Clever ad copy for one of the best shows this season. (Photo by Katya Yakubov)

It’s been another awesome week! I got to meet Adam Jones at a tailgate and watch the Ravens win along with…all the stuff below!

Movies

None this week!

TV

The Amazing Race – Katie and I shotgunned the entire tenth season because it had a leg that passed through Madagascar. I think she’s really starting to get into the show, which is great because it’s loads of fun to watch. I’m also working on the fifth season on my own and watching the current season. I’m really liking Nicole and Travis to win the race…

Masters of Sex – The show is pretty slow-moving, but I’m really enjoying the way that it’s setting up its relationships and plotlines so far. Lots of great character work.

How I Met Your Mother – Ask and ye shall receive, I guess. The mother made an appearance, but now I’m gonna complain that she’s not interacting with the present day cast. Soon enough, I’d think!

New Girl – Coach is back! I forgot how he was supposed to be characterized, but it was a little disappointing. Just felt trite and overdone with the whole “guy acting like girlfriends are controlling their friends” thing. His role in Happy Endings was way more interesting. Also who remembered that Winston used to play basketball in Europe?!

The Mindy Project – It’s a bummer that this show probably isn’t gonna survive, because it’s just got so many hilarious lines. They’re usually throaways, but they make me and Katie laugh so hard anyway…

Homeland – Remember how Homeland never lets you get comfortable because it’s always “GO GO GO!”? It’s that again for sure. Did you think we’d have another quiet interrogation episode like last year? Nope. Carrie’s already laying out the long con. It was pretty cool, but they seem to be randomly mismanaging stuff, so people ended up…dead.

Music

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys today because I heard it this morning and I love it.

Books

So close…

Video Games

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – Second case is progressing and I’m getting really close to finishing off the proper verdict. Still fun, if not a little quirky and weird. This case has been pretty convoluted and I’m still not sure where all the details are going to end up.

Pokemon Y – One gym leader left!

Tiny Death Star – F2P gaming at its worst, but it’s fine to set timers and have going on in the background for all the silly Star Wars jokes.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 – I’d rather play this on my PC. It’s not the worst, but it’s still not anywhere near as good…

오빤 강남 스타일! (Photo courtesy Music Star22)

This week was ridiculous, guys. I mean, so much K-Pop and so much Jazz! It’s like highs and lows here. Add in some fantastic TV shows and ninjas and you’ve got my media week.

Movies

Sleepwalk With Me – Mike Birbiglia and Ira Glass’ first joint movie project was a resounding success. It’s pretty much an adaptation of his stage show, but, as Min pointed out, we’ve seen this performed two or three times and it still feels really fresh. An excellent freshman effort. Catch it if it hasn’t left your city.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Looking for something to watch that she hadn’t seen, we settled on this. Man, I’d forgotten how fun this movie is. Just brisk and exciting. Ends one time too many, but otherwise great.

The Incredibles – Had this on the tube and it caught Tiffany’s imagination. Pulled out the blu-ray and watched it for maybe the third time ever. Guys, this movie is pretty awesome, even if it has weird message issues. I mean, being special is good, right? I get that, but why make a villain out of the guy who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps to make something out of himself? Buddy is misunderstood (and evil).

TV

Breaking Bad – HOLY COW! I’ve been forcing myself to slow down my consumption of these episodes because it’s just been SO GREAT. Season 3 really brought it together and taught me why everyone thinks this show is awesome. So masterful!

Kids on the Slope – What a charming, touching, musically amazing show that was. It’s only 12 episodes long, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome and it’s interesting the whole way through. You should check this anime out. It’s on CrunchyRoll right now for free.

The Daily Show – DNC time! The segments weren’t as biting (and the acceptance one was a remixed version of the RNC platform one), but they still had some good zingers for the DNC, such as the platform change vote.

NTSF:SD:SUV – Only my second episode of this madness, but the Time Angels stuff was hilarious. Sharp writing on this episode for the fake backdoor pilot.

Childrens Hospital – I love the “behind the scenes” episodes of this show. Too bad I missed the first half, but I’m sure I’ll catch it on reruns soon.

