Apparently, I am the Genre Police

Funny how it’s only been a week or so since I wrote a little bit about how it isn’t my job to correct people who are wrong on the internet and an article shows up on a blog I enjoy which makes me want to publicly raise my objections.

There’s a lot to love about Black Gate’s blog. They’ve done admirable work with articles about authors who deserve more attention. I particularly appreciate their retrospectives on Leigh Brackett, Manly WadeWellman, and Clark Ashton Smith. Their three part retrospective on the originsof the fantasy genre as a whole is highly worth reading for the fan of fantasy fiction, which many of Black Gate’s editors write quite well.

Among these editors is John R. Fultz, whose recent novel, Seven Princes, has attracted much positive attention. I read a post on a forum which compared it to Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy, which is high praise to say the least. And if it’s an apt comparison, I have to give Mr. Fultz a tip of the hat; it takes guts to publish that sort of mythic fantasy when the current trend in the genre is “in the grim darkness of… there is only grim darkness.”

So it is not personal when I say that Mr. Fultz’s “DANGEROUSBEAUTY: The Kung Fu Fantasies of Zhang Yimou,” is a presumptuous, wrong-headed, almost contemptible look at the wuxia genre as a whole, and a bland, uncritical paean to a mistake so big that Zhang Yimou had to make it over three movies.

I will not bother with a critical examination of Zhang Yimou’s films here; they, and the enamored western public, exhausted my patience when they were new. Needless to say, I have a number of aesthetic, political, and ethical bones to pick with Zhang and the critics who championed his films in spite of their less than savory political underpinnings. But Mr. Fultz seems to enjoy them primarily for their aesthetic qualities, for their evocation of “the China of Legend, where martial arts is a magic all its own.” (His words) Aesthetics are subjective, and personal; I disagree that Zhang’s films evoke this vision of China particularly well, much less better than many of the films of such directors as King Hu, Chang Cheh, Chu Yuan, and Pan Lei. But to each his own. If Mr. Fultz enjoys these films, I will not begrudge him his enjoyment.

I do take exception, though, to his myopic view of the genre as a whole, as I do with certain statements that betray unfamiliarity with the subject of not only wuxia in both its literary and cinematic forms, but with Chinese film as a whole.

The first real red flag comes from his mistaking wuxia films for kung fu films. This is, to some degree, like speaking of spaghetti westerns as though they were the same as Poliziotteschi. To acknowledge overlapping themes and visual conventions is one thing, but to mistake the one as the same as the other is a fallacy. I also find it hard to swallow that he refers to them almost uniformly as “flicks.”

After summing up what he believes to be the artistic triumph of recent wuxia films (Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Zhang Yimou’s trio of genre excursions being the only ones he mentions), Mr. Fultz informs us that “there’s nothing wrong with the ‘grindhouse’ style of kung fu movie,” which makes me what he means by “grindhouse,” given that these films were mainstream entertainment for their intended audience and home region. Compared to Chang Cheh’s The Five Deadly Venoms and Jimmy Wang Yu’s The Master of the Flying Guillotine, we are told, Zhang Yimou's films have “[taken] this type of action-based movie to a whole new level of excellence.”

This illustrates precisely the problem I have with this piece. More apt comparisons for Zhang Yimou’s films might be found in the highly influential, elegiac work of King Hu, or the literary adaptation of Li Han-Hsiang at his best, or even the thoughtful tragedy of Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time. But Mr. Fultz has, either through ignorance or genuine equivocation, written off the breadth of a nearly century old film tradition. To read his article, one would believe that until the advent of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the genre contained not a single thoughtful meditation on the cycle of violence and revenge, not a single critical examination of the xia code and the jiang-hu, not a single film that was not a “grindhouse” style action film.

If Mr. Fultz is under the impression that Zhang Yimou’s films have set a visual bench mark for the genre, I have to again disagree. Although the gaudy visuals of his films appeal to western sensibilities, visual experimentation -- whether with slow-motion, special effect, or wonky cinematography -- has long been a staple of the wuxia genre. If he means that there is a technical proficiency present in Zhang’s films that is lacking in the rest of the genre, I have to once again point him to the work of King Hu, and to Wong Kar Wai’s lone contribution. Visually arresting wuxia (and kung fu) films existed before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but Mr. Fultz gives us no indication that he has actually viewed them.

