Just facts and figures on your TV screen (Road To Berlin, 2004 ; Company of Heroes, 2006)

I’ve always enjoyed a nice documentary about WWII and obviously seen plenty. One rarely differs from an another, though. The other day, I started watching Al Murray’s Road To Berlin and it’s really fine by me. Contrarily to what the title suggests, it’s not an exhaustive chronological description of the war on the European Theater of Operation, which definitely would not fit on ten episodes of 22 minutes each. It just highlights specifically decisives operations and weapons.

As often, plenty of images are not exactly in the right place: when a Tiger tank is mentioned, you see one on the screen but it’s very unlikely the exact one it was really about. But it does not matter, it’s not what Road To Berlin is about. This Road is about a lad going around europe driving a Willys Jeep, talking to veterans in the very place where they fought decades ago and testing weapons like a Flak 88, a Sherman armor, etc. That’s quite unusual and really worth it!

After watching this, if you’re familiar with the real time strategy video game Company of Heroes, you’ll find very hard not to play even just a small part of its campaign. If you don’t know the game, note that aside from the quite usual gameplay for a RTS, the overall ambiance, inspired by movies about WWII, is über-catchy, taking advantage of a tremendous accuracy in regard of history (both weapons and events). If you know the game, you’ll surely be glad to learn that a sequel, about the Eastern Front, should be released next year – with the short term drawback of being probably as much CPU time/RAM consuming that the original one in its time.

Alternatively, re-watching Band of Brothers could do the trick. No one seems to worry?

 

Shame about the title (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, 2011)

Yeah, I did. I rated Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol 80% on RT, same score I gave to Black Death, Gattaca or Ghost World. How come? Well, while I’m almost unable to rate anything 100% (that’s kind of too  definitive isnt it?), I do sometimes generously rate movies like this that havent in any way changed my life. It was not supposed to, so I think it’s only fair to rate movie with their purpose/claims in mind.

This movie begins with a story of a bad guy stealing nuclear weapon. WTF? Now bad guys do steal nuclear weapons? Really? How original! I never seen that already too many times in movies and video games, never. And, next, what about a sci-fi movie about hostile aliens, eh?

But apart from that, this impossible mission is actually well played, like late James Bond movies. It just makes for a good action movie while perfectly recreating the atmosphere of the original TV show that I’m not even ashamed to recognize that I watched numerous times when I was kid. Action scenes are vivid -lot of crashed cars, how great is that?- while somehow credible given the genre. The Hot Fuzz guy (Simon Pegg, wikipedia just told me) is quite funny, with his Stephan Merchant-like lines. I’d gladly watch a fifth episode, just like I always enjoy some banjos even it’s not absolutely brand new and original (shame about the article title but there are no lyrics you see).

 

I need the magic of a burning kiss (This Is Where I Leave You, 2012)

The other day, I mentioned Bush Falls/The Book of Joe (still no clue whether it’s the exact same book or not ; update: apparently the former is the UK title, which does not explain at all why such title was needed) today I think worth telling that I’ve just finished This Is Where I Leave  You, the latest Jonathan Tropper’s work.

If I had to evaluate it, I would dare to say it is one of my all-time favorites books. Yeah, right, I know the future, at least mine. But, no, I won’t evaluate it and won’t say too much about it, to avoid stating the obvious (well thought, realistic and lovable characters etc). I rather, instead, let you catch a glimpse, not spoiling anything I hope (main character mostly avoided!) :

‘I’ve got one,’ Phillip says. ‘When I was in Little League, I had trouble catching. So they put me out in right field. And in the last inning, I dropped two balls that cost us the game. Our coach was this fat guy, I forgot his name. He got all crazy and started screaming at me. He called me worthless. So Dad stepped between us and I didn’t see what he did, but next thing I know, the coach is on the ground, and Dad is stepping on his chest. And the says, “Call my son worthless again”.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ Alice says, clapping. ‘I never heard that one.’

‘This might sound twisted, but I hope, when I have a kid, that someone calls him a name, just so I can do it for him what Dad did for me.’

‘That’s beautiful, Phillip,’ Mom says.

‘Yes,’ Tracy says. ‘But why not just hope that one calls your child a name?’

Phillips looks at her. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘What?’

‘You know damn well what.’

‘I was just saying that as long as you’re being theoretical, why not aim higher?’

‘My dad stood up for me. I want to stand up for my kid.’

