inFamous

This was a bit of a tough one to figure out. In some ways, inFamous was one of the must fun and addicting games I played all year. But it screwed up in too many ways for me to say I really loved it. Some of those flaws could be fixed with a few more months of polishing, while others are just fundamental issues I have with the whole experience. I will say that this is one of the few instances when the story actually docked points for me.

Before I talk about that, I'll go over the basics. inFamous is another open world game, but in this one you play a man who accidentally acquires electricity based super powers right before it begins. Sucker Punch is known for the slick-playing Sly series on the PS2, and that fluidity of movement and control carries over to inFamous star Cole MacGrath. He's probably the most fun to control of 2009's protagonists, as running through the city, climbing buildings, jumping from roof to roof, and even sliding along electrified rails and hovering are simple, intuitive, and fun things to do. Your main mode of fighting off the game's ridiculously numerous hordes of enemies is by hitting them with various powers that behave like you'd expect from a third person shooter, with different sorts of weaponry being replicated in electrified form. Things end up a lot more intense than in the standard shooter when you send out wave after wave of deadly electricity and face fire from every direction, but it's familiar enough that it's not too hard to get into. The system for unlocking and upgrading new powers works well enough, and it's satisfying to watch your strength grow even if you're only keeping up with the toughness of the enemies.

The structure of the game seems a little rote, with the same sequence of returning power to an area, unlocking side missions, seeing the next bit of the plot, and moving to the next place, but it's a pretty fun one to go through. I actually liked the optional tasks quite a bit. Side missions push enemies out the territory you find them in, and while it doesn't work perfectly because that would make returning to an earlier location pretty boring, it is a satisfying way to show your progress in righting what went wrong and made me do all of them. I could have done without the addition of hundreds of a collectible item to increase your supply of energy, but the dead drops that unlock bits of background information were interesting and fun to find since you can ping them on your radar. The main story missions themselves have the appropriate amount of dramatic height over the optional stuff, although a bit too often it would challenge you to do something and then basically say "Okay, now do that three more times." I will mention that this is one of the glitchiest games I've played this generation, which is surprising coming from this studio. There were occasional control issues where something wouldn't happen the way it should, and I frequently got stuck in the environment. It's okay if this happens once in a blue moon, but it was way too consistent to really be acceptable.

And that brings me to my main beef, the story. The game has the framework for an interesting long-term plot, and I hope the probable sequels (though I'd prefer a fourth Sly game) make good on that, but there are just things it does wrong that make me wonder if they were really paying attention to their own crap. Throughout the game you're given a bunch of ethical decisions to make, usually focusing on helping others at your own expense, or only worrying about your own hide. This plays into your powers, as these decisions contribute to your overall karma meter that determines what sort of upgrades you have access to. It mostly works fine, but there's a point where the whole system jumped the shark for me. I won't spoil details, but at one point, no matter what you choose, something unfortunate has to happen that couldn't possibly happen if you made the opposite choice, but it does either way. It's not a real decision, just a BS judgment of your character and it cheats. The game simply lost me there. It's not that there's anything wrong with the unavoidable plot event itself, I just hate that they pretended you could do anything about it. And the ending. Lord. It makes enough sense premise-wise and is suitably shocking! and dramatic! enough to close the game on, but the logical leaps it takes to establish basically everything about the entire situation are fairly ludicrous. Whatever. inFamous is a game that I loved at times and hated at others, and in the end it came out mostly on the positive end, though I don't know how much affection I'll have for it in the long run.

Avatar

I was in a bit of a conundrum here. James Cameron was possibly the best action director in Hollywood for about a decade, but that decade ended fifteen years ago. The only film he made since then was one I very much did not care for, and I was very unsure about Avatar based on what I'd read and seen. I went into the theater hoping it would be awesome and expecting it to be mediocre, and it ended up being somewhere in the middle, which I probably could have foreseen.

Just to get this out of the way, yes, a disproportionate amount of the film's appeal hinges on the visuals. And they are mighty impressive, both from looking at the quality of the computer effects and the effectiveness of the 3D. I haven't seen any other movies with anything more sophisticated than the blue and red glasses, so I can't honestly say how good or bad it is by modern standards. I will say that it looked pretty awesome, though the film still would have looked very nice without it. What the 3D was attempting to do was further pull you into this world Cameron created from scratch, and for better or worse it mostly succeeded. It's not really hype to say that you mostly forget you're watching something that beyond a few pieces of set in the human encampments only exists at all digitally, and you're left to focus on the story. Whether you actually like that story is a different question. But the visuals avoided gimmickry with jumping out at you for the most part, and spent a lot of time just letting you enjoy looking at it. I feel like this will hold up a lot better with time than effects laden pictures from earlier last decade, but only time will tell if that's the case.

So to answer whether the film beyond the special effects worked for me, the answer is: sorta. It's not really a great original story beyond the setting. It is very competently constructed, though. The film makes perhaps too great an attempt to justify everything, answering a lot of questions I had about the basic premise. Important elements are introduced properly before coming back later. Despite what you may think about the long running time, and it did feel a good twenty minutes too long, there is very little that happens and doesn't serve a purpose. It's not the most elegant script Cameron's ever written, but I guess it didn't have to be with his budget, and for the most part it all fits together and works to some degree.

