and unnerving but very much ambient, it's tense in the battle scenes and generally serves purpose...but I couldn't hum you the Dead Space theme. This new game puts the music front and center with a discernible theme in the menu, however it sounds like a poor man's Batman theme (Nolan era films, possibly including Arkham games). Not that it's bad since it's a great theme and other recent movie themes have lifted from it somewhat and it's possible it lifted its inspiration from something I can't recall, it's just very reminiscent and I couldn't stop noticing it.
Onto the actual gameplay, the game begins with Isaac pulling a Luke in the Wampa cave. Apparently he somehow ended up upside down when his ship crashed following Dead Space 2. Isaac is either the unluckiest or the LUCKIEST S.O.B. ever. He keeps running into these Necromorph outbreaks and somehow surviving them. Deciding he's the unluckiest, he assumes that if he survived everyone else is probably safe and begins to look for them.
I don't know that I can take full credit for this as I already saw Chris of gamertagged notice that Isaac shields his face with his hand while wearing his face-shielding helmet in the snow storm.
The early game in general is a lot more linear that previous installments, I barely felt like activating the beacon. The outdoor texture is quite well done and they have an interesting looking snow effect for when you're walking, though I do hope they make it look less lumpy for the final release. The footprints look good. It's a nice way to conceal the borders of the level, but I think in some spots they go overboard. There are a few spots where you can see the path really well, then take a few steps forward and now the snow is everywhere and you can't see more than 3 feet. It's not time based because it doesn't go away until you back up.
The physics system for loose objects on the ground has been upgraded, though still seems a little rough. This game involves the standard "Isaac stomp all boxes on the ground to receive goodies" mechanic, but the boxes are a bit more jiggly than they used to be. Stomping can sometimes just move the box. Also, the engine is so picky that when Isaac raises his foot to do said stomp, it can result in kicking the box like a soccer ball. At one point Isaac just straight up punted a box off the side of a cliff because of this. It was actually really funny.
The quicktime events the game uses are interesting. I had to do the opening one where you climb through the falling vehicle cab 3 times because I was having a hard time figuring out if the panicked and flashing buttons meant to tap, hold, or spam. The arrow for which direction to push the joy stick is hard to pick out until you realize what it means and the constant flashing is confusing. It turns out you HOLD the joystick even though it's flashing and spam the buttons because it's flashing.
The snowy terrain leads to some interesting potential where enemies literally pop up through the snow, but since this is Dead Space I have the sense they're going to beat the gimmick like a red headed step-child. The enemies are more charred looking and smaller than enemies in previous Dead Space games. They're all wearing snowsuits and from what I remember don't have many extra limbs. Some enemies will break in half causing 3 huge tentacles to spew from their waist. I'm not sure if this is because of a specific kill type or enemy type since there's a lot less differentiation...or the demo primary included this enemy type with a few variations. There are also pure human enemies due to the planet magically being a Unitology stronghold or something. There are some humans who are neutral to you and another faction that wants you dead. Also the necromorphs.
Initially the game invited a lot of comparison to John Carpenter's The Thing, and I kindof wanted to think it too, especially when I first ran into the co-op character but I can't see it happening. The Thing is all about slow tension and paranoia, a sense of isolation. With as much action as the series involves at this point I don't think they could pull it off. First off, Carver is the other player character. They simply couldn't have the character betray Isaac or be implied to be an enemy which removes the paranoia that could result from not knowing if your friend was really on your side. Sure they can do this with some of the other characters, but we're kindof used to that twist by this point in the series...it's happened in every game so far. Also, there are so many necromorphs, and random human allies and enemies that show up and fight you or shout and die by a scripted event that I don't feel isolated at all as Isaac. I feel like Doomguy. It's finally gotten to the point where I am no longer even pretending to cautiously move down a hallway. I am Isaac-Fucking-Clarke with advanced degrees in engineering YOUR ASS TO BE KICKED!!!!!!RAAARGH!!!!1oneshift
I'll still have to decide if the game is worth buying initially. I kindof want to play it on Let's Drink to Gaming, but I don't know if it's worth it. EA's doing a lot of stupid stuff around the game that I don't want to support so I may wait a few months until it goes on sale. Another option would be buying it and immediately marathoning the whole thing in a single sitting live on twitch.tv. That's sort of outlandish and would probably take 12 hours or more given the times on howlongtobeat.com for Dead Space 1 and 2. Maybe I'll ask twitter to see if there's interest in it.
Anyway, that's what I thought of while playing the demo. Take from it what you will.
The first thing I notice is the interesting change in menu style. Previous Dead Space installments used a menu style evocative of a RIG-style computer interface with a nebulous background of shifting tones and shapes. 3's menu panels are on large cross-sectional slices of what appears to be a necromorph or some other organic thing frozen in a block of ice. I suppose if I were trying to read into it I'd draw a parallel between the more concrete and grounded menu system with the terrestrial basis of the game. Dead Space 1 was entirely in space except for the last level and so far Dead Space 2 has been all in space as well (You can follow that playthrough on youtube). Either way, it's got a lot of motion and is very cool to watch although I can see possibly being annoyed at the length of some of the animations.
Immediately after the menus I noticed the focus on music. The previous Dead Space installments used music as a background element, and they were very effective with it. The menu is subtle and unnerving but very much ambient, it's tense in the battle scenes and generally serves purpose...but I couldn't hum you the Dead Space theme. This new game puts the music front and center with a discernible theme in the menu, however it sounds like a poor man's Batman theme (Nolan era films, possibly including Arkham games). Not that it's bad since it's a great theme and other recent movie themes have lifted from it somewhat and it's possible it lifted its inspiration from something I can't recall, it's just very reminiscent and I couldn't stop noticing it.
Onto the actual gameplay, the game begins with Isaac pulling a Luke in the Wampa cave. Apparently he somehow ended up upside down when his ship crashed following Dead Space 2. Isaac is either the unluckiest or the LUCKIEST S.O.B. ever. He keeps running into these Necromorph outbreaks and somehow surviving them. Deciding he's the unluckiest, he assumes that if he survived everyone else is probably safe and begins to look for them.
I don't know that I can take full credit for this as I already saw Chris of gamertagged notice that Isaac shields his face with his hand while wearing his face-shielding helmet in the snow storm.
The early game in general is a lot more linear that previous installments, I barely felt like activating the beacon. The outdoor texture is quite well done and they have an interesting looking snow effect for when you're walking, though I do hope they make it look less lumpy for the final release. The footprints look good. It's a nice way to conceal the borders of the level, but I think in some spots they go overboard. There are a few spots where you can see the path really well, then take a few steps forward and now the snow is everywhere and you can't see more than 3 feet. It's not time based because it doesn't go away until you back up.
The physics system for loose objects on the ground has been upgraded, though still seems a little rough. This game involves the standard "Isaac stomp all boxes on the ground to receive goodies" mechanic, but the boxes are a bit more jiggly than they used to be. Stomping can sometimes just move the box. Also, the engine is so picky that when Isaac raises his foot to do said stomp, it can result in kicking the box like a soccer ball. At one point Isaac just straight up punted a box off the side of a cliff because of this. It was actually really funny.
