Just Another Tuesday

Which actually feels like Monday, since the World seemed to have really “woken up” today. There’s only been work, GameAxis articles, the novel, and some typical errands, like running down to the post office to pick up a package (which turned out to be our Peter S. Beagle signed copy of The Last Unicorn) and the usual grocery store run.

Oh, and here, belatedly, is the Wife’s Easter Picture. As usual, you can click on it to enlarge it:

Real Peasant Food Versus Fake Peasant Food

Despite the fact that I have now been back in Canada for a few months, I still occasionally get those “Wow, I’m home,” moments that sneak up on me and smack me on the back of the head like a sadist in a pillow fight convention. Today was just another quiet day, no surprise considering a) I am incredibly boring, and b) it’s Easter Monday which, in a predominantly Christian country like Canada, means that school kids, banks, government employees and various others are enjoying the last of a four day weekend. A far cry from Singapore where everything grinds to a halt for Chinese New Year, and Good Friday, with its subsequent Easter Sunday is a grudgingly acknowledged blip on the calendar radar because the Asians know the Western world is going to be stuffing its collective face with chocolate anyway and thus no financial or business transactions are really viable.

So today was laundry day and a few other minor errands in the neighborhood, which meant that since the bulk of our clothing was going to be sloshing around in the nearby laundromat (yep, we actually drag our stuff to laundromat now, the first time in my life that a laundry machine has not been in the house) we could afford to take it easy and so decided to stop in a little place we’ve frequented before.

The place, as you can see from the picture, has the very comradely name of “People’s Foods Hamburgers” and like a few places back in the ol’ home town of Edmonton, this is an honest to goodness, 100% completely authentic, utterly functional and completely unpretentious DINER.

You walk in and you see booths. You see a long dining “bar” with stools set up. Hell, you see regulars who come in as the cooks and waitresses say “Afternoon, hon, cup o’ joe before you start on your lunch?” and the regulars barely acknowledge this greeting since it’s the same ritual one they’ve been getting for years. The place has been in the neighborhood FOREVER, and it’s the kind of diner that grandfathers and fathers have been taking their kids to, who in turn, carry on the vicious cycle of keeping this nifty little “greasy dive” alive in a world of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks coffee. I’m convinced that the coffee urns in this joint are older than I am. The only concession to the 21st century the diner has is an Automated Teller Machine stuffed away in hall to the bathrooms because the place refuses to deal in anything but cash.

Eating in there while the Wife happily sketched away at the diners, the staff and the funky old 50′s milkshake machine tucked away on the counter, I couldn’t help but remember the almost psychotic giggling fit I had the first time I arrived at the place pictured left. An Australian guy I knew had invited me to get a burger with him at a some restaurant on the upper floors of a shopping mall called “Billy Bombers,” a space that was supposed to recreate the authentic 50′s diner experience.

Okay, so said Australian guy was, after all, Australian and thus had probably never been to an actual diner in either America or Canada, and maybe he even thought that me eating at a place like this would somehow make me feel more at home, but MAAAAAAAAAAAAN…

Walking in, I think, for the first time in my life, I finally understood what it must have been like for a Chinese or Japanese national to walk into a North American version of a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. There was a thick, palpable sheen of “chintz” so viscous it practically clung to your skin like the humidity outside. Seeing disinterested Chinese kids dressed up as 50′s waiters with a sullen look on their face that screamed “God this job is so beneath me” was almost as hilarious as the great pains the decor took to be as authentically American as possible, complete with plastic figurines of various presidents scattered around, and a menu filled with cheap imitation renderings of Vargas girls. It should also be noted that they had what looked like imitation Seeburg Stereo Consolettes set up at each table, but these were largely for atmosphere it seemed; I could never get the damn thing to actually take my money and play music on the jukebox, assuming there even WAS a jukebox anywhere.

