BioshockHero
Video Games

Finite and Infinite

Today I finally finished Bioshock Infinite. I’d rage quit for a bit after not being able to get through the Zeppelin-based madness near the end. My save game for that chapter was first saved on April 2nd, so I’d been stuck there for a while. At this visit I got through third time lucky (and just by the skin of my teeth) and finally got to see the amazing ending. I hope it isn’t a spoiler to say that it’s worthy of the name “Infinite” and it’s pretty mind bending.

Up until today I’d had a bit of a problem with the game and I think I feel a bit better about it now that I’ve completed it. This post was originally going to be a bit of a kicking for the game because some of the content made me feel uncomfortable indeed and up until today I hadn’t been able to take down all those bloody mechanical patriots on the last level. (It’s the last level for a reason, so I understand that it’s hard but there’s some a bad decision on the user interface front that also make it a bit harder — one that I can’t really write about for spoiler purposes.)

For the last few weeks if you had asked me, I would have said that Bioshock 2 was a better game (Minor spoilers follow for a four-year old game). The reason being that it didn’t actually bother too much with plotting and just let you get on with the business of whacking splicers and Big Daddies in an increasing decrepit Rapture. I liked that. I also liked the way that the key to achieving the happy ending was to take a stake in people’s lives and show forgiveness. Until Infinite‘s ending, I wasn’t sure that the newer game was headed in that direction at all. All I can say without ruining it is that Infinite is effectively about one man’s sins unravelling and manifesting in front of him, and that sometimes sacrifice is better than forgiveness. Well, that’s what I took away from it.

Let me explain what I liked about the game overall and then I’ll wrap up with some of the things I did not like so much. Overall it looks amazing, the Bioshock games all have fantastic art design and there’s a lot of love and care that goes in to how the look and feel of Columbia drives the plot and surrounds the characters. In fact it’s not just the look, there’s also the sounds too: a barbershop version of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and a ragtime version Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” are particular highlights. (When the credits roll there are so many songs credited that there must be quite a lot of musical Easter Eggs to go hunting for!)

It’s also an incredibly satisfying game to play. The start is mysterious as you’re transported to the city in the sky and then languid as discover Columbia’s delights. In a masterful turn of pacing that I’ve not experienced before in a video game everything goes south pretty quickly at the city fair. After that you can play for about an hour or two with the pace barely letting up until you find Elizabeth. And then… well you’ll have to play it.

However, once it gets going it is an incredibly violent game and there are moments where you just have to plough your way through hordes of enemies. There are some interesting scenes where you find yourself in a war zone and all hell is breaking loose, in those scenes you have allies and it is nice to be in a Bioshock game without having to face an onslaught of deranged enemies without back up. Some of the enemies are outright deranged: the guys carrying coffins on their backs who shot crows at you (think of a Houdini Splicer from the original Bioshock but about twenty times more of an arsehole) are just mental and the Big Daddy redux the Handyman is just too strong. I completed the game on normal but I don’t make it through on hard. Obviously games like Bioshock have to be a bit violent, or else we’d just be playing Journey and Tetris all the time, not that that would be a bad thing.

The level that featured all the ghosts in the graveyard was a bit irritating and felt a bit forced. It was an interesting way to drive the plot forward (you have to find three bits of evidence to convince the ghost of Lady Comstock to let you pass) but it’s a mechanic that has been used in the previous games. In fact, the bits of this game that I liked the least were the parts that felt like a retread of previous games. Another example is the way that they introduce a new game mechanic by making you do something with it immediately, usually in some low pressure contrived setting.

Personally I think I admire Bioshock Infinite rather than love it in the way that I love Uncharted or Portal 2 but I definitely enjoyed it. I will play through it again one day. By the way, if you fancy a copy I think the PC version is on sale at the moment.

This was the source for the hero image. I cropped it and applied Analog‘s Stereoscopic filter. I wanted to show how I was trying to view both sides regarding the issues that this post raises — and it looks pretty cool too. As always, I used jpegmini to ensure that the file size of the jpg was as small as possible.