The quicktime events the game uses are interesting. I had to do the opening one where you climb through the falling vehicle cab 3 times because I was having a hard time figuring out if the panicked and flashing buttons meant to tap, hold, or spam. The arrow for which direction to push the joy stick is hard to pick out until you realize what it means and the constant flashing is confusing. It turns out you HOLD the joystick even though it's flashing and spam the buttons because it's flashing.
The snowy terrain leads to some interesting potential where enemies literally pop up through the snow, but since this is Dead Space I have the sense they're going to beat the gimmick like a red headed step-child. The enemies are more charred looking and smaller than enemies in previous Dead Space games. They're all wearing snowsuits and from what I remember don't have many extra limbs. Some enemies will break in half causing 3 huge tentacles to spew from their waist. I'm not sure if this is because of a specific kill type or enemy type since there's a lot less differentiation...or the demo primary included this enemy type with a few variations. There are also pure human enemies due to the planet magically being a Unitology stronghold or something. There are some humans who are neutral to you and another faction that wants you dead. Also the necromorphs.
Initially the game invited a lot of comparison to John Carpenter's The Thing, and I kindof wanted to think it too, especially when I first ran into the co-op character but I can't see it happening. The Thing is all about slow tension and paranoia, a sense of isolation. With as much action as the series involves at this point I don't think they could pull it off. First off, Carver is the other player character. They simply couldn't have the character betray Isaac or be implied to be an enemy which removes the paranoia that could result from not knowing if your friend was really on your side. Sure they can do this with some of the other characters, but we're kindof used to that twist by this point in the series...it's happened in every game so far. Also, there are so many necromorphs, and random human allies and enemies that show up and fight you or shout and die by a scripted event that I don't feel isolated at all as Isaac. I feel like Doomguy. It's finally gotten to the point where I am no longer even pretending to cautiously move down a hallway. I am Isaac-Fucking-Clarke with advanced degrees in engineering YOUR ASS TO BE KICKED!!!!!!RAAARGH!!!!1oneshift
I'll still have to decide if the game is worth buying initially. I kindof want to play it on Let's Drink to Gaming, but I don't know if it's worth it. EA's doing a lot of stupid stuff around the game that I don't want to support so I may wait a few months until it goes on sale. Another option would be buying it and immediately marathoning the whole thing in a single sitting live on twitch.tv. That's sort of outlandish and would probably take 12 hours or more given the times on howlongtobeat.com for Dead Space 1 and 2. Maybe I'll ask twitter to see if there's interest in it.
Anyway, that's what I thought of while playing the demo. Take from it what you will.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
2013, Hello, how are you?
I had originally intended to write this around Christmas time to explain the radio silence on the site, but the holidays just get so incredibly busy I just couldn't find the time. So it's pretty late on New Year's Day and I figure I can write this pretty quickly.
2012 was a helluva year, it was the year I started trying to be a lot more regularly active on this site, writing the articles on Bro-horror and the video game articles about SCP-087 and Self-extension and the horror of Discovery. Also, a ton of movies.
The House at the end of the Street was probably the most disappointing movie I'd seen. I really ripped into it, and that may not have been fair but if I had seen this movie on Netflix instant I would have wandered off or found something else to watch.
I didn't write a full post about it, but The Woman in Black impressed the hell out of me. It was a bit of a comedy of errors trying to watch it, but on the 2nd attempt we got all the way through it and it was a great old-school horror movie. It had a lot of Thing-In-The-Background, Weird-Shape-In-The-Storm styles of scares. Almost no jump scares and false scares used well. I wasn't making nearly as many "Oh look it's Harry Potter" jokes as I was expecting, since the acting was actually not half-bad. I'm planning on getting this on DVD/Blu-Ray.
In other news I also went to the National Homebrewer's Convention this year. It was a wonderful experience, and also very educational. The 2013 Convention is going to be in Philly, and as usual you need an American Homebrewer's Association membership. If you brew ANYTHING, vinegar, kombucha, beer, wine, sake, etc. you should get an AHA membership. It's not expensive and they are doing good things for homebrewer's across the country.
Also in beer I made the official change to all-grain brewing and started kegging my homebrew. Kegging is much more satisfying than bottling, it's a worthwhile switch. In 2013 I'm switching from a braid filter to a false bottom. I recently re-attempted the Chocolate Orange Stout, but won't get to try that until 2013 as well. I'm also anticipating some sours beginning this year.
2012 also saw me traveling much more than I ever have before. As mentioned the NHC was in Seattle, so I had to fly there. I also went to Florida twice, once in February to visit my folks on vacation and then again in October for Halloween Horror Nights in Universal Studios. It was an incredible collection of haunted houses. The whole thing teemed of some very annoying people, but with a speed pass it was possible to see everything. All the haunted houses followed the same basic formula, which really good in some haunts and not so well in others but it was all really professional quality. I can only imagine the show will get better in 2013, though I'll probably get a multi-night pass and spread the visit out a bit.
However, one of the main reasons I haven't been writing as much is that I started a Youtube Channel. Currently the only show is is "Let's Drink to Gaming", which is a Let's Play-style show with themed cocktails. Check it out, the edges are still rough but the quality is improving. There are a few more things in planning, so stay tuned. It'll hopefully be interesting.
Anyway, that's some stuff that's been going on. Now I need to start getting used to writing 2013 on my checks.
--Phil
2012 was a helluva year, it was the year I started trying to be a lot more regularly active on this site, writing the articles on Bro-horror and the video game articles about SCP-087 and Self-extension and the horror of Discovery. Also, a ton of movies.
The House at the end of the Street was probably the most disappointing movie I'd seen. I really ripped into it, and that may not have been fair but if I had seen this movie on Netflix instant I would have wandered off or found something else to watch.
I didn't write a full post about it, but The Woman in Black impressed the hell out of me. It was a bit of a comedy of errors trying to watch it, but on the 2nd attempt we got all the way through it and it was a great old-school horror movie. It had a lot of Thing-In-The-Background, Weird-Shape-In-The-Storm styles of scares. Almost no jump scares and false scares used well. I wasn't making nearly as many "Oh look it's Harry Potter" jokes as I was expecting, since the acting was actually not half-bad. I'm planning on getting this on DVD/Blu-Ray.
In other news I also went to the National Homebrewer's Convention this year. It was a wonderful experience, and also very educational. The 2013 Convention is going to be in Philly, and as usual you need an American Homebrewer's Association membership. If you brew ANYTHING, vinegar, kombucha, beer, wine, sake, etc. you should get an AHA membership. It's not expensive and they are doing good things for homebrewer's across the country.
Also in beer I made the official change to all-grain brewing and started kegging my homebrew. Kegging is much more satisfying than bottling, it's a worthwhile switch. In 2013 I'm switching from a braid filter to a false bottom. I recently re-attempted the Chocolate Orange Stout, but won't get to try that until 2013 as well. I'm also anticipating some sours beginning this year.