And as a fan of Jet Li who has long championed his ability to, y’know, actually act, I have to wonder at the statement that his one-note role in Hero “is arguably the greatest role of Jet Li’s career.” What about his deft handling of a non-action role in Ocean Heaven? What about his Golden Horse winning performance in Peter Chan’s Warlords? What about his role as the Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei Hung in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series, where he managed, with aplomb, to fill the shoes of the legendary Kwan Tak Hing? In the comments, there is some discussion of the melodramatic nature of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which Fultz compares to Shakespeare, oblivious to the fact that it is a loose adaptation of Cao Yu’s “Thunderstorm.”

I am reminded of the brief furor caused by HBO’s “A Game of Thrones.” Various television critics – critics unfamiliar with the fantasy genre, its history and current trajectory, its diverse audience, and the current enthusiasm it enjoys – made a number of statements about what it meant as a product of its genre. Many of those critics actually enjoyed the show, but fans took umbrage at their myopic view of fantasy, quite understandably, and rightly. Fantasy fans are more numerous than (English speaking) wuxia and kung fu fans, and their displeasure was made quite well known. I only hope that they will remember their displeasure when they decide to write about subjects that, though perhaps related, are not within the purview of their fandom.

So yeah. Apparently I am the genre cop. Also: please stop perving over Zhang Ziyi.

I'm not the Genre Police

It’s not so much that Lightwing23 and I have a bad relationship so much as we have a great love-hate relationship that manifests itself, in practical terms, as mutual annoyance. If you have not read his overview of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series, I can give you an idea of how he appraises it by telling you that I gave him the final book as a Christmas gift. He gave me a copy of David Gaider’s latest opus, Dragon Age: Asunder.

Lightwing23 was also present for a number of pivotal events in my life, like my discovery of Asian cinema, kung fu and wuxia movies particularly. One of the things he enjoys is making me rage by telling stories about people who spout off things that are completely wrong about subjects that interest me, and he knows that few things interest me more than my favorite genre films.

So when he e-mailed me a link to an IGN article titled, “AsianCinema's 20 Greatest Fight Scenes,” I expected to rage. He expected me to rage on my blog for his amusement.

Of the list, I have a few things to say. I find the listing a bit odd. Lacking entirely in Japanese cinema – the author excluded the region for the “purposes of focusing more on martial arts battles,” which is about as perplexing as it gets – the list is hardly a good representative of Asian cinema as a whole. It was nice to see a couple of Korean films make the list, although I would not have chosen the two that made it. I was even happy to see Invincible Armor, which has an expertly choreographed and performed finale. That almost made up for the lack of attention to the films of Lau Kar-Leung, Ching Siu-Tung, Chang Cheh, Kenji Misumi, and a great number of others I could rattle off were I up to it.

But I’m not up to it. I cannot really even get worked up about the assumption that all of the best fight sequences in Asian cinema would be “martial arts battles,” or that fairly recent films comprise the majority of the list. I cannot even be bothered to go off on a writer proclaiming with certainty that the finale to Drunken Master 2 is “the very best depiction of Zui Quan (a.k.a. Drunken Boxing) ever caught on film.”

I can’t get myself in a tizzy over this because it really is not that bad of a list. Granted, it is not a particularly good list; I can think of a number of people who could compile better, more comprehensive lists, myself included. But I was not asked to write it, and the audience for whom this article was written would likely have no truck with many of the films I would pick. It is easy for somebody who subscribes to a historical view to want to discuss the influential aspects of the finale to Zatoichi Monogatari, or the tea-house scene in King Hu’s Come Drink with Me. For the student of martial arts, there is probably a desire to highlight the very carefully constructed depictions of Hung Gar in Lau Kar-Leung’s Martial Club. For the fan of spectacle, it would be hard to top the finale to Ong-Bak 2, or the chaos of John Woo’s Hard Boiled.

