One week in London and all I got was these lousy videos.
I’ve been working on some big, kind-of-secret projects lately, hence the radio silence. But here’s one big project that has now seen the light of day: I went to London for a week to shoot videos at the Eurogamer Expo! I had a blast creating these videos.
Naturally, I worked with Ellie Gibson again, and we divided our efforts between two series. The first series was Expo Extra, in which Ellie and I “mucked about” (her words) on the show floor with the aim of eliciting yuks and laffs and what have you. Here are the videos we ended up with. Click on the screenshot or the title to watch each video on the Eurogamer site. (The EG video player can’t be embedded, for whatever reason.)
It is fun to stick gold stars on a big map.
Ellie and I try to incite milquetoast PR representatives into mud-flinging rage. It took longer to decide how we were going to punctuate the title of this video than it did to shoot the thing.
The notion that independent developers are not allowed to like money is an extremely dubious one, but that did not prevent us from adopting it in the name of wearing wacky costumes.
Speaking of wacky costumes.
Ellie and I tried to figure out what was the dumbest video we did all week; “Science Test” came in a close second to “I’m Mister Sony.”
We played it a little straighter (although not entirely straight) in this one to get fans’ impressions of the show. The original version of the video mistakenly used the American spelling of “favorite,” omitting the British “U.” Nobody noticed until the video was posted online, and I rushed to upload a corrected version. You cannot imagine how touchy people can get about that freaking “U.”
The other series, Eurogamer Expo Behind Closed Doors, was a casual talk-show format in the vein of the GDC After Dusk shows we did earlier this year. We set up shop in a corner of the Earls Court convention center and invited some game-production smarties to chat with us.
Ellie and I “outsourced” the post-production of the BCD videos to others on the Eurogamer crew, which frankly was a tough decision for me. I’ve always been too much of a control freak to hand off any part of the production on my videos. But Paul Loman et al., did a nice job editing everything together. And what a help they were. The extra assistance proved to be a godsend because without it, Ellie and I never would have been able to produce as much as we did. Teamwork, who knew? So all told, we made nine videos last week! That feels like a lot.
Our first guest was Nolan North. I was excited to make this booking. North has been the voice of countless game characters—seriously, check out that résumé—most famously Drake from the Uncharted series and Desmond from the Assassin’s Creed games. His uncanny ability to be cast again and again in high-profile games has given him a near-mythical status, so it was cool to meet the man in the flesh.
Willits is one of the main creative minds at stalwart developer id Software, and he has been there for decades. I enjoy a good shooter from time to time—and played a ton of id’s Quake in high school—but I admit that guns and ammo (id’s specialty) don’t rank among my top gaming interests. Still, this proved to be my favorite interview of the Expo. Willits was amiable and engaging, with an agile mind that ranged across a number of different topics in the gaming world.
The creators of the burgeoning iPhone hit Hard Lines and indie sensation Joe Danger, respectively, Andrew and Sean were our guests for “Indie Day” on Behind Closed Doors. How do you know a guest isn’t being constrained by corporate PR nannies? When he shows up to an interview taking slugs from a bottle of Heineken.
This was a great week of fun and creativity, one that I won’t forget anytime soon.
Nobody likes the new guy.
Especially not Six Feet Under‘s Fisher family.
Angela is a terrible fit for Fisher & Sons. … She spends the entire episode spouting uncomfortable truths—although in the case of the Fishers, “uncomfortable truths” might be redundant. This family is interested in truth, but they have a method for getting to it. First, they lie to themselves for a while, then they reach a crisis point, and then comes a bit of introspection. After all that, at last, a little baby truth is born. Angela doesn’t do any of that gestation—she skips straight to the end! And the Fishers can’t stand it. They don’t know what to do with themselves around her.
Read my TV Club Classic review of the Six Feet Under episode “The New Person” at The A.V. Club.
Have you Sawbucked your Gamer lately?
Probably not, because that sentence does not make sense.
It’s been busy these days. Sometimes I feel like Mister Runner in the screenshot up there. So amid all the editing and screenshot-wrangling, I only had time to actually write two of the entries in this week’s Sawbuck Gamer. They are Mr Runner 2 and Cuboy Hot Pants.
