Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to try and remotivate myself and content-up dorkclub.com, seeing as how this is basically my Quarter From Hell. I probably shouldn’t have capitalized that.

You see, kids, I’ll be graduating in June with a lovely (and useful?) degree in English. However, before that happens I need to make it through this fun filled quarter of last minute requirements ranging from a fantastically dumb 18th century literature class to a surprisingly easy (but still maddeningly difficult) James Joyce seminar in which we are reading Ulysses. In related news, I’ve found I can quote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from memory even though it’s been over a year since I first read the book. That probably proves what an astoundingly brilliant writer Joyce is, but I like to think it’s because I’m an idiot and boy oh boy this update sure is messy so far. And it gets messier!

Things I’ve been doing that I probably should have dedicated an entire update to but actually it’s probably better that I didn’t. A list.

I played a lot of Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires, though I still haven’t quite conquered all of China. Considering the only time I’d ever spent with a Dynasty Warriors game was on a demo kiosk in CompUSA in 2001, I’ve found the experience pretty radly. I just mash buttons and hundreds of Chinese soldiers die. Then I tell my advisers to shutup and invade another kingdom, murdering folks as I go. It’s pretty much the shallowest thing ever, but it’s a lot fun. If it had (online) coop play, I’d pretty much play it forever.

I also boughtened and playened Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, which is the PC expansion to Doom 3 and not the XBox port. It’s pretty good, but nowhere as good as Doom 3 (which, if you remember correctly, I actually liked a great deal). It’s way too short, most of the weapons beyond the machine gun and the new double barreled shotgun and “grabber” don’t see much use, and the new time slowing/ass kicking super powers are virtually useless. Well, they’re useless in the way that they’re super useful, but they’re rarely required so I never really used them.

Then! Also! Guild Wars. I’ve been finding World of Warcraft really, really boring lately (but eagerly await battlegrounds) so I bought Guild Wars to keep me entertained. It’s incredibly boring to play alone, but becomes a lot of fun when playing with a group. It’s primarily PvP focused, but not in a MMO gankathon sort of way, as PvP encounters are instanced, between balanced teams, and actually interesting. The game as a whole is sort of like a mix between Diablo 3, Phantasy Star Online, and Magic: The Gathering, which is what I think Penny Arcade described it as, but maybe not style. Also, the graphics are really, really bad. I remember the game being really pretty last May, but I guess after playing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft in the inbetween time in I’ve become spoiled in.

Spoiled like a fox!

I was going to watch a DVD on my Playstation 2 but it’s hooked up through a VCR so I can’t. The DVD? Pawel Majewski!

Sometimes I just use the names of INTERNET CELEBRITIES because they’re, like, my heroes and stuff. I also like to draw.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, it’s going to be one of those updates, only one where those is italicized. For fun! Copy and paste that last sentence into an HTML file, add italic tags to the first “those” and then upload it somewhere/someplace! Don’t tell me about it, though.

Other things!

Oh, so there’s this kid/dude in my English 101 class who’s probably the biggest asshat I’ve ever met. I’ve had to start sitting with my back to him (we’re in a computer lab room) just so he can’t see the horrible faces (disgustion, sadness, pain, LOVE) I make when he talks. My professor hates him too, so that makes things fun!

I kinda want to play Metal Gear Solid 2 a little bit. I have no schoolwork this weekend, see. I think I’m going to go play vector_black’s copy and yell at the screen and stuff because nobody else is home. EDIT: I can’t find his copy of the game! My life is nothing if not a waste.

First, though, I’ll leave you with a random bit of text copy-pasted from fifty pages up in this text document in which I am now writing which makes the title totally relevant and stuff, though this text will soon get shat into WordPress and then HTMLed and then you’ll see it through your browser of choice on your operating system of choice at the place you’re at (of choice). Only none of that might be of choice, and then where will we be.

!

Oh!

I got a great idea!

So, this update is pretty much a disaster of a mess thus far, I think we can agree on that pretty conspicuously, so, what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy-paste this thing I half-wrote on Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series, only like I said it’s half-written and completely unorganized and just an attempt to crap my ideas down on paper TO BE ORGANIZED LATER (which I did not). You probably shouldn’t read it if you ever have the slightest chance you might read The Dark Tower books at some point in your life. Actually, I think you can read up until the point where I start talking about the books themselves. (Actually I already labeled it with spoilers and stuff all those months ago!) AFTER that it’s nothing but massive spoilers, including a spoiling of THE VERY THING THE SERIES IS ABOUT!. I’ve read the fifth book since starting writing this, and it agrees.

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I am a selective fan of Stephen King. On the one hand, I greatly respect the man for his work ethic and unquestionable love for his craft. On the other, I find nearly every television and film adaptation of his work, whether he’s involved with the project or not, to range from merely uninteresting to downright bad (The Shawshank Redemption and the film version of The Shining being the only exceptions). I’ve never been particularly interested in any of the man’s short stories and I find what little I have read of his novels (Needful Things) to be entirely unable to hold my interest. However, I rank IT as one of my favorite books ever written and count The Stand (which I started reading before discovering there was a revised, longer edition and haven’t got back to actually finishing) as a truly remarkable literary achievement.

