Into the Thick of it... Together!

Because I've recently espoused my thoughts on collaborative gameplay - from my earlier Donkey Kong Country shpiel - it seems appropriate to rehash the concept. Sitting around playing Nintendo has been a staple of the quality time spent with my brothers. The four-brothers/four-players algorithm has governed these sessions for decades, and still hold true today. I bring this up because recently John and I have been playing a lot of Super Mario World for the SNES and everything time we boot it up, despite how fun it is, I end up asking myself why it took Nintendo so long to allow their consumers to play collaboratively all at once.

Super Mario 3d World has pretty much crowned itself as king in that department - embodying all the madness and bedlam of four players bouncing shells, stars, coins, and each other into abysses in a frantic scramble to reach Bowser's castle while also drawing out their innate ruthlessness by having them each compete for a crown which benefits them nothing but the right to wear a crown. It is not uncommon to see Luigi cut a drawbridge; sending Mario, Peach, and Toad all plummeting to their loudly belligerent deaths for the sake of racking up an easy 4, 000 points. Or for Luigi to be hurled cruelly off a ledge, in turn, to steal back the crown. I feel I will soon dedicate a whole post to this marvelous little jewel of a game, but don't feel like digressing just yet.

This is all even more curious since games have efficiently been doing since River City Ransom or Battletoads. There is something cathartic and momentous about being in the same room, holding controllers, and winning (or, as more often than not is the case of Secret of Mana, losing) together as a team. The good times roll. There is nothing quite like finding out SM3DW's "Bowser's Castle World" is immediately followed by "Bowser's Theme Park World", or of having pre-Playoffs motivational speeches after having died so many times in the poison swamp as to have humiliatingly received the game's golden "No Child Left Behind" leaf.

Secret of Mana was an SNES classic in my house. It was a rare find - a game that held all the conventions and tropes of a Final Fantasy game (big deal, back then) while also allowing multiplayer gameplay. I won't extensively pontificate on how spectacular the music is (do I fucking need to even?) - I'm primarily concerned with how this game dishes out the collaborative experience, especially early on. 

Whereas other games of the era offered up the job system or focused on bonus-granting equipment and ornamentation, Secret of Mana offers customization through its arsenal. Just because you are the dauntless, red-headed "Hero of Mana" doesn't mean you have to lug the sword around from Potos to Thanathos - you can equip and level-up whatever designer weapon you feel like. With three players, you can now start strategizing - delegating combat responsibilities based on short- or long-range reach weapons, projectile, or speed to try and hit as many marks at once. If John and Dabutt keep a particularly bastard enemy occupied with feeble, long distance strikes, Shemp can wait and deliver thrashing ("whacking" I guess) blows with a heavier weapon when he's ready (yeah our naming conventions haven't exactly reached middle-age). 

This is important. Why? Because Secret of Mana, especially as far as RPGs go, is another motherfucker of a game. It is occasionally mind-blowing to go back and play a motherfucker every now and then (an especially sobering revelation after the simplistic and kid-friendly Super Mario RPG) and appreciate just how ruthless game designers used to be. Secret of Mana really offers up a juicy example of a game where the mechanics themselves are out to get you. The game combines lenghty, nail-chewing dungeon-crawls with sudden and grotesque difficulty spikes (the kind that remind me of stumbling over the wrong load-screen in Diablo II) compounded with a limited inventory system than makes resource-management a harrowing ordeal, like winding up on the wrong end of the Monopoly table. 

It's a testament to its design that the Action-RPG combat is such a fluid, dynamic experience. Your characters parry, thrust, backflip, guard, get knocked back or deliver crippling (and cathartic) blows, the enemies cast spells, go on the offensive, dodge and backpedal, disintegrate spectacularly, etc. In a game that requires grinding to progress, grinding is about as enjoyable as eating Pringles. Potato-chip game-play at its finest. But it does take grinding. On our first playthrough of the Haunted Forest - naive after respectively ripping our way through The Legend of the Seven Stars we were sent back to the Dwarf village three time; staggering, half-blind from exhaustion, Shemp dragging the corpses of John and Dabutt behind him, so desperate to find an Inn without being ambushed and murdered on the treacherous route back everyone just kind of watched in a tense silence. 

"Just stop attacking! STOP ATTACKING US, YOU BASTARD, THIS ISN'T FAIR!"

Squaresoft really doesn't throw you any fucking bones either. They know full well by the time you're retreating desperately you have money to burn, and like a child killing ants with a magnifying glass prevents you from using canon-travel to safely cross great distances on the basis of "No Ghosts" being allowed (everyone knows your party will be half-dead on your exfil). The dungeons are long and they are labyrinthine. They twist, they turn, and they are intelligently designed in a rudimentary sort of way - being an Action RPG a higher standard of player-enemy interaction is required to keep us engaged. The Haunted Forest provides us with this by shaping the terrain to accomodate and entrench the enemies - the Chobin Hoods (the god damn Chobin Hoods) barricade themselves behind walls of thorns; from safety they hit your party with arrows and dance out of reach of your weapons, forcing you to circumvent the hedge maze, cut down lesser obstacles, and clear out each individual position one-by-one like Marines storming bunkers at Iwo Jima. In some instances you'll have to divide the party and come at the problem from both sides in a pincer - one player forcing the target back on your comrade's spear-point. Boss fights often force you to alternate between weapons as they manoeuvre around the arena. Combat is engaging.