People’s Foods Hamburgers however, do have authentic Seeburg Stereo Consolettes like the one pictured on the left, and they still work for only a quarter. In addition, when the waitress (a gruff, friendly gal that still chews her gum) takes your order, she DOES NOT blink in confusion when you ask for “a hamburger but hold the onions.” Or, she will actually ASK you if “you want everything on it,” as opposed to being completely baffled when you utter the phrase and ask to have it repeated several times, then slower, and then finally breaking it down to “I would like all the fixings, that is the ketchup, the mustard, the pickles, the onions, tomatoes and lettuce.”

I am also extremely happy about the fact that when you order a burger here, they do not fry an egg and put that on your order, something that still strikes me as profoundly bizarre, but for some reason, Singaporeans seem absolutely convinced that authentic American diners and patrons ate this.

However, probably the best part about eating at People’s Foods Hamburgers, aside from some real authentic diner ambiance is the fact that prices are also authentically diner. The Wife and I can easily have a hefty meal of massive amounts of food for less than $15. The average meal for two at “Billy Bombers” in Singapore will probably run between $40-$50 in local currency. I’m still amazed when I stop and think about that. These people are shelling out half-a-hundred bucks between the two of them, just so that they can feel like they’re “really in America” and, for an additional cost, get their name carved on a steel plate on the table, just like the greasers in America would carve their name with a switchblade or jack-knife!

Man. Singapore is just starting to seem more and more like this surreal dream I had for ten years…

The Prince of Perisa Essay

Having finally finished the new trilogy of The Prince of Persia I’m compelled by Greater Geek Forces Beyond My Ken to talk a little bit about this series, since I’ve been giving it a great deal of thought over the last little while.

First of all, meet the guy on the left. His name is Jordan Mechner, and he is the original creator of the series. A born and bred New Yorker since 1964, he was 20 years old and still in college at Yale when he made waves on the original Apple II series of computers with a little game called Karateka. It was an extremely revolutionary game at the time because of the elegance of the game design, as well as the enormous care that Mechner himself put into the animation of the characters. A simple tale of a lone martial arts warrior fighting in the shadow of Mt. Fuji to save his lady love from an evil Japanese warlord was one of the biggest hits of 1984, and a big indicator of how games could be more than just shooters, maze games or platforming games, a precedent established by games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, which were the dominant game forms of the time. Despite its simplistic combat system by today’s standards, Karateka was a revelation for both gamers and game designers, and its influence carries over into many games in the decades to follow.

Five years later, in 1989, Mechner would take the childhood nostalgia he had for the stories of The Book of One Thousand And One Nights and turn that into a similarly evocative and revolutionary game.

That games was, of course, Prince of Persia, pictured here on a Mac Emulator that could still run the old Apple II programs. Once again, Mechner kept it simple. A Persian Sultan goes off to war, leaving his daughter and kingdom in the care of his vizier, Jaffar. The Princess has fallen for a poor boy who has seen her from the balcony of her palace and the two are in the beginnings of love. The vizier, of course, has plans for both the kingdom and Princess, so when the Sultan goes off, the inevitable happens and the vizier makes his move to take over. His lust for the Princess is foiled by her love for the beggar, however, and so he locks her in her room and gives her one hour to decide whether to marry him or die. The beggar is thrown into the dungeons, left to rot away and die.

This, of course, is where the game begins, with you as the beggar, newly thrown into the dungeon. Prince of Persia was a major leap in the design of a genre known as “platformers,” a type of game that usually involved trying to stay alive while navigating from Point A to Point B through a lot of climbing and jumping. The simpler designs of Donkey Kong, which were more arbitrary, focused levels designed to entertain people playing for a few minutes in arcade, were heavily worked over here. Though the levels of Prince of Persia didn’t “scroll” (that is to say, when the Prince moved left, it cut to a new screen entirely, as opposed to scrolling, where the camera would simply track left as well to follow the movement) they nevertheless employed much more complexity in the design of the dungeons the beggar found himself trying to escape from.