None of the characters will impress you with their originality or uniqueness, but they're generally likable or easy to hate where required. For some reason Sam Worthington seems to be in every big action movie now, and I thought he was fine if not too remarkable. He was much more expressive in his alien form than as a human, but I thought that worked - he's becoming increasingly detached from his original life, and his whole character is driving towards being one of the natives. People have made a lot of disparaging remarks regarding the whole noble savages thing, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with how it works here. The movie's fairly funny too, providing some really nerdy laughs (the MacGuffin mineral that entirely explains the human presence on Pandora is actually called Unobtainium) as well as some much broader ones. The action sequences are sprinkled throughout, with the only major battle happening at the end, and they're all suitably exciting and well laid out. Say what you want about Cameron, the man still knows how to do this sort of thing. I don't know how excited I am for sequels, but I totally respect him for crafting an entire world and story out of whole cloth (and maybe a few bits from other stories), making an extremely expensive movie with it, and successfully selling it to the world. If I'm not mistaken it made the whole budget back worldwide in the first two weeks, and this was the third straight weekend it made about seventy million bucks in the US alone. I don't really dislike adaptations, but I do like to see original work as well, and if this means more is coming, then I'm happy.

Doctor Who - The 2009 Specials

Instead of having a normal televised season last year, executive producer Russel T. Davies and current (now former) Doctor David Tennant elected to say goodbye to the show with a series of hour long specials, including a two-part version of the normal Christmas episode to transition to the new regime. It wasn't the most consistent material we've seen, but it was a nice way to say goodbye to the man who brought the show back from the dead and one of the most beloved owners of the role.

The Next Doctor


2008's Christmas episode (which didn't air in America until June the next year) was a fairly average one. The story of a man deluded into believing he's the Doctor, if the Doctor was human and relied on 1800s Earth technology, is fairly interesting, but the actual conflict of the episode is somewhat tired at this point. Ooh, Cybermen again! And a villain who wants to take over the world and refuses the Doctor's offer of help and peace! Not terrible, just nothing new.

Planet of the Dead


This was another pretty boring one. If I was a big Who fan in England when this aired last April and knew it would be the only content I'd be getting in about a ten month span, I'd be pretty upset. The way the Doctor and a bus of Londoners end up on the titular planet is neat, but they get about as much excitement out of being marooned on a deserted wasteland as you'd expect. The girl was cute, though.

The Waters of Mars


Now here's what I like to see. Once in a while they'll just stick the Doctor on a semi-advanced Earth space vessel (in this case a base on Mars) where something is about to go horribly wrong, and just about every time it works out amazingly well. Doctor Who is a show that likes to be fun, but once in a while they'll be dark and emotional and dramatic like this, and it totally works. The resolution is as flawed logically as they come, but overall a very good episode.

The End of Time


This is the tale of two specials. Part one, which aired this Christmas, had a few moments, but was ultimately a failure. It's all set-up for the second part and not a whole lot of particular consequence happens, and watching it is barely a pleasure in itself. It's hard to call anything Who does outright bad, but it just felt like a waste of an hour. Part two though was pretty great, airing a week later on New Year's. It was probably too long, as the resolution of the main conflict happens with plenty of time to spare for a heartfelt sendoff for Tennant in the last 15 minutes of an hour, but instead we have to watch another 30. And the actual core of the plot had some interesting ideas, but didn't really make sense. The return of the Time Lords and the explanation for how the war really ended were neat revelations, and I sort of enjoyed Timothy Dalton's role as their leader even if not a whole lot was done with it. And they actually made the Master more interesting than he seemed to have been previously. They definitely tied up a bunch of loose ends without leaving nothing for Steven Moffat and Matt Smith, the new head writer and Doctor respectively, to tackle. While it might have dragged a bit, the Doctor's latest regeneration was very well handled, and I'm definitely going to miss Tennant in the role.

The Beatles - Revolver

I figure what the hell while I'm at it, right? No, but I'll definitely be slowing down after this one. Gotta spread it out a little.

Of the five Beatles albums I've listened to, this one felt like it had the best balance between all four musicians. I mean, if you look at the White Album, they all contributed a lot, but things will look like that when you have 30 songs together. But just on the 14 tracks here, you see remarkable accomplishments by all of them. Obviously Ringo is limited, but his drumming always helps a song and "Yellow Submarine" is one of his more famous and better vocal performances. The song's strange and a bit childish, but it's still a classic. There's quite a strong concentration of George to be found, as he opens the album with the clever and catchy "Taxman", and soon thereafter adds "Love You Too", which has a similar eastern feel to "Within You Without You" though I dare say it's a better song. "I Want to Tell You" is more forgettable but not bad. I've noticed that it's not hard to tell John and Paul apart, but does anyone agree that George and Ringo sound like them in their deeper registers, respectively? Oh well.

Paul has sort of a tendency to do bouncy, upbeat songs that elicit feelings of cheesiness as much as genuine affection, but I think Revolver has some of his strongest work. "Eleanor Rigby" is an obvious good one, helping signal the band's transition from pop to something much more interesting, and is still deeply enjoyable to listen to. "For No One" is another particularly good composition, and the rest of his contributions are at the least solid, impeccably crafted songs. John has always stuck out to me a bit more than the rest, and he fails to disappoint here yet again. I could take or leave "Doctor Robert", but "I'm Only Sleeping" is one of the best songs of his that sounds very much like just a Beatles song, and he caps off the album with "Tomorrow Never Knows", which apparently attempts to recreate the experience of taking acid and manages to be quite trippy without ever sacrificing its success as an enjoyable song. He has a couple more tracks which, like Paul's are of particular consistent quality. Revolver is one of the most acclaimed and probably important albums ever released, and while I can't say it blew me away, it's still impressive throughout and frequently steps into moments of brilliance.