That being said, the instant you've self-inflated with pride the game will slap you across the mouth with some new jackassery; like a Kung-Fu Werewolf, or self-multiplying Jellies, or enemies that cast spells like "Moogle" or "Balloon" (the latter of which despite its fluffy name gleefully allows all surrounding enemies to cheap-shot your kidneys until you've wasted your last Cup-o'-Soup.. err, Wishes). Once we finally reached Ellinee's Castle after having survived the Forest and naively salivating at the prospect of an imminent Save Point we got our asses ambushed and beat so black-and-blue by haunted furniture that we (well, I, the party being decimated) didn't stop running until the Dwarf Village. 

The game really hearkens back to old-school RPG dungeon-crawling, where after venturing long enough into some nameless grotto you have to weigh the risk of making your way back out of the dungeon or exploring even further in the hope of finding an oasis of some sort. This is a particularly nail-biting example, as your inventory space is so restricted you literally have to factor every healing item at your disposal and when to risk using one up. It's a perverse kind of logistical ballet, and items like Cups of Wishes are so expensive using them up might be preventing you from affording better gear, which is likely impeding your progress in itself. The hell of it is, you can't tell which armour is better until you've already bought it, occasionally forcing you to fence back everything you just bought at half-price to piecemeal together enough small-change to buy something of value before going back outside the wire. 

To further complicate matters, Secret of Mana is one of the only games I've ever seen so succintly introduce to nefarious realities of capitalism into a fantastical little JRPG world. Where it is commonplace for dauntless adventurers to end up desperately in need of supplies and grinding their teeth at the prospect of either working their way back to safety or bravely (if foolishly) plunging forward in the hope of making progress, a shrewd, ruthless, anthropomorphic cat named Neko is slowly building an empire and mortaring its foundation with your misery. 

"I am a complete piece of shit."

At first, you stumble upon this walking Save-Point (which he in his esteemed and limitless kindness offers to you pro bono, in the most blatant example of reciprocitative marketing I've ever seen in a video-game) and think you've won the dungeon-crawl lottery. After all, the AI in this game is bunk and the Sprite blindly charged a Wolfman and used up your last Cup of Wishes. How fortunate you should run into a merchant here, of all places, when you are so despondent - and one who carries all the provisions you might need!

Of course, It'll cost you double what you would pay back in the safety of comfort of that town you left so long ago. Neko, you greasy bastard - you have us by the short-hairs, every time, and you have claws.

Some might argue that the game, thus, should be more user-friendly - I argue that there is a kind of romance to the frustrations of its current system. On some level you feel invested in finally mastering the technicalities of the game, and feel accomplished when you've worked out your own system. 

Like I've stated before, I believe gameplay in itself can convey its own message (it is, after all, the medium of any game). Where Donkey Kong Country through the perilous nature of its mechanics (and in comparison to its competition) conveyed realism and grit, Secret of Mana uses the harshness and difficulty of its gameplay (in conjunction with the tonality and dream-like quality of its music) to convey a dark, fantastical atmosphere. The harshness of the environments difficulty-wise coincides with the increasingly desperate situation plot-wise. Your party always seems a step behind the Empire and Thanathos, never quite able to save the terribly named Dyluck, culminating in a last-ditch attack on the Mana Fortress while the world underneath roils with chaos. 

There is something grim about being reminded that "No trace of [you] was ever found..." after gasping your last breaths at the mercy of Ellinee's pet tiger - especially since one of his many attacks involves him chewing your characters like bubble-gum. 

For all this, my bias can't be denied. I'm playing this game with my brothers - it could be complete shit and I imagine I would still have the time of my life. I am counting the days until Mike comes back so he can finally take up his rightful place as Dabutt, the Sprite. 

"Fungah! Foiled again!"

I uncovered in a particularly obtuse article, once, criticizing Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars for its aesthetic. It argued that Miyamoto's decision to deviate from Donkey Kong Country's faux-3D when building Yoshi's Island had cheerfully been trivialized a short time afterwards by the Nintendo-Squaresoft relic. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to me.

I wonder constantly if I'm a nostalgist - I try and look back as objectively as I can, even when criticizing such train wrecks as the Final Fantasy series or George Lucas. That being said, none of my objectivity can really stand in the way of how damned amazing Super Mario RPG is. During another session of melancholy on my parents' couch and while flipping through the Virtual Console I plugged in the SNES classic as a quick distraction. Hours later, I found myself working through the Forest Maze to stomp on an anthropomorphic longbow. At a certain point, nostalgia can only drive you so far - I have yet, for instance, been "nostalgic" enough to pick up and replay a Final Fantasy game (especially the PSX-era goliaths) - and yet I got sucked so deep into SMRPG I could barely extricate myself.

In a fit of curiosity I've played a bunch of Mario RPGs since - but some of the charm is missing. The hand-holding gets pretty nauseating, too - I would wager more time is spent learning how to play Bowser's Inside Story than is actually spent playing it. That star-sprite makes Navi look about as micromanaging as an absentee father. The Legend of the Seven Stars is the definite answer to the "what if... the makers of Final Fantasy designed a Mario game" question. The game itself is self-aware and even self-deprecating. The aesthetic is marvelously twisted - Mario jumps on some pretty gnarled-looking bad guys in a series that exclusively anthropomorphized mushrooms and turtles. The game boasts probably some of the best enemy design next to Amano's unearthly concept art (I mean check out this rogues gallery, really). The Squaresoft staple for treasure chests is replaced by floating, chest-shaped "?" boxes in a splendid little marrying of art styles.