But for the average reader of IGN, whose interest in Hong Kong cinema likely extends no further than what is readily available on DVD, and whose knowledge of Asian cinema likely does not extend beyond martial arts movies, this is probably a series of excellent recommendations. Not everyone is likely to become a collector, let alone a historian, critic, or aficionado.

I’m not the genre police. None of us are, really. And while there is a presumptuous edge to this list that I do not appreciate, I can actually get behind the author’s enthusiasm for lesser seen films, like the Indonesian film Merantau. You still cannot spell ignorance without IGN, but for even mentioning a few underappreciated films, I have to give the writer props.

Oh, and, for the record, I actually got all of my rage out the way in the e-mail I sent to Lightwing23 yesterday.

Bioware Fandumb

Indeed, nobody at all believes that I wrote that review of Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne for any reason other than to troll Bioware fanboys. If I am a troll, I am one of the rare, righteous ones. I troll with the truth; it is super effective.

I logged onto blogger a couple of days ago to see a huge spike in views and an incoming link from Bioware’s forums. David Gaider has new book, Dragon Age: Asunder, the third of his Dragon Age novels, now set during the same time frame as Dragon Age 2. I haven’t finished reading Gaider’s other novel, Dragon Age: The Calling. In fact, I’ve only just started to read it. David Gaider’s comments in that thread will likely receive due attention when I get around to reviewing The Calling, where my remarks will likely be more pertinent (and pointed). To my surprise, the rest of the responses in that forum thread actually got me thinking.

I posted a response to all of the negative attention my review of The Stolen Throne received not long after it went online. It’s been linked on Bioware’s forums before, to similar reactions, and most of the negative comments accuse me of either being “pretentious” or not having played the games; I admit to the latter in the text of my review, while the former is actually incorrect (few of these people seem to understand what that word means). When I wrote that first response, I thought that the fans were taking issue with the fact that I did not like The Stolen Throne. I was wrong; they do not like that I wrote out the reasons why I disliked it.

There’s a certain line of thinking that runs through many of these posts, a way of viewing things common, at least from what I’ve observed, amongst younger fans of certain media, especially amongst fans of video games. It’s an attitude that informs many of the arguments in the evergreen “video games and art” debate. It revolves around the term “subjective.”

The fanboy/girl’s typical defense of their half-formed thoughts or opinions or appraisals goes like, “well that’s just my opinion,” as if it could be anything else. Another one: “well I liked it.” Yeah. Likely nobody would tell you otherwise. Often they invoke subjectivity directly, under the false impression that if something has a subjective element, that all criticism that surrounds it is inherently subjective as well. Take, for instance, the following post from Imported Beer, in response to my review:

I’m only going to address that last part, as it serves to illustrate my point, and I will try to refrain from snarking at the repeated use of the term “personal construct.” Imported Beer makes two claims in this paragraph. The first is that prose aesthetics are subservient to narrative. The second is that all criticism is subjective, and only personally useful. Basically: “I don’t care what you think, and it doesn’t matter what you think.”

That people of this mindset would denigrate criticism – but only negative criticism aimed at the objects of their fanaticism – is unsurprising. Another Bioware forum-goer, nedpepper, contributed what he calls an old cliché: “Writers write because they can, critics critique because they can't write.” I suppose he’s unaware of how many professional writers of fiction publish criticism of their peers; I suppose he’s also unaware of the semi-colon.

Of course, if everything about fiction is subjective, their evaluations of Gaider’s work do not matter either. They think that they have marginalized an outspoken critic; they have attempted to do so by marginalizing an entire media, the liberal arts, and those who study them. And they do so -- I think -- unwittingly.

Few things in the world are purely subjective. Fiction, for instance, is not. The text is an object. An evaluative critique is based on observations of that object.

Fuckin’ duh.