My mother, a huge Stephen King, she is, considers Mr. King a “wordy” writer. There’s a lot of truth in that statement. One of the most common complaints brought up against any of his books is that they’re just too damn long. IT is often harshly criticized for taking too long to amount to too little. Many people write it off as two poorly edited books crammed into a single binding. There’s a twenty page sequence near the beginning of IT in which readers are blessed with a ridiculously long account of a character’s entire life history. Then this same character goes up stairs, discovers her dead husband, and is never even mentioned again for the rest of the book. Stephen King has a way of making even the shortest of his novels seem incredibly epic, if for no other reason than their insane page counts.

If books like IT and The Stand are epic and King’s other novels are just really, really long, then no words exist to accurately describe the length or scope of The Dark Tower series. I suppose really fucking long just about grabs it. The entire thing clocks in at roughly 4,500 manuscript pages. That’s long, kids. But like I said, a good portion of that length comes from King’s writing style. He’s the sort of writer who rarely provides his readers with a “two weeks later” or an “early the next morning.” Instead he writes, and we read, about every single event of even marginal importance down to the last detail from one moment to the next. If something’s happening then King’s going to write about it, and he’s going to write about it from six different angles and he’s going to use a tremendous amount of adjectives and adverbs. King loves his adjectives and adverbs. But The Dark Tower series is epic for more reasons than its unprecedented length. At its heart stands what is very easily the largest of issues: the very safety of not just one world, but all worlds. The Dark Tower itself is still a rather vague construct, even after the fourth book in the series, but this much is certain: something, whether it’s a dark spire of enormous girth height or a single red rose stands at the center of all worlds acting as the lynchpin for size, time, and reality. And something’s poisoned it.

Heavy stuff, to say the least, but King is a writer of popular fiction not because he’s fond of words, but because even though it takes him a long time to get anywhere, the reading on the way is one hell of an easy going. He writes with liberal use of what I’ve always heard referred to as the Uncle Charles Principle. That is to say, when the narrative focuses in on a specific character, the language itself slightly shifts to reflect that character’s own thoughts and feelings. Stuff is generally described using the character’s own words. Partially because of this, King is an extremely crude writer. He has no problem using “bad” words, even when they stand in stark contradiction to the rest of his prose, or describing the most lurid sex act or violent mutilation down to the last detail. He’ll often refer to his characters using inappropriate slang, usually while the narrative streams through another character’s head, but sometimes when the words are coming from no source at all.

If King’s writing style has any real downside, it stems from the cumulative effect of all these things. The wordiness, the Uncle Charles Principle, and the crudeness of the writing combine to form a sort of overarching bluntness which often insults the reader, and in no place is this clearer than in the Dark Tower series. Because every detail of every event is transcribed for the reader, and because these events are often shot through the perspective of various characters and the language itself is hardly “high” (even when characters employ the high speech of the Dark Tower’s world) or “artsy,” very little is left to the reader’s imagination. Should you happen to notice an interesting way in which the relationship between two characters echoes another relationship between two others, King did too and he’s about to directly point it out to you. If you were wondering what King’s alluding to in a certain line or passage, he’ll tell you in the next. If you’re starting to consider a character or object as a larger symbol in the text, King’s going to fully explain it to you two sentences from now. The end result doesn’t really hurt the series in any real way, though it might have an impact on the books’ longevity a century from now. As it stands, it’s merely unfortunate, and often insults the readers who picked up on any of the story’s nuances (and is merely glossed over by those who didn’t).

As of this writing, I’ve only read the first four books (of seven) in the Dark Tower series, but I feel this is a perfect time to stop and write about them. King began work on the first book in the series in 1970 and finished the fourth in 1996. While the first half of the series was written over the course of sixteen years and released as they were finished, the second half of the series was written at the same time and released six months apart over a year and a half. Though the entire series is related and one book flows into the next, at no other point in the series (except perhaps after the very first novel) is there a better breaking off point. Besides, if I didn’t stop and write down all this stuff now I’d probably explode trying to keep it all inside me through three more (2,500 manuscript pages!) novels.

So, let’s get to it.

The Dark Tower 1: The Last Gunslinger

The first book in the series has the unique disposition of being almost nothing like the remainder of the books that follow it. It’s certainly tightly connected to the other six novels, especially after King’s extensive revisions following his completion of book seven, but The Last Gunslinger stands on its own like no other Dark Tower title.

The Last Gunslinger quite literally follows Roland Deschain of Gilead as he follows the mysterious Man in Black across an impossibly harsh desert landscape. As a gunslinger, Roland stands as a proud symbol of the world before it “moved on.” He is a one man army – judge, jury, and executioner – and a highly trained diplomat. He is just as deadly with words as he is with his six shooters. As he draws ever closer to the mysterious Man in Black, the gunslinger faces a town turned against him by the power of religion, a sex-hungry demon, and a band of mutants that dwell along the railroad tracks beneath a forgotten mountain.

The novel is largely a western adventure right down to the saloon with batwing doors. However, King complicates things with constant flashbacks to Roland’s youth and the interesting character of Jake Chambers, a young boy who died in 1970s New York and finds himself in the world of the Dark Tower, and who ultimately plays a pivotal role in the series.

The novel asks a lot of questions and yet doesn’t provide a single answer. In fact, the events of the entire book could easily be summarized as, “there’s this dude named Roland who wants to go to this dark tower for some reason.” It is a beginning in every sense of the word. Though largely self-contained as an adventure through the possibly post-apocalyptic desert of a world that resembles our own, any questions which may arise from looking beyond the plot events only leads to dead ends. The novel seems to exist as a simple bookend, one whose events merely hint at what’s to come.