It was also innovative for the fact that the urgency was real; the clock was ticking in real time, and you really DID only have one hour to navigate your way out of the dungeon, fight your way up through the levels of the palace and save the Princess. The game was also notable for having some of the most realistic animation ever seen in a game; Mechner went so far as to video tape his younger brother performing the various actions required of the beggar during the adventure, and then lovingly recreated those same movements within the game, for one of the earliest attempts at an animation technique called “rotoscoping” where real human movements are used as the foundation for the animation of the characters. Like Karateka before it, the game was a huge hit, and went on to have a few sequels, as well as being ported over to other systems like

Then in 2003, a curious thing happened. French developers Ubisoft, in some drunken, inspired bit of gaming nostalgia, decided to bring the series back for the newer, more powerful game consoles like the Playstation 2 and Xbox. Not only did they go back to Jordan Mechner to secure the rights, they went so far as to make him a consultant and writer for this update to one of the all time classics of the platform genre. That title became Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It was a complete revamp of the original story. Now, the Prince was a proud warrior son of the Persian King, who was involved in an invasion of a neighboring country ruled by a Maharajah. The Maharajah’s vizier willingly betrayed his lord in exchange for a gift of his choosing. The Prince heads up the invasion, attacking all defense and eventually finding a massive hourglass and a strange dagger that emitted a blue glow from its blade. The Prince and his father take both the dagger and the hourglasses as prizes despite the fact that these are items the vizier wanted as his prize. The Prince’s father makes a gift of the hourglass to
the ruler of a kingdom known as Azad, and it is here that the vizier tricks the Prince into using the dagger to open the hourglass, thus unleashing the Sands of Time.

The sands corrupt everything in the massive palace, turning all living creatures into sand-filled, zombie versions of themselves, except for the Prince, who manages to hold onto the dagger, the vizier, who uses his magic to render himself immune, and Farah, the daughter of the Maharajah that has an amulet linked to the hourglass and dagger that protect her from the sands. Together the Prince and Princess work to undo the Prince’s tragic error, and so the game begins.

PoP: SoT was as revolutionary for the new generation of consoles as its predecessor was on the old personal computers of the time. Fully 3D, it had some of the most elegant control seen in a game, while taking the tried-and-true platform genre and creating some of the most original and mind-bending puzzles seen in a console game. Just trying to figure out how to get to the top of, say, a massive library, involved a display of thinking and acrobatics that was almost balletic as the Prince jumped from ledges, swung from poles and literally ran across the wall in order to overcome gaps and obstacles. He was also given the limited ability to control time, such as the “Rewind” ability, which could turn back time 15 seconds into the past, just enough so that if you tried to jump over a pit and fell to your death, you could erase those moments and try something else. It was a much more forgiving and more sensible version of the traditional “trial and error by death” method that so many games had previously employed as players struggled to find the right attack pattern or path to overcoming an obstacle.

And it was a truly magical experience. The French seem to have an innate gift for understanding light. Whether its paint, cinema or games, it always seems like it is the French who best understand how to employ light for truly beautiful effects. The large, sprawling palace of Azad was filled with gorgeous locales in morning, noon and dusk that would filter light in brilliant shafts through windows, giving an elegant, fairy-tale quality to the struggle of the Prince and Princess. To this day, PoP: SoT is still one of the best platform games ever made for the Playstation 2/GameCube/Xbox era and I would heartily recommend it to anyone in a second if they saw it in a bargain bin at some game shop.

The same cannot be said for the sequel.

Just 11 months later, in December of 2004, a sequel to the commercially and critically successful Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was released. The game was called Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. The release dates should be the first give-away. To crank out a game in less than a year is an OBSCENELY short period of time in the games industry, and that alone was a strong indicator that Ubisoft, seeing the dollar signs generated by the first game wanted more money and FAST. They went to their developers and gave them the unenviable task of producing a game as good as–or better than–the first but in 1/3 of the time.

