Thursday, October 22, 2009
Speaking From Beyond The Grave
A mountain load of books came in to [Pages] on Tuesday. Towards the final hour, second in command [Veronica Oxford] pulled out a book, she said, "You like this author, right?" I looked and recognized it was a Vonnegut book. His books all have a new style to their cover designs. When I was introduced to him, his books all had covers with giant Vs which alternated in colour depending on the novel, and a small square in the top with an image pertaining to the story. The new design has his crude illustrations, and as well, alternate in colour. So, mind-numbing details aside, what I am saying is that I thought it was just one of his older books with a new cover. But then I looked at the title, and also saw that it was a hardcover and realized that it was all new. It's titled Look At The Birdie. It's a collection of unpublished short stories. Needless to say, I'll have to pick this up soon enough. I wonder if bits of the last novel he may or may not have been working on will be in it. I'll find out soon enough.
See everyone in hell! (Except for Kurt Vonnegut who is up in heaven now.)
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Brutal Stuff Legends Are Made Of
OK, so the game's been out for two days now, but this is practically my first bit of spare time not playing it. I'm not much of a serious gamer. As a matter of fact, most games, I guess like most of everything else are shit. But since games are so expensive to make, they take a lot less risks. So most games are derivative and bland. But this game, I almost never want to stop playing.
I'm talking about Tim Schafer's latest brain spawn Brutal Legend. For people who don't know much about him, Tim Schafer is a creative genius. I have played just about all of his games. From Secret of Monkey Island, to The Day of The Tentacle, to Full Throttle, to Psychonauts, to Brutal Legend. Whenever a game of his comes out, it's an event.
What makes him such a legend? None of his games really reinvent the wheel in terms of gameplay or technological aspects. He's not a Shigeru Miyamoto or even a Yuji Naka. What he does do, however is come up with games that have interesting and well-developed stories, immersive worlds, and unique main characters. Very refreshing when you look at the characters of most games; soldiers, warriors, and sometimes ninjas/martial arts experts.
Brutal Legend has all of the above ingredients of what make Tim Schafer games such treats. It stars Jack Black as Eddie Riggs, a roadie who gets into a stage accident. His blood drips into his cursed belt buckle, and he gets transported into a hellish but "bad-assed" heavy metal world. Look at the surreal heavy metal album covers of the 70s and 80s with spiders made out of motorcycle engines, mountains made of skulls, panthers who shoot lasers out of their eyes, trees with flesh and teeth, etc. and you'll have a good idea of what kind of world Eddie has found himself in. It's populated by characters modeled after and voiced by heavy metal musicians such as Ozzy Osbourne as the guardian of metal, Lemmy Killmister as a doctor whose music heals people, Lita Ford as a warrior princess of sorts, Kyle Gass (Jack Black's partner in Tenacious D) as a bouncer, and some others I have yet to meet. The main villain, a sadomasochist demon is voiced by Tim Curry of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame. I'm sure there are others I met in the game, but couldn't identify, but I admit, I'm not the most versed guy when it comes to music of any sort. I have what I like, and that's it. That said, I really like the music in the game. 90% of it I've never heard in my life, but I constantly pause to get the names of the artists and the tracks.
There is a lot to the gameplay mechanics, and it really merges genres. It's an open-world that the player can drive through a la Grand Theft Auto. Honestly, my only problem with the game stems from this aspect. Not the driving, which I am fine with, but the navigation. I am a person who is generally not good navigating, directions mean very little to me. In the game, the player has to constantly look for a white light coming from the sky at a far distance to figure out where to go next. Not all the time is the light even visible, so I wind up getting lost or have to constantly go back to the menu to look at the map.
Basic action is hack and slash, guitar solos (hitting the right buttons on time) can be pulled off to cause certain effects such as the face melt. There are a few types of side missions you can go on, and so far most have been one of about four different types over and over again. Highly repetitive, but too short to get bored of.
There are also elements of real-time strategy where the player builds up Eddie's band and stage and has them take down the enemy's stage. That is also what the multiplayer mode consists of, the RTS gameplay. The player can choose from three armies: Ironheade - Eddie's army, a band of headbangers and razor girls. Drowning Doom - An excellent parody of goth culture. When I see and hear them I almost have to think that Tim Schafer plugged in the brains of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams, and then hired Jhonen Vasquez to consult him on their gothic sensibilities and aesthetics. Naturally that is the army I almost always use. There is finally Tainted Coil - The demonic army themed around S&M and dark divinity. For example, in the army, there are nuns in skimpy outfits with zipper-teeth, men with large torsos with arrows sticking out of their backs and gag balls in their mouths, and leather faced priests.
The story has been really involving so far. Most of the characters all have an interesting flair to them, and are more than just stock characters. Eddie Riggs seems like a mind meld of Tim Schafer and Jack Black, and of course the character is incredibly likable as well as has the funniest lines. The only character who I found to be a little one dimensional was Lars, who leads the resistance at the beginning. Mr. Schafer has listed Kurt Vonnegut as an influence on more than one occasion and it's certainly helps. The game never forgets to have a sense of humour, even during or not long after some of its darkest moments. I've reached about a third through, and the story and humour seem to be getting better. Though it has reached a point where it strikes a dark chord. Tonally, the game is a lot darker than its predecessor Psychonauts, which was purely whimsical, and pretty lighthearted. But that's to be expected. Psychonauts was set in a psychic camp for preteens, this game is set in Heavy Metal hell, so it's darker, gorier, and edgier.