The writing still makes me smile today. Maybe in a genre continuum supersaturated with tropes a game plot built more for comic relief than drama is a breath of fresh air. Mallow the cloud's insistence that he is, in fact, a frog and his shock at discovering he is, in fact, a cloud, is hilarious. Whether its Mario constantly being praised or lampooned for his appearance ("How about a fat lip to go with that ugly mustache!?"), the minigames and silliness throughout Booster's Tower, or being smuggled into Nimbus Castle as a sculpture routinely appraised by Nimbus Land aristocracy, the game is constantly enjoyable. SMRPG is one of the most whimsical little gems out there - and it plays fast, its mechanics as stream-lined as Chrono Trigger's, requiring a minimum of grinding and leveling to advance with an absurdly low level cap of 30.

I actually introduced the game to Cam, who'd never played, and he was mesmerized by its charm.

Playing as a late-20s layabout grants you a little more perspective, too. You tend to appreciate minute degrees of sophistication in the content. The Legend of the Seven Stars is a game about a world of cartoon-violence where the status quo is upset by an invasion of real-world weaponry. You have to wonder at the madness of the planning sessions that must have gone behind this bizarre joining of RPG-mechanics and platforming whimsy:

"We should have Mario be able to equip a real weapon! Or Peach, even!"

"Are you out of your god damn minds."

"Geno will have gun hands and shoot bullets!"

"If by 'gun-hands' you mean 'wand-hands' that shoot 'stars'."

It's amusing that during the collaboration both teams would have settled on Mario's universe fighting off an army of generic JRPG tropes in its genre debut. I could actually sophist my way through this in a ponderous, asshole kind of way but I'll just cite a conversation I had with Cameron about this very topic: 

Cameron Morris

...this is a Hephaestus-looking sumbitch right here

Andrew MacInnis

Yeah the monsters in Mario RPG are menacing, conceptually

Cameron Morris

Pardon me for a bit while I beat this game

Andrew MacInnis

Enjoy the best final boss music ever written

Cameron Morris

I dunno about that but he may have been the scariest boss design of all time

Andrew MacInnis

Yeah he's monstrous

Cameron Morris

Like... if that game had been aorund when I was 5 or 6 I don't know that I could have even played against that background, much less Smithy himself

Andrew MacInnis

I dunno if you read that article I linked you too, but he's also symbolically even MORE monstrous, taken in context

Cameron Morris

Article???

Andrew MacInnis

Gimme a sec

http://gameological.com/2013/10/to-the-bitter-end-super-mario-rpg/

Check this, then let's talk about Smithy

Cameron Morris

Interestingly I disagree with this article by the end of the second paragraph. Or the beginning

That ending sums up pretty much the whole thing: every character in the game, including the dead bosses, put on a merry parade as one last show, and they hope you liked it

Andrew MacInnis

How so

Cameron Morris

That's how so

Mario RPG isn't real. It's just another show that the cast puts on for you.

If we want to talk in a textual sense, the only time Mario and the gang are "real" is when they're riding go-karts or playing sports together

Every other game in the series is just performance. It's why the universe is literally god damn destroyed in Super Mario Galaxy (really) and then Mario Galaxy 2 pretends the first game never happened

Andrew MacInnis

Rewind the clock back to when SMRPG came out though - this concept may have been retconned (not that finding narrative in the Mario universe should ever really be a priority), but the game is a framed as an interruption to what was portrayed as their "real" lives

A world of cartoon violence invaded by real weapons from another dimension

Cameron Morris

In a way that sort of makes sense

Or would, if the real weapons weren't all googly-eyed and incapable of hurting people

Andrew MacInnis

True, this isn't "Watchmen", but hey it's still an interesting concept

Cameron Morris

Smithy's an interesting one, though

Andrew MacInnis

The weapons may be googly-eyed but when else do you see Axes, or Bows and Arrows?

Cameron Morris

Because he very plainly does want to take all good nad magic out of the world and replace it with weapons.

Axes? You kill Bowser with one in the first game

Andrew MacInnis

And then you have Smithy, a kind of Haephastus who is a *maker* of weapons

You don't kill bowser with an axe, you use an axe to cut a drawbridge to drop him into a lava pit like it was a dunk tank at the county fair

Cameron Morris

Details

Are we reading too much into a game about a plumber and turtle-king teaming up to beat up a giant sword-with-eyes? Absolutely. Is it fun despite this? Absolutely. It may be presumptuous to take The Legend of the Seven Stars as an early deconstruction of the Mario-game model (that it would occur during a dramatic shift in game mechanics only makes even more sense). That behind the eternal, vaudevillian platforming struggle between Mario and Bowser lies an average day in a world of RPG mechanics is both meta and in itself a parody of the meta-narrative. 

That being said, let's take a step back from all the symbolism and the the bimbolism and just enjoy the hell out of the game for being a game. The music is stupendous, uplifting, and atmospheric (Koji Kondo and Uematsu for the win). The enemies frolic about on screen - in gorgeous, clay-model environments - and are dispatched via a quick and simple button-oriented battle system. Timed-hits engage the players, while simplistic strategy is plumbed from how to layer your attacks and dispatch groups of enemies more expediently (combining magic attack-all spells and hard-hitting singlle strikes). The story is deeper than you would presume but fun either way. All the enemies are hilariously characterized and moving from location to location on the world map is a joy. 

