Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Just as I talk up the work I publish, I should mention when I drop a gig – and last week, I retired my Save the Robot column at GameSetWatch. GSW is one of my favorite gaming blogs, and I was pleased with most of the columns I wrote for them, but I’ve had trouble finding the right ideas lately – or finding time to do serious research and planning for a column that was supposed to run every other week.

I’ve had the privilege of writing several columns over the past few years, for Pitchforkmedia.com, Paste, and The Wire newspaper in Portsmouth. I’m the kind of guy that tends to do well with a column: I hang on to the gigs that I like, so I store up the kind of credit that leads to these invitations, and I have a short attention span and a lot of ideas, which can keep a column fresh.

If anything, I usually cover too wide a ground in my columns – which is part of the reason I quit this one; I didn’t think I was hitting this audience’s sweetspot very consistently, and would rather find a gig where it makes sense to write about pretty much anything. But I’m grateful to Simon Carless for the opportunity, and it gave me a chance to turn out some cool pieces. Here are some of the highlights:

• The One-Game Diet
• My Horse and Me
• Let’s Burn Down Africa
• Gaming and Web Me.0 (Or: Why is My Butt Online) – This is the one where I felt like I lost everybody; in retrospect, it could’ve been better argued.
• Childish Things
• The Birth of the Cool

And here’s the full archive.

This means for the first time since ‘03, I have no columns at all. Strange.

I can’t tell you why it took this long, but I finally recently got Rock Band. It brings me endless, uncomplicated joy. I’ve been buying some downloadable content – the Bowie pack, the free “Still Alive” download (which was surprisingly dull). But the real winner was this week’s release of Pixies’ Doolittle. That this is the third full album they’ve ever released for the service – and ahead of all the new albums that a desparate music industry would probably die to push into the trough – well, the fact that they went with a Pixies record is proof that Harmonix is loaded up with Boston scenester snobs. (Like I said – I love this game.)

But okay, first impressions of the songs themselves: they work really well – even better than “Wave of Mutilation.” The songs are hella fun to play – and I don’t just mean “Debaser” or “Here Comes Your Man,” but even the weird little tracks like “Cracklin’ Jones” or “Mr. Grieves” are fast and tricky, with fast, tricky chord changes, erratic starts and stops, and no wanky solos.

The Rock Band setlist tries to satisfy many camps. I’ve never been a fan of macho hard rock/blues rock/meathead rock/grunge. I’ve played Kiss’ “Detroit Rock City” exactly once. But indie rock, early alt-rock, new wave, and power pop are my thing, and there are all of about three songs on the main disc that hit my bullseye – until now. I’ve been playing too much Rock Band as it is – my wrists hurt like goddammit – but “Debaser” makes it all worthwhile.

With the release of Wall-E – which I can’t wait to see, with my kid, as soon as it hits DVD and I can sit and explain everything to him in the privacy of our living room – I’ve been digging the Pixar coverage, including articles like this primer (with clips) at the AV Club.

But I can’t help but notice how everyone hates Cars. I haven’t seen every Pixar movie – I missed the ones about monsters and bugs – but I deliberately skipped Cars, because it sounded like a kid’s movies. Pixar is artist-driven, and the maturity level seems to vary: Incredibles and Ratatouille were adult movies that kids could enjoy, while, say, Finding Nemo was definitely a kid’s movie that adults could love.

But like I said, I have a three-year-old, and three-year-olds dig the hell out of Cars. So in addition to living with a few die-cast McQueen’s and a talking Chick Hicks that’s loud as a bridge falling and just as annoying, I’ve also seen the DVD a couple times. And you know what? It’s a pretty good movie.

Yes, it’s long and a little padded – though we’ve never sat through the whole thing in one go. Yes, it spawned a ridiculous amount of merchandising. And it’s definitely a boy’s movie: there are only a couple female characters, and the love interest, Sally, may be independent, but she’s also shuffled to the side pretty quickly before any kisses or displays of affection would gross out the little boys in the audience. (Plus, cars kissing, wtf.)