The Dark Tower 2: The Binding of the Three

If The Last Gunslinger is western genre fiction then The Binding of the Three is a dark, twisted version of Being John Malkovitch, which wasn’t exactly all lollipops and handjobs to begin with. Beginning immediately where the first book in the series left off, The Binding of the Three opens on a beach populated with deadly lobstrocities as Roland sets out on his quest to draw the prisoner, the lady of shadows, and the pusher. Apparently drawing is a lot like walking through doors and into people’s heads.

The novel takes place almost entirely in New York City at various points in the twentieth century. Whereas The Last Gunslinger is largely an exercise in introducing and developing a single character, The Binding of the Three King introduces three more (though really a lot more than that) major players. If book one is simply a beginning, then I’d call book two more beginning. King sets the stage with the Last Gunslinger, but he populates it in The Binding of the Three.

Gone are the constant flashbacks to the Roland’s youth as the narrative flows in a strictly linear (though not that strict) fashion. The book is divided into three roughly equal sized sections, each of which deals heavily with one of the three which Roland draws. Interestingly, the presence of other characters (who aren’t little boys or advisories) and Roland’s mutilation at the beginning of the book (BUT HOW? STILL SPOILER FREE!), as well as the absence of any of Roland’s ‘though youth’ narratives, greatly softens the character of the Gunslinger. In fact, over the course of these three books Roland becomes less and less like a stone figure carved from legend and more and more like an actual human being. This obviously has a great deal to do with our old friend Character Development, but the very shifting of the genre and the end of Roland’s solitude has a lot to do with this too. Make someone talk and they won’t seem quite so alien. Or something.

The Drawing of the Three’s greatest weakness is that it seems so completely disconnected from the first book. Readers may wonder if their favoritest Gunslinger in the very wild west might have wandered into another series entirely sometime between book one and two. As mentioned earlier, very little of the book actually takes place in Roland’s world, and the little bits that do very rarely involve Roland and are all contained on the same beach. It’s not necessarily bad, just not at all what you’ll likely expect, but as the next book in the series shows, that’s about par for the course for The Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower 3: The Wastelands

This book should have received a different title. Ignoring any grand ideas which the wastelands may come to symbolize (like uh… nothing), the titular wastelands have all of twenty pages of air time in the novel. They are not a goal the protagonists are striving for. They are not a grand obstacle in the protagonists’ path. They just kinda are, and allow King to show off some creepy creatures and generally sick the reader out before finally closing the book.

Instead of having anything to do with any Wastelands, the book is divided into two noticeable chunks. The first half focuses on (now the major spoilers start, turn back now if you value your Dark Tower virginity) Roland and his ka-tet (watch me not explain a term) as they struggle to return Jake Chambers to the world of the Dark Tower. Once again, a great deal of the story takes place in New York, and once again King takes it in interesting new directions the readers (stupid, stupid readers) weren’t expecting. During this first half we also learn that all the problems of the last book seem to have magically disappeared (huh?) and that robotic bears are a blessing in disguise.

The second chunk of the novel then takes place in and around the ruins of the New York-esque city of Lud. Interestingly, King tries to finally provide the series with not one but two antagonists here, only to simply leave them hanging in the air as the book ends. One is simply mentioned as a future threat (and who later turns out to be anything but). A conflict begins with the other but then the book abruptly ends with the ka-tet in certain danger and a dramatic showdown about to begin.

The Wastelands is easily the weakest link of the Dark Tower series, which is a shame because so much of it so excellent. The interesting complications arising from Jake Chambers and his adventures in New York are downright fun to read and the ka-tet’s later perils in Lud are exhilarating to no end. However, the sudden love between Eddie and Susannah and their ability to quickly learn the skills of the gunslinger is completely unbelievable. Similarly the ending of the novel, as well as the title itself, seem like half-assed attempts for an author who is known as being anything but. However, the book is still good, it merely doesn’t hold up to the standards of the previous two novels. Luckily for it, the fourth book completely knocks all three out of the water.

The Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass.

The fourth entry in the Dark Tower series is easily the most interesting of the series thus far. Though there are some strange problems with the actual plot of the novel, the book’s structure and the themes it addresses not only in itself but in the previous entries in the series as well are extraordinarily interesting and worth looking at.

The book’s beginning starts literally right where the previous book left off. King even goes so far as to include the last few pages of The Wastelands just to help readers make sense of things. However, the book has a definite ending and is in many ways an ending to the first four books of the series as a whole. The vast, vast majority of the book is actually a direct sequel to the B-plot of Roland’s past from the first book as told by Roland to the other members of his ka-tet. So, we have a beginning which is directly connected to another novel, an ending which ends not only one book but three other books as well, and a middle which is a sequel to a sub-plot in a book at the very beginning of the series. Perhaps I should also mention that the beginning and ending of the book take place in the very same world as The Stand. Yes, things are very interesting indeed.

Wizard and Glass brings to light things about the previous three books which can easily be overlooked or simply dismissed outright at first glance. Here is my thesis which I’m about to attempt to prove using only the most vague of arguments. I’m going to remain rather conservative in my ideas for now, because there are still three books just waiting to prove me horribly wrong. Here goes: The Dark Tower stands not at the center of all realities or at the center of all of Stephen King’s stories, though King himself writes that he sees the Dark Tower universe as containing not only the story of Roland but all his stories as well. No, the universe of the Dark Tower is the universe of all stories, rather written by Stephen King, my mom, or your dad. At its center stands the Dark Tower. And still, something has poisoned it.

