When I get really serious about writing, when it’s “crunch time” for an assignment or I feel I really need to bang out some words on The Project, I head over to my corner. Like a carpenter’s workbench or a mechanic’s tool chest, my corner is a place I’ve set aside to work on writing and nothing else.
The PC runs Word, Notepad++ and little else, as the hardware is a bit on the older side and I don’t want to tax it. I even have a separate CD player for music. My work is saved on a USB drive so I don’t have to worry about any sort of hard drive mis-reads or other catastrophic failures. But one of the best things about the corner is its isolation.
I’m not just talking about its distance from the couch, the television and the gaming consoles, though that is a factor. The PC in the corner is not hooked up to the Internet. As much as it might be necessary to research something on occasion, when I want to put myself in the writing zone, it’s best to minimize my distractions.
Heck, it’s taken me a while to put this little blog post together, and I’ve been planning on hitting 10k on the Project since last Sunday…
The first of many sword-in-the-ground opening screens.
I cherished my golden cartridges as a child. The original Legend of Zelda was one of the first Nintendo games we owned and I played it like it was going out of style. My sisters and I mapped out every dungeon for each other, as this was back in the days before GameFAQs or the Internet or internal combustion. It was innovative and challenging, and when a sequel was announced the children in the house were understandably excited. This was, as I’ve intimated, a more innocent time before I realized how disappointing sequels could be when they simply retread the ground covered by the first installment – but even now, I’d have been impressed by it.
Ten-year-old me: “This is a Zelda game? GNARLY!”
Instead of rehashing the top-down interface of the first game, the designers took it in a different direction, a similar direction to Castlevania. The Adventure of Link is a side-scrolling adventure-RPG, full of the familiar foes from the first games seen from this new perspective. I had no idea moblins were taller than Link. Anyway, replacing the sub-items such as the boomerang and bombs is a magic system, and Link has moves at his disposal other than “slash” and “toss my sword with power.” Other than that, there’s dungeons that need to be conquered in a specific order, a mysterious Big Bad at the end of it all and a damsel in distress named Zelda who needs rescuing.
Stuff I Didn’t Like
Wait, what? Already?
There’s a ‘lives’ system. It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing in the entire game, considering that neither the first game nor any one following had one, for good reason. In the first game, when Link got rocked, he’d be sent back to the beginning of the dungeon or the starting point in the overworld map. Here, there are ‘checkpoints’ that exist within the dungeons and the overworld encounters that will put you back to the start of the current room or scene. But being sent back to that checkpoint after stabbity death or being set on fire costs you one of your three lives. Once they’re gone, the game is over and you have to start from the beginning. While you’re able to continue so you don’t lose special items or experience gained, spending hours slogging through mazes only to lose your last life just as you’re about to down that frustrating boss can require a herculean effort to choose “Continue” instead of “Fuck This.”
You can find little 1-Up dolls scattered throughout the world to help the lives situation, but there are two problems with this. First of all, unlike the heart and magic containers that permenantly boost the amount of life or magic you have, the 1-Up dolls do not permanently increase your total number of lives. They just give you an extra life to be snatched away by a jerkass Ironknuckle or a misjudged jump. Secondly, some of the dolls are on obtainable after a long sojourn across the world and fighting legions of creatures that might possibly lose you one of your lives anyway. So these, like the lives system to which they are related, are completely arbitrary.
Stuff I Liked
I hate fighting Ironknucles. I don’t hate them, just fighting them.
This game is challenging. The Ironknuckle enemies in particular can be a real struggle, and in some case come across as more challenging than some of the ‘boss’ characters. There are a couple bosses you can defeat just by jumping repeatedly on their head (provided you have the ‘downthrust’ maneuver) and Ironknuckles will just raise their sheilds as you sit there hopping up and down on them like a flea on a hot griddle. What I like about these foes and the overall difficulty curve of this game is that it’s consistent, gradual and, as I said, challenging.
Like the previous game, the ‘temples’ are laid out in a fairly linear fashion that help you figure out where to go next. The map is vast, and the environments are varied but it doesn’t get confusing. Like many modern games, the optional items (‘side quests’ if you will) require a little digging, but the construction of the temples and their connection act as a guide on their own without the need for a FAQ or online guide – neither of which existed in 1989.