But it’s still a solid, entertaining flick, with a couple particular strengths:

- Radiator Springs. The “fast-talking city slicker winds up in the sticks” storyline might be a cliche, but genuine love went into making this town. Radiator Springs was a hopping place in the ’50s or ’60s – but then the interstate diverted all the traffic, and sucked all the commerce out of the community. We have the luck to live in a small town that’s doing well and has a good economy. But a lot of people work hard to keep the place vital and interesting. I like that Cars tries to raise an appreciation for places like this, and I brought it up a couple times to my kid while we watched the flick.

- Friendship. McQueen’s and Mater’s friendship evolves in fits and starts. Mater’s the annoying, dumb but tried-and-true friend that many kids are lucky to have, and easily take for granted. When Sally stops McQueen and reminds him to take Mater’s friendship seriously – and not to dick him around – it’s a good moment: this isn’t a complicated lesson, but it’s an important one.

- The Big Race. It’s a given that in the big race at the end of the flick, the way McQueen races will be more important than whether or not he wins. And it’s a given that MCQueen will “do the right thing.” But I didn’t really see the ending coming. (The rest of this graf will have spoilers.) I admired the fact that McQueen did the right thing. But it was also a significant choice. It would’ve been easy for him to wrap up the race and then go back and check on the King, and still come off as a pretty good guy. He didn’t make a choice between a bad act and a good one; he left a good outcome for a noble one. I haven’t been so moved since the end of Chicken Run.

And a bonus number four: It helped turn my three-year-old into a “car guy,” which made his uncles really, really happy. (Pictured below: my kid, learning to drive a ‘64 Corvette.)

This week for the Onion, I filed a review of a zippy little art game called Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist. The review runs next week, so no spoilers on the grade. But I wasn’t satisfied with my write-up. I basically described the title and concluded, “It’s cool ’cause it’s weird,” or maybe I said, “It’s weird and that’s awesome” – I can’t exactly remember. But the thing I didn’t get into was why that’s a good thing. Randy Balma is provocative. It’s disturbing. It’s hard to play. And it’ll give you a headache. So … what?

The game comes from Mark Essen, who goes by Messhof. He’s made a series of difficult, motion sickness-inducing titles with names like Punishment and You Found the Grappling Hook. (You can see the whole portfolio on his site.) They play off retro visual styles and sound design, and they’re annoyingly difficult platformers – but they’re not quite as in your face as Randy Balma. Messhof claims this is his “most narrative” game to date. That’s hard to tell on the first play, because it seems like four unrelated mini-games stitched together into one package – which is pretty much how it seems to have been designed: in his blog he talks about working on sections two (the flying Big Ben) and three (originally slated to be Punishment 3) separately, and then munging them together with a driving sim and … well, I don’t even know what you’d call the fourth chapter, where you play a mutant baby head with lips for tentacles that eats other babies against a synapse-misfiring strobe background. I have no idea where that came from.

If all four pieces were designed separately, do they work as a narrative? Yes and no. I can imagine a theme throughout the game, where an abortionist dies in a fiery bus crash and then is transformed into the afterlife into a monster – a monster that still eats babies, but this time, it is itself a baby, which is weird. That said, the story makes as much sense as you want it to. The real thread is the sense of transformation – that you open in a disoriented, drugged state and then transform into something new and mind-expanding, and the aggressive visuals and eerie sound design accentuate this transformation. If you buy that, the game works pretty well. (Although if you buy that, then section three – where you are, not a transforming superabortionist, but a little dude jumping around in circles – doesn’t seem to fit. So, there’s a criticism.)