Speaking of enemies...

"I JUST WANT MY HOUSE BACK!"

That despite his late induction into your party Bowser still manages to steal the damn show is a subject that makes me wonder if at one point he was not originally intended to be the game's protagonist. While this in itself doesn't seem to be a novel concept it still hasn't been done yet - even Bowser's Inside Story only ladles the koopa king half of a spotlight and spends most of the plot ridiculing him, anyway. Bowser in Super Mario RPG though is both fascinating and entertaining - absolutely narcissistic and confrontational throughout, he sees himself as the protagonist after all is said and done. The game could just as easily opened up in Bowser's castle, have him kicked out, and spend the rest of the game stomping around the Mushroom Kingdom, trying to get his castle back, inadvertently sharing mutual goals with and recruiting a bunch of do-goodnicks and even his worst enemy along the way. That this would undoubtedly lead to Bowser being wrongfully (and unwillingly) perceived as a "hero" by the kingdom and even his "sidekicks" would have been a laughable sort of role inversion.  

"I'm gonna do something I may regret later...! But I'm gonna let you join the Koopa Troop. You can thank me later..."

Frankly, there's little point to characterizing Mario (it's why his whiny, taller, cowardly brother gets so much more fan love). He's the hero - the plot may revolve around him, but that certainly doesn't make him interesting. SMRPG recognizes this, making Mario out to be a silent protagonist and showcasing his interaction with townsfolk, baddies, comrades, using him as the means by which to characterize them.

"Here I was, thinking of a plan to get my castle back, and all of a sudden, Mario walks up to me and BEGS me to let him join the Koopa Troop! I had no choice BUT to let him in! It was so pathetic!"

That being said, Bowser still ends up being the more relatable character. By constantly running into him and his foiled attempts to take back his castle and bearing witness to the overly emotional encounters with his lieutenants and footsoldiers, the entire "find the princess" story is hurriedly shoved aside by a far more entertaining character-study. Frankly, even the overarching quest to recover the 8 humdrums to rebuild the plot road is made far less interesting than Bowser's personal quest to regain to right the steal the princess himself.

"Hold it! I only joined so I could get my castle back. I'm not gonna be dragged along on this stupid hunt. This is as far as I go. I'm gonna gather my troops and rebuild my castle! And YOU, Mario! You're an official member of the Koopa Troop! It's your duty to help with the repairs!"

Frankly, here's an idea for the next Mario RPG - Bowser gets evicted from his keep by the Mushroom Kingdom's health inspector for not keeping his home "up to code". 

"Magikoopa! I've said it a dozen times - I want that leak in the basement fixed!" (referring obviously to a boiling sea of lava)

"But your lugubriousness, we've already blown our budget on trying to coral that herd of magma-snakes that infested the west wing! We'll have to wait until the next fiscal year, if we can recoup our losses from that volcanic eruption..."

"GEEZ!"

The inspector, quite obviously, should be an old, mustachio'd Toad (the equivalent to finding out Hitler's art instructor was Jewish) flanked by expendable, traumatize ensigns fewer in number the deeper they explore Bowser's "house". That Bowser somehow can't "out-bad" royal bureaucracy winds him up tromping around trying to find another hideout (or alternatively searching for Plot MacGuffins to conduct the needed repairs). He could recruit shmoes along the way, tour a round-a-trope of villainous lairs from Missile Silos to Haunted Mansions and Dungeons, wind up saving the world by accident and granted a royal writ of propriety from the Princess as thanks. I want to play it already and it's not even real. 

It's a real shame Nintendo and Squaresoft haven't paired up to make another game. Not only has it deprived the Mario world of some awesome characters (Geno the star-knight-turned-doll, Mallow the cloud, Johnathan Jones the best pirate ever designed... raise your hand if you hoped he became a party member), but also that tongue-in-cheek brand of humour and self-awareness that could only come out of a smashing-together of genres. That being said, who knows if Square-Enix would even be up to the task these days - Mario would probably wind up jumping around in a leather suit covered with belts and zippers and Luigi would grow angel wings. All the easter eggs and tasty little hidden-away bits of dialogue (like Mario enjoying the fruits of his suite and inadvertently working as a bellhop at the Marrymore Inn) remind me of what used to make Square games so charming. The Shadow-Relm controversy from FF6, the squirreled away dating simulator in FF7... its a reminder that RPGs despite their big fat stories were still originally meant to be played, and even plot-heavy games like FF7 didn't take themselves too seriously. 

All this talk about Mario makes me want to immediately bust into how much I enjoy the new Super Mario 3-D World game, but I think it's best to let that one simmer for a bit. Besides, I still need to beat Culex, our resident Dark Knight of Vanda. 

Singular-Minded

Mayhaps I am a sensitive soul but watching movies is usually a terrifically emotional experience for me. Recently I've twice-sat in on two films which I could say I've experienced more than I really watched. The first would be Fury, a war movie starring Brad Pitt and company as the crewman for an American tank in the twilight months of the Second World War. Fury isn't an especially great movie - the overall message seems... sophomoric when considering the subject matter and it ladles out heavy servings of cheese on several occasions. It isn't as well put together as, say, Saving Private Ryan which does a better job of creating both an experience and conveying a story. 