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OutAndAbout2

Random Photos

Out And About #2

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OutAndAbout1

Random Photos

Out And About #1

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RecallHero
Movies

Rekall and Recall

The other night I watched the DVD of Total Recall (the 2012 version, starring Colin Farrell) with my housemate; and in a surprisingly meta- turn of events, I’d already been implanted with memories of another film called Total Recall (the 1990 version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) with almost exactly the same plot! Who would have thought that I would open a post comparing those two films with that joke?! It’s safe to say that this post contains spoilers for both films, but nobody reads this blog so it doesn’t really matter.

The first big question is which version is better? I think the original is better, though I would love to have seen Colin Farrell be given the chance to get his chops around the original’s wackier plot machinations. I think he is better for the role than Arnie. What I don’t like about the new version is just how boring the plot becomes. Sure the tech looks a hell of a lot cooler and the weird elevator through the planet is probably a better idea than this film deserves, but so much of the “What is real? What is recall?” aspect of the plot is so watered down. Unfortunately, the remake is basically “Total Recall For Dummies”.

On paper, the studio making the remake was probably going for a Philip K. Dick extravaganza: the wackiness of the original Total Recall crossed with the aesthetic of Minority Report, with the rain that soaks Blade Runner thrown in for good measure. They obviously care about Dick’s work: on one of the posters that Quaid moodily gazes at, Rekall’s slogan is “We Can Remember It For You” — add in the word “Wholesale” and you have the title of the Dick novel that serves as the film’s source material.

Nevertheless, I prefer the goofier 1990 version. Sure the third breast on the girl is made of papier machine and all the prosthetics for the weird body horror look a bit like they were made from plasticene, but the sheer excitement of all the zig zags in the plot make for a much interesting film. Besides, the effects being a little ropey is not a reason to discount a movie — movies are made with the best effects available at the time and the imperfections are what drive the creation of better effects. The remake has none of the ebullience and charm of the original despite looking a lot more real.

In the end, comparing these two films goes to show that just because something convinces the eyes, it might not necessarily convince the heart or the mind. We are back at my objections to things like 3D movies: if the film in front of you doesn’t make you feel anything, be that laughter or fear or excitement, there is really no point in green screens or digital painting or adding in extra dimensions. Next time guys, just go with the crazy and let us go for a ride.

(Side note: I found out today that the producers of the Total Recall remake (and of the Fast & Furious movies) are going to be at the helm of the US remake of “A Prophet”. Given how much fun they sucked out of “Total Recall”, itself hardly the masterpiece that “A Prophet” is, I am mortified.)

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BitsAndBobsHero
Ideas, Music, Seasons, Software

Bits and Bobs

Just a little post with some random observations. I have written about “Don’t break the chain” before and this is me just trying to keep up with a post a day for June. I’m not feeling particularly inspired and most of the ideas that I have are for longer form posts so I’m doing some work behind the scenes this evening.

I’ve been trying to settle on how to organise my digital life, in particular how I take notes on various things. I like Apple’s Notes app because I can jot something on the phone and have it there on my computer later on. Meanwhile, Evernote is great for collecting stuff on the internet but I am still not used to whipping it out for making notes. I also really like my Markdown apps. And Sublime Text 2. Not to mention my paper notebooks and all the doodles I make on the back of receipts. I have a really fragmented note taking landscape. And then of course, sometimes I just write these posts off the top of my head!

The weather is good this week. It has made walking to and from work an unexpected pleasure. I am hoping to take a longer way around on my walk to work and snap a picture of Sunny Hill Park because it is looking very nice at the moment. Last Saturday I went for a walk around the park only to find that the powers that be have let large areas grow up into long grasses and (at the moment) flowers. For a while you can almost forget you are in Hendon.

I’m on a big Boards Of Canada trip at the moment. Inspired by the fact that their first album in seven years is out next week, I have dug out my copy of “Geogaddi” and I’ve got the other albums on order along with the new one. I am surprised by how long ago Geogaddi was released and by how modern it sounds. Perhaps “modern” isn’t the word, maybe “timeless” does the job better. It is certainly easier to listen to than I remember, but it is likely that in the last 11 years my ears have changed a fair bit too.

That’s it for now. The hero image is Bits and Bobs by Louis du Mont.