2012 also saw me traveling much more than I ever have before. As mentioned the NHC was in Seattle, so I had to fly there. I also went to Florida twice, once in February to visit my folks on vacation and then again in October for Halloween Horror Nights in Universal Studios. It was an incredible collection of haunted houses. The whole thing teemed of some very annoying people, but with a speed pass it was possible to see everything. All the haunted houses followed the same basic formula, which really good in some haunts and not so well in others but it was all really professional quality. I can only imagine the show will get better in 2013, though I'll probably get a multi-night pass and spread the visit out a bit.
However, one of the main reasons I haven't been writing as much is that I started a Youtube Channel. Currently the only show is is "Let's Drink to Gaming", which is a Let's Play-style show with themed cocktails. Check it out, the edges are still rough but the quality is improving. There are a few more things in planning, so stay tuned. It'll hopefully be interesting.
Anyway, that's some stuff that's been going on. Now I need to start getting used to writing 2013 on my checks.
--Phil
Monday, July 30, 2012
Combat's place in horror games
I got a lot of flack from a few people for disparaging Dead Space as much as I did and engaging in the typical exalting of the early Silent Hill installments last time I talked about games. In the first post, the bit about Dead Space was mainly a footnote so I didn't really explain myself. I never wanted to leave something like that without a good explanation, because that's not fair to the game. But in seeking to flesh out my stance on Dead Space, I started thinking a lot about combat in general since it tends to be such a contentious aspect of horror games.
For the sake of this exercise let's define combat as your single player-character in a direct, weaponized altercation with one-to-n enemy combatants. This should be broad enough to encompass everything I want to talk about while excluding squad-based combat and other non-first person forms of combat.
Combat is obviously the core gameplay mechanic in games like Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, God of War, Prototype, and all their forefathers. Even games like Arkham City and Arkham Asylum where navigation and puzzle-solving often take center stage, combat is a huge mechanic and part of what makes these games notable. And in all these games the purpose of combat is to serve the emotional engagement of making the player feel like a badass (or in the Arkham games: Batman, the ultimate badass). That's what they're for. These games all serve to immerse the player in an environment where they can experience the visceral joy of dominating one's opposition without moral ambiguity.
However, the same sort of combat exists in the survival horror genre in games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead Space, etc. A lot of these games are about that moral ambiguity, they force the player to make uncomfortable decisions or confront uncomfortable reality. There is no visceral joy to be had here, yet they still involve combat. So in this genre, combat isn't around to make you feel like a badass but why is it around? An easy theory is that combat exists in survival games to place a strain on your resources which forces you to ration instead of simply horde. Without something depleting your supply of ammunition and health restoration items, the game simply doesn't have the stress factor involved with making sure you have enough of everything to make it to the end, which is a significant amount of the point.
While this is true, I think there's deeper engagement. First, the focus on resource maintenance inherent to these games makes each combat situation you survive a Pyrrhic Victory: You live to fight another day, but at what cost? Forcing the player to ask that question in any form keeps them in a state of introspection, and makes sure they don't get too cocky.
The combat also feeds you hope. Survival horror games often have a puzzle solving or key-quest component to go along with their oppressive atmosphere. Unfortunately this can quickly become demoralizing because if your experience of a game is a constant stream of endless puzzles in similar environments it doesn't feel like you're making any progress. But the thrill of combat, of facing down the mutated hellbeast zombie creature and emerging victorious gives a sense of accomplishment. It lifts you up and gives you the feeling that maybe you're capable of making it out of whatever situation you're in alive. Also, the tense and immediate nature of combat raises the pitch of the game briefly making the experience feel more varied, similar to the rising and falling action in the story structure of a book or movie.
Part of the reason combat is so tense is because of how quickly it happens. Decisions have to be made and executed so fast that a wayward second being taken aback by a monster will get you killed. Simply put, you don't have the time to be scared during combat, you just have to react or you probably won't make it out of combat. In an FPS after the post-combat relief you get congratulated, it's a positive payoff because you're told you've done well. In survival horror after combat you have to examine your situation and resources, and get to reflect on whatever unholy face-craving scarecrow you've just seen.
Closing thoughts?
The combat in a horror game serves the same basic purpose of tense action with a feeling of victorious exhilaration when its done, but its use and context within a horror game let it evoke a much wider range of emotions. However, in order for it to evoke the intended emotions it needs to fall into context of a resource-limited survival horror game. Trying to include long combat scenes or waves of enemies doesn't make sense because it becomes too stressful and gives the scene a Contra-like failure rate which prevents it from making the right impact.
--PXA
For the sake of this exercise let's define combat as your single player-character in a direct, weaponized altercation with one-to-n enemy combatants. This should be broad enough to encompass everything I want to talk about while excluding squad-based combat and other non-first person forms of combat.
Combat is obviously the core gameplay mechanic in games like Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, God of War, Prototype, and all their forefathers. Even games like Arkham City and Arkham Asylum where navigation and puzzle-solving often take center stage, combat is a huge mechanic and part of what makes these games notable. And in all these games the purpose of combat is to serve the emotional engagement of making the player feel like a badass (or in the Arkham games: Batman, the ultimate badass). That's what they're for. These games all serve to immerse the player in an environment where they can experience the visceral joy of dominating one's opposition without moral ambiguity.
However, the same sort of combat exists in the survival horror genre in games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead Space, etc. A lot of these games are about that moral ambiguity, they force the player to make uncomfortable decisions or confront uncomfortable reality. There is no visceral joy to be had here, yet they still involve combat. So in this genre, combat isn't around to make you feel like a badass but why is it around? An easy theory is that combat exists in survival games to place a strain on your resources which forces you to ration instead of simply horde. Without something depleting your supply of ammunition and health restoration items, the game simply doesn't have the stress factor involved with making sure you have enough of everything to make it to the end, which is a significant amount of the point.
While this is true, I think there's deeper engagement. First, the focus on resource maintenance inherent to these games makes each combat situation you survive a Pyrrhic Victory: You live to fight another day, but at what cost? Forcing the player to ask that question in any form keeps them in a state of introspection, and makes sure they don't get too cocky.
The combat also feeds you hope. Survival horror games often have a puzzle solving or key-quest component to go along with their oppressive atmosphere. Unfortunately this can quickly become demoralizing because if your experience of a game is a constant stream of endless puzzles in similar environments it doesn't feel like you're making any progress. But the thrill of combat, of facing down the mutated hellbeast zombie creature and emerging victorious gives a sense of accomplishment. It lifts you up and gives you the feeling that maybe you're capable of making it out of whatever situation you're in alive. Also, the tense and immediate nature of combat raises the pitch of the game briefly making the experience feel more varied, similar to the rising and falling action in the story structure of a book or movie.
Part of the reason combat is so tense is because of how quickly it happens. Decisions have to be made and executed so fast that a wayward second being taken aback by a monster will get you killed. Simply put, you don't have the time to be scared during combat, you just have to react or you probably won't make it out of combat. In an FPS after the post-combat relief you get congratulated, it's a positive payoff because you're told you've done well. In survival horror after combat you have to examine your situation and resources, and get to reflect on whatever unholy face-craving scarecrow you've just seen.