King’s series is inspired by Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Before even being brought to paper, the Dark Tower series was already infused with the ghostly inspirations of other stories. But what story isn’t? And what author can live in a storyless vacuum before creating stories of his or her own? The fact that The Dark Tower was born of other stories is simply one of many signs (albeit a lesser one) pointing to a story about stories taking place in the world of stories.

The first book in the series, The Last Gunslinger, is comprised almost entirely of people telling stories to one another, only the first time through it’s too easy to get too caught up in the adventure to notice. Roland tells the story of Tull to the man with a raven. In his story the female bartender with a scar across her forehead tells Roland a story about her own experience with the Man in Black. When Roland meets Jake Chambers at the waystation, Jake tells him the story of his own death and his own experience with the Man in Black. Later, Roland tells Jake of own his childhood and the events leading up to his claiming his guns. And finally, when the gunslinger finally meets the Man in Black, the moment the entire novel has been building towards, what do they do? They hold palaver. The Man in Black tells Roland the story of his own future in the form of a tarot reading and then tells him about the creation of the world, this world of stories, and of the Dark Tower itself.

The second book, The Binding of the Three, is similarly comprised of a series of stories. The doors which Roland finds on the beach each lead to New York City in different wheres and whens, and what’s a story if not a doorway to a where and when? These doors are literal representations of stories titled The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, and The Pusher. Eddie Dean thinks of these doorways in terms of film, a medium for stories, likening looking through the door to watching a POV shot from The Shining. However, what this book is really about is the stories which people tell themselves. Though other stories are told throughout the novel, as Eddie tells airport security his story in a dingy interrogation room, Roland mutters pieces of his story while recovering from infection by a campfire, or a gunslinger-possessed Pusher weaves a tale for two police officers in Terminator-esque style, the majority of the stories within the novels are stories told by characters to themselves. Odetta/Detta Walker makes up stories for the lapses in her memory when her other personality takes hold. She tells herself about her past, about her father, her accident, and a certain forespecial plate. She later tells Eddie and Roland. Eddie tells himself the stories of his own past as well, the stories of his mother and his brother Henry and the ways in which he controlled him and the way he feels about his death. He later tells Susannah and Roland.

It is also in this second book that we further learn of the connection between Roland’s world and others. In The Last Gunslinger we learn of Jake’s passage into Roland’s world following his death. Then, when Jake dies again in the world of the Dark Tower he tells Roland that “there are other worlds than these.” Though the world of the Dark Tower is certainly related to other worlds, its exact relation is only reinforced, though not quite explained, during the second novel. Keep this in mind, as I’ll return to it later.

The third book in the series, The Wastelands, is (surprise, surprise) once again comprised of a series of stories. Both Eddie and Susannah are blessed with a gift to see certain things in Roland’s world. Susannah can see the world’s past, the daily mundane events of people going about living their lives. Eddie, on the other hand, sees a rose and key in a campfire. Both end up telling the stories of what they see to the ka-tet.

The first half of the book takes place almost entirely in New York, as Jake Chambers tries desperately to come to terms with the fact that he has lived two lives and he remembers both of them. The telling of stories and be further stretched to unbelievable limits and I could discuss how Jake tells himself stories of these alternate lives or tells his parents and their housekeeper stories to cover up his experience with the rose. I could talk about the dreams that Eddie and Jake share, treating them as stories. But I won’t. There’s a much more obvious story in Jake’s life.

Jake buys two books from a Mr. Tower, a book of riddles and another titled Charlie The Choo-Choo. The latter book holds a special significance to the third book (and both play a major role in the fourth). When Jake reads the book we read it with him, reading the exact words Jake reads as he reads them. This story within a story bears a striking similarity to Roland’s world of the Dark Tower. The world of Charlie The Choo-Choo is just as related to Roland’s world as the world of Eddie Dean, Susannah Walker, and Jake Chambers (which may or may not be different worlds). Within the book, Jake finds names of characters and locations from the Dark Tower series. The fact that this story within a story contains these connections to the larger world of King’s story seems to suggest that both, though not identical, are shades of each other. It is but another story in this world of stories.

Additionally, when Roland’s ka-tet meets with the elders of the small village outside Lud, the characters once again tell stories to another other. Most importantly, the ka-tet is told a story of Blaine the Mono.

Finally, in Wizard and Glass we hear Roland’s story. Throughout The Wastelands and the beginning of Wizard and Glass the other characters constantly beg Roland to tell them his story. They want to know about Susan and about events which were hinted at in the first novel. In many ways, the story which Roland tells is the point to which the entire series has been building up to. Or more accurately, it’s the less obvious point the series has been building up to. Obviously, the drive of the characters and the motion of the novels have been heading toward the Dark Tower, but the mysterious references to Roland’s past and the very themes of the series have been leading to Roland’s tale.

He ends it now.

I took the long way around today and yesterday (but certainly not tomorrow!). I took the long way because it is farther out and higher up. I circled because of gravity’s pull.

(vector_black doesn’t panic)

The Japanese label on the CC Lemon bottle claims that 1400 miligrams of vitamin C are contained within, but the USDA label insists that there is none. Whom do I trust? What, if anything, am I to believe anymore?

