Posts Tagged Video Games
Citizen Kane is to Pac-Man as Rosebud is to Wakka Wakka Wakka
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Film, Uncategorized, Video Games on October 15, 2009
Kane, after dying on Quick Man's stage for the 90th time.
The term “Citizen Kane of gaming” needs to be buried, along with “totes,” “staycation,” and “sparkling vampires”.
Not because it’s an exaggerated phrase, the Godwin equivalent of any Internet argument invoking Hitler or the Holocaust. That, I don’t mind. The problem is that it’s trite. What’s a famous movie that critics like? Citizen Kane. What do I like doing in my spare time? Gaming. How can I combine the two to create a delicious sandwich of my favorite pastime and art/intellectualism? Say X is the video game’s Citizen Kane.
Beyond sounding like a hipster’s failed attempt at MadLibs, the main issue is that it shows a somewhat obvious misunderstanding of a movie like Citizen Kane and, perhaps, movies in general. It was on the top of AFI’s greatest movie list, but is by no means the most important movie to define cinema. Birth of a Nation defined the epic. Metropolis might be the first sci-fi/dystopian vision. Safety Last could be the first high-concept comedy.
Seeking the “Citizen Kane” of games is a silly endeavor because you should be seeking not one but several video games that redefined the genre in some manner. There are plenty games that do this, even if the use the same basic mechanics or style.
Below is an example. First is the final scene of Citizen Kane, which uses deep focus as a “larger than life” visual motif.
Now, below is a video from Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, a French film that– dare I say it– also used deep focus! In fact, this movie is pretty damn famous (outside the US) and, I believe, uses deep focus much more effectively, especially in relation to the overly-complex plot involving emotional portrayals and backstabbing and cheating and so-on (by the way– it’s not as melodramatic as it sounds; it’s actually pretty funny.)
I know that this makes me appear like some sort of hipster-film snob, but I’m not. Hell, I enjoyed Transformers!… when the robots were fighting. But I think the pursuit of a game that, as Destructoid’s Burch quotes, “[utilizes] a medium’s strength” is really nothing that you need to “find” so much as you have to explain in relation to the genre of video games as a whole. Citizen Kane’s reputation is not unlike many other films that have been released; On the Waterfront is a good example, and so is Chinatown. Nothing particular is unique about deep focus and good editing; hell, this is what films should have. And, as being a complex character study? I can’t count the number of good films focusing on one slightly-disturbed character.
As far as I’m concerned, Doom is a good contender is for such a title, in that it took the FPS and utilized it in a format that, at the time, was novel and seemed perfect for it. I personally wouldn’t argue it, but it’s a viable possibility. So is Goldeneye, Mario 64, Final Fantasy, and so on.
It’s telling that the Citizen Kane of gaming is being used; no one says “the Macbeth of gaming” or “the Mona Lisa of gaming” or “the The Death of a Salesman of gaming,” all of which are genre defining and game-changing in their own ways. Let’s be honest here– it’s not about genre-defining, since we have plenty of games that do– but it’s about games as art, as the game we’re “going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form”. There’s a pretty huge difference in games that utilize the medium to its most potent effect, and showing the world games can be art. The latter requires several games to do this, from the indie to the blockbuster to the foreign. It requires an avenue through which games can be studied and explored, returned to and debates, thought upon and analyzed. And while I truly admire sites like Destructoid trying to approach this issue, along with the active fanbase, I think that overall approach is flawed. I don’t want “a” game to showcase gaming as an artform. I want “lots” of games. I want the people, the fans, the game designers, and so on to explain their thinking and their flaws, the ins and outs, the interplay of gamer/game, the controversy (real controversy, not Sambo-watermelon crap), and nuances of gaming as a whole.
A critic would already “roll his eyes” at the debate of a single game that’s definitive of this.
The argument of Portal, Braid, Shadow of the Colossus, and Half-Life are starts. Hell, add in Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Mario 64, Sonic 3/Sonic and Kunckles, Mortal Kombat and Metal Gear Solid. Even the defunct Dreamcast. Show how they started an idea, began a movement, instigated a social and cultural response, supported or subjugated a genre, and so on.
Stop looking for the Rosebud, people, and start looking at everything around it.
BLACK MAN RAGE – “WHAT DA PROBLEM IS?” #2
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Uncategorized, Video Games on September 24, 2009
It's not chilled.
Somebody call Al Sharpton up in this bitch.
As you may or may not have heard, 5th Cell’s hotly-anticipated (but mediocre-reviewed) game Scribblenauts apparently is purely and unabashedly racist. For you see, if you type in the word “sambo,” a watermelon pops up on the screen. I assume it’s not seedless and warm, and probably lacks vodka.