‘And teach him that violence is a legitimate means of conflict resolution?’

‘He’s going to have to learn it sometime.’

‘A few well-chosen words might have shamed your coach into apologizing.’

‘But if he had, I wouldn’t have had a story to remind me of how my father took care of me, and you wouldn’t have been able to suck all the joy out of it, and where would we all be then?’

Later…:

She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. ‘In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.’

‘And it’s really that simple.’

‘My alternate universe, my rules.’

Way Later…:

‘I have a very nice life, with a good man,’ Wendy says. ‘I love him for who he is. Sometimes who he is isn’t enough for me, but most of the time, it is. There are women who would leave to find something better. I envy them, but I also know I’m not one of them. And how many of those women truly end up with a better man?’ She shrugs. ‘No studies have been done.’

‘And Horry?’

‘There is no Horry. Horry is a fantasy. And that’s all I am to him. Time travel. We slept together as a favor to the kids we once were, not because there’s really anything besides history and some completely useless love.’

Still Later:

Paul stops walking and clears his throat. ‘I want to say something else.’

‘Yeah?’

‘What happened the other night. I said some things.’

‘We both did.’

‘Yeah, well, the point is, I’ve been pissed at you for a very long time and that didn’t do either of us any good. I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can’t get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right or who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning without thinking about it.’

Actually, I feel just like if I was listening to Lesley Gore, some song in beetween The Look of Love, Off And Running, and Maybe I Know – go pick one.

 

But then we smiled no more (Young Adult, 2011)

How much Young Adult reminds me of Jonathan Tropper’s Bush Falls (side question: what’s the difference with The Book of Joe?) somehow disturbs me: you have the narrator, now big time book author, that returns back to its small hometown, where he meets his first and only love, lost memories, along with a somehow gay and ill friendly character that, obviously, have a hard time finding its own right place there.

But Young Adult Mavis Gary is no Bush Falls Joe Goffman and she just seems overly self-absorbed. The childhood love she’s trying to revive is not even big enough for her to take a little interest in what has become the loved one. Dialogs are just a sad reflection of her moral emptiness and complete lack of empathy. She does not even deserve the harsh words Joe Goffman gets from his old friends and his past lover, she’s not that interesting at all. Unlike Joe Goffman, she’s not capable of thoughts like “To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it’s too late is to become divinely fucked up. Only after burying my father do I realize that I always intented to forgive him. But somewhere I blinked, and seventeen years flew by, and now my forgiveness, ungiven, has become septic, an infection festering inside me.” As result, this Mavis just seem in the end shallow as ever, I can’t focus, I just don’t care about her, her sadness and all the nasties attempts to break into the happy life of her childhood sweetheart.

I’m not sure my judgment is fair to Young Adult. I just cannot avoid the comparison with Bush Falls, that I thought of during the whole movie. And I must say I would have expected way better from the author Thank You For Smoking and Up In The Air, both movies with main characters hard to bear with but nonetheless lovable. Yeah, it was the only way it could be?

 

Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still rock and roll to me (Battlestar Galactica, 1979-2004 ; The Walking Dead 2003-2012)

Usually, sequels are crappier than the work they are based upon. Yes, take this as a postulate! Please don’t ask me to refer to the The Pillars of the Earth TV show where Ellen is a gruesome hag. In previous posts, I mentioned Battlestar Galactica 2004 (BSG) and its prequel Caprica, I also talked about how The Walking Dead TV show and Left 4 Dead video game are alike. Sometimes, a sequel is captivating enough to push you to watch the original work: I enjoyed Fallout 3 (missing nifty hardcore mode though) after Fallout: New Vegas, and I keep an open mind about Fallout 2 (even if its gameplay looks dire at first sight). So, as I already suggested I’d do, I took a look at the original BSG series and at the Walking Dead comics.

About BSG, I won’t comment the visual layout: it would be just damn stupid to compare special effects considering how computing evolved during these 25 years in between. Note also that I didn’t had time to watch the whole original series yet.

Allow me to introduce Lieutenant Starbuck on both shows. Notice a little difference? Their crotch maybe? Suffice to say that watching the original series provides you with a world consistent with the 2004 series, you follow a similar story, but it’s like listening to two versions of the same song by two bands with strong and divergent identity. In one case, he smokes, in the other she’s on the booze. It’s not the same but it’s hard to determine which one is best – except if you blame the 1930′s recording to be of nastier sound quality than the 2000′s one. It’s just a simple obvious example. If you enjoyed BSG 2004, please give a try to the original one.