I’ve trusted myself for a long time — I think now I’ll trust you instead.

(vector_black finds it)

Yesterday World of Warcraft’s honor system finally went live, and it did so without its much anticipated sister feature, the Warcraft 3-like battlegrounds. With the honor system in place, players are now rewarded for brutally murdering players of the opposite faction, effectively making PvP an integral part of the game experience rather than a worthless waste of time. Unfortunately, in all its infinite wisdom Blizzard never stopped to think that such a system would make any sort of gameplay other than player versus player combat completely irrelevant.

With no battlegrounds to contain the killing (and at this point, I doubt even they could do it), the world itself has turned into an all out war zone. While a few players cling desperately to the old ways, saturating the general chat channels of the major cities with LFG messages, the rest of the player population, a majority of which is at the level cap, is actively participating in a full scale war. I wonder what the NPCs who claimed that the Alliance and Horde were no longer at war say now.

Over the course of a few hours last night I joined a roaming Felwood death squad, participated in a large South Shore raid before hopelessly trying to defend Tarren Mill from within a small barn, defended Orgrimmar against an Alliance raid, ran like hell from a huge Alliance ganking party in Winterspring, participated in a massive underwater brawl consisting of at least 100 players outside Grom’Gol, and crashed against the gates of Stormwind. And honestly, it was a lot of fun. It’s like I was playing an honest-to-God Warcraft game or something. However, for the minority of players not bored of running instances at the level cap, I imagine the results of the honor system are more like a nightmare than a breath of fresh air. Every zone in the game has become incredibly unsafe, as massive groups and lone warriors both search for any and every player who would reward them with an honorable kill. Traditionally PvP-heavy zones like Hillsbrad, Tanaris, and Blackrock Mountain (home of four (and soon to be five) major end game instances) are now little more than huge, lag-filled tug of war matches. Neither side ever holds a single zone for long, despite hugely imbalanced player populations, resulting in a large scale back and forth struggle which makes any sort of PvE gameplay an impossibility.

Tonight I signed on to see if the initial activity following the patch’s release yesterday had settled down, but if anything it’s actually become worse. There are now players with 5,000 or more honorable kills (I have 355) and the game-destroying lag which plagued the most PvP intensive zones has now spread to the entire server. Still, it is a hell of a lot of fun to kill your fellow man, especially when doing so with 300 of your closest allies and enemies, but I can’t help but feel that a large percent of the player population isn’t going to be too keen on the idea of paying their monthly fee towards what has essentially become a deathmatch of epic proportions. Players stuck trying to quest and level up are probably in store for even less entertainment.

It’ll be interesting to see what Blizzard does to fix this problem, assuming they do anything at all. The most rational and least probable solution would be to remove the honor system entirely until the battlegrounds themselves were available. However, chances are Blizzard won’t do anything at all and we’ll be stuck with this insane online war until the next patch is released in a month or two. If they make any sort of move before then, it will probably involve adding some sort of strict penalty for dishonorable kills rather than changing the system at large. Also, I can’t help but wonder what measures Blizzard will take to try and confine the player versus player game to the battlegrounds when and if they do show up. Perhaps honor will only be earnable in the battlegrounds themselves or players will instead earn some sort of honor bonus in the instanced combat zones. Whatever happens, Blizzard will need to do something, especially if they hope to ever attract any new players to the game. As it stands right now, the honor system transforms the game from a PvE heavy, solo-friendly quest-a-thon to an all out war in which only the strong can hope to survive. It’s a lot of fun for those of us ready to experience it, but hell for those are aren’t.

Additionally, the amount of honor that players earn is ladder based, meaning each honor ranking is reserved for a limited percent of the population rather than based on a linear, level-like system. This effectively makes alts, the distraction of choice for many bored 60s, entirely pointless, as trying to gain any sort of respectable rank is enough of a chore with one character, let alone two or more. Also, this ladder based set up ensures that players will keep killing one another in ridiculous numbers until they have some reason not to.

I guess I’ve just become another grumpy MMO player, but it’s hard for anyone to admit that the honor system, while desperately necessary, was implemented extremely poorly.

I’m legitimately trying to update this space more often, honest (I wrote Sunday morning before legitimately going to Costco/playing a lot of World of Warcraft/writing a terrible paper for a terrible class), but last week was my first week back at work and the first real week of the spring quarter, so the amount of time I had available to write about video games/be an idiot was sort of minimal. Then Friday and Saturday saw a complete guild breakdown in the less-fun-with-each-passing-day World of Warcraft. That was fun.

However, I still found the time to download and play through the PC demo for Psychonauts, the action/adventure platformer from Tim Schafer, the man responsible for Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Psychonauts is a game I was interested in even when it was a Microsoft-published Xbox exclusive, so the fact that it’s coming to the PC now and the PS2 later means I’ll actually get a chance to play the damn thing. This excites me. For those of you completely uneducated on the Psychonauts front (and shame on you if you are), I highly suggest checking out the disgustingly awesome trailer over at gametrailers.com.

Anyway, the demo was pretty much proof that this game is exactly what I was hoping it would be, even if the gameplay showcased therein was extremely basic (the demo consisting of only the first level of the game). Super excellent level design (including a really neat Spiny Room O’ Death near the end) and great art direction and character design all wrapped up nicely with great writing and a great sense of humor means Psychonauts is set to hit all the right notes. Unfortunately, it features a lot of “features” that have become blatantly overused over the years such as tight ropes, rope swinging, and rail surfing. Still, the demo is incredibly solid and hopefully an indication of what the game has to offer.