From the title to the aggressive aesthetic sense, the game is provocative. It reminds me of aggressive noise rock or experimental film, which attacks the audience with anti-social and rebellious themes. What’s more anger-making than abortion? Thing is, in playing Randy Balma, it’s hard to say if it’s “rebellious.” Against what does it rebel? In music, you can look at initially-repulsive genres like free jazz or no wave, and see how they revolted against 1. a particular artistic tradition, 2. a set of social conditions, 3. and oh yeah, everyone was fried on drugs or hormones. With Randy Balma, I might see #3, but not #1 or 2. It’s not clear from this game or Essen’s other titles that he’s making a conscious break from gaming or from life in America today. He doesn’t hate on commercial gaming: the retro elements make you think he’s fond of ’80s-style platformers, and there’s no satire against anything else. It’s hard to see any political undertones. I think he chose the “abortion” thing because it makes people go “What?!” Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

From my experience, the content and themes of the game – and the clunky, disjointed narrative – aren’t what make the game engaging. Randy Balma works purely because of the sensory experience. It’s not as subversive or as intriguing as Portal, another puzzler/platformer that lures you into playing head games with yourself. And I don’t really care if it “means” anything: in fact, to the extent that it tries, I think it hits some problems. But it unites the visuals, sound and gameplay for a unique and disturbing effect, and that’s always a hoot.

Still. If I had to put my finger on the single thing that makes it truly provocative? The game is not cute.

A lot of experimental games that have bubbled up give us new ideas or weird mechanics or goofy sound and visuals. But often, they’re sentimental or even fanboyish. Retro elements are thrown in out of love, not anger. The stories rely on trite cliches. I played the acclaimed art game Passage a few months ago, and I thought it was surprisingly insipid: when you meet your wife at the beginning, the game seems corny, but when she dies at the end and she’s replaced by a little tombstone? I just cracked up. Games can explore serious issues, but “You live, you love, and you die” doesn’t qualify.

Randy Balma stands out because it doesn’t have soppy moments. It tries to do something a little fucked up and consistently sticks to its guns. In fact, if you read it as a comment on the state of indie/experimental games today? Maybe it’s more rebellious than I thought.

UPDATE: Review is now live. The best comment came from El Santo: “To all the complainers who slagged on Roger Ebert’s assessment that video games are not art: be careful what you wish for. It just might come true.”

It’s been slow the last week or two. I’m still swamped with work – day job and freelance – but it’s finally starting to break, so now I’m filling the time with Rock Band. But not so much yet with the blogging.

So a couple clips:

- I reviewed the reissue of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville today for Pitchfork. I took a specifically male slant, ’cause I’m a guy and I was the reviewer. For a good take from a woman, Jennifer Maerz’ is a great read. I know the reissue’s targeted at the thirty- and fortysomethings who knew it when, but I’m incredibly curious what the younger kids will think of this – the writing, the attitudes, the sound. I can’t imagine it would surprise kids today as much as it did in the early ’90s. But the songwriting holds up. Can’t wait for the chance to revisit Whip-Smart.

- I subbed for Scott Tobias writing up Fear Itself at the TV Club. Doing these write-ups is hard on the system. I drank coffee before 10 to stay awake to write the recap and found myself lying on the couch at one in the morning, still buzzed, watching South Park. But as I’ve said before, I’ve spent more time discussing these things with readers, via comments, than on anything else I’ve written. So that’s always worth it.

After watching this video, I don’t know what I think of Scritti Politti.

Be sure to watch as far as the mountain climbing scene.

Joe Jackson:

Okay, not “rocks” in the Guitar Hero sense. But post-punk jitters and heartache are my cup of tea. How did I make it all the way through Scritti Politti’s back catalog (psst … 4 A-Sides, holy Christ) but sleep on this guy?

Thanks to WUNH’s Rock is Dead, the radio’s greatest radio show, for making me look him up again.

What’s Jackson up to today? He just cut a new record – and he’s on a pro-smoking campaign.

My last two Battlestar links for the year:

- My write-up for the mid-season finale. Boy oh boy, are there spoilers, and clues, and speculation. And comments! Some of the best speculation about next season is going on right here, so check it out.