Now, regarding The Walking Dead, I’m a bit annoyed. I already said about the TV show that “characters are where we expect them to be”. Well, it’s untrue for the comics. Characters are way more humanlike in the comics. The story is quite different too and I must admit I’m not sure some comedians have the guts to be credible in the events that should, at some point, take place in the TV show because it already happened in the comics.

The very childish boy Carl of the TV show seems unfit to me to even just comprehend the reality of the prematurely growned-up Carl of the comics. I admit this is open for debate, though. But it’s not enough to make a kid wear khakis, I just do not see at all the same light or fire in the eyes – I’d be glad to be proven wrong. Also, in the comics, the antagonism of Shane and Rick is shortly lived. So, Rick determines itself through the incidents his group are living, not in regard of Shane. As result, the comics character stays consistent over time, striving all along to determines what still makes him human despite the fact he regularly butchers humans, while the TV character suddenly and oddly change when the Shane counterpart is removed. The list of differences is endless. That’s not an issue in itself, but, contrarily to BSG case, the Walking Dead TV show appears just less smart than the Walking Dead comics. Don’t waste your money on a new set of speakers, You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.

 

Was it for this daddy died ? (Call of Duty 4/7/8, 2007 – 2011)

That’s no april fools’, I expect a new Call Of Duty to be published this year around November. I notice that, according to Steam, I already played around 137 hours to Modern Warfare 3 (MW3), while the year before I played around 191 hours to Black Ops (BOPS), which one I left untouched since then.

I won’t go in details describing these games, and keep focused only on multiplayer. I almost assumed Den Kirson would never release anything about MW3. I’ll only point out I found myself playing to Modern Warfare (MW1 from 2007) recently, when it comes to FPS. So I’m not sure I’ll invest money in Call of Duty in 2012.

The obvious most notable nuisance is the publisher greed: When you pay 60 € for a game, you don’t expect to buy a DLC to get 3 maps a few month later, it’s just unfair.

But, most annoyingly, recent CoD games seems somehow unbalanced. It’s not about the weapons set, this is usually fine. It’s more about these extras, like Killstreaks and all. In BOPS, Killstreaks are just omnipresent, you spend your time changing to a FLAK-class, and on some maps with easy kills like Nuketown Killstreaks makes to much difference. In MW3, Killstreaks are somehow balanced, easier to workaround, except for the AC130 and Pave Low that makes an horrendous difference over the game outcome. But how easy it is to get a grenade-launcher attachement to most weapons is what completely breaks the game, allowing über-low player to get many easy kills, with no sense of strategy or teamplay. During some games, you have to wonder if game publishers really believe that real modern warfare is just about throwing nades with an attachment on a rifle, with no concern of safety for your own team. Sadly, the peer-to-peer server model of MW3 removes from you the usual ability to pick a server with proper admins that bans tubers. Even worse, recently, the feature that autoselect games for you/your team no longer allows you (aside from forcing you to play Ricochet when you only want to play Hardcore, forcing an unrealistic feature in a supposedly realistic setup) to pick random hardcore game modes. So your forced to pick by hand a game mode and when you select, say, Headquarters you easily end-up facing a team of unskilled childish tubers that destroy your team utterly because it’s not so hard to tube when you can predict easily where the enemy is (ie capturing or protecting the Headquarters),  kind of team of tubers unfit for other modes like Search & Destroy.

I wonder why these games have such obvious unrealistic drawbacks. Maybe it is not a bug but a feature: I guess it makes the games more appealings to eleven years old gamers. Fact is I have more fun playing MW, a game from 2007, with servers where players misbehaving get banned, where random hardcore game mode is still possible, where you can easily carry anti-aircraft weaponry to avoid Killstreaks being too much a nuisance. And visually, it does not make much difference, as all these games use the same rendering engine. Hum, What have we done, Maggie what have we done?

 

Its not in your head, you’re a living dead (L4D & L4D2 & The Walking Dead, 2006-2012)

Zombies are hip. Don’t ask me why they are, or to prove it (hint: specific blatantly-off-topic game mods). Seems to me people talk about it everyday, or almost. I don’t know when the current trend started exactly. The Road? I Am Legend? I guess it is related to the fascination of post-apocalyptic world ; after all, eschatology is a major issue of most monotheims.