As you might imagine, things did not go so smoothly this time around. Because of the lack of time, the developers simply fell back on using the existing graphics engine and animation routines, tweaking them and adding a few new moves to keep things “new” as well designing new levels.

The biggest error they made, however, were in terms of story and art direction.

It would seem that the Ubisoft developers, either desperate to differentiate PoP: WW from its predecessor, or simply wanting to be different for its own sake, took a diametrically opposed route. I’m guessing they were big fans of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, since they took the series in an almost cliche “dark n’ gritty” direction. The music, formerly made up of ethereal, ethnic compositions with a haunting female vocal accompaniment, was now all blaring guitar riffs. The Prince, formerly an educated, articulate, charming and likable hero, was now gruff, bitter, and spouting lines like “YOU BITCH!” The story was also considerably different; the seemingly happy, fairy-tale ending of the first was utterly erased. Having opened up the Sands of Time in the first had apparently released a “time cop” of sorts, a demon known as the Dahaka, that relentlessly chased after the Prince. The years of being on the run from the Dahaka had turned the Prince into a grim, bitter figure with not an ounce of charm or grace. His journey now was to go to the island of the Empress of Time and try to prevent the Sands of Time from ever being created, thus negating the need for the Dahaka to chase him down.

If that sounds like a plot with more holes than Swiss cheese, you’d be right. The game’s story took on increasingly more bizarre and arbitrary twists that seemed tacked on more to justify new gimmicks in game than anything that made ANY kind of narrative logic. The island itself was a broken, dark, dank environment that was putrid and rotting. With the exception of one area, with hanging gardens, the entire game lacked any of the beauty that made PoP: SoT such a magical experience. And the game itself made the fatal error of focusing too much on the ONE criticism made of the first game; combat. The original PoP: SoT had a fun, acrobatic system of combat that many gamers said was entirely too easy. Somehow, that one criticism consumed the entire development team to the point where they ignored the brilliant level design of the first, the engaging story of the first and beautiful environments of the first, to concentrate on combat, combat, combat and more combat. They also felt that simply challenging gamers with puzzles of spatial logic, trying to get from point A to point B when there’s a mountain of bottomless pits and cliffs and walls between them, was passe. They created their levels to be an exercise in precision where the obstacles before the players were traps, and now the challenge came not from understanding the layout of an environment, so much as just getting the timing down of dodging traveling circular buzzsaws, rotating blades, spinning poles filled with razors. They didn’t want you to think anymore, they just wanted you to have fast reflexes.

As you’ve already guessed, I was monumentally disappointed with this sequel. In addition to the flaws above, the haste with which the game was released resulted in many bugs that seriously interfered with the playing of the game. For example, the “bad ass fight music” that consisted of relentless guitar riffs wouldn’t stop playing even after all the enemies were gone, and so the Prince would be jumping and dodging through vast, still, cavernous environments while metal-heads refused to stop riffing in the background. In addition, the “time trave
l” aspect of the game was horribly bugged; one of the gimmicks was that the game allowed the Prince to travel into the past and present of an environment, but doing this at the wrong time could actually make certain portions of a level disappear, thus making it impossible to complete them.

And, most unforgivable of all–though quite understandable when you realize they only had 11 months to make this thing–the developers got LAZY. Much of the game consists of backtracking through environments you’ve been through before. There are portions of the game that have you going through the same area three or four times over the course of the game, and it’s a cheap, shoddy way to artificially lengthen the lifespan of a game.

While the game is by no means terrible, after setting the bar so high with the first, Warrior Within was a major disappointment for me on all levels. And I’m not the only one. Jordan Mechner himself actually divorced himself from this project, citing the departure in art direction and story as his chief objections with the project. And I can’t blame him. After wanting to create a living fairy tale, watching that success get turned into a bleak, cynical sequel that was bug ridden and lazy must have been heart-breaking.

Incredibly however, just one year later in November of 2005, Ubisoft saved their endangered franchise.