But boy-howdy is Fury ever one of those see-it-in-theaters type movies. It's hard for me to easily recommend - if you want to feel like you're huddled huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with soggy, exhausted infantrymen whose coats are heavy with damp, reek, and mud while 7.62 rounds bang off the front of the clattering, snarling Sherman tank providing you with a mobile shield as you inch your way across open ground to a hasty German defensive position, then by all means watch it. If you want to feel claustrophobic, deafened, and terrified as four American Shermans dance a slow and high-stakes ballet with a single German Panzer - feel the air suck out of your lungs as 88mm anti-tank rounds howl like banshees overhead and peel paint off the side of your turret while your gunner frantically attempts to traverse and engage and everyone is screaming because people are dying and everyone is going to fucking die if you can't get around it and get ahead of its gun and then be racked with relief and grief when it's over and all that's left is the burning of engine oil and the terrible empty silence that was moments ago filled with chaos - well, this is the movie to see.  

Why you would might want to experience that is a pretty good question, I guess. But I remember watching Lone Survivor and listening to the squeal and thunder of Chinook rotors and feel the machine heartbeat in my chest and boots as a four-man team stepped panting into the mountains under the burden of heavy rucksacks. I watch Fury and I remember laughing nervously through a screen of cigarette smoke in the back of a LAV-3 while dust tumbled down in screens from the air-sentry hatch, ears humming with the monotony of radio chatter. I remember banging my fingers off the C-SAM and hearing the muffled thump-thump-thump clang-clang-clang of our gunner laying down a Z-pattern burst and watching the kinetic backlash kick dirt up on the screen and howling with the frenzy of it. It's cathartic. 

The second movie is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I've seen it twice and both times I've had the wind knocked out of me. Both times I've walked out of the theater with friends or my brothers and said it's the best movie I've ever seen - subjective, biased, a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing, maybe, but I can't help but feel disconnected from the cynical critical observations I've perused through online. I guess in the end, it's an emotional issue that can't readily be rationalized - I guess I'm a very empathetic being. 

Spoilers ahead, folks.

I think the main reason Star Trek: Into Darkness left such a bad taste in my mouth was that it was ideologically bankrupt and Star Trek, if anything, is an entirely ideological concept. When Gene Roddenberry wrote

"Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

I doubt very much he intended it to be representative of a brainless game of laser-tag. Superficially Captain Kirk traveled to "strange new worlds" made of styrofoam and had sex with green women but subcutaneously the series was a kind of fictional vanguard for the pursuit of knowledge and for human exploration. Superficially, Interstellar (especially with all the awesome power of IMAX™) lets us wonder at the silent majesty of space yawning terribly around the fragile Endurance; we breathlessly watch it tumble insignificantly past Saturn's rings, fold through space into a wormhole and feel the physical stresses run through the ship's frame and instruments, gaze upon the blinding event horizon of a massive black hole, feel its tidal power move waves the size of mountains across the surface of a planet caught haplessly in its orbit, and break frozen clouds into a glittering riot across the upper atmospheres of some alien, semi-gaseous world galaxies away. 

The hard physics of this are irrelevant in face of the theme - if I can hand-on-heart talk about the conveyance of realism in Donkey Kong Country, then I can attest that Christopher Nolan achieves similar conveyance through Interstellar's depiction of space-travel. Now that the movie is also an emotional roller-coaster - to hook an audience on the layman's terms - and viscerally dramatizes temporal relativity and the traumatic effects on a small American family adds profundity to the overall experience. MacConnaughey watches helplessly as his children grow old and suffer emotionally through distant radio transmissions, stuck in dilated time, The concept of a loved one ultimately beyond your reach and that love exists beyond purely physical dimensions gnawed at my heart - but how couldn't it? We are all human and suffer the same. 

I am a very tonelessly unreligious man. To me, religion seems like a sort of betrayal - to believe in purely fantastical concepts for the sake of comfort and community baffle me because I guess I am a humanist. I acknowledge fundamental scientific reasoning and that unanswered questions will be answered not by some higher power but by our own ingenuity and achievement. If that is faith, then I willingly choose that faith. MacConnaughey's character plummets into Gargantua and finds himself unstuck in a tesseract of space-time desperately attempting to caress his daughter's face decades into the past and correct his mistakes. The revelation that this five-dimensional room is the construct not of some alien power, but of a future human civilization evolved beyond our contemporary comprehension raises the hair on my arms. Why believe in anything if not us? 

To know that there is a finite amount of matter in all the universe and that it cannot vanish - only change states - and to dream about somehow reaching beyond space and time to even faintly hold my youngest brother in my arms again; or that whatever made up Tommy beyond his physical vessel must exist in one form or another - could somehow try and reach through that barrier - is religion enough for me. 

How could anyone want to believe in anything else? 

Same Country, Different Province

Well it's been a few months now since the suicide of my youngest brother. You would think this heavy subject would be what I want to talk about more than anything - to open a vein and pour red, wet words across a white page. Frankly, it's the last thing I want to talk about. The impact of it makes me feel malformed with grief and it has overall been a confusing and terrible experience. The whole world is a darker, grayer place, with fewer points of light in between. The geography of every day life has shifted - some thing matter more, other things less or not at all. It's hard to trust yourself to be okay all the time anymore - some days you move through life as if nothing has changed and other days you sit down and your heart cracks open with grief and all you can do is try and hold the pieces together until you can breathe again.