Closing thoughts?
The combat in a horror game serves the same basic purpose of tense action with a feeling of victorious exhilaration when its done, but its use and context within a horror game let it evoke a much wider range of emotions. However, in order for it to evoke the intended emotions it needs to fall into context of a resource-limited survival horror game. Trying to include long combat scenes or waves of enemies doesn't make sense because it becomes too stressful and gives the scene a Contra-like failure rate which prevents it from making the right impact.
--PXA
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Let's talk about remakes
I've briefly mentioned my opinions on horror movie remakes a few times on this site and other forums, but I've never really felt the need to go into detail because it always seemed to me like it would be more of a complainy rant than a well thought out opinion. However, I feel compelled now to make a case for my opinions simply because it doesn't seem like anyone else is and I'm getting a bit tired of the bashing remakes take. Put simply: Remakes deserve consideration. That's it.
Remakes tend to be made for one of two reasons: Translation or subject matter update. A lot of updates are pretty crappy, they're made with the goal of using the notoriety of the original film as a built-in fan base for the new movie. Often, these are lackluster flicks with some superficial nods to the source material: Nightmare on Elm St, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. But these are bad because they're straight up bad movies, not because they had the audacity to remake a classic. They are generic, poorly plotted, boring slashers.
It's not that big studios are incapable of making a decent horror movie, or even horror movie update. Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Thing, and Fright Night are all decent remakes of older movies. They're not amazing or earth shattering but they don't have to be, but a remake can be amazing. The Thing in 1980 is widely regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time. It's on lists constantly and people keep praising its atmosphere and special effects. Also, it's a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World based on the novella Who Goes There?. What if horror fans at the time had dismissed as just another remake?
Another reason for remaking a movie is to translate the original story into another language. This is the one that seems to inspire the most vitriol. The opinion seems to be that if you are unwilling to watch the movie as originally presented you are somehow unworthy of seeing that story. But for the most part any audience will want to watch a movie in their own language, the original foreign audience as well as our English-speaking audience. There are always subtitles, which is how I watch most of the foreign movies I check out, but I feel like they break the immersion. In horror where the movie's atmosphere counts for so much, floaty words on the screen make me incredibly aware that I'm sitting on my couch and pull me out of the movie. If being remade in English can help someone really get into a great horror story and get creeped out or disturbed, it seems like a perfectly valid reason to make a movie. It shouldn't matter that a movie is a result of someone translating something to their native language, if it's still a good movie.
And some of these are good movies. The Grudge and The Ring were huge hits and make lists of people's favorite horror movies all the time. I've even spoken to a few people who prefer The Ring over Ringu because the production qualities are higher and native English is more comfortable. But still the first thing you hear when someone mentions the upcoming English remakes of Suspiria or Martyrs are Americans ruining great movies. The Suspiria remake is set to star Isabelle Fuhrman, who was absolutely phenomenal in The Orphan, in the lead roll. The slated director, David Gordon Green, has a bit of a reputation for quirky indie comedies but he hasn't failed at horror of any sort yet and his direction seems competent so I'm willing to give him a chance. I'm more interested in speculating about whether or not he's going to ape the visual style or go for something more subtle than just harping on it sight unseen.
That's really my whole point. It's depressingly negative to just prejudge remakes because of something so petty as their language or that they're remakes. Movies should be allowed to suck on their own merits and the "The original was so much better" or "This was way better in the native French/Polish/Sanskrit" arguments sound an awful lot like the hipster complaint that their favorite band is too mainstream now. I just really like this "Horror" thing and it seems self-defeating to spend time talking about a movie's audience instead of the merits of the movie itself.
--PXA
Remakes tend to be made for one of two reasons: Translation or subject matter update. A lot of updates are pretty crappy, they're made with the goal of using the notoriety of the original film as a built-in fan base for the new movie. Often, these are lackluster flicks with some superficial nods to the source material: Nightmare on Elm St, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. But these are bad because they're straight up bad movies, not because they had the audacity to remake a classic. They are generic, poorly plotted, boring slashers.
It's not that big studios are incapable of making a decent horror movie, or even horror movie update. Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Thing, and Fright Night are all decent remakes of older movies. They're not amazing or earth shattering but they don't have to be, but a remake can be amazing. The Thing in 1980 is widely regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time. It's on lists constantly and people keep praising its atmosphere and special effects. Also, it's a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World based on the novella Who Goes There?. What if horror fans at the time had dismissed as just another remake?
Another reason for remaking a movie is to translate the original story into another language. This is the one that seems to inspire the most vitriol. The opinion seems to be that if you are unwilling to watch the movie as originally presented you are somehow unworthy of seeing that story. But for the most part any audience will want to watch a movie in their own language, the original foreign audience as well as our English-speaking audience. There are always subtitles, which is how I watch most of the foreign movies I check out, but I feel like they break the immersion. In horror where the movie's atmosphere counts for so much, floaty words on the screen make me incredibly aware that I'm sitting on my couch and pull me out of the movie. If being remade in English can help someone really get into a great horror story and get creeped out or disturbed, it seems like a perfectly valid reason to make a movie. It shouldn't matter that a movie is a result of someone translating something to their native language, if it's still a good movie.
And some of these are good movies. The Grudge and The Ring were huge hits and make lists of people's favorite horror movies all the time. I've even spoken to a few people who prefer The Ring over Ringu because the production qualities are higher and native English is more comfortable. But still the first thing you hear when someone mentions the upcoming English remakes of Suspiria or Martyrs are Americans ruining great movies. The Suspiria remake is set to star Isabelle Fuhrman, who was absolutely phenomenal in The Orphan, in the lead roll. The slated director, David Gordon Green, has a bit of a reputation for quirky indie comedies but he hasn't failed at horror of any sort yet and his direction seems competent so I'm willing to give him a chance. I'm more interested in speculating about whether or not he's going to ape the visual style or go for something more subtle than just harping on it sight unseen.
That's really my whole point. It's depressingly negative to just prejudge remakes because of something so petty as their language or that they're remakes. Movies should be allowed to suck on their own merits and the "The original was so much better" or "This was way better in the native French/Polish/Sanskrit" arguments sound an awful lot like the hipster complaint that their favorite band is too mainstream now. I just really like this "Horror" thing and it seems self-defeating to spend time talking about a movie's audience instead of the merits of the movie itself.
--PXA
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Horror Off-Season: Chernobyl Diaries
Before we begin, there is one thing that I should probably get out of the way. Whenever I write these movie reviews I try to be as objective as possible. Of course reviews are by nature opinion pieces, and it's impossible to form an opinion of something that isn't colored by personal experience or feelings regarding a given topic. So what I mean is that I try to be as aware of these biases as I can so that when one of them makes me feel a certain way about a movie, I can explain it and not just stumble around trying to claim my opinion is absolute truth.
