This week: The art of controller throwing. Kojima masturbates. The final panicked hours of Snake Eater.

As the mass video game market has increasingly become a blockbuster oriented industry, big budget game design has slowed to a crawl, with gamers expectations of graphics and depth rising to previously unknown heights. At the same time, as it becomes easier to get games online through quick & easy downloads, smaller games flourish in the gaps between larger releases. As such, there’s been something of a renaissance of classic arcade gameplay, with bar-raising shooters, puzzle games, and sidescrollers coming out each month.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve diligently turned off N+ and Geometry Wars to return to the elephant in my room: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Over four consecutive nights, I sat down in front of the TV determined to beat the game before heading to bed, feeling achingly close to the end credits.

[Read more →]

The power is yours: 47 Words explores Captain Planet’s distinguished rogues gallery, and the awkwardly famous celebrities Ted Turner forced to voice them.

[Read more →]

There was a time when the first few notes of the Star Wars theme song would get me high. My heart would beat faster, my eyes would dilate, and my mind would go completely blank in preparation for nirvana. I was a junkie, and George Lucas was my dealer. So what happened? Prequels, that’s what happened.

As if Episodes I-III weren’t already the crack to the original trilogy’s cocaine, we now have meth in the form of the CGI film Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is not to be confused with Star Wars: Clone Wars. Well, I guess it’s only appropriate that The Clone Wars is the Star Wars death rattle for me, considering that the introduction of computer graphics was the beginning of the end.

[Read more →]

If you’ve never read Philip K. Dick, being familiar with him only through one of the many big-budget sci-fi action films that bear his name in a “story by” credit, you likely think that his books are violent, pulpy actioners, short on character and long on battles, chases and twist endings. The thing is, they’re just not like that. At all.

Dick’s novels are often quiet, funny stories about the human condition, with a focus on awkward personal interactions, religious experiences (both drug induced and not), and quotidian matters involving making one’s way in the city, interfacing with popular culture, and living with a partner. Sure, they generally have a mindblowing sci-fi premise, but it’s always seemed that Dick’s books
would be better adapted by a romantic from the French new wave with an ear for dialogue like Eric Rohmer than the likes of Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg. This was proven not only by Rohmer disciple Richard Linklater in his fantastic adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, but also by French director Jérôme Boivin in his adaptation of Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist, Barjo.

[Read more →]

As the 2008 Games carry on with their lip-synched grandeur, 47 Words explores several infrequently heralded yet vital pieces of the Olympic puzzle.

[Read more →]

You’ve experienced it before. The acting is broad and exaggerated. The situations are absurd, and keep getting more and more ridiculous. There’s a comedian in the lead role, so you look at the back of the DVD case to see whether the movie’s supposed to be filed under comedy. You start looking for things that are supposed to be jokes or gags, but they’re not there.

You’ve entered the world of the uncanny comedy. While some dark satires — Brazil, Southland Tales, anything authored by Bret Easton Ellis — may deliberately use the devices of an uncanny comedy for unsettling effect, and to lampoon social constructs and vices, other films fall into this universe unintentionally. Films like Gung Ho. Hudson Hawk. An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And, perhaps, Tropic Thunder.

[Read more →]

As the spectacle that is the Beijing Olympics explodes onto the international stage, 47 Words takes a look back at the games that once were.

[Read more →]

Dear Perez Hilton,

When we first met, I was in a dark stage of my life. I spent a lot of time watching American Idol on YouTube, read Us Weekly, and somehow managed to keep my nascent pop-trash flame alive long enough to stumble onto your website. The Sangina tidal wave, the Britney head-shave, the Brangelina babies, you were on the front lines, drawing MS paint fluids on celebrities’ faces. And suddenly, by your own proclamation, you were a celebrity, too. Now we see you on VH1 (on those rare moments when we couldn’t be bothered to change the channel away from VH1), read about you in Newsweek, watch you jet-set around the world to shower your meta-celebrity on unsuspecting victims around the world.

[Read more →]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Survive Style 5+ is just another J-Horror knockoff, riding the coattails of Takashi Miike and Ichi the Killer. I mean, right in the first scene, you’ve got Tadanobu Asano — better known as Kakihara in Ichi — as a sullen killer, trying to bury his wife. You also may think, early on, with all the hitmen and petty thieves in the film, the splasy, stylish titles and the killer soundtrack, that Survive Style 5+ might be taking on Tarantino’s style and slipstreaming it into Japanese film.

But you’re pretty likely to be shocked and surprised when you realize that the primary influence isn’t really Miike, and probably isn’t Tarantino — Survive Style 5+ owes more to the candy-colored set design and surreal scenarios of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse than the grittier world of independent cinema. It’s just as much fun as you’d imagine.

[Read more →]

This Week: Quimby the Mouse, collecting Chris Ware’s college comic strips found in Acme Novelty Library, issues #2 and #4.

Quimby the Mouse is by and large Chris Ware’s diary — or if you prefer to be more masculine and highbrow, his journal. It is nonsensical, often confusing, sometimes embarrassing, and, above all, exposing. Unlike other issues I have read up to this point, where the protagonists (Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown) can be separated from Ware himself – making an appearance in Rusty Brown as an art teacher makes this especially true – Quimby is a personification of Ware’s feelings and consciousness.

[Read more →]