Anyway, before that, I had in mind that zombies was somehow result of witchcraft. But now, it looks like an experiment that went wrong, a biohazard that went wild.

It’s the case of the Infected in Left 4 Dead (2006) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009):

It seems to be the case of the Walkers of The Walking Dead (2010):

The whole point of this article is, actually, just to highlight of many similarities (ambiance, characters, weaponry, etc) of these video games and this TV show. Because both are great. The video games use Source engine so the gameplay is alike Half-Life²/CS:S, which is very fine by me, and is very very well thought for cooperative multiplayer (teams of four, as humans or as infected). The TV series is quite captivating, even if characters are where we expect them to be. You should give a try to both.

I’m still wondering whether the video game inspired the TV show or the contrary, or if by any chance the video game was not itself inspired by the comics the TV show is based on. I plan to look into the comics ASAP.

Even funnier (yes, funny), it came to my attention that Telltale Games, publisher of the über-absurd (but a bit redundant maybe) point-n-click Sam & Max, plan to release a The Walking Dead game. Not a multiplayer game, not a game where you can go zombie, so it will not make much sense to compare its gameplay to L4D/L4D2, though. You wanna be undead so you can be hunted?

Warning: L4D/L4D2 is really meant to be played as a cooperative multiplayer game. It’s not worth it if you do not play it with friends along on voicechat. There is a reason why Steam proposes it as a pack for four players, it’s really about survival and you can’t really do it without real cooperation.

 

I am a cliche you’ve seen before (Friends With Benefits, 2011)

In plenty of shows, characters traits are obvious and expected. So I won’t complain because in Friends With Benefits you get: as main character, the nice but sometimes dumb guy (yes, you just got Mosbied); the über-clever but childish nerd (hum, Bosoms would not have said “howdy” in the Fifteenth Century. If anything, they would have said “Huzzah!”); the detached and witty good friend with an unorthodox background (black guy with lesbian mother, Why don’t you just try being nice to her? People like it when you’re nice to them. Remember five years ago at the pet store when you made that guy smile?); the dirty slag that hides too well her big heart (tada, I wanna be able to tell you that my boyfriend really freaked me out). I’m not really bothered that, afterwards, the show makes episodes about how they are not only this and how they can behave very differently than what we would have assumed considering the precited traits, even if that’s a little too easy to be really funny.

However, characters still have to be somehow sympathetic, if not tantalizing. To keep it short, in Friends with Benefits, they’re not. I just hate them. So much that I first wondered if, by any chance, it was not the comedians that I just don’t like at all. I must say I’ve never seen someone looking as dumb as Jessica Lucas, I can’t help it.

But, actually, after watching four episodes (full stop!), I think the scenarists are likely to be the problem. Who would come up with ideas like: having the Elliot Reid character going to a “drug party” (yes, that’s truly a quote) with the complete bitch (yes, that’s a character enacted by Jessica Lucas I did not described before) where she makes out with a hobo and then yells for hours “uargh I made out with a hobo, a fucking hobo, we should eradicate all the hobos” (no, that’s a not an exact quote, I think I made up the last part, but that’s the spirit anyway) or having the Sheldon Cooper guy suddenly thinking is the ultimate playboy that all girls are in love with, stating plenty of times “I’m so rich, how could not all the girls be in love with me”, and insults his friends because of it?

No. The problem must come from the scenario. These scenes suggest, deep down, sordid and disgracious states of mind. According to Wikipedia, the authors are Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. These guys wrote 500 Days of Summer. How is that possible? This was a good movie, I liked it. Well, now I’m wondering. Maybe it was just the Smiths music and the comedians that I liked. After all, it was already about some crooked girl that stayed with a guy for 500 days while claiming not wanting to settle down, just before settling down with a guy she’s just met two hours ago. Boredom boredom boring boredom.

 

Robots FTW (The Big Bang Theory, 2007-2012)

The Big Bang Theory reminds me of The IT Crowd. Even if the main point is making fun of nerds, it won’t be really hilarious to the ones lacking decent geek culture references. Not for jocks. But, indeniably, this isn’t enough to make a great show over years and I feel the late seasons of The Big Bang Theory kind of lost it.