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Lake Michigan Storm
Life Experiences

Tasered and Maced

Yeah, so I went back to work today. Sad face. After two and a bit weeks of freedom it was pretty rough. I know everyone hates their job (otherwise it’s not a job) and so I’ve tried to think of a positive spin on things. When I do, my mind keeps spooling back to “Tasered and Maced” the final track on the (MP3 version of) “Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends” album. It features Aaron Behrens of Ghostland Observatory talking about an incident at a protest march when he was tasered and maced.

Tasered and maced… uhhh… pretty good!

That quote above is the last line in which he pretty much laughs it all off. That little laugh is amazing. I think that is the attitude I am trying to take these days. All the negative emotion I feel is only temporary, and one day these experiences will just form a funny anecdote that I will tell to my partner, or to my kids, or to my fellow inmates in the institution. And actually, it wasn’t that bad today.

Hero image is Lake Michigan Storm by Tom Gill on flickr.

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ActivePassiveHero
Writing

Active and Passive

I have to admit that I have a real grammar blind spot. I regularly lapse into writing passive sentences, rather than active ones. It is especially annoying because every book with some variant of “how to write better” in the title has “favour the active over the passive” as its number one rule.

It is easy to understand why active sentences should be favoured over passive ones. It forces you to direct the action of each sentence toward the reader and this makes each sentence easier to understand. I get the feeling that I would actually think better and generally make my opinions and thoughts more clear if I were the sort of person who automatically wrote active sentences. But I am not. I have a grammar checker and it weeds out the passive sentences; every time I write a post one such sentence gets through somehow.

So is it faulty thinking that makes me construct passive sentences as I write? Not always, but I am slowing becoming aware that there are a number of circumstances that produce passive sentences. I will share them with you dear reader, in the hope that it might spark some recognition in you too. For me, the primary source of passive sentences is writing automatically, that is “off the top of my head”. In this situation I find that I often insert defence mechanisms into my sentences, things that will get me off the hook if I were to come back later and find that I did not really mean what I had written. These mechanisms include wrapping verbs in “seems to” or “tends to” and using continuous action in the past rather than the present tense.

The biggest generator of passive expressions is writing fast or without a plan. Sometimes sentences become passive without any particular need for being defensive. This is because a lot of the time I write reviews of books or films or albums and if you write reviews on the fly, you tend to pick out the effects that these objects have and then attempt to discern their cause. A review written in passive sentences will probably be a pretty good first draft.

Sometimes it works better to retain passive sentences in reviews because the reader is more interested in the effect than the cause, often the effect is more important because the joy of films, books, music etc is determining the cause of their effects on you. This experience is unique to everyone but the effect usually precedes the cause and the fathoming out of that is the joy. To some extent I have a fear (or perhaps a distaste) of writing active sentences in this situation because if I did, I might effectively tell people what to think and I don’t really want to do that.

There of course is the act of being passive writ large. When the need arises, it makes sense to be passive. This is why I am sometimes wary of “advice”: it attempts to make one rule apply to all cases just because it usually makes sense. It is the point now where we stroke our chins and tell ourselves that these things are more guidelines than rules. Sometimes we need to wrap the reader in a blanket of passive sentences, to mollycoddle them until we hit them with our amazing active sentence.

Anyway, this is just a start. As I said at the beginning, a passive sentence still manages to pass through the filter sometimes. I will hit “proofread” in a minute and I will post the number of passive sentences it flags up at the end of the post.

Passive sentence count: 2. “It is easy to understand why active sentences should be favoured over passive ones” and “When the need arises, it makes sense to be passive”, but I’m sneaky because those were both deliberate.

Hero image is “Waiting for…” by Maja & Marko. I wanted a picture of a frog but I am not sure why. As usual, flickr had just the thing.

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Website

Wrapped and Tagged

I have been using WordPress again for a month now and am getting to grips with all the wonderful things it has to offer, along with the JetPack plug-in. One of the features of JetPack is the Publicize tab that allows you to automatically broadcast to social networks when you publish a new post. It is better than all the previous kludges involving RSS and IFTTT (though I am sure it’s the same technology deep down). One of the best things is that my posts all go to my Tumblr with the same tags attached – this is pretty cool because tags are the best way to get your content noticed on Tumblr (and Google too, which is why I will be taking the trouble to add tags to all my old posts) and I am picking up a few new followers there now, which is nice.

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