The only person to respond to the review rather than react to it (sorta) was RosaAquafire, who would later accuse me of “rocking a big dumb bias.” Disregarding that second post, I appreciate that she both read my review and expressed disagreement with points I made rather than accusing me of “elitism” and “snobbery.” But then, she didn’t actually respond in the comments. In fact, none of the posters bothered to write a comment on my blog, in spite of my comments remaining open, even to anonymous posters. Bravely done, fellas.

The JRPG Conundrum (part 1?)

It’s about that time of year again. Last May, Bioware’s Daniel Erickson claimed that Final Fantasy 13 was not an RPG, explaining that it had no character creation or goofily obvious dialog trees. The reaction was about as expected from the itinerant gaming pundits on the internet: a huge debate over semantics. Of course, most of these guys either have short memories or have not studied their hobby particularly well or, for that matter, have not actually swam past the familiar genre points of Final Fantasy 7, Baldur’s Gate, and Diablo. If they had, they would realize that CRPGs are nothing like the tabletop games that spawned them because no computer program can replicate the human involvement of an actual dungeon master, much less players. Erickson’s definition actually eliminates not only Japanese developed RPGs, but a large portion of the genre’s progenitors.

Semantic arguments serve an important purpose, of course; if one cannot argue about the definition of words, what else can one have to argue about? (What is an RPG if words have no meaning? … sorry, I couldn’t resist) The problem with the argument is that if either side took its position to the most logical end, they would render the term “CRPG” a complete misnomer. That would be logical, disregarding the context in which we use the term “RPG,” but not sensible, and it solves approximately nothing. And besides, it’s old news.

The decline or death of the Japanese RPG is a favorite meme of gamers and game journalists in this current console generation, and there are at least a couple of narratives repeated by those who believe their understanding of the genre, and video games in general, and the people who make and play them sufficient to explain this phenomenon. The first explanation, and in my experience the most prevalent, is that the Japanese developers, conservative and risk-averse, wallow in dated conventions of game-design and that Western developers, more willing to change with their audience and to meet their audience’s demands, have usurped the Japanese position within the industry as the purveyors of what we call RPGs. This set off the argument last year.

The other narrative posits that Japanese developers, unlike their counterparts in the west, failed to grow up with their audience; this is the argument made by people who hate or are at least antipathetic towards anime illustrations and teenaged heroes of ambiguous gender, who balk at the narrative conventions so closely associated with the genre. Both sides miss the point. One focuses on the games as games and the other on the games as media, but both miss the mark in complementary ways.

It’s the latter I focus on because this year’s annual celebration of “What’s wrong with the JRPG” comes as a reaction to a peculiar little game published by NIS America and developed by their equally, eternally peculiar partners, Idea Factory, Compile Heart, and Gust. Hyperdimension Neptunia blipped on my radar thanks to a few mentions on the WAHP podcast and the few sites actually willing to cover odd Japanese games. A niche title in an increasingly niche genre, Hyperdimension Neptunia seems like an odd choice for localization when looking at the overtly moe illustrations and its developer’s track record. The ambivalence towards the Japanese aesthetic here in the west has, as mentioned, never been so pronounced, and even Japanese otaku refer to developer Idea Factory (アイディアファクトリー) as “Idea Fucktory” (アイディアファック), though not without some affection, if I understand correctly.

The game’s plot, as much as any game can be said to have one, is what made it a candidate for an American and European release. Hyperdimension Neptunia envisions the “console war” as a battle between goddesses in a vaguely defined space-opera milieu filled with anime and game references that exist solely as references to anime and video games. The main characters personify game platforms and developers; Neptunia is based on Sega’s ill-fated, never released console that became the Sega-32X add-on for the Genesis, and Compa stands in for developer/Idea Factory subsidiary Compile Heart, and etc. They battle against Airfore, a play on R4 piracy.

The tone of the professional reviews, however, suggests that NISA should not have bothered, no matter how cute their project’s story. The largest professional review sites (IGN and Gamespot) took aim mostly at the “hypersexualized” characters, most of whom resemble very young women. Taking note of this, Eurogamer’s Simon Parkin ranted about sexism, ending his review calling the game a “sexist, senseless and ultimately stupid cultural curio.” He scored the game a two out of ten, which according to Eurogamer’s scoring guide, denominates Hyperdimension Neptunia as “atrocious.”