The conclusion to the trilogy was called Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. And it takes place with the assumption that the player got the “good alternate ending” that is only possible if player collects all the optional “life upgrades” that extend the Prince’s “life bar” so he can take more damage.

In this game, the Prince is returning to Persia with his new lover, Kaileena, the former Empress of time. He comes back to his capital, Babylon, only to find it under invasion by the vizier of the first game, who has taken over the Maharajah’s troops in order to find the Sands of Time which are destined to be found in Babylon according to his magic. Of course the reason the vizier is here in the first place is because of all that confused mucking around with the timeline that the Prince did in the second game, thus negating everything he did in the first, including defeating the vizier. However, from this confusing and potentially disastrous beginning, the game manages to redeem itself.

First of all, by degrees, it actually manages to bring the Prince back to his old, likable self from the first game. It criticizes his selfishness, his boorishness and his quick reliance on violence, forcing him, over the hours of gameplay, to realize his grave error in going the “dark n’ gritty” route.

Second of all, it returns to the more enchanting and beautiful environments of the first game, this time in the form of Babylon, with its teeming city and famous Hanging Gardens. Once more, the world of the Prince of Persia is a lush, magical place that looks lovely and exotic. They also returned to the more cerebral routes of the first where the fun and the challenge comes from figuring out how to get to your destination, rather than just dodging a bunch of traps.

The game isn’t perfect though, and it doesn’t surpass the first. Combat is still there, though not in the same excessive, annoying amounts as PoP: WW. And its supplemented by the fact that the Prince can now sneak up on enemies and perform “stealth kills” that are timed to certain cinematics that play out as the Prince moves in for the kill. There are also more boss fights that are similar to cinematic battles of God of War, even going so far as to mimic the same timed presses of specific buttons in order to inflict lethal damage on the enemy. At some points there are even “chariot races” that involve the Prince jumping gaps and fighting off enemies Ben Hur style. All of this went a long way towards winning back the affection for the series that I’d lost with Warrior Within. While the game wasn’t quite the magic experience of the first, it still managed to FEEL like a proper PoP game in a way the second one failed utterly at. It was challenging, it was charming in its way, the Prince was once again someone you could respect, the levels were smart, and though there was still a sometimes annoying emphasis on the combat, it was vastly reduced from the annoying constant battling of the second.

I have no idea if there will ever be more Prince of Persia games, though considering the logic of the games industry, it’s pretty likely that there’s more to come. Jordan Mechner himself is currently working on a Prince of Persia: Sands of Time movie slated for release next year. I really don’t know where the series could go from here, but considering that there’s a whole new generation of consoles like the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 that have no PoP love (unless you count backwards compatibility of playing your old games on these new consoles), odds are Ubisoft–tastefully or not–will find some way to bring the Prince back for more adventures on these newer, more powerful systems.

I just hope, to God that they don’t put the Warrior Within team on it. The last thing I need is more “dark n’ gritty” badassness in my smart, elegant, fairy tale adventuring…

Snazzy

Today the Tactician showed up in the evening to take us out to a dinner at a restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel, as a kind of belated “Congrats on getting married” thing since he wasn’t able to make it to the original wedding in 2005.

I surprised myself by actually being able to find a shirt with a collar and some dress pants to wear, which were all horrifyingly appropriate considering the level of service at the restaurant. The food was also something else, though the thing I found neatest of all was the dessert we ordered which was a “snow globe”; somehow, they’d figured out how to stick pureed passion fruit into a globe of blown sugar “glass.” It was quite an impressive trick, and one of the oddest desserts I’ve ever seen in my life.

Sadly, there were no big geek sessions of gaming or movie/anime viewings this time around, but considering we are not only living on the same continent again, but the same province, I’m sure that it’s just a matter of time (or Battlestar Galactica Season 3 coming out on DVD) before this occurs…

Yet Another Reunion

Not much going on today except for a bit more GameAxis writing in the afternoon, followed by a half successful attempt to run a few errands. The successful errand was returning the DVDs to Suspect Video and getting some new ones. The less successful one was mistaking the operating hours on the Canada post website as legit and getting there only to realize that they did not take holidays into account for their listings and thus, a package that is waiting for me will have to remain in a holding pattern for a few more days.