Pretty Little Liars – GUYS…this show is bonkers. It’s insane. Thank god I have Jacob Clifton’s recaps to read and laugh about. The show’s not bad, but man is it trashy and hilarious in all the right ways.

Fashion Police – Joan Rivers makes vagina jokes! No real complaints here. I can deal with this by now.

Cupcake Wars – So many strained Star Wars references. So many weird ingredients.

Music

“Gangnam Style” is AMAZING. How did I miss this when it came out?!

Super catchy and super ridiculous/bizarre/awesome. Psy is incredible in this video.

Like I said above, I spent a lot of this week listening to Jazz too. Here’s the best segment from Kids on the Slope:

That medley is just fantastic. Such a brilliant scene.

Books

I promise I’ll get back to reading soon!

Video Games

Driver: San Francisco – Evading the cops sucks. Couldn’t get it quite right, but I dug some of the driving. I’ll have to give it a little more time.

Spelunky – Started trying to speedrun for the 8 minute achievement after I got the Casanova one. Made it to the caves once, but it’s hard to just blow through these levels.

Mark of the Ninja – The Giant Bomb guys talked this game up like it was awesome. It is lots of fun. I like how clear all the stealth stuff is, but I wish it were a little easier to stun/not kill some of the guards. I feel like some puzzles very early in the game require you to kill or set off an alarm and that’s a bummer.

There’s also quite the size difference in the reprint.

The best comic book news (so far) this year is, without a doubt, the announcement of color reprints of Scott Pilgrim. I’m a huge fan of the original graphic novels and of Bryan Lee O’Malley so I was completely stoked to see what this new version would bring to the table.

I never noticed how frightening Stephen Stills’ teeth were in the bottom left until I started looking at these photos in detail.

“But Dan,” you might ask, “aren’t you generally opposed to remaking and endless tinkering with media a la George Lucas?”

I think it’s clearer that the souls of Sex Bomb-Omb aren’t leaving their bodies in color. It’s just music, you guys. Rock and roll music.

You know, random internet question asker, you’re not completely wrong. I don’t really care for all the editorial changes in Star Wars, but, here’s the thing, you don’t have to make ironclad rules for everything in life. Some things can still be awesome even if you didn’t like another similar thing…

…And boy howdy is the color reprint of Scott Pilgrim amazing. In fact, I’d say it’s the preferred way to read at least Vol 1.

Second best line in the entire series.

Wallace looks weird in the bottom left there.

Story and dialogue-wise, there are no changes (that I noticed), but you do sometimes get a little more nuance or expression thanks to the addition of color. For example, I think the panel where Stacey is yelling at Wallace for stealing her boyfriend looks more angry in B&W, but more exasperated and/or embarrassed in color thanks to how pink Stacey’s face gets.

She just looks way angrier this way!

Love the little colored hearts.

Then there are the other subtle details that my eyes never noticed in B&W. T-shirt designs, Ramona’s star-shaped ring, and even story things like the way that Knives’ clothes look like a palette swap of Kim’s as she gets more “scene”. Not to mention changing Julie so that she wears glasses in Vol. 1 as she does in later volumes.

In the monochrome dimension Julie’s eyesight was still good.

Maybe the shift to color just overwhelmed her rods and cones.

I’m sure that some of the detail noticing simply comes from this being my fifth (or so) reading of Scott Pilgrim, but I do genuinely believe that these little things pop a lot more thanks to the contrast.

Then there are the things that are just executed better in color. My favorite example of this is the dream sequence where Scott’s playing a show while Ramona wanders by. In the monochrome edition the visual language of all of Scott’s dreams are conveyed by layering the white panels over an all-black page. Additionally, in this particular dream, O’Malley adds in these hazily defined lights and some looser pencil work that I think contrasts with his tighter lines (could be imagining this). In color he can still use the same motifs, but now he can also add a washed out, hazy look to his color selection. This page stands out more from the rest of the book as a dream in my eyes.

Who is that woman singing? Why does it look like Knives is on sax?

Those mysteries are NOT answered by the color edition.

The last change to the book is the addition of even more behind the scenes information. I didn’t snap any shots of those since they are bonus exclusives to the book, but we’re talking concept art, reference photos, and commentary by O’Malley about the creation of the book. My favorite inclusion was the original pitch that O’Malley used for the book. It was neat to see what elements were dropped over the years and which ones he retained as more volumes came out. Very cool stuff.