Stuff I Loved
Yes. Yes you are.
This was the first Zelda game and one of the first console RPGs to have NPCs that gave information, support and even quests as you progressed through the game. Instead of defeating just destroying monsters to earn new powers, you need to do some tasks that might seem menial to learn new magic spells. Some of the inhabitants of the town are interested in helping you while others just want to go about their business. And some young ladies even invite Link into their homes to restore his health. Of course older women do it too, so it’s not as sexy as it sounds.
There are some good musical bits in this game, for a relic of the 8-bit era. The temple music in particular stands out. It’s been recycled a couple times for the Smash Brothers franchise, and it’s some of my favorite music from the Zelda series.
Despite being laid out completely differently from the original Zelda, it feels like high fantasy adventure through and through. It established a lot of the tropes similar games follow to this day, and actually holds up after all of the years. I recently fired it up through the collector’s edition on the GameCube, and it wasn’t just nostalgia that had me enjoying it. To this day, it’s a solidly built, engrossing, challenging and very fun game.
Bottom Line: If you find yourself frustrated by the convoluted plots and overhyped CG of modern games, fire up the Adventure of Link. It’s a refreshing trip down memory lane that’s still a blast to play.
I think it’s safe to say that just about anything can be adapted into a film. Even in this little obscure corner of the Internet, quite a few adaptations have been reviewed as they’ve passed through my mailbox or browser. Starship Troopers is the adaptation of a novel. The Mutant Chronicles adapted a tabletop role-playing game. In The Name of the King had something to do with the video game Dungeon Siege . …I think. These adaptations run the gamut of being generally faithful to their source material, to preserving the spirit of the original while rewriting a good portion of it for one reason or another, to bending the franchise over a rail and gleefully going to town while making obscene gestures at the fan base. Wanted falls into that middle category, adapting a comic book for the big screen in way that might not be terribly recognizable to the comic’s fans but is still charged with enough of the original’s spirit to not descend into an incoherent disappointing mess. Like X-Men: The Last Stand did. I still have nightmares…
If anything can disperse the aforementioned nightmares, it’s this. ‘Wanted’ indeed.
Wanted was a short-run comic book series penned by Mark Millar about a down-on-his-luck office schlub named Wesley Gibson who has his hum-drum life of corporate drudgery interrupted by a sexy foul-mouthed assassin named Fox who informs him that his father, the greatest killer of super-beings who ever lived (appropriately dubbed ‘The Killer’) has died and left his son a substantial fortune. To earn it, Wesley must embrace his destiny of super-villainy, overcome years of self-deprecation that anybody who spends any time in a cubicle can tell you is a side-effect of office work and kill a whole lot of super-heroes. There are a lot of super-powers thrown around the pages of Wanted, but Wesley’s power is, simply, making people stop breathing. With bullets. Lots and lots of bullets.
The film adaptation does away with the super-hero motif, making it more a straight-forward badass action flick and less an examination of what a super-powered world would be like if the super-villains had won the seemingly endless struggle between good and evil. Wesley is still an office schlub, Fox is still hot, and there are still lots and lots of bullets. However, instead of joining a fraternity of super-villains, Wes joins a fraternity of assassins who use their work to ensure the tapestry of fate does not come apart at the seams. They get their orders from a magic loom. And no, I have no idea how that thing works.
I wish I looked that good working a desk job.
Much like the comic book, this movie is less about the “what” and more about the “who.” Wesley as a protagonist is someone with whom just about anybody can relate, and like his blonde comic-book counterpart, we actually find ourselves cheering for him as he breaks free of his corporate shackles, learns to curve bullets and embarks on a journey to discover who he really is, because that quiet mousy pushover in that cubicle is not him, or who he wants to be. This journey of self-discovery is a bit more violent than most, but it’s still a journey worth taking.
The other thing Wanted has going for it are moments that worked just as well in the comics as they do on the screen. There’s the moment where Wesley shoots the wings off of flies, moments where he lashes out against his co-workers, the moment where his pseudo-mentor Morgan Freeman drops the F-bomb and the moment where Angelina Jolie as Fox walks around dressed only in her tattoos. Some new elements that take the place of super-villainy have moments of their own, like the moment where Wesley curves a bullet for the first time or uses a car in a very interesting way to get a shot on his target. They’re the kind of moments that make me smile, even upon reflection.