I haven't finished it off, and I think I will try to stretch out my enjoyment of it as much as possible, since it was four and a half years between this and Psychonauts. It will probably be just as long of a wait for the next. But I am already excited for what it will be. I can only assume it will probably have a totally different tone and style, since, in an interview, he once said he likes to go from one end to the other in terms of what his games are about. I look forward to it, but until then...
See everyone in (heavy metal) hell!
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Ocular Obscurity
A couple minor updates to the weird works page have been made.
I have added [The Noxious Novella] to my works, and I have swapped the "incomplete" image for [The Obscure Opus] for one which one could say, gives a better eyedea of what one could expect to see in the novel. I've replaced it with this:
Certainly a sight for sore eyes. Or maybe it's an eye sore. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I presume. I slapped the image together in Photoshop. I admit, the graphic is amateur at best, but hey, I'm a beginner. A couple courses that I'm taking at [Miskatonic University] this term heavily involve graphic and web design. The idea is for me to be good enough to handle the architecture, maintenance, and all of the other darkly divine duties required to manage Gallowmere without depending too much on The Prince of Darkness.
The actual artwork used though is superb. I allowed an artist by the name of El Khan to stick a pipe into my brain and drain the images of the characters from [The Obscure Opus] out of my brain. When the time comes, their entire essences will be revealed on here. But until then...
See everyone in hell!
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
A pet peeve of mine...
Revealing that there is a twist in a plot without explaining what it is is still a spoiler! I've been thinking about this a lot, lately.
I was most peeved about this a few years ago, when, due to a complicated and convoluted plot filled with many twists and turns, I had The Prince of Darkness launder books for me from the pits of hell. One of those books was Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight. I had the novel recommended to me, read a brief synopsis, enjoyed the Lemony Snicket books published up to that moment, and decided it would be my kind of book. That was all I needed and wanted to know. When I finally had it in my hands, it was as if I was holding a melting ice cream sandwich, dripping down to my toes, seeping onto the dirty floor, being licked up by rats. I saw this:
Unexpected twist... Well not anymore, shithead. I was astounded that:
1)The writer wouldn't see the irony and error of saying unexpected twist in a review which I can only assume is written for people who haven't yet read the book but want to. By saying there's an unexpected twist in the review, people will expect there to be a twist when they read the book.
2)That the idiot who designed the book cover would think it's a bright idea to include that on the back of the book. The sole purpose of blurbs on the backs of books is to convince a reader to an amount of time and attention to their book. A purpose of fictional novels is to entertain the reader. The reader wants to be taken out of his or her world, they want to be taken for a surprise. The twist is a plot device employed almost solely for entertainment and sensationalistic purposes. The more of a surprise the twist is, the more unexpected the twist is, the more of an impact it has.
So, naturally, when I read The Basic Eight, I read through, reluctantly trying to figure out what the twist was. I think I figured out what it was about halfway through. It didn't completely ruin the experience. It meshed well with the style of the entire novel. I'm stopping myself from saying too much as I spill my thoughts into this blah, blah, blog, realizing that I am pretty much being a hypocrite. I could have been ambiguous, and not named out The Basic Eight as the novel which includes a "completely dark and unexpected twist". And saying that the twist makes sense due to its relation to the overall style of the novel, could get gears turning as to what the twist is. I don't think this novel is anywhere near as popular as the Snicket books. Anyone who may be reading this, and have an interest in reading the novel his or herself will have had the experience ruined the way it was for me. And to that I say, fuck the world! If I had the experience ruined for me, then everybody else should as well!
See everyone in hell!
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Obligatory Updates
I'm not dead yet, you bastards and bitches! You thought you could pop open the champagne bottles? No, keep them in your cellars, I've got a lot of saliva salvaged, and will make it my business to spit in each and every bottle.
So I'm here, still no publisher for [The Obscure Opus] but at least no more have died yet, which means that they haven't read it. I don't understand why not though. My manuscripts all glow and emit hums in the slush piles they sit in. Maybe they're scared. I'll have to make sure I don't check off the evil energy box when I ship another batch of manuscripts through Gallowmere Express.
I'm still squeezing in time to work on [The Noxious Novella]. I can tell that I've gotten serious about it, because I'm over-thinking it. I've got, I'd say, a quarter of the first draft written, but I keep stopping myself and wondering which direction to take it in. I have an outline, but I've changed it up dozens of times. It's not necessarily events of the story that I change, though some have been removed, added, replaced, and altered. It's more about the actual storytelling. I'm trying to figure out different techniques and devices to use for certain parts for the sake of cohesion. The book could almost work as a collection of short stories, it's very episodic. The only initial connection has been that they all have the same protagonist. Other characters from his life recur in a lot of the segments. Events from certain scenes are sometimes alluded to in other parts, and of course there's a bit of foreshadowing. There are other techniques I'm experimenting with which are a bit less tried and true and am trying to see how they would work. Some I have to wonder if it's too obvious if handled one way and too subtle if done another way. Other techniques I'm not quite sure how to pull off yet.
Finally, quarter way through, I'm still not sure if I should narrate it in third or first person. I'm giving myself until the very end of this year to finish this thing and send it off. We'll see if I actually adhere to my self imposed deadline...
See Everyone in hell!