My only gripe with this book has to do with credit. I get that it would be very unconventional to list a colorist’s name on the cover of a book, I suppose. Usually top billing goes to writers and pencilers/inkers, but when the major difference between the volumes is the inclusion of color…well I just feel bad that poor Nathan Fairbairn (who did fantastic work on this volume) gets credit only on the info page and the author splash in the back. I mean, at the very least couldn’t you just namedrop him in the summary printed on the back cover? “Now with colors by Nathan Fairbairn!” It’s a nitpick, but I just feel like he did great work and he’s not getting enough publicity for it.

That aside, guys, this book is awesome. I don’t care if you already have the B&W version of this volume, you should go and buy this. Now. Hurry.

Emma Stone remains too cute for existence and Bill Hader remains super hilarious.

Richard Pryor is a comedy legend. I had no idea he made this short where he was a bartender in a Star Wars bar. Hilarious.

Funny video. Good dancing. Thanks for sharing, Kai.

Wallpaper courtesy Pet-Shop on DeviantArt

Ruminations on video games as an art form – this could very well become a Mother 3 review. There will be spoilers here. Seriously, don’t read it if you want to play Mother 3 and not have the plot spoiled.

There’s a trite comparison that floats around the internet almost every month that always gets my eyes rolling. Inevitably, someone will call such-and-such the Citizen Kane of video games or ask what the Citizen Kane is or claim that the medium is immature because we’ve yet to hit our Citizen Kane. It’s exhausting and, quite frankly, futile and stupid. To begin with, Citizen Kane opened with good reviews and was generally well-received, but it didn’t start to gain notoriety for ten years. It didn’t even make #1 on a top movies list until twenty years had passed. When the Citizen Kane of gaming hits (god I hate that phrase), we probably won’t know it for quite some time. The more important point is that movies and games are apples and oranges.

The day that we stop worrying about whether books or movies are better than games at expressing a particular artist’s point of view is probably the day that we’ll realize that we’ve already got fine examples of games that are reflections of authorial control already. Brütal Legend was not a great game, but Tim Schafer’s hands are clearly evident all over it. Anyone who’s ever played one of Fumito Ueda’s games knows precisely how a game can effectively be used to bring out your emotions through simple mechanics. Goichi Suda (AKA Suda 51) has been making games that show clear, artistic direction through his use of bizarre symbols and incomprehensible plots for years. My point is, we’ve been here for a while.

You may have heard of Shigesato Itoi, but chances are, you have no clue that he’s one of the most famous and respected men in Japan to such a degree that his dog was probably the most recognizable animal in the entire country for a few years. In America, we know him as a video game designer, specifically the man behind Earthbound, but not much else. Interestingly enough, Itoi is actually more famous for being an essayist, interviewer, and slogan generator than his work for Nintendo. His association with Hayao Miyazaki is well known enough that he’s famous for the Kiki’s Delivery Service slogan (“Ochikondari mo shita kedo, watashi wa genki desu” — “I was a little depressed for a bit; I’m okay now”) and he even voiced Mei’s father in My Neighbor Totoro (a role that went to Phil Hartman (rest in peace) when the movie was dubbed in English).

In his younger days, Itoi found himself sick and unable to do much but play Nintendo as he recovered. It was in this state that he discovered Dragon Quest, which set the wheels turning in his head. This experience was the impetus behind the Mother series and led to Itoi’s long, fruitful relationship with Nintendo. In case you were wondering (protip: you probably weren’t), Shigesato Itoi is the guy who came up with the name for the Game Boy. True fact.

It’s not surprising to me that most of the names I’ve mentioned were not always video game designers. The most bizarre of the bunch, Suda, was an undertaker before he tried his luck in the video game industry while Ueda was an artist and the aforementioned Itoi was a…well there’s no easy word to describe someone like Itoi. He was (and is) a cultural personality.

“If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form, whether it’s video games, movies, comics or whatever,” he continues, “your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field, rather than breaking new ground.”