Between Psychonauts, God of War, and Resident Evil 4, this is already shipping up to be quite a year for gaming. In fact, I enjoyed those latter two titles far more than anything that shipped in 2004 (aside from maybe World of Warcraft). And now that Doom 3 expansion pack is out too! I should probably pick that up, seeing as how I seem to be the only person who really enjoyed Doom 3.

I was going to call this a “Metroid Prime 2 Review,” but seeing as all I do is bitch and moan and then bitch and moan some more, I decided against it. I’m sorry it’s so painfully dry in the beginning, but it gets better as it goes on, honest. In related news, I’ve only proof-read the first five or so (very boring) paragraphs, so best of luck to all who dare read on.

Metroid Prime’s greatest success and its greatest failure, for better and for worse, is the fact that it successfully translates the 2D gameplay of the Metroid series into 3D, and does so through a first-person perspective at that. While surprising and new in 2002, the game’s sequel, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, fails to impress as its most dramatic feature, a theoretically interesting light/dark mechanic merely draws attention to the original’s greatest flaws and to the fact that Echoes does little more than echo Prime. Both games do little to expand upon or evolve beyond the original Metroid formula, and though now hidden behind an admittedly gorgeous three-dimensional mask, the core gameplay is stale, boring, and out of date.

Though Metroid Prime’s move to 3D brought some interesting new features to the series, such as deeper, more exciting combat, and complex three dimensional puzzles and world features such as half-pipes and spider ball tracks, it did little to stray from Metroid’s root gameplay. The game still featured the big boss battles, backtracking, and multitude of hidden power-ups the series was known for. The game was unquestionably Metroid, but many of the series’ flaws became hugely amplified when directly translated from their two-dimensional existence into a three-dimensional world. For one thing, the series’ inherent backtracking and exploration became far more tedious when traversing large, complex 3D environments rather than the simpler 2D levels of older Metroid titles. It simply took far more time to travel through the 3D world of Tallon IV than it ever took to get from place to place on Zebes or SR388.

Additionally, backtracking became even more of a chore when dealing with constantly-respawning enemies. Though it was less of a problem to deal with the game’s easily ignorable wildlife which did little more than follow pre-designed patterns (which begs the question, why are they even there?), the constant respawning of the game’s more complicated foes, such as space pirates and chozo ghosts, was downright annoying. The fact that the same batch of enemies were always present every time you entered a room added one extra layer of hassle in the already more time-consuming exploration and re-exploration of this 3D world, especially given the more complex nature of the combat when compared to Metroid games of the past. Enemies respawned in previous Metroid games because they didn’t slow down progress, because combat was a much quicker, simpler affair and because the screw attack (which is not present in Metroid Prime) allowed players to easily dispatch of annoying enemies when re-exploring areas later in the game. However, in Metroid Prime they simply work as an exciting element the first time through a new area, and as an annoying distraction on every subsequent visit.

One of Prime’s most prevalent new features was the addition of three additional visors which enhanced vision in some way, of which the scan visor saw the most use. While Metroid, Metroid 2, and Super Metroid (and Metroid Fusion) consisted of levels built from 2D blocks with meaningful symbols which corresponded to which of Samus’ power-ups were capable of destroying them printed on their sides, such a feature would have been mostly-ridiculous in the realistic, three-dimensional environments of Metroid Prime. In Metroid Prime, it is therefore impossible to know what elements of the environments are interactive or even how to interact with them. Retro solved this rather complicated little problem with the scan visor which does exactly what its title suggest: it lets you scan things. By using the scan visor, objects which offer some degree of interactivity are highlighted a certain color. By then targeting them as though they were enemies, such objects are scanned, revealing backstory, enemy weaknesses, and clueing the player into what power-ups are used to destroy which objects. Essentially, the scan visor strips the game of its fancy coating and reveals the block-destroying gameplay behind the curtain. In many ways, the scan visor reveals Prime’s greatest flaw: for all the exciting 3D graphics and interesting new features, the game is a Metroid game at heart and is a direct translation that doesn’t function nearly as well in 3D as it does in 2D. However, the extra, pointless effort required because of the respawning enemies, large three-dimensional environment, and the scan visor itself were not enough to ruin the game; they are merely the unfortunate side effects of directly sticking a recipe for 2D success into a 3D universe while making minimal changes to compensate for this added dimension.

In Echoes, however, the new light/dark mechanic not only complicates gameplay, it further amplifies the problems generated during Metroid’s direct translation to 3D. Metroid Prime 2 takes place on Aether, a world which has been torn into a light and dark version of itself. This additional dark world makes backtracking, a major feature of Metroid gameplay, even more tedious than it was in Prime, as half of the areas that players are backtracking through exist in two palette-swapped realities: the light and the dark. Therefore, it becomes extremely difficult to navigate through the game’s world without frequent use of the game’s map, as only a little more than half of the Aether’s environments are unique. Additionally, players can only travel back and forth between the light and dark worlds at certain points, either through alien-constructed portals or tears in reality. This simply adds one more unnecessary step to the backtracking process, as not only do players have to backtrack through massive, 3D environments, only half of which are unique, but they have to backtrack through massive, 3D environments just to backtrack through the other half of the massive, 3D environments. Additionally, three of the light world’s areas are almost aesthetically identical and the entirety of the dark world shares similar visual elements, further frustrating movement through the world. Unlike in Prime, where it simply took a long time to get from place to place, the additional light/dark mechanic and the limited aesthetic palette work to make getting from place to place not only time consuming but frustrating and make the game’s map not just a useful tool but a necessity.