We were four brothers, a Four-Temperament Ensemble. We were Ninja Turtles, Pizza Cats, Ghostbusters. Now we're staggered down to three and trying to share what's left and made haggard with the cold mathematics of tragedy.

When I think of Tommy I think of holidays, of Christmas, and of lumbering down to the rec-room and splaying out on the big leather couches with Mike and John and lording over our youngest brother as he diligently set up game-system after game-system. Four brothers, four controller-ports, all plugged in to each other. We hit each other with shells or won more stars or fought over golden guns or collaborated in a scrambling, dysfunctional sort of way (usually over each others backs) to get all the Star Coins in Mario. Now there's an empty slot, a CPU, a bot.

I think regression is the common trope of grief, and so I occasionally find myself doing nothing but watching Game Grumps' Let's Plays or SNES retrospectives or fiddle-fucking around with emulated classics and sometimes wishing my HTC One-M8 was a Gameboy. Occasionally there is some heavy, emotional significance - like orchestrated Squaresoft music- but not always. The first time I played Donkey Kong Country for the SNES was at my dentist's office in Winnipeg. The man was a genius - had installed several then-gen Sega and Nintendo gaming consoles in his office waiting room to mesmerize whiny, bored kids and keep their minds off the hooks and drills and fluoride. Sonic 2, Aladdin, oh boy!

Something struck me about Donkey Kong Country, though - which, despite being stellar platforming games and some of the best Wii titles, is missing from the Returns and Tropical Freeze sequels. For a pixelated 2-D game about monkeys jumping on crocodiles DKC managed, through sheer mechanics and decoration, to convey genuine atmosphere.

Granted, this is owed to David Wise's outstanding soundtrack - but also to aesthetic. Again, despite being a game about anthropomorphic gorillas beating up alligators to steal back floating bananas something about DKC's design aesthetic conveys realism and grit. Something about the weight and jump mechanics while platforming - about your Kong's constant vulnerability to the enemies and level design around them - something about the awesome worlds you explore. That latter bit may be a big piece of it - there is a grain of fantasy, of cartoon, planted in an otherwise realistic world of chasms and pitfalls and pastoral landscapes. Yep, cartoon animals. Gotcha, floating barrels. But there is no... cartoon vegetation... or bizarre and childishly drawn mountains. Pine trees, icy grottos, coral reefs, and oh - Kremlins, beat those guys up. The minimalism does a lot for the aesthetic - like the original Crash Bandicoot for the PSX.

I'm a firm believer that the medium should dictate the message, ultimately, and in the case of Donkey Kong Country realism is conveyed rather than directly experienced through game design. If Super Mario Bros. is an absolutely enjoyable game to play, then Donkey Kong Country is an absolutely perilous one. The first game (unlike it's successors) lacks some serious balance gameplay-wise. You can cheerfully coast through the first three worlds and hoard lives like nobody's business and then WHAM Gorilla Glacier will stonewall your progress and every level will see you test the tensile flexibility of your SNES controller a little more as you grind your teeth watching Diddy Kong get barrel-blasted right into a Zinger or miss than one last bloody jump. The difficulty is immersive - pattern recognition, obstacle memorization, timing and dexterity. You're paying attention when you play Donkey Kong, fuck the doorbell. 

There is an interesting thematic arrangement in the world-design as the lush jungles and forests and natural environments give way to the toxic, industrialized wastelands of K. Rool's mines and factories:

Which does a lot to magnify the theme of increasing peril and difficulty. If it were up to me, I would have reversed the play-order for Kremco Inc. and Monkey Mines (to end with the factory), but whatever. The Gameboy port followed suit - moving from the jungle to an abandoned urban center. All of this is completely absent of the new Wii games (again, despite their brilliance), which feel like Mario games with alternate game mechanics. They are most definitely missing from the big, fat, galumphing collect-a-thon that was Donkey Kong 64 - with its monkey rapping, coconut bazookas, barren polygonal environments and lumbering Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack (which worked in Banjo but feels out of place after the Country series). 

Me and John finally sat down and two-playered the shit out of Diddy Kong's Quest, the rarely disputed pinnacle of the trilogy. The sequel branches off from the pure Country of the original, featuring pirate ships, bayou boardwalks, haunted forests and castle parapets - but again the mechanics still convey that gritty, realistic edge to the platforming. 

I'll say it, though - Donkey Kong Country 2 is tough as nails. 

You are given a short grace period to familiarize yourself with the mechanics but by the time you reach Kremland the gloves are off, and with still half a game left to play including the insanely difficult Lost World levels. For a second-hand sample, watch the Game Grumps fruitlessly attempt to beat it before rage-quitting in frustration. John and me don't fuck around though. We've sunk dozens of hours into the bloody thing on the Wii Classic Console - we've climbed the rigging on bog-sunk pirate ships, jumped across lava flows, wrestled with giant (motherfucking) wasps and hugged doomed rollercoasters up and down ludicrously unsafe tracks. At the present time we've stalled - having squandered most of our lives in Gloomy Gulch - with one foot in the final world slipping around submerged ice shelves at the base of K. Rool's castle. I play as Diddy, because I'm better and can use his acrobatics, and John plays as Dixie, because he's worst and needs the hair-float handicap (admit it, John). 