–Jordan Mechner

Now, Schafer is, himself, a product of the industry, having held no other jobs, but he’s the exception, a true creative mind that is not crippled by his feedback loop of doom. Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts, and Brütal Legend could not be more different from each other, but just think of how rare this is. For every Schafer or Ken Levine out there trying to bring new influences into the industry, there are tons of Star Wars- and Lord of the Rings-inspired games produced each year retreading on the same, tired stories game in and game out. How many World War II games do we really need?

In 1989 Shigesato Itoi looked at the video game industry and said “How many sword and sorcery RPGs do we really need?” 2009 just passed us by and I’d say we’re still mostly mired in these medieval locales in 95% of all RPGs. Mother, Itoi’s freshman attempt at a video game, was set in “modern day” America. Earthbound (Mother 2) wasn’t exactly breaking with Itoi’s norm by being set in America yet again (in 1994), but it’s still a light among the sameness that pervaded the industry. Mother 3 is ambiguous about its timeline, but it feels like a scaled back modern day. In any case, like in the other games of the series, the weapons aren’t swords and bows, but sticks, yo-yos, and baseball bats. It’s really only a cosmetic and tonal shift, but it makes all the difference.

That’s exactly what makes Shigesato Itoi so great as a game designer. Perhaps it’s his outside status or maybe it’s just his brilliance, but Itoi understands video games to a scary degree for a man who only undertook them on a whim. I applaud him most for understanding that a game is an interactive piece of art and reflecting that with his systems. To wit, every Mother game revolves around music. The first game had the character searching for the Eight Melodies while the second repeated that idea with Eight Sanctuaries (each with a musical theme associated with it). Earthbound’s instruction manual (in Japanese) contained a little song that Itoi wrote for the player to sing as the main melody played on the overworld. Every line of text in the Mother series is written in kana (katakana or hiragana), so that the person has to vocalize Itoi’s often lyrical writing style. Mother 3’s focus on musical themes and leifmotifs (from the Masked Man to the Magypsies) is also emphasized through every character’s attacks in the battle system.

From Lucas to Salsa the Monkey, every character has a musical instrument associated with his attacks. So does every enemy. Each enemy also has a musical theme that plays in the background. Once you attack, you can continue to press the ‘A’ button to extend your combo to 16 hits if you can keep time with the (sometimes fiendishly difficult) beat. Just like that, something Itoi has always wanted the player to do (become musically involved with his world) becomes integrated into the activity the player does most in the game, battling.

Itoi also loves to toy with player perception to a hilarious degree. In an early sequence in the first chapter of the game, Flint becomes covered with soot after saving a friend’s kid from a fire. Why? Because that’s what would happen if you were running around in a fire. As he makes his way back out of the woods, you can bet that every person you talk to will question why you are covered from head to toe in black soot. Even better, if you hop into a hot spring to recover, the soot will wash off of your character from the neck down, since the Mother 3 hot spring animation always leaves the head exposed. It’s not until much later when it starts to rain that the soot washes off Flint’s face, this time to emphasize that we’re not joking around anymore, Flint’s family was still missing after the fire and they were almost certainly in danger.

An even more brilliant sequence comes much later in the game when the player is washed upon a tropical island with 1 HP and no equipment. The only way to progress through the jungle without dying is to eat one of the psychotropic mushrooms growing on the island. A bizarre sequence of events follows as you make your way to the next Magypsy with your perceptions completely torn asunder. Replicas of your family and friends attack you, which isn’t that unique for an RPG, but the way the narrative is presented and the visuals are warped, it becomes seriously unsettling. The one moment of calm comes when you arrive at another hot spring and recover, only to continue back into the horrors of the jungle.

Once you get to the Magypsy’s house, you’re constantly bombarded with insults about how bad you smell. It makes no sense though, because the player has done nothing different that would cause such a foul smell. Still, when your perception is returned to normal, there is a visible stench rising from Lucas and his compatriots. A quick dip in the bath follows and you’re no longer “smelly”, but, as a curious player, I wondered what had happened in the first place. Instead of continuing forward, I dove right back into the jungle to get to the bottom of it. halfway through, I was feeling a bit fatigued, so I popped on over to the hot springs and it all made sense. In my hallucinogenic state, I was unable to recognize that the pond I dove into for recovery was a festering, toxic-looking garbage dump of a pond. Off to the side, where no conceivable player would ever go, was a door into the real hot spring.