In the interests of being as clear about my own personal biases regarding the subject matter as I can, I will preface this discussion of Chernobyl Diaries with the fact that I am Ukrainian. Now, I was born and raised in suburban America but I'm 50% Ukrainian by blood. My mother immigrated here when she was 14 and attempted to raise me to at least be aware of my heritage. While I never managed to incorporate the language or culture into my own personal identity (unless a drinking contest is involved), there are aspects of my upbringing that are impossible to get around. Namely, I was born in 1985 and the Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, well before my first conscious memory. I have literally been aware of what happened since I could understand human language. When I was a kid my mother's church would hold fund raisers for Chernobyl victims in their basement, so I would be there toddling around and being exposed to these science fair-style triptychs of the devastation. I saw photos of abandoned and looted apartments and midways, mutated animals, mutated people...for better or worse these images are a part of my formative years, and nuclear disasters and mutants are some of my earliest nightmares.
So I don't need a movie to show me all the gory details or parade a freak with a melted face in front of me like The Hills Have Eyes did. All it needed to do was say "Pripyat" and establish a credible atmosphere and I will take that ball and run with it, imagining nightmare fuel around every corner. And on that token, Chernobyl Diaries performed admirably.
From a visual aspect the film felt a lot like Cloverfield or Quarantine, using mostly handheld camera shots making you feel like you were another person in the middle of the scene. They also had some great wide shots that really drove home the eerie stillness and isolation of the city. The dialog and pace of the plot was all very frantic keeping you moving along from point to point without too much time to stop and catch your bearings, but it was never too difficult to tell what was going on. There was a point towards the end of the movie where an incredibly creepy looking little girl appeared; before you could really get a good look at her, shit went bananas and everybody had to run again. I lost track a bit there because a roving band of theater hoppers appeared in my 11:30pm showing and started critiquing the characters.
The introduction bits were difficult to get through because the film knew that with as little as it was going to show of the Pripyat inhabitants that it needed to get going as quickly as possible. As such, it felt like we were being forcibly dragged through the first several minutes of the movie, establishing the character relationships. I'm not really sure if it was a bad thing, but I didn't feel like I could really focus on anything until the movie settled into the main storyline.
There were bits where it could be argued that the characters behave retardedly for plot convenience and that no real person would act so stupid, but I didn't see it. Yes, there were instances of information being withheld until after it would've been most important, or just mentioned and brushed aside...but from the perspective of the characters that information did not matter. Even if they had been able to put 2 and 2 together to get 4, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference for their situation. The characters weren't particularly deep, but nobody seemed like an obviously obnoxious stereotype without any other qualities, and the acting was passable enough that everyone felt genuine. That's not to say everyone was memorable or unique, some of them were boring and forgettable, but they felt like real people. Uri is a standout because while I may question his badass credentials, he felt a bit tragic when he was giving the tour.
The group dynamics were a bit chaotic, but can you really blame them given the situation? In the chaos, it also seemed like the movie kindof dropped a few things. There was a moment where one character was bitten pretty badly by some mutant fish, and then nothing is ever made of it again. It's a little odd, but I didn't even think of it until several hours after the movie.
The very end of the movie threw me for a total loop, I think it could've actually benefited from being maybe 5 minutes shorter. It's one of those totally unexpected, very unfair, twist ending sucker punches where they kill the final cast member in like the last frame of the movie in a very cruel way. It was just so sudden and strange that I couldn't really make sense of it. I'm sure there's an audience for that sort of thing since I've seen a lot of other movies and episodes of The Outer Limits end like that, but it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Chernobyl Diaries isn't some grand horror statement, but it is a pretty competently done scary movie. I think that all it was aiming to do was have some fun with an interesting premise and do something exciting, and at that I can't fault it. I know I have a large bias regarding the setting going in, but I don't think that has anything to do with why I think it's not a bad flick. I think that given the subject matter and just a bit of imagination anyone can psych themselves up for a scary movie set in a mini-nuclear wasteland. It is creepier because it really exists.
I enjoyed it, it was a fun movie to watch and it had some very well done scary moments.
Anyway, that's just like...my opinion, man.
--PXA
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Self-extension, Video game characters, and the horror of discovery... Oh my?
It took me a really long time to write the previous article because I just had too many topics I wanted to bring up, and that led to an over-long and meandering article. I'd still like to discuss them a bit, so while I edited them out of the previous post so it could focus on SCP-087 I'd like to visit some of them now.
Firstly, when I was writing Bro-Horror I became really interested in the nature of horror games vs movies. Video games are in a unique position to tell their stories because you interact with them, it's an active experience instead of a passive one like watching a movie. In a movie you can connect with a well written character and vicariously experience the horror they're going through, but that doesn't quite compare with the depth of connection you have to a player character in a game and the game world. People always talk about the immersiveness of video games, and how a great game can pull you into the story. I think there's also more at play here, because as SCP-087 shows: it's not just the world/story/character, you can immerse a player with nothing but an in-game avatar.
What I'm referring to are the theories of psychologist Gordon Allport (1897 - 1967). Allport was one of the first humanist psychologists, and his theories on personality and self went on to influence other major players like Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs. He posited a concept he called "Self-extension", basically that at around age 4 we begin to incorporate external identifiers into our sense of a self. Concepts like "I'm a New Yorker" and "I'm a software engineer", and also why we take damage or slights to our cars or other possessions so personally. There's something really special about controlling the car that really gets people to identify with it. We often take damage to our cars personally, and we talk about things that happen while we're driving without referencing the intermediate vehicle. Think of how often you hear "That guy cut me off!" vs "He cut me off with his car" or some other variant. It can't just be the constant use or the cost because I don't feel like this about my shoes or other property like my computer.
We tend to incorporate the car so far into our sense of self that it becomes part of "us" instead of "ours", and it seems this extends to video game characters. When we talk about video games we always refer to our characters in the 1st person instead of talking about them as characters. If you think about the sentence "So I cleared out all the Medusas." vs "Kratos cleared out all the Medusas." or "I had Kratos clear out all the Medusas.", the first seems more natural. If we're talking about God of War we talk about what we did in the game, not what Kratos did.
It's not surprising with this, that horror games have historically been really effective at creating a lasting connection with players. Some of the bigger games that came out of the PlayStation/PS2 era were survival horror games: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clocktower. But more recent AAA titles have failed to recapture that magic, but other people have already contributed enough to why that is. The games that have succeeded have been smaller indie titles. I'm not entirely convinced this has to do with the budgets directly, but comes about as a side effect of where a studio has to focus their energies with the small budgets.
Enter, one of my favorite games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in late 2010 by Frictional Games and was a great hit, even notoriously difficult to please Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation enjoyed the game and said he was scared by it. In the game you are Daniel, a helpless British guy with no memory or so much as a sharp stick to defend yourself with.
The game tells its brutal and Lovecraftian story through flash backs and diary entries that force you, as Daniel, to remember a past that you obviously didn't want to remember. Although at first glance it seems a little trite, the amnesiac protagonist trope does something very useful to the story: it equalizes your knowledge with Daniel's. Even in a game like Skyrim or Fallout where you have a huge amount of customization available, your character has had a rich life before you got ahold of them. That gap will always insulate you from the character, but because both you and Daniel know exactly as much about Daniel's life as he does that element of separation between you and the character is removed.