Not having played the game, I cannot speak to its mechanics, though they look very similar to those in NISA’s previous PS3 release, Trinity Universe. I can laugh at the charges leveled against it and shake my head. Never mind that by any normal standards, highly praised American games feature sexism every bit as noticeable (and often more graphic) as that seen in the relatively harmless sexual fantasies of Hyperdimension Neptunia. A closer look at this game shows just how wrong the accepted narrative of the JRPG decline is; this game, as bad as it seems to be, was developed specifically for the Japanese gamers who grew up playing video games.

In Japan, games are for kids. In America, games are for kids and grown-ups who want to pretend that theirs is not a childish hobby. The Japanese developers who make games for otaku realize that their audience has no vested interest in proving the social legitimacy of their hobby, and the otaku seeks to fulfill his needs through media, as explained by Hiroki Azuma in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Idea Factory, Nippon Ichi Software, Key, Image Epoch and others realize this and provide what their customers want. The games have grown up with their audience, in that these are games that are made for adult consumers. They have grown inert with their audience as well, but that’s another, much more involved matter.

Neither does the claim that Japanese RPG mechanics have not evolved hold up. They have merely not evolved in a way that pleases western gamers who have only recently discovered the sort of games that used to appear only for the PC. In fact, compared to games like Baldur’s Gate, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex, the current RPG offerings on the consoles are significantly dumbed down. Bioware, Bethesda and their peers have found what works, and are now crafting variations on the same concepts that fulfill their customer’s wants, which are sometimes creepy, sometimes sexist, and very often the product of their consumer’s internalized nerdiness. If the JRPG is said to be stagnant for not dramatically changing in the past twenty years (although in subtle, sometimes unfortunate ways, it has), so must western RPGs, and all other games that fit under a generic label.

Make no mistake: the average Japanese developer makes the average JRPG for teenaged boys (Namco’s Tales series is the most obvious example) because that is their primary audience. But rather than acknowledging this fact and readjusting their expectations, professional reviewers persist in treating games developed for a very particular audience on the other side of the planet as though they were made for them by their neighbors. It’s an attitude born of a false sense of superiority and never offers anything that even approaches constructive, insightful criticism. And it is lazy. Damnably lazy.

The truth: Japanese RPGs are not in decline; they are merely declining in the west. Both Euro-American and Japanese audiences have grown apart in interests. That those of us who still enjoy many of the mechanics in Japanese games, particularly the experimental efforts of teams like Gust, have fewer and fewer games localized for our amusement – and that non-critical video game critics who have bought wholesale into so stale a meme as the one about which I just wrote over a thousand words help to drive mainstream disinterest – is frustrating and sad.

Korean Dragon Ball: The Review -- The Reckoning

If you actually think about it -- believe me, I can understand if you have not -- Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball is one of Japan’s strangest cultural exports and should have been the least likely to achieve lasting popularity. Of course, it wasn’t immediately welcomed. The first attempts to dub and export it were considerable failures, and it wasn’t until Funimation, a Texas based entertainment company, dubbed and released episodes of the anime series in syndication under the title “Dragon Ball Z” that it found its audience. Even then, it didn’t become really popular until Cartoon Network included it in its Toonami block of afternoon programming.

I was an early fan. I woke up at six a.m. on Saturday mornings to catch “Dragon Ball Z” on what was then the WB network on channel 33, before the nationally broadcast Saturday morning cartoons aired. “Dragon Ball Z” was filled with huge, muscley guys with huge, spiky hair doing martial arts and shooting fireballs. The female characters had tons of cleavage and characters would die or have their arms ripped off and Goku went to hell for a few episodes. My parents would have been horrified if they knew what I was watching, but this was before the word “anime” meant anything to most people.