Albeit the main story feeling aimless, the show still succeeds however to finely portrait geeks, especially physicists. Watch the following scenes (from episodes: S03E16 The Excelsior Acquisition; S05E16 The Vacation Solution; S03E03 The Gothowitz Deviation)

Then, compares that to what Fluffeh wrote on /.  the other day, in reply to the article Faulty Cable To Blame For Superluminal Neutrino Results:

I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco – but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future.

Fascinating, isn’t it? You may even wonder whether it is the science community that influences the show or the opposite. Science is fun.

 

Been in a palace, been in a jail, I just don’t want to be reborn a snail (Civilization I to V, 1991-2012)

There was a time we were happy to have 16 colors and like 320×200 and even the idea of Super Video Graphics Array was mental. Nowadays, it became tremendously hard to have fun playing games from this era, considering how our standards obviously changed over years. For instance, the first Real Time Strategy (RTS) game I ever played was Dune II, released in 1992: simple tasks like moving units are so painy to achieve that in no way I’m able to play even one short game.

Yesterday, I tried a game of Civilization, released in 1991, and found no major interface issue. I was also surprised, even though I played a lot to this one back in the nineties, to find a damn well designed and polished gameplay. Diplomacy, science, war, economy: each feature can be toyed with in depth. Clearly, this is a game were you build a Civilization, with a keen understanding of science, geography, history, weaponry, etc. Surely this has to do with the fact the game concept was not created from scratch, but that’s a great achievement nonetheless.

A few years later, in 1996, Civilization II was released. The gameplay was kept unchanged but the interface was greatly improved using Microsoft Windows 95-like widgets. Most notably, the tree of science research is easier to bear with. There was only two real issues, already there in Civilization but less obvious as you tended to play on smaller maps. The first one is the fact that you have a lot of micromanagement involved: you’ll have to build roads, rails, irrigation, etc, on each tile, and it cannot be automated (ahem). The second one is the fact that, to win wars, you’ll have to stack a considerable amount of units, sometimes so many it become a nightmare to handle in plenty of cases (ocean to get across, etc).

Truth is I played Civilization III the other day for the first time, even if it was released in 2001. So I won’t recollect any memories, just say that this version provides two new things: units automation, culture. The first one (auto-explore, auto-improve tiles, etc) was an improvement made obviously necessary by the previous release and was already a reality in the clone named Freeciv. The second one is a well-tought addition, marking the evolution of the game to a less scientist approach while also enlightening the notion of cultural area and frontiers/borders previously missing.

I played numerous times to Civilization IV, released in 2005. There were no radical changes in this version, but, following the addition of culture, the religion appears, which makes the experience even more realistic, providing motives for alliances or wars. There is still the issue with the too big stacks of units though. Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization mod keep the game light: considering all civs rise and fall (quite true), you only play a civ during a short period with 3 civilization-specific goals to reach. So no civilization get overwhelmingly gigantic.

Published one year ago, Civilization V could have a been one step beyond. Could have. This release address the issue of the big stacks of units: units can no longer be stacked, several units can do ranged attacks, cities can defend themselves. It is no longer necessary, neither it is desirable, to build supersized armies. Great. Not so great: the diplomacy is crappy, with less possibilites than in any release I can think of, religion is out. A plausible explanation would be the current trend is to publish half-baked games to, a few month later, sell “downloadable content”/DLC that provides what should have been already included in the game. Take the example of Call of Duty: each year, one release at 60€, then 4 times a year a DLC at 15€: if you want the full experience, while 60€ a year could have been considered not so cheap, you have to spend 120€. Indeed, Civilization is cheaper; fact is Civilization V feels broken with missing parts, unfinished business, not ready for release. A pity.

So what are the alternatives, where’s the sunny side of the street? Freeciv seems to be lagging behind (not talking about graphics; that obvious but that’s not what truly matters here), with no religion, culture and still the big units stacks. Europa Universalis III is worth giving a try. It gives more headaches than any Civilization release just to understand the basic rules, it’s not wonderful eyes candy-wise, but it is complete, with no missing parts at all. The economy goes as far as dealing with colonies and center of trades, diplomacy includes notion of casus belly and infamy (if you declare war without motive, if you ask too much for peace, etc, you’re seen as bad boy, and that influence the others players behavior towards you), religion includes all major religions, holy war, papal influence, etc.

.

(I havent mentioned multiplayer: I think uneasy to have fun in real-time with other humans playing a turn-based game. Freeciv is okay in this regard, though)