Amnesia's story is based on the need to know more and what happens when you learn terrible knowledge not meant for man. This theme is present in the game as the Orb, and the Shadow that kills anyone who attempts to learn its secrets. However, it's also present in what happens to you as the player when Daniel learns more about his past. His past was filled with very unsavory things, and as you continue to uncover them you can't help but feel that you didn't want to know that. What's important is that when you learn that Daniel had done these things, you actually feel a little bad about them because Daniel is a part of "you", to some degree. This makes the first play through so uncomfortable, but the affect does diminish.
In the Silent Hill games, particularly Silent Hill 2 because I've never played 1 or 3 at all, James is a fully fleshed out character with a life, personal connections, and flaws to put it lightly. And you know none of it, but the both of you have been placed in the middle of all this craziness that neither of you understands, that similarity can connect you. In this game part of the horror relies on the story, and the connections to James, so they need to have a character they can tack all these flaws on and build a connection to the town into. Those things themselves are disturbing so they can still be scary when they're not internalized to the degree that Daniel's actions were. Also, they're unknown to you at the beginning of the game so when the connection is revealed to you and James there is still some of the horror of discovery because you've both had the same experience in the town.
While it's not related to self-extension, I think the horror of discovery is worth mentioning because it does play such a huge role in making these two games psychologically disturbing, and plays to Amnesia's Lovecraftian theme. While everything in both games is pretty messed up on its own, it's passive: the monsters are just being presented to you. Discovery is active: when you think about the story while you play, and put James' or Daniel's actions into context and discover for yourself how they relate to the situation. You've been forced to participate in the disturbing realization and that really makes it internal to your thoughts...you've been incepted except instead of "break up my father's empire", the idea planted in your head is "James murdered his infirm wife and half the monsters in Silent Hill are manifestations of his own sexual guilt.".
In Dead Space, which is a technically wonderful game that I've yet to get around to finishing, the best and most skin-crawling parts are when I see logs with Dr. Kyne or encounter Mercer. It's that feeling of realizing your trapped in a tin can breached to the vacuum of space with an absolutely insane and truly zealous adherent of some Necromorph religion. Unfortunately, what should have been gut-wrenching tension spent most of the game as frustrated nervousness because everything is a jump scare and Necromorphs kept sneaking into my camera's blind spot and eviscerating me in one blow. I did the same battle probably close to 20 times before I finally got through it, that made it annoying and not scary. The game thought the monsters were creepier than their story, so I had to get through them before continuing the story and that ruined the atmosphere. Nothing takes you out of the immersion like a game-over screen every few minutes for a few hours.
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had. What do you think?
Firstly, when I was writing Bro-Horror I became really interested in the nature of horror games vs movies. Video games are in a unique position to tell their stories because you interact with them, it's an active experience instead of a passive one like watching a movie. In a movie you can connect with a well written character and vicariously experience the horror they're going through, but that doesn't quite compare with the depth of connection you have to a player character in a game and the game world. People always talk about the immersiveness of video games, and how a great game can pull you into the story. I think there's also more at play here, because as SCP-087 shows: it's not just the world/story/character, you can immerse a player with nothing but an in-game avatar.
 | |
| Gordon Allport |
We tend to incorporate the car so far into our sense of self that it becomes part of "us" instead of "ours", and it seems this extends to video game characters. When we talk about video games we always refer to our characters in the 1st person instead of talking about them as characters. If you think about the sentence "So I cleared out all the Medusas." vs "Kratos cleared out all the Medusas." or "I had Kratos clear out all the Medusas.", the first seems more natural. If we're talking about God of War we talk about what we did in the game, not what Kratos did.
It's not surprising with this, that horror games have historically been really effective at creating a lasting connection with players. Some of the bigger games that came out of the PlayStation/PS2 era were survival horror games: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clocktower. But more recent AAA titles have failed to recapture that magic, but other people have already contributed enough to why that is. The games that have succeeded have been smaller indie titles. I'm not entirely convinced this has to do with the budgets directly, but comes about as a side effect of where a studio has to focus their energies with the small budgets.
 |
| Amnesia: The Dark Descent |
The game tells its brutal and Lovecraftian story through flash backs and diary entries that force you, as Daniel, to remember a past that you obviously didn't want to remember. Although at first glance it seems a little trite, the amnesiac protagonist trope does something very useful to the story: it equalizes your knowledge with Daniel's. Even in a game like Skyrim or Fallout where you have a huge amount of customization available, your character has had a rich life before you got ahold of them. That gap will always insulate you from the character, but because both you and Daniel know exactly as much about Daniel's life as he does that element of separation between you and the character is removed.
Amnesia's story is based on the need to know more and what happens when you learn terrible knowledge not meant for man. This theme is present in the game as the Orb, and the Shadow that kills anyone who attempts to learn its secrets. However, it's also present in what happens to you as the player when Daniel learns more about his past. His past was filled with very unsavory things, and as you continue to uncover them you can't help but feel that you didn't want to know that. What's important is that when you learn that Daniel had done these things, you actually feel a little bad about them because Daniel is a part of "you", to some degree. This makes the first play through so uncomfortable, but the affect does diminish.
 |
| Silent Hill 2 |
While it's not related to self-extension, I think the horror of discovery is worth mentioning because it does play such a huge role in making these two games psychologically disturbing, and plays to Amnesia's Lovecraftian theme. While everything in both games is pretty messed up on its own, it's passive: the monsters are just being presented to you. Discovery is active: when you think about the story while you play, and put James' or Daniel's actions into context and discover for yourself how they relate to the situation. You've been forced to participate in the disturbing realization and that really makes it internal to your thoughts...you've been incepted except instead of "break up my father's empire", the idea planted in your head is "James murdered his infirm wife and half the monsters in Silent Hill are manifestations of his own sexual guilt.".
In Dead Space, which is a technically wonderful game that I've yet to get around to finishing, the best and most skin-crawling parts are when I see logs with Dr. Kyne or encounter Mercer. It's that feeling of realizing your trapped in a tin can breached to the vacuum of space with an absolutely insane and truly zealous adherent of some Necromorph religion. Unfortunately, what should have been gut-wrenching tension spent most of the game as frustrated nervousness because everything is a jump scare and Necromorphs kept sneaking into my camera's blind spot and eviscerating me in one blow. I did the same battle probably close to 20 times before I finally got through it, that made it annoying and not scary. The game thought the monsters were creepier than their story, so I had to get through them before continuing the story and that ruined the atmosphere. Nothing takes you out of the immersion like a game-over screen every few minutes for a few hours.
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had. What do you think?
Friday, May 11, 2012
Horror games only work if you want to keep playing
I don't often discuss games publicly because I just don't feel qualified to talk about most aspects of them with any sort of authority. However, horror games are definitely something I feel like I understand, since I spend so much time talking about horror outside of games.