This movie looks horrible

But while the episodes that comprise “Dragon Ball Z” were unusual to me when I was kid, the earlier story arcs, referred to as “Dragon Ball” in the United States, still strike me as incredibly strange. Loosely based on Wu Cheng-En’s The Journey to the West, Dragon Ball began, supposedly, as a way for manga-ka Akira Toriyama to create a series less westernized than his previous works. But while The Journey to the West was a Buddhist fable filled with topical political and moral commentary, Dragon Ball seems driven more by Akira Toriyama’s desire to just draw whatever he felt like. References to King Kong, tributes to Jackie Chan movies, dinosaurs, giant robots, villainous armies in Soviet style regalia, aliens and busty females -- these are a few of his favorite things.

This movie is horrible

Que terrible!

So it is understandable that James Wong and 20th Century Fox would try to make sense of the giant mess that is Toriyama’s world building by opting for a generic, semi-sci-fi environment when they filmed DragonBall: Evolution. Granted, they also missed everything that made Dragon Ball popular, including themes that resonate just as strongly with American audiences as they did with the Japanese. But Dragon Ball was popular enough world wide that live action film adaptations were attempted in other countries. Chan Jun-Leung’s DragonBall: The Magic Begins is well known as terrible movie, but it isn’t one of a kind.

At one point, the South Korean Dragon Ball movie was my Holy Grail, that ever elusive bad movie that I thought I would never get to see. I have it. Really. And after watching it, I have a new respect for Chan Jun-Leung’s technical skills as a film maker.

Korean Dragon Ball (hangul: 드래곤볼), or Goku Fights, Goku Wins (Ssawora Son o gong, Igyeora Son o gong), is a lot like the Korean Street Fighter television series, in that both intend to visualize their source material as literally as possible on a prohibitive budget. Korean Dragon Ball visualizes the first story arc of the Dragon Ball manga in a manner that is frequently weird, inappropriate, ugly, and hilarious.

The movie opens with a theme song sung by a children’s choir, and then proceeds to follow the storyline probably all too familiar to fans who have read the manga, watched the anime series, the movies and played the video games. Bulma finds Goku living alone in the wilderness, finds out that he has a dragon ball, and convinces him to travel with her as a bodyguard so that she can collect all seven and summon the Dragon who will grant a single wish.

The film follows them up to the end of story arc with Pilaf. I’ve never figured out what Pilaf is supposed to be. Is he an Alien? A troll? Nobody seems to know. The film is slavishly loyal to the manga’s storyline, the only exceptions made being what the film makers apparently knew better than to try. There are no dinosaurs; the film makers replaced them with guys in robot suits. Sadly, Goku does not transform into Oozaru. Thankfully, very little of the nudity and crass sexual humor from the manga was included, though director Wang Yong appears as Master Roshi and does the “dirty old man” bit pretty well. As with "Korean Street Fighter," I was surprised by the sheer amount of wire work. There are some talented stunt performers (the guy who plays Yamcha does a Jackie Chan inspired stunt where he ducks underneath a car as it drives over him), who are more or less upstaged by bad special effects.

It's safe to say that director Wong Yong didn't know that much about making movies, or at least not good ones. The cinematography and mise-en-scene match their cheapness with garishness.

Watching anything that slavishly translates material from one medium to the other raises one of those irreducible questions that is always the hardest to explain. In this case, that question is, “why?” What is the purpose of retreading this particular story -- itself an imitation of centuries old literature, and a spastically referential one at that -- when one can experience it not only in its original form, but in video games and animation and even in other live action films? The obvious answer is that film and game studios wish to exploit it, but that doesn’t explain why the audience remains so willing to return to the same story.

Proverbs 26:11 comes to mind, and Dragon Ball, with its messy pan-Asian setting filled with bits and pieces of generic manga tropes and amalgamated references to other fragments of the greater pop-culture world, certainly fits the image. Maybe the reasons why so many keep asking for more is no more important than the reasons why film makers and game developers choose to exploit it. Dragon Ball’s enduring popularity seems inexplicable because it’s inexplicable. Korean Dragon Ball strikes me as a half-hearted attempt at cultural appropriation, to officially plant the Taekgukgi in the soil of Akira Toriyama’s never-never land. It isn’t terribly unlike certain American and European fans who, when arguing about the validity of the then upcoming DragonBall: Evolution, insisted that Goku not only could be played by a Caucasian actor, but that the character himself was an Aryan superman when in his "Super Saiyan" mode.