Mr Runner 2 isn’t bashful about its influences. It has a level named Canabalt, and it’s hard to mistake the soaring, squishy acrobatics of Super Meat Boy. But if an homage is a copy that’s good and a rip-off is a copy that’s bad, Mr Runner 2 is a nice homage to its two most obvious forebears.
Read the August 8 edition of Sawbuck Gamer at The A.V. Club.
Did you know that Project Runway is an unconventional show?
It is. They said so and everything.
The contestants meet Tim Gunn at Petland Discounts, and therefore they will have to make outfits out of crap they buy in the pet store. “It’s the unconventional challenge!” says Tim. A graphic slides onto the screen to emphasize the point: “UNCONVENTIONAL CHALLENGE.” This is the difference between the Bravo era and the Lifetime era. In the Bravo days, the show assumed that viewers were aware—or could at least figure out—that traditional fashion design does not entail a former Miss Trinidad heaving a 20-pound bag of dog kibble into a basket full of aquarium tubes.
Read my review of Project Runway‘s latest episode, “My Pet Project,” at The A.V. Club.
This is a bear wearing a hat.
I enjoy picking out the screenshot that will accompany each of my Six Feet Under reviews at The A.V. Club. As I shuttle through the episode on DVD, screenshot-hunting refocuses my attention on the visual composition of the show, and then I get to choose a single image that will set the tone for my review.
This week, I set the tone with a bear wearing a hat.
Hiram wishes that Ruth would loosen up, and he gets his wish something fierce. Ruth takes a couple of aspirin for a headache, except it’s the same bottle in which David had stashed a couple pills of ecstasy. Thanks to the luck of the draw, Ruth falls into a synaesthetic bliss, where she sees new colors and bonds with the life force of the trees. And what do you know! She attracts a bear. A big fuzzy teddy bear with an oversized pocket watch. He points to the clock. The unspoken message is, “It’s time.” Time for what? Time to face her dead husband. Time to exorcise her crippling guilt. Time to love again.
Project Runway is back.
And I’m delighted. I love reviewing this show for The A.V. Club. I think that my Project Runway recaps are, in one sense, my most liberated writing, insofar as I just let loose and have fun with it. It’s almost therapeutic to write these, even if it does mean staying up until 4:30 a.m. on the nights that the show airs. I mean, that’s only about an hour past my usual bedtime anyway, but c’mon, Lifetime, cut me some slack. Would an 8 p.m. time slot be so bad?
This week’s guest judge: Christina Ricci. She will be starring in ABC’s fall series Pan-Am, Heidi notes. I remember a day when young actresses with a TV project to promote would go on The $25,000 Pyramid and try to outwit Poet Laureate of TV Nipsey Russell. Now they judge fashion shows alongside an ersatz Anna Wintour and a braying tangerine.
Read my review of the Project Runway Season 9 premiere, “Come as You Are,” at The A.V. Club.
Dream a little dream of sheep-people.
As I said to my editors at Eurogamer, they might have been better served having Carl Jung review Catherine. This was a tough one to write up, but for all the right reasons. It’s an eccentric, hard-to-describe game with a strong vision. These are the kinds of games you want to play. To quote a reader who commented on my review, “Gaming seems fresh again” when you encounter works like Catherine. And despite struggling with it, I’m proud of how the review turned out after all the pushing and pulling.
During each night of climbing, Vincent gets to rest at midway points, where he can chat with other climbers who have been relegated to this same recurring nightmare. I can try to describe these rest stops, but it’s going to be strange, like someone telling you about a dream. Because that’s what I’m doing. See, all the other climbers are sheep. Vincent isn’t a sheep, except yeah, he basically is a sheep. They’re all sheep but also people, OK? A church bell tolls incessantly. There’s not really a church, but there is a kid in a confession booth who asks you personal questions. The booth may or may not have rockets.
We all have our freakout moments.
But seeing the Fisher family freak out is particularly hilarious. Fortunately for us, that’s not an uncommon occurrence on Six Feet Under. As I work my way through the first season of the show for The A.V. Club‘s TV Club Classic, I get to relive some of the series’ classic spaz moments. The most recent unhinged rant came courtesy of Nate Fisher slamming some bong hits and getting ultra-paranoid, sending himself into a spiral of nutso that leaves him screaming, “YOU HAVE A SHIATSU MAT!”