You wouldn't expect that to co-op a side-scrolling 2-D platformer short of New Super Mario Bros. would be much fun or immersive, but DKC's switch-over gameplay is far more palatable than the my-turn-your-turn Mario-Luigi concept. It's great. It's hard; it's mind-blowingly, give-me-another-beer-I-need-a-fucking-cigarette-fuck-this-game hard - but it's also a blast to make progress and hoot and holler like idiots when you've accomplished something together. Like I said, we're in a tight spot; with three lives at the entrance to one of the final worlds - we've exhausted all the Swanky Bonus Bonanzas and there is no Kong College in sight to save and we don't have any goddamn banana coins to pay off Funky and score more lives in another world but dammit we're not done yet. We're just going to have to stick this one through until the end.

It's all you can do, really.

The Hate Locker

Critical review submitted for my United States History class:

"You know, after my first tour I told myself I was never coming back to this fucking hole. After my second tour I was one-hundred percent sure I was never coming back to this fucking hole. And all that to say, good luck getting that fucking degree when you get back to Ottawa, buds." 

- Canadian Forces Sgt, Kandahar

The opening to Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker snaps the audience to attention. Everything feels very real - the cinematography catches the smothering combination of heat and light in the urban gingivitis of Iraq so well you can practically feel the sun squatting down on the back of your neck, or taste the dust and dried spit the Middle East tends to leave in your mouth. The American soldiers, Explosive-Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians all, go about their business with the effortless swagger of filthy-handed professionals  - from their frosty back-and-forth about dick-sizes to the rattling off of ballistic predictions and other jargon. When Guy Pearce zips himself into the bomb-suit and moonwalks his way over to their daily find, you can smell the gym-bag blast-blanket stink inside his helmet, feel every footstep thumping against sizzling asphalt, and every bead of sweat crawling spider-like down the back of his neck. Kathryn Bigelow can convey atmosphere. When Zero Dark Thirty hit theaters in 2012, her audiences experienced the longest ten minutes of their lives inching their way through Osama Bin Laden's compound and unempathetically removing all human obstacles across a bed of spent casings. The Hurt Locker's opening sequence promises a riveting premise - the daily lives of deployed American EOD technicians against a backdrop of adrenaline and combat addiction.

Unfortunately, what The Hurt Locker actually delivers smells more like the inside of one.  

Critical reception of the 2008 blockbuster was almost obnoxiously positive - its won nine more Oscars than it was worth and was joyously written-off by critics as "realistic", "harrowing", "powerful", and all the other spin-words movie critics use to market their Oscar winners. The negative backlash was almost exclusively from the military community, whose actual experiences conflicted drastically with the insipid, ignorant, and occasionally fantastical scenes depicted in the film. Jeremy Renner's cavalier attitude towards endangering his own team and lack of regard for his own personal safety inflamed the sensitivities of many returned veterans. Technical details, like the particular pattern of uniform worn by soldiers or the Vietnam-era helicopters which serve as MEDEVAC, were and still are ridiculed in Company-lines. Most egregiously; for someone allegedly embedded with an actual EOD-team in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow seems to understand little to nothing about what EOD technicians actually do and where they fit within the greater military scheme of things. 

But how important are these technical details, really? Saving Private Ryan for all of its realism is guilty of a by-the-numbers Spielbergian plot almost hackneyed in its simplicity. The concept of an officer and several enlisted men pulled out of a Rifle Company during the Invasion of Normandy to find and pull some unlucky Private out of the madness of war is absurd. Apocalypse Now makes a better acid-trip than it does a mission, and Full Metal Jacket is a Kubrickian series of complex symbology sauteed in the Vietnam War. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, one of the most famous cinematic portrayals of Vietnam, ladles out some pretty soupy melodrama courtesy of Willem Defoe. And yet, for all their warts and boils, these films sit atop the pedestal of war cinema among critics and military minds alike.

What was the deciding factor? The message? The anti-war undertones? The satire? 

For all its failings, The Hurt Locker covers a unique angle in cinematic war narration that has gained little coverage in Hollywood. The underlying theme of combat-addiction, by contemporary nomenclature, or the notion that some actually enjoy combat and participating in wars, is rarely explored and certainly overlooked in the media. It is a brave direction to take in this day and age, where in the wake of the Vietnam War the cultural respect for martial prowess had been replaced with social mourning, and condemnation. Today, soldiers go to Afghanistan, or Iraq, and in our popular mindset they are still fighting the war in Vietnam and surrounded by the same outdated controversies. The tragedy of The Hurt Locker ultimately is its inability to string together the powerful scenes which convey this message midst the movie's narrative wreckage. 