I couldn’t believe that some players would never find out the mystery behind why they were so smelly. Returning to that hot spring is hardly mandatory. Maybe that’s why it felt so amazing to see these little narrative games played with my perception of what was going on in the Mother 3 world at the time. It’s also interesting to look at from a player trust perspective, because when I saw that disgusting pond, rendered in all its GBA, low-fi glory, I felt nauseous and I know it was partly due to a feeling of betrayal. I have a feeling that this was exactly how Itoi wanted me to feel at that point.

Shigesato Itoi admits that the original draft for Mother 3 was way darker than it already is. It was written shortly after his divorce was finalized, which I think has a lot to do with the emotional betrayals of even the finalized version of this game. However this game was very nearly vaporware that was never released. Its development started for the SNES in 1994, but was quickly shifted to the N64 and the ill-fated 64DD not long after. Anyone familiar with the 64DD peripheral knows that this was going to prove troublesome for Itoi and his team. The game was even canceled at one point, but it was eventually decided to put it on the Gameboy Advance and announced around the re-release of Mother 1 + 2, no doubt to help drum up sales.

No one but the team knows just how dark the original narrative was, but Itoi claims that the story that eventually made it to print was the result of him finally becoming a good person. It boggles the mind to realize that it could have been any more dramatic, especially for a game that looks as friendly and cute as this one. In fact, this is the reason why Nintendo of America claims it will not localize the game. They claim the narrative is too mature and depressing for the way it looks and, really, the tone and the subject matter are alternatively irrelevant and deathly serious, so I kind of get what they mean. At one point you have a guy telling Flint that he’s got good news and bad news. The good news is something irrelevant and stupid while the bad news is that Flint’s wife, Hinawa, is dead. What follows is a scene that is so emotionally gripping that my little brother was affected even without hearing the music and sound associated with the scene. Flint completely flips out and starts beating on the guy who gave him bad news and even starts lashing out at the townspeople who are trying to calm him down. He is knocked out by a friend and put in a jail cell that has never before been used in the town’s existence.

It’s this weird juxtaposition of the inane and the deathly serious that creates the dissonant feelings I mentioned before with the hot tub scene and makes the player feel uneasy about what’s going on. When Hinawa’s father, Alec, is trying to tell stupid jokes to help Flint not be so tense about the certain danger his son is in. I wanted to tell him to shut up and let him focus, but I could also see that Flint was obsessing to a dangerous degree and that Alec was right in trying to calm him down. You also have the lighthearted love story of Salsa and Samba being ruined by the brutal and sadistic torturer Yokuba (Fassad in the fan-translation). It’s like Itoi is trying to say that the world is a screwed up place, but you can’t let it get you down.

I’ll tell you right here, I’m a huge sucker for any story about brothers. Later on in the game, it becomes fairly obvious that Mother 3 starts to center around the struggle of twin brothers Lucas and Claus as they attempt to collect more plot coupons than the other. The game series is called Mother for a reason and this one in particular focuses on the differences between each of Hinawa’s boys and how they came to deal with her untimely death. While Lucas comes out of his shell and becomes a healthier, more assertive and confident boy despite his absentee father, Claus foolishly rushes out for vengeance and finds himself enslaved by the Pig Army in its quest to end the world. The climactic final battle reunites the family once again, but the reunion is bittersweet. Claus has almost killed Flint and Lucas must face him alone to the death, even though he’s yet to realize that the Masked Man is his brother. Once the mask is knocked off and Lucas is staring into his own face (they are twins after all), the battle becomes a masterpiece. Selecting attack will cause Lucas to intentionally pull his punches or miss his attacks completely. Sometimes he’ll even refuse to comply. Claus, having lost most of his humanity, will continue to attack until Hinawa begins pleading for him to stop. Eventually, Claus comes to his senses and realizes that Lucas is his brother and that he is no longer anything close to himself. At that point, Claus commits suicide in a peculiar way. It becomes apparent that the Courage Badge that Flint gave to Lucas (via a Mr. Saturn in another example of absentee parenting) is actually a Franklin Badge, an item that repels lightning in the Mother world.