The Insanity of the Week culminates with Nate attending just a terrible, terrible party. Brenda loves keeping her various social spheres separate and them bringing them together as quickly and uncomfortably as possible. Since she’s the only one with a personal connection to everyone in these situations, it ensures that she will be the center of attention. She did it with Nate and her parents, and now she does it with Nate and Random Australian Dude. And, of course, Billy, to whom she has a connection that nobody else could EVER match. Which is so convenient for her. Whenever he’s in the room, she gets to be the Princess of Wisdom.
You can always keep up on the Six Feet Under reviews by clicking the link below. Watch the show along with me! We’ll have TV adventures together.
Go ahead, have fun.
Bastion is one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking games I’ve played in the last few years. It got me thinking about the nature of loss—something on my mind already, what with the weekly Six Feet Under reviews—and asked me to make choices that were loaded with import, rather than the usual “will you be good or evil?” gimmickry that lesser games sometimes try to pass off as profound.
It does all this while also being great fun to play all the way through. In fact, Bastion‘s fun is one reason that it’s such an effective work. Some people act as if “fun” is a lower form of interpretation, or at least that it acts in opposition to deep thought. This is silly. Entertainment doesn’t have to mean brainless escapism. (In my opinion, it almost never does. People don’t turn their brains off as readily as conventional wisdom might have it.)
Having fun brings us to a less guarded plane. A fun game can open us to new perspectives and influence our motives in unexpected ways—make us do things we wouldn’t otherwise consider. Your usual defenses are lowered. In other words, you become more open-minded without even being aware of it. That cannot be a bad thing. We need to have experiences like this.
I had an email exchange with a friend recently regarding this game. He believed that analyzing any observation about Bastion that didn’t occur to me in the “moment-to-moment” experience of playing the game was, in his words, too “generous” to the game. His stance was that the impulses we experience in the act of playing the game are the only “actual” (his word) insights that a game critic can consider. Not surprisingly, he takes a pretty dim view of games’ ability to speak to larger ideas.
I was pretty upset by this conversation. It’s not just that my friend’s view was startlingly anti-intellectual—leaving no room for contemplation—but he also seemed to be missing half the fun of fun! The incredible thing about a fun game is that when the thrill passes and you come up for air, you often find that you’ve performed these strange, wonderful acts that you didn’t know you were capable of. It’s after the fact that you get the chance to think about where the game took you. That contrast between the perspective of your “normal” experience and the playing experience is a remarkable font of insight and meaning. It’s a point of synthesis. I thought about Bastion for days afterward and continue to turn it over in my head.
This phenomenon is not unique to games, although I think that games do it very well. Any great art sticks with you and bubbles up in your thoughts. I remember seeing Monet’s “Water-Lily Pond” when I was a teenager. The painting affected me in that moment and has affected me, in different ways, when I’ve thought back on it. The manner in which the painting changed me in the years since I saw it is no less “actual” than what happened in the museum that day. Some meaningful insights come in an instant, and others take time to ferment. Anyone, but especially a critic, ought to be open to both.
As it applies to games, I believe that to consider only the playing experience in its own isolated bubble is to pursue a needlessly crippled approach. Yet it’s an approach that, in games writing, isn’t as rare as it should be (probably because it’s also easy).
Fun is underrated. A game doesn’t need to be fun in order to be incisive and meaningful. But contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t hurt, either. So here’s to Bastion, a fun game.
Bastion is a post-apocalyptic work, yet it’s almost never grim. Its premise is that even when the future seems to have been consumed by past calamity, the only way to go is forward. But does moving ahead after a disaster mean rebuilding what was there, or creating a new world? When all the earthly things have been destroyed, how much does the soul of the past persist? Bastion leaves those questions open; its philosophy is that only the survivors can decide.
“Hi, I’m Billy.”
Billy is scary.
Jeremy Sisto makes those three words sound remarkably dangerous. Claire is attracted to danger—not actual danger, but her clichéd imagination of it—so of course she’s enamored right away with Billy. She’s too young to notice the smoldering fuse of madness that she ignites when she tells him she’s the sister of the guy who’s “dating” Brenda. Billy’s face twitches. “Oh yeah, dating? Like what, going steady?” Smile. “He give her his ID bracelet?” Smile. “She carve his initials in her arm so they’d be there forever?” Not smiling anymore. Did she burn his name into her body? Because she did that for me. And nobody else.
Read my review of the Six Feet Under episode “The Room” at The A.V. Club.