In the ending sequence of the movie, for instance, we are jarred out of the Iraqi war-zone without warning and dropped into an average American grocery-store. Jerry Renner's character is back home. We are jarred out of the war the same way soldiers are jarred out of the war - without proper decompression, or travel-time - and instead of facing the indifferent faces of Iraqi civilians and threatened by open window-panes we are facing miles and miles of cereal boxes, brand-name product, the meaninglessness of choice, modern life, and overwhelmed by it. The structure, the simplicity, the self-validation is all gone. As John Rambo states in his final soliloquy from the 1982 First Blood, "Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!". The notion that is is not merely the trauma experienced in war-fighting environments that cause mental disorders, but the mediocrity of the modern civilian world is a refreshing one to explore. There is boundless territory here to explore the shifting cultural perspective towards war in modern society, down to the shift-worker mentality by which our soldiers are deployed overseas versus the traditional campaign. When Renner steps off the transport in the final scene to join Delta Company, he wears a smile on his face. He's home. There's a moment of multi-dimensional characterization when he honestly admits to his infant son that he doesn't feel any real love for him at all.

Unfortunately the thematic depth that could be cultivated from this is wasted on Bigelow's direction. Instead of spending time developing the cast, we are treated to a Hollywoodized portrayal of a modern warzone. Disposing of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other Un-Exploded Ordnances (UXOs) on a routine basis does not pack enough tension for The Hurt Locker - these EOD technicians must also engage in sniper-to-sniper combat, run free through the streets of Baghdad like criminals, spend the entire movie operating independent of any parent organization like some fantasy Special-Forces team, and get drunk and punch each other in a Paleolithic example of male-bonding. What these farcical plot developments commit is twofold - foremost, it is absolutely disrespectful to anybody who has served operationally to suggest that their job isn't interesting enough on its own merit to revolve a story around, and secondly, it shows more ambition than sense. The film itself can be taken as a poetic statement of our modern dissociation with the realities of war - even The Empire Strikes Back managed to get the details of a proper military defensive position correct and that was a science-fiction/fantasy epic. 

What separates Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan from The Hurt Locker is that the plot is true to the source material. Both films take the audience on a tour of the Vietnam War and the Invasion of Normandy respectively - and thus, the narrative is built around this. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard commands a lone Patrol Boat on an independent mission and acts as our Virgil into the dark heart of the Vietnam War. All the disconnected scenes of madness and chaos make narrative sense because for all intents and purposes it is supposed to be the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Saving Private Ryan pushes us out of the Higgins Boat into the bloody mayhem of the Omaha Beach landing and then, scene-by-scene, we are whisked up the Yellow Brick Road to Ramelle, and Ryan, and the Alamo. In both these movies the war in question is the backdrop for the narrative - either movie could have easily taken place during the Trojan War, or the Peloponnesian. These movies are not written for soldiers, they are written for audiences, and the plot is conveyed to us as if we are tourists (which we are). 

The Hurt Locker should have been made about an embedded or freelance Combat Journalist, a character who bounced unit-to-unit and whose story explored the Iraq War piece-by-piece. If you are just determined to have action sequences, make the film about Combat Engineers or Assault Pioneers. When dealing strictly with the lives and experiences of your characters, authenticity reigns - the 2008 HBO series Generation Kill reproduced the 2003 Invasion of Iraq down to the ornamentation on the Marine First Recon Humvees. It unashamedly shows off the modern Marine Corps sub-culture at war and allows us to interpret it as we see fit. Platoon is a morality tale set within a dismounted infantry platoon in Vietnam. The routine, the exhaustion, the formations, the weapons, the slang, the juxtaposition of mundanity and fear, all are so accurate that they smoothen out the narrative - characters stumble and slip in the mud, cigarettes take multiple attempts to light, and actual South Vietnamese Safe Conduct Passes are stapled to the mutilated corpses of American soldiers. When the environment your characters live in is authentic, their performances becomes authentic, and your message becomes authentic. The Hurt Locker, for all the power and good of its message, fails to authenticate that message with technical knowledge and it ends up falling flat.

The final nail in The Hurt Locker's coffin is its absence of humanity. While Jeremy Renner's Staff-Sergeant William James shows sporadic moments of depth, he still ends up being a flat character (which is a far cry above his entourage, who show about as much depth as gasoline puddles in a supermarket parking lot). During his final scene in Iraq, James claims he "[doesn't] know" why he is the way he is - why combat and war does not shake him as much as it does his team-members. The Hurt Locker does not even make inferences as to why James feels this way - this coupled with the ending sequence makes James out to be some sort of alien or sociopath incapable of "normal" human emotions. This is a disgraceful notion because there are legitimate (and aforementioned) reasons why he may enjoy his job so much. This popular idea that war is absolutely terrible and that everyone who returns from its is fundamentally changed for the worst (or that those who excel at it are somehow broken) is juvenile and insulting. Incidentally, James' flatness conveys more about the audience than it does about the characters - our cultural misunderstanding of war and war-fighting are reflected in James' smile at the end of the movie.

This lack of humanity is compounded by other supporting characters - Specialist Eldridge's fatalism becomes so melodramatic it becomes unrealistic and borders on being satirical. Eldridge himself becomes a smaller symbol of this cultural disconnect by proxy - he is less a soldier at war than someone imagining himself to be a soldier at war, and is unconvincing.  

There is no light-heartedness either, nothing about these characters that makes you smile. For the most part they merely crack wise, or moan and complain. There are no "Tracks of My Tears" moments, or "Field Fucks", or running in serpentine patterns, that truly convey the absurdity of war and mankind's ability to cope with it. In Jarhead, Swofford's ability to make us laugh made his psychological transformation under the external pressures of a combat deployment all the more shocking. At the end of the day, Bigelow is telling us how to think instead showing and letting us decide, and leaves herself and The Hurt Locker open to rejection.