However, the big highlight was meeting up with an old friend from university. Not the Math Genius, who I will likely also be seeing tomorrow, but the Tactician, a guy who studied military history in university and is essentially unbeatable in any Real Time Strategy game he chooses to take on, since while many of us are thinking “I’ll just send a pile of tanks to blow up the base,” he’s drawing on maneuvers as varied as Rommel’s tactics in the Africa campaign or luring enemies into funneled kill zones like in the Battle of Thermopylae.

As to be expected it was a gross and decadent exercise in being geeky.

It is good to be home…

One Of Those Quiet Thursdays

In which all I really did was write articles for this month’s GameAxis issue and work on the novel.

Yep. Pretty boring all right…

Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe. Friend of Children. Destroyer Of Commercial Real Estate

It is with no small amount of warmth and affection that I discuss one of the classics of “Daikaiju” or “Giant Monster” movies of Japan. Gamera is a giant turtle. That flies. With rocket legs. Or simply withdraws his limbs into his shell and spins rapidly like a flying saucer.

Originally created in 1965 as a cash-in by Daiei Motion Pictures to get some of that green that Toho was pulling with Godzilla, Gamera was a much more light, “friendly” version of the normal rampaging, giant radioactive monster in that he was actually a friend to children, who looked up to the behemoth as a protector and guardian of Japan against other giant monsters.

While I’ve seen bits and snippets of the original Gamera movies made in the 60′s, it was only thanks to Suspect Video that I reacquainted myself with the “re-imagined” Gamera that was released in the latter half of the 90′s. First came Gamera: Guardian of the Universe which did away with Gamera’s original 60′s, nuclear paranoia inspired origin (a giant, slumbering tortoise buried in the arctic, awakened by atomic testing, naturally) and ret-conned him as the creation of an earlier advanced civilization (Atlantis) the engineered him too late to save themselves from their own genetically perfect killer, but as a guardian that might rise up to defend the Earth should these bio-engineered weapons ever arise again. Well, they do, and Gamera proceeds to rise and combat them with all the glory and enthusiasm a Japanese giant monster movie can muster with the better special effects available in the late 90′s. The result is a somewhat darker, more “serious” monster movie that previous Gamera incarnations, about on par with Godzilla films of the time, but, astoundingly with more story and characterization behind them.

In the same way that 70′s disaster movies often made an ensemble cast shine by focusing on different characters as they struggle with the incoming cataclysm, so too does this 1994 film focus a lot on the characters as they try to understand Gamera and the monsters he fights. In the end, despite the inherent silliness of a giant turtle that spits fireballs and has legs that transform into rockets, you end up cheering the big palooka on, as well as caring for the characters. And not to totally do away with friend of children thing, they do have a cute teen girl who ends up having a special bond with the monster, and she ends up appearing in the rest of the 90′s trilogy. Which brings me to…

Gamera: Attack of Legion. This one takes place a year after the first, and this one surprised the hell out of me by not only being better than the first, but, despite the dated effects, having a restrained, yet affectionate view of a new cast of characters as well as having some VERY smart writing and logic with regards to giant monsters, the military reaction to giant monsters and how these things might possibly go down in the real world. Despite having been made in 1996 with the limited effects of Japanese cinema, the actual story itself is a strangely compelling and realistic depiction of just how ordinary people would try to survive the onslaught of an alien, insect-like species, and return of Gamera to set things right. The giant monster in question, named “Legion” because its a collective organism, has been thoroughly thought through by the writers of the script and the methodology of its lifecycle is actually quite logical and systematic.

