indefinite articles

In August of 2001, I went on vacation with my parents to Hawaii. For some reason, my parents’ itinerary focused mostly on towns and shops, rather than taking in God’s green-blue earth, and since most Hawaiian towns seem to consist of the same six stores repeated ad nauseam, I was a bit bored. So, I ended up spending the trip reclining on hotel balconies, eating Goldfish crackers and reading.

I finished four books over the course of the vacation, and their character gives some indication of what a moody bitch I was that week: American Psycho, The Monk by Matthew Lewis (one of the original Gothic novels), Notes from the Underground, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. Basically, I was being a little dick, and I was proud of it.

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A very special installment of Crisis on Indefinite Earths this week. Rather than an impending disaster, instead we take a look at a crisis averted.

With comic books swiftly executing a complete coup d’etat of popular culture, I’ve long been seeking out comics of every stripe to see the myriad approaches to the still-evolving medium. From the wide range of American comics — superhero, indie, underground — to the many vibrant comic cultures around the world — Japan, France, Belgium — I’ve tried to sample from each, at the very least. And while my list of favorite titles seems to be ever expanding, one series has stayed king of the hill the entire while: Garth Ennis’ Preacher.

A long, winding journey of an American preacher traveling the country in search for an awol God, the series blends a grotesque vision of Americana, a deranged sense of humor, and a refreshingly clearheaded sense of morality. And, of course, let’s not forget the vampire, the superpowers, and the copious bestiality with small animals. In other words, it’d be perfect for an adaptation by HBO, which is exactly what was in the works. Until it was canceled.

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This Week: Metal Gear Solid 4, on first blush, turns out to be … actually good!

Ladies and gentlemen, sing it from the rooftops! After emerging from the vision quest mire of Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater, those monuments to design indulgence, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot is not only fun, but suprisingly so. Perhaps it has the advantage with the ornate punishment of the previous games so fresh in my mind, but this latest endeavor is refreshingly clean in comparison.

The big game of the year thus far along with Grand Theft Auto IV, Guns of the Patriot was released to massive buzz and, as is sadly to be expected of high profile releases, critical acclaim. Sons of Liberty also was lauded, with a Metacritic score of 96, and not until later did it rightly come to be regarded as the steaming pile of shit that it actually is. So, despite the initial rush of dopamine that Guns of the Patriot offers right off the bat, the true cut of its jib remains to be seen.

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Robert De Niro and Al Pacino seem, in many ways, to be interchangeable, peddlars of the same unique brand of high-art ultraviolent cinema and Academy Award-winning gravitas. Through them, we have been able to vicariously live all of our sickest immoral power fantasies. It would seem obvious then, to have long ago put them in a movie together. After all, wouldn’t the power fantasy then be twice as good?

On the contrary, it seems as though their mutual kinetic energy, like some kind of opposing magnetic force, continually pushes them apart — perhaps, a la Time Cop, if their flesh were to touch they would spontaneously cease to exist. Yet at the same time, another force, albeit a much weaker one, seems to be pulling them ever closer together, one small step at a time.

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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.

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This week: A few hours further through Snake Eater, Jake speaks his mind on the gameplay of the first three installments of the series.

For a game that so regularly wrests control from the player, the Solid series’ big appeal is, oddly enough, a sense of freedom. Certainly, the plot is going to play out the same way every time, and the game is ultimately one long funneled experience, but each step along the way is a sandbox within which the player is invited to experiment. Solid Snake enters an area, is given a specific goal, and must overcome a sequence of obstacles. And when that goal is accomplished, the game successfully makes you feel like you noodled a solution out all on your own.

Despite all the constant interruptions of gameplay, the leaden dialogue and thecutscene tsunamis, the game’s most invasive flaw is one which utterly undermines this sense of accomplishment. Coming to a solution is always satisfying, but the execution is anything but. As the controls and options have slowly ballooned over the course of the three games, the gameplay, once tactile and snappy, has grown so heavy that the whole structure collapses under the weight.

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It’s been six years since The X-Files, the proto-Lost that never managed to figure itself out, went off the air. And as far as I can tell, it’s been ten years since anyone actually watched it, or could bring themselves to care. And yet, on Friday, the second film spawned by the show, is coming out in theaters.

The subtitle, I Want to Believe, reads to me as a reluctant admission to the questionable timeliness of it’s release. At this point, the show seems like a relic, its deadpan seriousness from an era when TV was seemingly divorced entirely from style. Clearly, there is something deeper going on here, some invisible hand with a hidden agenda silently pulling the strings in the shadows. But who? And why?

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This week: Can Hideo Kojima find redemption with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater?

After the debacle that was Metal Gear Solid 2, I’ve been playing the third installment of the series with a knot in my stomach. The notion of another Metal Gear game fills me with equal parts nausea and hope.

Hope, because Snake Eater is regarded by many fans as the best in the series, a redemptive return to form after we were force to watch Raiden’s shit-eating grimace hour after hour. But many fans also dress up in costumes and have accounts on DeviantArt. Plainly, they can’t be trusted.

I play on in fear.

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Whenever I watch a Guillermo del Toro movie, it kind of feels like a day at the races. I put my money down and cheer in the stands, hoping Guillermo will launch forward to take the cup. But so far, he’s never been able to pull ahead of the pack. Not to say that his films are necessarily bad, but Del Toro’s enthusiasm for directing drips from his every frame, and with his chutzpah I expect nothing short of greatness.

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This week: Things take a turn for the worst in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

By their nature, the great films of history are manipulative, selfish bastards. Leveraging expectations, they exploit their power over the viewer, tugging the mental puppet strings of their unsuspecting audience. And it’s what we want: to have our frame of mind altered in some meaningful, though not necessarily pleasurable, way.

Not coincidentally, the worst cinematic experiences are those that grow from grand ambitions, but resolutely fail to meaningfully address their audience. No matter the genius of the initial conception, the end result becomes a nauseating monument to self-indulgence.

But in even the worst case, a film will rarely last longer than three hours. My play through of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty took fourteen.

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