Angelina Jolie and the luckiest car in the world.
The biggest problem Wanted suffers from is that these moments are not necessarily directly related to one another. They are, instead, strung together with a plot that has all of the tensile strength and cohesion as a slightly frayed string of dental floss. In losing the super-powers, Wanted also lost a lot of its color and charm. The graphic novel had me rolling or cheering just about every other page. The film manages a few laughs and a smile or two, but isn’t quite the same. It is, in essence, the generic corner store version of your favorite soda pop – it’s still fizzy and tastes kind of similar, but you can tell the difference.
Seriously, hearing ‘Red’ drop his Precision F-Strike on us is worth the price of admission.
Wanted wavers a bit on the line between recommended watching and something you should skip. What puts it just barely in the positive column is the very self-aware nature of the film. Unlike some other adaptations out there, it’s ashamed of neither its source material nor the idea of taking the piss out of itself. Cleolinda Jones, in the preface to her Wanted in 15 Minutes, says that this film is “outrageous and stupid and funny and knows it“. James McEvoy is having just as much fun here as he did playing Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, if not more. Of course, in Narnia he didn’t have the chance to make out with Angelina Jolie. I had fun watching Wanted, and reading the graphic novel again afterward was even more fun in light of this adaptation, which makes it a success for me and earns a recommendation. It’s not the greatest badass action film out there – Shoot ‘Em Up is a better self-parody of the genre – nor is it the best comic book adaptation film to date. That honor belongs to Iron Man and the only thing endangering it is coming out on May 7th. Because if anything is going to dethrone Iron Man, it isn’t going to be Wanted – it’ll be Iron Man 2. And I cannot wait for that.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
It’s been brought to my attention that, in a previous post, I might come off as somewhat unkind to Orson Scott Card. That certainly wasn’t my intent. I’ve only read a few of his works, but I admit that what I’ve read so far has impressed me. Here’s why.
Ender’s Game
As far as I’m aware, this is pretty much Card’s seminal work. The presentation of the Battle School, Ender’s struggle as a ‘Third’, the characterization of Peter and the way in which the story ended broke a few rules and wrote some new ones. I recommend that anybody interested in writing speculative fiction in either the short or long form read this book if they haven’t already. It’s full of realistic characters, a well-realized future for humanity that’s within reason, and some pretty riveting conversation. Ender’s one very intense kid.
Enchantment
Orson Scott Card probably isn’t a name that springs to mind when you think of period romance or high adventure. However, Enchantment does a very good job of blending these elements. It’s Sleeping Beauty meets A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with the legend of Baba Yaga mixed in for good measure. Along the lines of Ender’s Game, this is well worth the reading if you’re a fan of or interested in writing fantasy stories or romances.
Ultimate Iron Man
Marvel’s Ultimate universe is a darker, grittier version of the one with which most are familiar. In that universe, Tony Stark isn’t just a genius, he’s a genius with his brain matter distributed evenly throughout his body. The downside of this is that he has nearly constant pain from contact with everything around him due to the over-stimulation of his neural tissue. Card pens the two mini-series (also available as graphic novels) that bring us through his difficult birth and childhood through the early uses of the Iron Man armor that place him, along with Captain America and Thor, among the ranks of the Ultimates, which is what that universe called their Avengers. Card’s pacing and powerful dialog are here along with some striking artwork.
So yeah, he’s sparing in his descriptions. That’s because the room is taken up with awesome characterization and conversations.
Ignore his politics. Focus on his prose. It’s worth reading.
Seriously. Why are you still here? I have nothing to say today. I have a complete and total lack of energy and the day’s not at all gone well. So go read something that’ll cheer you up instead of depressing you. That’s what I’m doing. Here, let me make some friendly suggestions:
Visit lovely SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAA with 300 in Fifteen Minutes (“Can you make do with a party hat?”)
Witness the horror, the HORROR that she isn’t making up in Twilight in Fifteen Minutes (No, really. She IS NOT MAKING THIS UP.)
Double the horror, double your fun in her latest, New Moon in Fifteen Minutes (“Warm your hands at my chestular fires, baby”)
So yeah. Read Cleo’s work, friend her on LJ, follow her on Twitter. She’s awesome. As for me, this day sucks, bring on another one with less suck, the end.