Of course, 5th Cell, who’s name I assume designates where they believe all black people should belong, denies that such a feature was intentional. Sambo, in Ecuadorian, refers to some fruit that only resembles a watermelon.
Oh, LIKELY story, 5th Cell. I assume they all saw this (absolutely hilarious) cartoon by Tex Avery:
… while masked and/or shaving their heads and thought this would be okay.
Well, I assure you, this is NOT.
The ‘sambo-leads-to-watermelon-and-perhaps-KoolAid’ picture, however, isn’t really the problem that black people have with it. As a black man, one who speaks for ALL OF THEM, I assure you that most of my brethren (kats? dogs? my ni**as? They keep changing out collective name) care little, if at all about this controversy, almost as much as they care about the controversy surrounding the African zombies in Resident Evil 5. (Wait– zombie-causing virus hits an African tribe, and the zombies they produce happen to be black?! Did they port Birth of a Nation to the Wii!? Can my grandmother play this?!)
Of course they don’t care. Black people only care about two video games:
1) Madden
2) The next Madden
No, we’re up in arms (you know, the ones that Obama took away, but didn’t take away, which inevitably led to a severe shortage of bullets) because sambo seems to be the only potentially racial gimmick in the game!
Now, sure, it you look at the 200-plus comments in that Destructoid link, a load of people didn’t seem to realize that sambo could be perceived as racist. Imagine! Kids today, running around as they stuff Big Macs and candy and Big-Macs-stuffed-with-candy into their mouths, playing a DS in one hand and a PSP in the other, blindly asking that sambo janitor to clean up their mess. Because, gosh darnit, they just didn’t know! We perverted their innocence, and thanks to 5th Cell, President Sambo is now a JOKE THEY WILL USE (presumably shouting this out at a town hall meeting, or Congressional session, or some other ill-advised political locale, along with socialist, communist, birth certificate, and other “way too big” words for them to be using).
“But,” they will say as they smear their greased-soaked digits on their keyboards when they finally realize how shitty Crysis really was, “if sambo is a word I can use now, safely and without harm, then what about the deliciously antagonizing vocabulary slang such as kike, wop, nip, spic, and so on? If I type in cracker, and a literal cracker pops up on screen, should I get angry and riot and/or flood my own city?
I say to you: YES. We blacks and whites have be represented (wut wut!) but my fellow minorities have been shafted their chance at video game recognition. So stand up, Scribblenauts in hand, and throw it away (after, of course, getting frustrated at its insane difficulty level) and instead, insert the race card! You know, that multi-player game of choice we all play when we get (or don’t get) what we want! It’s all or nothing, 5th Cell! You best think about that when you make the inevitable sequel, or we’ll try twice as hard to sit idly not caring as dollar bills rain down when you type “Kosher” or your character self-destructs when you type “Arab” or “Indian,” because, well, they just look so much alike!
Now, if you excuse me, I’m eagerly awaiting Madden 2011.
CHILDHOOD REVISITED – SUPER MARIO BROS.
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Childhood Revisited, Film, Uncategorized, Video Games on September 13, 2009
You know a movie sucks when they didn't even bother to edit out any WTC scenes.
Super Mario Bros. – (1993)
Director: Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton [Roland Joffe and Dean Semier, uncredited]
Starring: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis
Screenplay by: Parker Bennett, Terry Runte, Ed Solomon
So, if you look over there in my list of links, you may notice that there’s a little fan project I’m working on. Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Together. Think this and this, but what people would actually like to see.
Of course, then, I have a lot to say about this so-called film. The stories that emerge from the making of this film are staggering. Hoskins and Leguizamo were drunk for most of the film. The directors and studios clashed over whether to make it more “adult” or keep it a children’s film, ultimately making a hodgepodge of a mess. Working with the directors was apparently excruciating, with random re-writes of the script every day; there were so many that the actors ended up ignoring them. So, it’s easy to see how horribly it did at the box office; fans hated it, regular audience members hated it, and Nintendo vowed never to enter the movie business ever again. (Oddly enough, Miyamoto claimed to have enjoyed it.)
Since I’ve been doing a ton of research on Super Mario for that project, I have a small jump on how and why the writers did what they did; the movie itself, I can’t excuse. I can say right now that it doesn’t hold up. The question is, how bad?
NOSTALGIC LENS: I know that as much as this hates on the film, it’s not that bad. But it’s pretty close. I know that I convinced myself that the movie was good – I remember distinctly dancing to the theme music as it plays during the intro – but it took some seven-to-ten years to finally acknowledge that, no, I did not like this movie at all. With no distinct visual reference to the game, how could I? At least the title designed in chrome lettering was cool.