But even more impressive for me was the depiction of the human cast, in particular, the Japanese Self Defense Forces. They were treated not as an incompetent crew of arrogant bumblers who thought they were invincible until their pride proved to be their undoing. Nor were they portrayed as a noble, flawless depiction of human greatness that could do no wrong. Instead, they were a collection of soldiers and commanders who loved their country, loved their team and just wanted to come back home, if they could keep home intact. I found myself strangely moved by little vignettes such as when a tank commander confides to gunnery officer, “If you want to just run, everyone will understand. We don’t stand a chance against that thing.” And when a tank battalion opens fire on the giant monster and it retaliates by vaporizing half the force, the general responds by actually calling for a retreat, saying, “I am NOT losing any more men.” Or when an old munitions officer says “When I was young, we ran away from the fires of the city. It’s been in my nightmares ever since. This time… I’m not running away.”

Once again, Gamera rises up, and once again, mass destruction ensues, and when I say mass, I mean MASS. There was one moment in the film I simply did not see coming, simply because American film had trained me to expect the last minute rescue that saves everyone, and when it didn’t happen I was shocked beyond belief.

We haven’t yet watched the final film in the 90′s Gamera trilogy, but I’m really looking forward to it now. These Gamera films have become my new standard for favorite Daikaiju films, even displacing the venerable Godzilla. The Godzilla films are pretty entertaining in their own right, but in Gamera, they have pulled off the nearly impossible trick of taking inherently silly material, deciding to play it straight, and having enough faith in the story to actually carry it off. Even if there is a giant turtle battling to defend Tokyo, you’re actually hoping that the citizens of Tokyo get off all right.

“Elmo Love Cutting Wrists!”

Lately both the Wife and I have been on a kick where we are once again turning an extremely critical eye to that latest bout of Youth Ideology known as Emo. It got to the point where I realized that this damn thing needs some better marketing in order to help us Old, Terminally Unhip Fogies and young children under the age of 10 understand exactly what this Emo stuff is all about. And so, as both a learning tool and toy for children, I present, with extremely bad photo-shopping skills (and the help of the Wife for word balloons) my solution to letting both young and old understand them crazy kids.

Tickle Me Emo!

This new doll has a built in vibrator that makes TME shudder in despair whenever he is poked and prodded by an uncaring world that doesn’t understand him. TME was raised with a horrifying childhood that defies all sanity or description, thus creating the traumatized, but deeply stylish and good looking wreck you see before you! When touched or poked, he confesses in jarring sobs, his deep, dark childhood secret that warped him so.

“It… it was… Oh God, I can’t go on… It was… safe! And boring! And… and… OH GOD, IT WAS MIDDLE CLASS, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, I’M SO TORMENTED, HOLD MEEEE!”

When hugged, TME cries hysterically.

TME has a far greater range of interactivity than previous toys. In the presence of a flash camera, his photo-sensitive sensors will cause him to tilt his head down so his hair covers one eye while he grabs one arm in a deliberately insecure, yet androgynous sexually provocative manner.

TME will also only kiss boys, but not because he’s gay, so much as he’s just confused.

He also comes with several free pairs of razor blades so that you can play the hot new teenage game “Slashin’ For Fashion” which involves creating the most esthetically pleasing cuts on the arm for both style and the attention of counselors and girls wanting to “rescue a beautiful soul from his dark side if only he’d sleep with me.”

It goes without saying that TME comes programmed with several phrases. Here’s just a small sample of the Emo-isms you will enjoy.

“Nobody UnderSTAAAAAAAAAAAANDS! WAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Life is so black. So bleak. WAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Don’t touch me there unless you’re a boy! WAAAAAAAH!”

“My life is an empty void. It’s like a poem… without words, y’know? Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? WAAAAAAAAH!”

“What can I cry about today?”

“This reminds of a poem I wrote once when I was really upset, let me recite it for you…”

“This reminds me of a girl who dumped me… WAAAAAAH!”

“This reminds me of a girl I like who I can’t speak to because I’m afraid she’ll dump me. WAAAAAH!”