Recently, someone on reddit.com/r/horror posted a link to a small game based on the horror/creepypasta project called "The SCP Foundation". The game is specifically based on SCP-087, the code name given to a bottomless stairwell located at an unnamed college campus, and is one of the most terrifying games that I have ever played. I'm not lying when I say I lost sleep because of how deeply frightened I was after playing this game for like 20 minutes at 3 in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that it has maybe 3 distinct textures that don't even wrap correctly, no story beyond the SCP itself, and seems to have been made in spare time then released for free by a bunch of guys from 4chan's /v/ board. I noticed something interesting about what exactly made it so compelling and horrifying at the same time and I wanted to talk about it.
SCP-087 is cheap and ugly but it is, knowingly or not, a brilliant exercise in purely experiential gaming. Video games, while generally being pretty immersive always break that immersion in a very fundamental way: You aren't your character. You always know something or see something your character doesn't, and the disconnect is either integral to the story or the gameplay. It's either creating tension by giving the players knowledge of events that affect the character but that the character doesn't know, or assisting gameplay by giving the character knowledge or skill that the player doesn't know about until told. I can't think of very many games that have stories that are told entirely during the run time by what happens to the character. Maybe some of the early FPS games that are more about the run-and-gun experience and don't need more than a very simple story.
The story frames the experience, but a story needs characters so in order to exist in a story you have to have a vessel to act through, and this will always be not-you. The horror you experience in these cases is a lot more like the horror you get when you're really immersed in a movie or a book. It can be really terrifying but there's always a comfort in the fact that it's happening to a character in a story, not you. The eventual resolution of the main plot is also a satisfying experience which gives you a nice payoff.
By doing away with an in-game story SCP-087 has removed the need to have a character for you to act through. By not having any sort of goals, the game no longer needs any of the traditional mechanisms for interacting with the player so it has no options, no HUD, no inventory or anything. With all of this out of the way there's nothing separating you from your in-game self, for all intents and purposes you are in the game and that makes it uniquely terrifying. There's no more disconnect, or comfort because this is all happening to a character.
In most other games, horror or not, the motivation to keep playing the game comes from a desire to reach the end. If a game is too long, without giving us anything new most people will stop playing, but if a game continues to weave new and interesting events into the narrative people will just keep playing. Look to RPGs, especially Mass Effect and Fallout for evidence of this. A game like Amnesia uses this to great effect since as you go on you learn more and more about Daniel's past and experience the dawning realization that Daniel has done horrible things. The very act of continuing the story contributes to the horror of the experience and also has the effect of strengthening the player's resolve to reach the end-game and take revenge on Alexander.
SCP-087 doesn't have an end game, but you keep playing beyond the point where you've seen everything because you want to continue the experience. I had always thought a good horror game relied on a compelling story and a great player character, with mechanics and visuals that supported the themes of the game, but now it seems like everything else is just a means to an end because you can have a truly terrifying game without any characters or story.
This just goes to further my theory that major studios simply can't produce a good horror game anymore, because how on Earth would you market a game without characters or a story?
Games are weird, man.
--PXA
Recently, someone on reddit.com/r/horror posted a link to a small game based on the horror/creepypasta project called "The SCP Foundation". The game is specifically based on SCP-087, the code name given to a bottomless stairwell located at an unnamed college campus, and is one of the most terrifying games that I have ever played. I'm not lying when I say I lost sleep because of how deeply frightened I was after playing this game for like 20 minutes at 3 in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that it has maybe 3 distinct textures that don't even wrap correctly, no story beyond the SCP itself, and seems to have been made in spare time then released for free by a bunch of guys from 4chan's /v/ board. I noticed something interesting about what exactly made it so compelling and horrifying at the same time and I wanted to talk about it.
SCP-087 is cheap and ugly but it is, knowingly or not, a brilliant exercise in purely experiential gaming. Video games, while generally being pretty immersive always break that immersion in a very fundamental way: You aren't your character. You always know something or see something your character doesn't, and the disconnect is either integral to the story or the gameplay. It's either creating tension by giving the players knowledge of events that affect the character but that the character doesn't know, or assisting gameplay by giving the character knowledge or skill that the player doesn't know about until told. I can't think of very many games that have stories that are told entirely during the run time by what happens to the character. Maybe some of the early FPS games that are more about the run-and-gun experience and don't need more than a very simple story.
The story frames the experience, but a story needs characters so in order to exist in a story you have to have a vessel to act through, and this will always be not-you. The horror you experience in these cases is a lot more like the horror you get when you're really immersed in a movie or a book. It can be really terrifying but there's always a comfort in the fact that it's happening to a character in a story, not you. The eventual resolution of the main plot is also a satisfying experience which gives you a nice payoff.
By doing away with an in-game story SCP-087 has removed the need to have a character for you to act through. By not having any sort of goals, the game no longer needs any of the traditional mechanisms for interacting with the player so it has no options, no HUD, no inventory or anything. With all of this out of the way there's nothing separating you from your in-game self, for all intents and purposes you are in the game and that makes it uniquely terrifying. There's no more disconnect, or comfort because this is all happening to a character.
In most other games, horror or not, the motivation to keep playing the game comes from a desire to reach the end. If a game is too long, without giving us anything new most people will stop playing, but if a game continues to weave new and interesting events into the narrative people will just keep playing. Look to RPGs, especially Mass Effect and Fallout for evidence of this. A game like Amnesia uses this to great effect since as you go on you learn more and more about Daniel's past and experience the dawning realization that Daniel has done horrible things. The very act of continuing the story contributes to the horror of the experience and also has the effect of strengthening the player's resolve to reach the end-game and take revenge on Alexander.
SCP-087 doesn't have an end game, but you keep playing beyond the point where you've seen everything because you want to continue the experience. I had always thought a good horror game relied on a compelling story and a great player character, with mechanics and visuals that supported the themes of the game, but now it seems like everything else is just a means to an end because you can have a truly terrifying game without any characters or story.
This just goes to further my theory that major studios simply can't produce a good horror game anymore, because how on Earth would you market a game without characters or a story?
Games are weird, man.
--PXA
Thursday, March 22, 2012
What is Bro Horror?
In the Devil Inside review previously posted I used the term "Bro-horror", which I realize doesn't actually exist. But I think it should, so I should attempt to define it and explain why it's relevant to the discussion. ...bro.
There's an interesting parallel to literature where there's a genre often referred to as "Fratire" which is defined by the use of "Frat-boy" humor and focus on binge drinking and crude sexual humor. If you're interested go check out Tucker Max's book I hope they serve beer in hell or the film adaptation. Tucker Max is a deplorable human being, but I'll be damned if he's not worth a laugh.
Anyway, I'm not saying that these are movies that are for bros. This is is not defining a genre by the preconceived notions we might have about the audience. This is applying the stereotype to the material directly.