DOES IT HOLD UP: You know what? If you were to remove every single thing that’s supposed to be Super Mario Brothers related and replace it with original characters/concepts, you’d have a cheesy, ridiculous, so-bad-it’s-awesome sci-fi flick that resembles The Fifth Element or Event Horizon.
I had a treat while watching this on Friday—my nieces watched it along with me! They, being owners of Wii’s and DS’s, proceeded to ask me a ton of questions about the Super Mario fandom, and, as a nerd, I proceeded to answer them. I told them the story of the Great Princess Toadstool/Daisy/Peach confusion of the mid-90s, the Toad/Yoshi debacle, the King Koopa/Bowser debates… and they surprisingly ate it up.
Yes, I have a lot of knowledge of the Super Mario canon. So, in the 90s, with a lack of special effects, at the very least I’ll commend the writers for trying their damnest to keep at least some the SMB world in tact (they even seemed to crib a teeny bit of information from the short-lived Valiant comic run, I believe). But of course, I won’t excuse the pathetic final product, the blame of which mainly fall on the directors. Here, it seems the studio meddling actually tried a good thing.
Mario and Luigi are our plumber heroes screwed out of work by their corporate, mob-tied rival, the Scapelli Company. However, Luigi meets Daisy, an archeologist digging for fossils, which lightens the mood. After dinner, they, like all couples do after dinner, explore the skanky cave at the fossil site, where a lot of stuff happens that’s irrelevant. But Daisy is kidnapped and the Mario Bros. chase her into the “alternate dimension” where evolved dinosaurs rule, all under the despot King Koopa.
The movie’s main problem? Over-exposition. It’s terrible. It’s probably the worse exposition I’ve ever seen on celluloid. Check out this scene where King Koopa explains the entire plot in one go, starting at 3:58:
What in god’s name did King Koopa put his hands in? McDonald’s French Fries grease?
SMB fans understandably hated it, which were mostly kids. Look at any Super Mario video game, and then look at this movie. The instant hate is palpable. What about everyone else (the parents), though? Well, with the goofy animated intro, the moronic Koopa cousins Spike and Iggy, and asinine set design (which, by the way, looks like a cross between rejected Blade Runner sets and the crappy locations out of The Wiz), I suspect they just rolled their eyes and hoped at the very least their children were liking it; however, they WERE NOT.
And yet…
With fifteen years of general recovery behind me, I’ll have to admit that I kind of dug this movie, sans my fanboyism. As much as Hoskins and Leguizamo hated their position, I have to admit they still tried their best, with Bob nailing a slightly grizzled yet knowledgeable plumber, and John, although goofy and annoying, still managing to not want me to kill myself. Samantha Mathais, however, is still the worthless blank slate she’s always been (I cannot believe that she was popular at some point). But Dennis Hopper is surprisingly gold. Given that his dialogue is generally shit, he delivers it as best he can, with his most primal lines being anything about killing people. Because, hell, the real Bowser would have no qualms about killing people, so, neither does Hopper.
(I should also note that the models of the various creatures are pretty nice. The Goombas aren’t excellent, although they move well, but Yoshi is particularly well done, animated with a nice, seamless blend of animatronic and CGI. Thank you, Jurassic Park; it seems we nowadays have forgotten what you taught us.)
But imagine my surprise when I found myself really enjoying the final conflict between King Koopa and Mario at the end.
There’s no reason for Mario to go up against Bowser after he knocks the jewel out his mouth. But he does. Why? Because he’s MARIO.
I joke, but in an odd way, it’s telling that, even in the midst of an obvious disaster waiting to happen, that at the very least the writers and the actors (minus Mathais) were still trying at some level to present something watchable. So seeing King Koopa and Mario duke it out (sort of) draws a decent level of something that kind of, in part, resembles a facsimile of an iota of an idea that you may or may not see in the video game.
IN A NUTSHELL: Don’t get me wrong, now. It’s still a crappy movie, but at the same time, there’s a lot here that can be enjoyed, I suppose. If you were to tell me you hated it, I’d completely understand. But if you’re the kind of person that enjoys the sleezy action from sci-fi, B-movies, then simply replace the names Mario, Luigi, Koopa, Toad, and Daisy with Paul, John, Ringo, George, and Yoko. Hell, they already introduced a number of random characters like Daniella, Lena, and Scapelli. (Couldn’t one of them at least be named Pauline?)
September 21th: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
September 28th: Robin Hood
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