“I have this perfect vision in my head of the angel girl who will save me from my black, black heart… But then she dumps me! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Do you have any idea who much it makes my paper heart bleed when you say you don’t understand how getting a shirt that fits properly instead of being to tight hurts me?!? WAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“I wanna’ kill myself! That’s so cool!”

“Let’s cut ourselves! It’ll be so fun and cool and tormented!”

“Ernie and Bert keep picking on me and Bert won’t kiss me anymore! WAAAAAAAH!”

Compared the original Tickle Me Elmo, this one is a steal at only $1000, and each one is an organic product that is acquired through a fair trade deal with the indigenous people of a country known as China where they get a penny for 8 hours of happy work in a nice, warm factory set to a comforting 38 degrees Celsius, and you get the doll knowing that you’ve just made someone in China a whole penny richer while at the same time getting to wallow with Elmo about how unfair your suburbanite, middle class existence is. AIN’T IT GREAT?!

Redemption For Ubisoft

Just another Monday involving errands in the Annex, although in a bizarre turn of events, we ended up having to deposits cheques for me from the Singapore government instead of the other way around, which is usually the way it goes. I dunno what happened that made them decide I needed a tax refund but hey, I won’t dig into this mystery too deeply. For all I know, they just decide to give me a little parting gift because they were so happy I wouldn’t be blowing holes in their censorship methodology anymore.

The only other news of note is that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has been finished, and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones has been begun. I’m now compelled to write a “PoP” essay at some point explaining my feelings on this series, because, like Devil May Cry before it with Capcom, Ubisoft has now also managed the trick of making a great original game, nearly burying the franchise with a horrible sequel, and then following through with “third time’s a charm” syndrome by making a fine third iteration in the series. While I wouldn’t quite go as far as to say that Two Thrones surpasses the original, it’s still a fun, balanced, and much, MUCH better designed game than its predecessor, with no glitches, horrendous music, or lousy level design. However, it’s a little bogged down by incorporating some of the less favorable elements of Warrior Within, though not to the same annoying degree.

HAKSKEEKAH!

I never, EVER saw this one coming.

The title to this blog post will only have meaning if you were geeky enough to have read the novelization of the 1982 Jim Henson fantasy film The Dark Crystal. I, of course, was geeky enough to have read it, and the term is used by the Skekses to describe their “trial by stone” where they take big blades and repeatedly whack at a big rock to see who can make the biggest cut in it.

I use this term because it’s a Dark Crystal term, and I’m making a Dark Crystal post, so I figured it was appropriate.

The reason I’m making this post is because I recently decided to watch The Dark Crystal again just for the hell of it, and then went and looked it up on Wikipedia only to find to my stunned amazement that the Jim Henson Company has announced they are working on a sequel, scheduled for a 2008 release.

Heck, they even have a blog where they post updates about the production. The movie is a true sequel in every sense of the term. It takes place after the events of the first film, with the characters Jen and Kira still kicking around. However, thanks to the miracle of CGI and digital post-production, they’re going to be doing things a little bit differently this time. From what I’ve read, they’ll be going the 300 route and mostly resorting to CG backgrounds, but what interests me is that they’re going to still be using puppets. However, these puppets have been built in an entirely different manner than any puppet used in film or television before. The reason is they’re going to shoot the puppets on a green screen (naturally, for the CG background) but they’re also to have the puppeteers wearing suits so that they can digitally painted out.

This completely blew my mind, and made perfect sense. But, as with the original film, it’s something that’s never been done before. Not with puppets. I can see how this would suddenly free the design of the puppet since you wouldn’t need to build raised stages to hide the puppeteers, or worry about getting the wires running into the limbs appearing in shots. I’m really, really interested in seeing how this turns out, because The Dark Crystal has always been one of those 80′s movies that’s always sat in my head, in a space all it’s own. There’s never been anything quite like it, and up until now, I never thought I’d see anything again remotely like it.

I sure hope this doesn’t suck.