The heartbreaking thing about this whole sequence is that there’s nothing the player can do once Claus decides that he must kill himself to save the world. Lucas may not be physically (or psychically) killing his brother, but there’s nothing he can do but watch his brother kill himself using an item that he is holding. When it’s all over and Claus is dying in Lucas’ arms with Flint nearby and Hinawa’s ghost above them, the reunion is finally completed and the family is happy for a brief second before both Claus and Hinawa depart the world leaving Lucas to pull the last plot coupon. The world literally ends and it all fades to black. Everyone (who was alive before) is still alive in the finale, but the world is darkness and it’s not made clear what the true outcome of the whole battle was. We do know that the world is safe and everyone makes it, but not much else beyond that, it’s left to the player to decide, I guess.

If you want to really see a strangely tragic, chilling ending for a character, consider the fate of Porky, the antagonist in the game. The conflict in this game is motivated by his desire to see the world end. Porky’s mind was so warped by Giygas in Earthbound that he has remained in a permanent immature, childlike state even though he is now hundreds of years old. His influence corrupts and nearly destroys everything about the idyllic and peaceful Tazmily village and he is the one responsible for sapping Claus of all of his humanity. In his final encounter with Lucas, when it becomes apparent that he will not win the battle, he encases himself in the Absolutely Safe Machine, a capsule that renders him absolutely safe from all attacks both interior and exterior. Because it was just a prototype, there was no way to escape it, meaning that the ageless Porky can never die, but he can never leave the capsule nor can he communicate with anyone on the outside. For someone like Porky, an agent of entropy like the Joker in The Dark Knight, this is truly an ending worse than death. When all is dead and gone, when the universe dies of heat death, when existence is nothingness, Porky will still exist, alone in that capsule. It gives me chills just to think about it.

There’s so much about this game that just doesn’t quite add up and leaves the player feeling strange about the relationships they are seeing. Duster, the limping thief, is very clearly verbally and probably physically abused by his father, Wess, yet they seem to be a team and there does seem to be some love there. It’s unsettling on all levels because Itoi wants to take the player from comfortable and happy to uneasy and sad throughout the whole game.

Games like this, they make me appreciate things, like my family and my life, and think about things, like the nature of society and happiness. I’m being simplistic here, but my point is this, what is art? Wikipedia calls it, “…the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.”

So I say yet again, why are we questioning whether or not video games are art? Wake up and smell the sunflowers.

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.

We’re back to everyone’s favorite day of the week: Monday. This week I’ve got a few selections for you to watch and enjoy.

First on the agenda is the latest in my favorite ad campaign in a long time, the Sony VP of [Insert VP Title Here] ads.

I really hope this ad campaign sticks around for a while, it’s the first time that I think Sony’s really “got” it. Too often their ad campaigns are unnecessarily arty, bizarre, and alienating. I’m sure the idea behind those campaigns was to get people thinking about the product to look it up themselves, but it’s really more effective to have a solid, funny, VP of Epic Footage to help sell the system.

I really hope Han shoots first…

Our next video comes from a really awesome fan project:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

In case you didn’t understand or didn’t watch the video, the idea is that each fan will get to film his or her own interpretation of any scene in Star Wars and the project will then cobble together all of the results into a full version of Star Wars. It’s a brilliant idea. This is why the Internet was invented. Wow…that’s kind of a depressing thought, isn’t it?

I think power is getting to his head

We here at I Bring Nothing to the Table love a lot of things made more awesome by the virtue of us loving them. In that vein I bring you the latest in a series that we have always vigorously promoted, Auto-Tune the News.

I really have no idea what Chavez is doing there, but it seems like too much power is going to his head. In other Chavez-being-strange-related news, it’s kind of awkward to say that you “smell hope,” but maybe that awkwardness comes from my mostly English, partly Spanish brain not recognizing the phrase.

It looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen…

Now, I’m not typically one for rap and hip-hop nowadays, but this video is great. I even kind of like the song too.

Sneaking it in…

Oh? What’s this video here? I didn’t even notice it join the crowd. Well, we may as well show it, right?

This Tuesday the demo goes live to pre-orders. I can’t wait to get my hands on it, I’ve already pre-loaded the demo on to my hard drive.