The stereotype I'm working with here is the college guy who calls all his friends "Bro". He loves his sports, wears polo shirts with popped collars and sandals. The guys with hopelessly superficial adherence to 80's macho attitudes, just mixed with the surfer stereotype's laid back but stubborn refusal to let anything get them down. This is the stereotype the internet loves to make fun of when we imagine people saying "Dude, that was a brotastrophy, bro" or "Broseidon, king of the Brocean". An absolute caricature.
How does that apply to horror movies?
The core engagement of a horror movie is to be scared, to be made uncomfortable by something. A good horror movie has to offer you something to identify with and emotionally invest in so that you can experience fear of something. There a lot of ways a movie can do that, but they all depend on you being involved in the story so that you're emotionally open and can feel the fear.
Paranomal Activity 1 & 3 are great at this. They create characters you can identify with, and place them in a situation where they're helpless and don't understand what's happening to them. The handheld camera style helps you buy into the realism of the story and suspend your disbelief so that you can share those feelings with the characters. Other movies like Insidious unsettle you: They create situations and scenes in which what you are seeing does not make sense. They're familiar, but not right at the same time, and then they give you a payoff by throwing something in your face and startling you, but not every time.
All this only works if you're invested. In the case of Paranormal Activity if you don't care about what's happening you're bored, and in Insidious you're annoyed.
Now, what about this bro-horror thing?
Part of the stereotype we're working with is a superficially macho refusal to expose "tender" emotions, like fear. Simply put: Bro, you can't be scared, that's just a movie, bro.
Bro-horror is a horror movie that at some level is mocking the idea of being scared of a movie. When I first said bro-horror in the other review I was talking about Stay Alive, which I admitted was a movie I really liked. However, the movie itself didn't think anyone watching it should be afraid of what it was showing us. It felt more like the movie was making fun of the idea that a video game could be killing people, and that it would be ludicrous for someone to be afraid of that.
Another aspect of bro-horror is schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure derived from another's misfortune. Slashers have always had an element of moral judgment, where the killer tends to first go after characters that display "immoral" behavior, but in the modern crop of these movies that's the entire point. You don't want to see anyone live because they're all terrible people. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, they got drunk and ran over a guy who then just got revenge killings. This creates an effect where instead of feeling horror at the death of other people, you watch the movie in order to see them die. When they die, instead of feeling the death had an impact you turn to friend and say "Aaaawww, DUUUDE! Look at that, bro!".
Often the kills are so over-the-top they're funny. They've taken the most superficial trappings of horror movies and draped them over top of usually a pretty dull premise, just for the purpose of doing a movie where you find creative ways to kill off the cast and have the audience enjoy it in a really similar way to watching stuff explode in action movies.
Quit harshing my buzz, bro.
I just wanted to define an interesting phenomenon, not say these movies are bad. A bad bro-horror movie is that because it's a bad movie. There are movies I would say are bro-horror that I really enjoy, they've succeeded as movies. They're not scary or unsettling, so they're not really horror, but they are entertaining. I liked Stay Alive, Cabin Fever (even though it's really strange), Jason X, The Final Destination series, and other things along these lines. I even somewhat enjoyed the Friday the 13th remake.
Some of these are good movies, but they're not horror. They don't quite fit anywhere else, but they should have their own distinction.
--PXA
* image taken out of context from: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=285 Please don't sue me, Scott.
There's an interesting parallel to literature where there's a genre often referred to as "Fratire" which is defined by the use of "Frat-boy" humor and focus on binge drinking and crude sexual humor. If you're interested go check out Tucker Max's book I hope they serve beer in hell or the film adaptation. Tucker Max is a deplorable human being, but I'll be damned if he's not worth a laugh.
Anyway, I'm not saying that these are movies that are for bros. This is is not defining a genre by the preconceived notions we might have about the audience. This is applying the stereotype to the material directly.
The stereotype I'm working with here is the college guy who calls all his friends "Bro". He loves his sports, wears polo shirts with popped collars and sandals. The guys with hopelessly superficial adherence to 80's macho attitudes, just mixed with the surfer stereotype's laid back but stubborn refusal to let anything get them down. This is the stereotype the internet loves to make fun of when we imagine people saying "Dude, that was a brotastrophy, bro" or "Broseidon, king of the Brocean". An absolute caricature.
 |
| Meet Chet and JR* |
How does that apply to horror movies?
The core engagement of a horror movie is to be scared, to be made uncomfortable by something. A good horror movie has to offer you something to identify with and emotionally invest in so that you can experience fear of something. There a lot of ways a movie can do that, but they all depend on you being involved in the story so that you're emotionally open and can feel the fear.
Paranomal Activity 1 & 3 are great at this. They create characters you can identify with, and place them in a situation where they're helpless and don't understand what's happening to them. The handheld camera style helps you buy into the realism of the story and suspend your disbelief so that you can share those feelings with the characters. Other movies like Insidious unsettle you: They create situations and scenes in which what you are seeing does not make sense. They're familiar, but not right at the same time, and then they give you a payoff by throwing something in your face and startling you, but not every time.
All this only works if you're invested. In the case of Paranormal Activity if you don't care about what's happening you're bored, and in Insidious you're annoyed.
Now, what about this bro-horror thing?
Part of the stereotype we're working with is a superficially macho refusal to expose "tender" emotions, like fear. Simply put: Bro, you can't be scared, that's just a movie, bro.
Bro-horror is a horror movie that at some level is mocking the idea of being scared of a movie. When I first said bro-horror in the other review I was talking about Stay Alive, which I admitted was a movie I really liked. However, the movie itself didn't think anyone watching it should be afraid of what it was showing us. It felt more like the movie was making fun of the idea that a video game could be killing people, and that it would be ludicrous for someone to be afraid of that.
Another aspect of bro-horror is schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure derived from another's misfortune. Slashers have always had an element of moral judgment, where the killer tends to first go after characters that display "immoral" behavior, but in the modern crop of these movies that's the entire point. You don't want to see anyone live because they're all terrible people. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, they got drunk and ran over a guy who then just got revenge killings. This creates an effect where instead of feeling horror at the death of other people, you watch the movie in order to see them die. When they die, instead of feeling the death had an impact you turn to friend and say "Aaaawww, DUUUDE! Look at that, bro!".
Often the kills are so over-the-top they're funny. They've taken the most superficial trappings of horror movies and draped them over top of usually a pretty dull premise, just for the purpose of doing a movie where you find creative ways to kill off the cast and have the audience enjoy it in a really similar way to watching stuff explode in action movies.
Quit harshing my buzz, bro.
I just wanted to define an interesting phenomenon, not say these movies are bad. A bad bro-horror movie is that because it's a bad movie. There are movies I would say are bro-horror that I really enjoy, they've succeeded as movies. They're not scary or unsettling, so they're not really horror, but they are entertaining. I liked Stay Alive, Cabin Fever (even though it's really strange), Jason X, The Final Destination series, and other things along these lines. I even somewhat enjoyed the Friday the 13th remake.
Some of these are good movies, but they're not horror. They don't quite fit anywhere else, but they should have their own distinction.
--PXA
* image taken out of context from: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=285 Please don't sue me, Scott.
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