felis_ultharus

So in my continuing series of reviews, I thought I'd tackle Bioshock, the anti-Ayn-Rand video game.

The short review: brilliant. I mean, I would've played anything that allows me throw lightning bolts and bees at well-dressed Objectivists. But it also had a brilliant story, and (dare I say it for a game?) cinematography. It has a very Orson Welles feel to it. An anti-Atlas Shrugged meets Citizen Kane, 20,000 leagues under the sea.

( Review continues, with mild spoilers only. )

So, yeah - nearly perfect. I'm looking forward to the sequel. I hope the anti-Objectivist stuff continues, though I've barred friends from spoiling it for me. So who knows? Maybe the archvillain will be Alan Greenspan? He did his part in crashing the world economy with Ayn Rand as his co-pilot, so if anyone deserves to be covered in psychically-generated bees, 'twould be him.

On a completely note, here's the best use of stop-animation ever - the last 14 billion years, summarized. Ray Harryhausen, eat your heart out. This must've taken a decade to produce:

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and a belated Io, Saurnalia to those who don't. It's also my fourteenth year of being a Montrealer - I arrived on Christmas Day, 1995.

This is the first year that Yule has felt bigger than Christmas. I've been Pagan more than fourteen years now, too, but it takes a long time for a new set of traditions to become visceral, if that makes any sense. The last two years, I've held rits here when everyone is asleep. I don't know a single other Pagan in Victoria, though I know the community is huge, here.

I've been visiting Sean almost every day. He and his brother have a huge collection of games. One that's really captivating is Mirror's Edge, particularly if you like the Cyberpunk aesthetic - you play a courier running information for democratic dissidents over the rooftops of a shiny corporatist dystopia. I get a little vertigo watching that game, though.

It's summer, and construction is in the air. In particularly, there are places in northeastern Verdun where the roads look like they've been turned over to the Silent Hill urban planning committee -- every day, the possible path through the labyrinth of deep gulches changes, and only one road ever takes me where I need to go.

Speaking of Silent Hill, I finished the first game in the series this week. Good, and very scary, but still not quite up to the standards of the second game.

For those who don't know, Silent Hill is the scariest work of fiction in any medium. Each game, some ordinary person is trapped in an empty city in an unspecified part of New England, looking for some lost person. The town is semi-aware, and every once in awhile the hero/ine falls out of the world and into its twisted dreams.

( Description of the series continues, not for the squeamish )

Happy Canada Day! It's been 142 years since Confederation, and depending on how you count, we could four hundred years old or longer. John Ralston Saul argues we're effectively thousands of years old, because our usual way of counting leaves out aboriginal peoples who contributed so much to this country.

But still we like to think of ourselves as a young nation, naive in everything we do and likely to fail at any time.

I've done very little lately, aside from writing and working and researching -- I've half-written another article for my historical website. This heat has made me feel sluggish.

I've also been playing a fair bit of the Persona series. The third was brilliant -- one of the best endings of any game -- and the fourth game is even better, and even stranger. For example, I just defeated a giant decaying teddy bear that kept quoting Postmodern philosophy and hurtling bolts of pure nihilism at me. I defeated it with game's patented Jungian psychology combat system.

Using Jung to beat Foucault -- I doubt John Ralston Saul has ever played a video game, but somehow I think he would have approved.

It's been a quiet few days.

Writing progresses. This heavy edit is about 70% of the way through. I've heavily altered the tone. There's a couple of characterizations of secondary characters I'm not entirely sure about, and the dream sequences are always a sticking point, but I notice there haven't been any massive structural changes in the last two re-writes.

I don't think there will be any more full re-writes, just more edits.

Otherwise, I've been reading Drawing Down the Moon. I also finished the video game Okami, a strangely beautiful Japanese game in which the hero is the sun goddess Amaterasu, and the style of art is drawn from traditional illustrations of Japanese myth.

It's funny -- if a game like Okami were made here with Christ as its protagonist, or in the Muslim world with Mohammed, the studio's main offices would get bombed. In Japan, you can use Shinto's chief deity this way without fear.

And in spite of the game's many little irreverences and its playfulness, it proves to be very pious in its own way by the end -- an update of myths rather than a negation or parody of them.

Now I'm playing another game frequently mentioned on people's lists of video games that can be considered high art -- Shadow of the Colossus. And it is a sweet little jewel of a game, almost eerie in its unclutteredness, and more a lyric than narrative. It has a very Ursula LeGuin feel to it, and something of a dream, while being disturbingly realistic in all the ways that count. Here's the opening scene.

It's such a strange game, though. The RPG genre is usually so cluttered. This is an RPG with no levels or stats or menus or magic or lines of attack or random encounters or limit breaks or stores or money or treasure or towns. Just a teenage boy who can't do much of anything you can do, except maybe use a short sword passably well, and ride horseback. His only magic is a sword that points the way to things.