- And a (spoiler-free) interview with James “Baltar” Callis, who was a hoot to speak with and gave some illuminating background on religion, his career, and how the cast reacted when they learned the identity of the final Cylon. When I was pitching interviews, I picked him as the guy I wanted to talk with. He’s got one of the best roles in television right now, and I figured he’s really smart – or at least, English. And I was right. It’s a good read.

On a recent trip to Jetpack I picked up some new X-Men spin-off series called Divided We Stand. It’s about how something big has happened to the X-Men, and some people died, and other people changed, and … well, I’m sure that whatever happened will be undone in a couple years by some other writer, so the details don’t matter.

What was interesting about the comic – or actually, maybe the word is “boring” – is the way it treated its characters. The story basically concerned five mutants who, in the wake of this giant crisis, were walking around talking about themselves. They think about their past, ruminate on the nature of power, mull over whether they can handle the responsibility of being superheroes. And that’s pretty much it.

Usually in genre fiction, you can’t tell a story about an internal struggle without giving the audience some external head-bashing. In E.R., the doctor who spends half the episode fretting over some botched surgery gets to spend the next half saving a premature infant. In Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore has complained how every episode where he wanted to just hang out with his characters, had to feature some stitched-on threat. And in comic books, Peter Parker can gripe about whatever he wants, but he’s going to be slugging somebody by the end. You want a whole story where the character just walks around looking serious? Then pay for HBO.

Well – usually you have to go to HBO for that stuff, or read a book or something. But navel-gazers are actually more common than you’d think. The Cloak & Dagger comics from the ’80s all boiled down to the characters obsessing over their status – their powers, their relationship, whatever – without ever doing anything about it. I dug up a New Mutants issue recently where Magik spent most of the book talking about how she’s a bad person, and Magneto basically sat there and convinced her she wasn’t. No coincidence that the heroes of both books are adolescents: unproductive monologues about whether you deserve to live are prime teen material.

And to tell the truth, sometimes I like that stuff. This Divided We Stand comic is a dull read, but that’s mainly because I don’t know the characters. If I gave a damn about Forge, or that blue-haired chick pictured above, I’d probably be happy to read a book where I just get to sit there and listen to them talk about themselves. Watching heroes and villains beat the crap out of each other is more cathartic. But watching them hate themselves is easier to relate to.

(By the way: the reason I bought the book was to read the story about Magik, aka Illyana Rasputin, who’s back in play after supposedly being killed off a few years ago. I guess Marvel’s interested in telling stories about her again, which is cool by me – she’s one of my all-time faves. A couple months ago, I wrote a very short piece on the Magik mini-series from the ’80s – the one where Illyana spends ages six to thirteen in hell, tortured by the demon-lord Belasco – and for the first time I realized that it’s a perfect metaphor for a childhood abduction. Oh Chris Claremont, you sly dog you!)

My Battlestar Galactica blogging continues, and so do the comments. One of our commenters had this to say after the latest episode, “Hub.” I don’t know whether to put spoiler warnings around this one – I guess he doesn’t give away anything specific, but when I read this I knew: the jig is up.

No, no, NO!

by Praise Allah No One Was Hurt

Look, I have been using a lot of mind-altering substances since my semester from hell just finished, and have had my own spiritual vision of the truth behind BSG.

SPOILER ALERT! (perhaps)

As our technology progress, life for the average smuck becomes safer and more boring (even if CNN would try to have us believe otherwise). Thus we construct elaborate theme parks, with increasingly complex simulations of danger. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Disney Land, but compare Space Mountain to your average roller coaster. Then scale that improvement up over thousands of years. The end result is a multi-generational theme park ride that sends an interested party out into space, where they’ll experience the thrills and danger of colonization, conquest, expansion, and ultimately collapse, only to have their distant descendants carefully, carefully herded back to the safety and prosperity of Earth.

I mean, what are the fucking odds of all final 5 cylons, apparently unique in the universe, winding up amonst the 0.0001% of humanity that survives, unless the whole damn thing was perfectly orchestrated by techno-omnipotent beings ahead of time?

Actually, I can tell you the odds: 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Is it 4:20 yet?