Additionally, the light/dark mechanic influences combat too, and it does so negatively. Once again nearly all enemies respawn, including complicated enemies which can require a great deal of work to overcome. However, because the game’s light and dark beams, which deal extra damage to dark and light enemies, respectively, have a limited ammo supply and because ammo is almost always scarce, players rarely have the most effective tools to deal with the enemies at hand. Instead, most of the game is spent using the standard power beam and Samus’ supply of missiles, effectively making the light/dark mechanic a moot point with respect to combat which does little else than act as an annoyance.

The 3D world has once again provided the opportunity for Retro to create ridiculously-complex puzzles, and create them they have. However, these puzzles, which often involve liberal use of the morph ball and its accessories (bombs, power bombs, spider ball tracks), rarely reward the player with anything more than additional missiles. Why? Because “puzzles” in previous Metroid games rewarded players with additional missiles. However, these “puzzles” in the 2D games served more as exploration-rewards and most of the time came from just blowing up a wall or curling up in a statue’s hands. The amount of work Metroid Prime 2 asks players to perform just to see their maximum missile capacity increase by five often borders on ridiculous. Retro obviously has a tremendous knack for puzzle design (and level design, on the singular scale), but they seem too trapped within the confines of what it means to be a Metroid game.

In fact, all of these problems stem from the fact that Retro is too literally translating the 2D gameplay of the Metroid series into 3D. Once again, the scan visor returns to reveal the game beneath the game and show players the symbols on the now-3D blocks. However, the game’s two new visors, and one (of two) of its new power-ups are blatantly useless. The Metroid series has always been a series of finding keys to doors baring progress, only the doors are usually symboled-blocks and the keys are usually missiles or bombs of some sort. In Metroid Prime 2, the keys are literally keys and the doors are literally doors. The new sonic visor literally allows players to see the keys to locked doors. That’s it. Some doors are locked by sound-producing devices and in order to unlock them players need the sonic visor. The seeker missiles are used to open doors – literal doors – which need seeker missiles to unlock them. However, both of these meaninglessly trivial power-ups pale in comparison to the sheer useless glory of the dark visor.

The dark visor let’s you see enemies. Sure, it makes them bright and red, but chances are nobody was having much trouble seeing them without the visor’s aid. There are a total of two enemies in the game which require the dark visor in order to be seen, and they are merely two different variations on the same enemy and they rarely show up. The dark visor is also used in two puzzles, total, to see invisible platforms. It’s main use is in what has become Nintendo’s patented 11th hour fetch quest, as in order to do the fetching players must use the dark visor to shoot a “dark cache” and then… shoot it some more with the combat visor.

These power-ups seem to exist just to fill quotas and because Metroid games have power-ups. Retro doesn’t seem to care if they’re useful, fun, or interesting or not, simply that they’re there. This stem’s from the Metroid Prime series’ largest problem: the series is comprised of Metroid games. The Metroid formula still works brilliantly in 2D as last year’s Zero Mission so eloquently demonstrated, but in 3D it leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of its basic game mechanics don’t function nearly as well in three dimensions as they do in two, but Retro has performed such literal translations of the Metroid series with the Prime games that such features are present any way. The fact that the scan visor, which strips away the layer of shine and finish Retro has covered the basic Metroid gameplay with is even necessary is indicative of a larger problem. Retro knows that this formula doesn’t work as well in 3D as it does in 2D, but it presses on regardless, providing players with literal keys to literal doors and providing the scan visor to highlight the literal doors for the not-so-literal keys. The Metroid Prime games are what they are because they are little more than slightly-updated versions of the older games in the Metroid series.

And this really isn’t a good thing. After two games, I find the 3D Metroid gameplay virtually unplayable. I doubt I would buy a third Metroid Prime game without first seeing massive changes to the way such a game would play. I played the first Metroid Prime game in under a week because it was Metroid and it was 3D and despite its obvious short comings it was surprising, unexpected, and genuinely interesting. It took me nearly five months to play through Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, because the basic Metroid formula, which isn’t particularly suited for 3D, was disgusted even more poorly in Prime 2 than in Prime. And in a way, this has ruined Prime for me, made it nearly unplayable, because all I see now is a Metroid game that begs to be 2D. If Nintendo wants people to continue caring about the Metroid franchise (because Prime 2 sold much worse than Prime, though there are admittedly other reasons for that), they need to look beyond the franchise’s past for inspiration. The Metroid universe is incredibly rich and remains mostly ignored. Hopefully the next Metroid game will be something more than a Metroid game.

Ever since The Internet started going on and on about how Rez was, like, totally a work of art and stuff, man, I knew I had to own a copy. Then I saw that they go for about $100 on eBay (unless you want the PAL or Japanese versions, which are cheaper) and decided to play ICO instead. However, man cannot live on ICO alone, so a few weeks ago I finally broke down and was the winning bidder on an auction for a shiny new copy of Rez at $99.95, shipping included. A nickel saved is a nickel earned, kids.

