Not Books X

Video Games-

 The Walking Dead: Season Two (2013)
Telltale Games- X-Box 360

Telltale Games' first 'season' of The Walking Dead from 2012 felt to me like a landmark in games design in revamping the point and click adventure game genre to more than ever resemble a form of interactive movie. That's not to everyone's taste, but for me it was pretty much all I could've dreamed of, as a long time fan of adventure games. It wouldn't have worked without a good story though, and season one delivered an amazing one, in my opinion a near-perfect encapsulation of zombie horror, making me really care about the central characters to the extent that a simple quick-time event caused untold panic. On top of that, the ending was magnificent.

Season Two catches up with Clementine, the little girl who survived the madness of the initial virus outbreak thanks to player character Lee Everett. It's a bold move to make the player control an eleven year old girl, but it definitively changes the dynamics of the moral aspects of the game, where players are made to make hard choices at critical points in the story. It amplifies the danger of the zombies, necessary to protect the player's suspense of disbelief from the fact that the game is really quite easy. I completed it in a couple of sessions, with each episode taking maybe an hour to complete. That's short for a game, but this is far too cinematic to be classified alongside most console titles in that respect. It felt shorter than season one, and overall I don't think it hit the same heights, but the shift in characters enabled the writers to turn the established themes of zombie horror in a different direction, letting season two stand out from the original in its own way. Roll on season three.

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 The Dig (1995)
LucasArts- PC

Although The Dig is from the golden era of LucasArts' 2-D point and click adventure games, it's probably the most forgotten game of an otherwise beloved series. I first played it when I borrowed it from a friend many, many years ago, unable as I was to find my own copy in the pre-Amazon era, and gave up fairly early in because it was boring. Having finally gotten around to exploring the possibilities of the SCUMMVM emulator, I decided to scratch the long-standing itch in the back of my brain somewhere, and completing the game. I went in with good intentions, then after about ten minutes searched for a walkthrough, because otherwise I'd never get around to finishing it since life's too short

The Dig has a markedly different tone to other popular LucasArts games like Monkey Island or Full Throttle, since it lacks much in the way of humour barring a bunch of sarcastic characters, and there's not many of them. Apparently co-created in some way by Steven Spielberg, the plot is a familiar one to fans of Aerosmith everywhere, as a giant meteorite comet thing is hurling through space towards the Earth. A team of three astronauts (of which bizarrly none seem to be proper astronauts- there's an army guy, a generic scientist man, and a journalist) fly up to it and discover a mysterious extraterrestrial shapes puzzle, which upon completion hurls them across the universe to a planet far away. Upon exploring, the player discovers the seemingly-abandoned ruins of an alien civilisation to find that their only chance of getting home relies upon them understanding the alien technology.

As a plot, it's unoriginal and doesn't stretch very far. The writers include a good variety of mysterious alien McGuffins, and the graphical design nicely evokes the unfamiliar, but there's not enough cohesion to the whole thing, plus the technobabble designed to explain the technology is seriously weak. Adding to these scripting problems are the cast limitations. It seems like hiring former T-1000 and X-Files star Robert Patrick to voice the lead character used the whole budget, and so as a result there are five (and I'm being slightly generous) characters in the whole game. It makes sense for the plot, but it goes against the usual expectations of the genre to do so, making the game that much more unmemorable.

The lack of characters means the game relies mostly on logic-based puzzles rather than conversation ones. It's not as bad as some cheap adventure games full of rubix cube-style puzzlers, but they're still quite irritating and dull, as opposed to the LucasArts norm. Had I refused to use a walkthrough I would've given up pretty soon once again, because The Dig is just a dull game all around. It's way below the usual standard, and though some of the visuals are imaginative, there's nothing else to praise about it.

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Films-

 Street Fighter (1994)

Okay, first of all, I only watched this because it was on television in the background while my girlfriend and I played Pokemon Monopoly (yes). Prior to that I hadn't seen this movie in easily fifteen years, with that first viewing being enough to convince me that I really didn't need to see it again. In the meantime Street Fighter has gained legendary status on the Internet for being absolutely awful, so it was nice to be able to update my geek credentials by watching and hating every second of it. And hate it I did, with the casual fury of a thousand suns. I, like millions of others, used to be a big Street Fighter geek in my youth. My fondest memories are of playing Alpha II on the unappreciated Sega Saturn. Now, I'm not naive enough to complain about a fighting game with barely any story not getting an accurate onscreen translation, but I am self-righteous enough to moan about how all of the best characters were made to look like pathetic idiots.