I have since played through the game several times, sadly without a trance vibrator inserted into my orifice of choice, and I find the game to be a tricky sort of beast indeed. As a game, it’s nothing more than a button-mashy, completely depth-less on the rails shooter. As an interactive experience, it is a thing of beauty and, quite possibly, a work of art. And to be perfectly honest, I’m just fine with that.

This last December I went against my better judgment and purchased the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (staring Vin ‘Ryan ‘Sugoimonkey’ Hall’ Diesel and X to the Z). And though its first person action/adventure, stealth heavy, RPGy gameplay made for quite an interesting experience (AND YOU CAN SEE IN THE DARK!), as a game it was fundamentally broken. The game was obviously designed with a console (the XBox) in mind, as its levels are broken up into a series of interconnected bits and pieces which makes for constant, constant loading. However, the load zones do more than simply bring up the next level segment, as they effectively wipe all temporary information (such as whether or not a guard is currently chasing you) from uh… the RAM, I guess. So, it becomes entirely possible to strong arm your way through areas, alerting half a dozen guards to your presence and then making them promptly forget about you by passing through yet another loading zone. However, despite this fact, and the fact that the entire last section of the game is spent mindlessly clicking on things and watching them die, the overall product, as an interactive experience and not as a video game, is pretty damned excellent. The graphics are really pretty good, even given their super-glossy plastic look and manage to look just as good as Doom 3 while running much, much smoother. The sound work is excellent, from the varied musical score to the terrifically professional voice acting, though it helps when the game’s script is so spot-on too. The simple fact is that the entire experience, from shanking fellow inmates to blasting alien zombies and ducking through the dark underbelly of a space prison in search of hidden cigarette all add up to a worthwhile experience, even if the gameplay itself isn’t up to par. The game isn’t about playing as Riddick, but rather about being Riddick.

In much the same way, Rez works wonderfully as an interactive thing, much better than Escape from Butcher Bay, to be sure, but as a game it leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a tremendous amount of fun listening to the game’s music and watching the great visuals the game offers, but the actual playing amounts to little more than going through the motions of pressing a single button, selecting enemies, and then releasing that same button. That’s it. The joy of the game lies not in the playing, but in the being. The gameplay is so simple that most of the time is spent as a rather passive interactant, simply enjoying the fat beats issuing from your speakers, the controller furiously rumbling to the beat in your hands, and the psychedelic visuals dancing across your screen. The game isn’t challenging and requires basically zero effort to play. The game is meant to be experienced, from beginning to end, in a single, effortless sitting (which takes about a single hour). It’s more like one of those OMG COMPUTER GRAPHIX videos from the earlier nineties, only with just enough interactivity to make it interesting. And it is good, undoubtfully so, but Rez is not a good game, it is a good experience.

And that last level is pretty weird/rockingly awesome.

Vector_black (as Kojima), LeadPipe (as Majorburns), Trizma (as Trizma), and I (as Pfhor) were getting our quest on in the jungle zone of Stranglethorn Vale. After LeadPipe left us, we stumbled across an interested quest which had us solving riddles and traveling back and forth across the world in search of hidden clues. The final reward, a 14-slot bag, was hidden beneath the massive waterfall on the coast of the Hinterlands. We leapt from high atop the coastal mountains and claimed our prize, but with no means of returning to the world above in sight, we decided to swim north along the coast to see what we could find.

Eventually, our goal became to try and make it inside Quel’Thalas, the Scourge-ravaged home of the high elves and unopened zone. After a little more than half an hour swimming along the coast and trying unsuccessfully to climb up the steep coastal mountain ranges, we happened across a gentle incline that lead directly into the former home of the elves. However, rather than lush forests and ancient cities, we found a strange, semi-textured land that was perfectly flat and seemed to stretch on forever.

The un-zone was filled with strangely jagged, cookie-cutter cliffs

and half-mountains.

After further exploring what little there was of Quel’Thalas (which the world map claims is a full-sized zone while in reality it’s mostly bottomless ocean), we came across a deep pit whose height was guaranteed to cause instant death for anyone unfortunate enough to take one step too many.

However, being a warlock, I had the skills at my disposal to get down there. I put a soulstone on myself, took a leap of faith (which turned out to be a leap of death), and reincarnated at the bottom of the cliff. Whereas before both our guild tab and our party information itself listed us as not actually existing, filling the ‘location’ information with a big heaping of nothing at all, the game now claimed I was in the Eastern Plaguelands. Off in the distance I could see two strange glowing circles, so naturally I headed towards them.

When I got closer, I discovered that the circles were actually instance entrances and I was standing directly behind and under Stratholme. Here you can actually see a plane of water above my head.

I continued to run in the massive Quel’Thalas/Eastern Plaguelands pit long enough to realize that I had other choice but to hearth if I wanted to get out of this strange, unfinished land. Maybe I’ll go back again some day before the zone actually opens or maybe I’ll just take the time to swim from Hammerfall to the Undercity.

Manatee’s old classic The Matrix: Reloaded review and Buddy Buddy Buds Buds are now reonline. They have the best two header images of any articles on this site. I had originally planned to use an image of the cast of Friends for the latter article, but when running an appropriate Google image search I came across an image of Warcraft 3’s Mannoroth that just seemed perfect. Though I certainly don’t need to explain myself to you, of all people.

Also, I went ahead and shat the God of War update I wrote into its own paged and called it a God of War review. Just like that Fire Emblem review that’s no longer online, this is once again my attempt to be concise, to the point, and boring. I think I succeed smashingly.