I suppose the fact that heavily-accented famous Belgian Jean Claude Van Dam plays Guile, the American hero gives the game away from the start, but I could ignore that if Ryu and Ken (the game series two main characters) hadn't been turned from bad ass world warriors into a pair of pathetic street criminals. Then there's Sagat; muay-thai giant of the game turned into a scowling midget. And let's just not mention Blanca. The characters, acting, dialogue and plot are all awful; a complete abomination of a film. Writing about it is actually annoying me so I'm going to stop.

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Dragon Ball Z- Battle of the Gods (2013)

Boy, this Not Books thing really exposes me as a nerd, doesn't it? Like most nerds, I got into the three Dragon Ball anime series when I was in secondary school, and got so attached to the characters and mythos that I carried my interest into (alleged) adulthood. Battle of the Gods caught the attention of every DBZ fan upon its announcement due to the involvement of original Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, as well as being the first new Dragon Ball story in about fifteen years. It's also the eighteenth Dragon Ball movie, and I think the first one to exist within the continuity of the television series- being set before the controversial Dragon Ball GT show. On top of that, it's only the second Dragon Ball movie to be anything other than total nonsense.

Not that I'm recommending this to non-DB fans; Battle of the Gods is feature-length fan service. To that end, the plot is totally appropriate; Goku, long-standing Superman-esque lead character of the franchise learns of the existence of a god of fighting, and immediately challenges him to a battle. Goku is defeated easily (as he always is when facing a new lead villian opponent for the firs time), and it's up to the rest of the DBZ heroes to somehow prevent Beerus, said god, from destroying the Earth while Goku tries to find a way to power up enough to fight him. If that sounds stupid and immature to you, then you are correct, but to the legions of fans like myself, it's pretty much all we need from DBZ. Thankfully for us, Battle of the Gods is mostly rather good in terms of what it is. There are some continuity things that bugged me, but everything else was entertaining enough, with a plot that seemed to send the story on a new tangent to be explored in the next film.

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Aladdin (1992)

It occurs to me I watch the most random selection of films. Hadn't seen Aladdin in years, and I was surprised at how entertaining it was. Robin Williams as the genie makes the film come alive, but there's also a lot of fantastic animation; not just technically, but incredibly imaginative. It made me chuckle in places, and never got too mawkish with the Aladdin/Prince Jasmin coupling. Not much else to say really, I never need to see it ever again. 

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TV Shows-

Red Dwarf I (1988)

I haven't written much in Not Books for tv shows I've watched recently, and I think that's because I find them so disposable that I put them out of my mind quickly afterwards. It's not that I don't like them; these past few months have seen me whizz through eleven seasons of The Simpsons, three Futurama and most recently almost all of Angel (for the upteenth time). But I'm obsessive compulsive, so each time I skip writing about something like that it puts a dagger through my heart, so I'm going to try to do better, starting with a rewatch of one of my favourite shows of all time. Red Dwarf began as a very modest, cheaply-made Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-influenced sci-fi comedy on BBC2 back in the late eighties, and though it's success has earned it international fandom and ten (so far) other series, going back to Red Dwarf I was a great reminder of how it was all built.

Compared to the later series, I think the first is generally recognised amongst fans as noticably different in tone and style. Not that this is a case of The Black Adder; the six episodes here are still very funny, but in a  more low key way. Without much of any kind of budget, the action is entirely set on the ship, based around the relationship between Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer. Though the show arguably peaked a few years later when focusing more heavily on the sci-fi aspect, I think the basis for all of that was built in these quieter earlier episodes, thanks to the huge effort put in to characterisation. It's also obvious that the cast are still growing into things, with the odd bad line reading standing out here and there. Still, I've seen it at least a dozen times, and it's still endearingly funny to me, as though there's something homely about this bunch of ragtag losers stuck on a rust-bucket three million years into deep space.

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