Dragon Ball, or Deulaegon Bol, I should say, is influenced by the same things that influenced Akira Toriyama’s original manga. In a sense they deserve each other. Korean Dragon Ball is a professional product that feels like a fan film based on a manga that itself seems too bizarre to have come from a professional author, much less one of the most internationally successful in his field. And after all that, I’m less sure than I’ve ever been of why I actually wanted to watch this movie, or why I care about Dragon Ball, or why anybody else does either.

Oolong's infamous wish: used panties.

Fantasy Title Generator Game

Lightwing23 and I have been friends for a little more than half of our lives, which is funny if one considers that we have (in his words) “the best love-hate relationship ever.” Our tête-à-tête doesn’t consist of one-upsmanship, always; but when it does, the passive-aggressiveness is never less than fun and never more than that either. And in that spirit, I’ve suggested that we collaborate, in a loose sense, between our blogs. This was the first thing that I wanted to do when I considered what might be feasible: The Fantasy Title Generator Game.

The Rules:
- You have 15 points.
- Words from tier one are one point; from tier two, two points; from tier three, three points. Proper names are tier four, and take up four points.
- “the,” “of,” "a," and “and” are all free words.
- You can use up to five points on a single title.
- You must use all fifteen points.
- You must write a short synopsis for the books you come up with

The Words:
Tier 4:
Any sort of proper name (i.e. Odin, Thor, Hogar, Conan, or anything you make up)

Tier 3:
God(s)
Queen
King
Lord
Dragon
Sword
Ring
Talisman

Tier 2:
Legend
Tale
Assassin
Wolf
Shadow
Fire
Ice
Mage
War
Thief
Lightning
Thunder
Blade
Fox
Curse
Valkyrie
Medusa
Knight
Wizard

Tier 1:
Gold (or golden)
Black
Moon
Lance
Blood
Divinity
Blood
Radiance (or Radiant)
Pool
Goblin
Invincible
Devil
Consort
Crown
Iron
Steel
Light
Song
Truth (or True)
Sacred
Virile
Wind
Stone
Dark
Power
Fact
Scimitar
Sun
Stars
Couch
Virago
White
Ruby
Jewel

My titles:

White Virago: Consort of the Virile Lance (-5)
In the land of Wrikania, the race of humans fought a bitter war with red scaled, tentacled Draakhen, leaving the population in danger of extinction. In the Wrikanian society, women are prized for their virility, but by the Draakhen for their alabaster skin. Etria is a powerful warrior-priestess, charged with the protection and procreation of the human race, who is forced into the harem of the Draakhen Lord, endangering her life, but also that of the Draakhen's supreme leader. In this Normanesque fantasy, Etria must escape from enemy territory clad only in the Draakhen's harem attire, which is practically nothing!

Adapted from the Sega Genesis game, WarSong (-3) tells the tale of Garret as he fights to regain his kingdom from an evil usurper. No random encounters!

Radiant Devil Fact (-3) tells the story of young Stenton, a printing agent who disagrees with the direction of publication in his country, controlled as it is by the religiously implemented government agency of materials, media and propaganda. He learns that the devils against whom he publishes tracts are in fact the true life blood of the world, and finds himself fighting with them for the sake of their philosophy of personal freedom and meritocracy. (Translated from Japanese.)

Nyasdofijasdokmnfoia (-4)
In this stunning evocation of Lovecraftian mythology told in Stephanie Meyer-esque prose, Rubia Weiss' move to Spoon, a lonely, rainy town in New England, brings her social life to screeching halt. But when she meets Timmy Nyas, a brooding student who glows in starlight and has the raw sexuality of James Dean and all the members of the all the boy bands of the nineties combined -- who also happens to be an exiled god from before recorded human history returned from his sojourn in space and just happens to be hanging out at the small town's high school picking up girls -- her whole world changes! Now unable to keep his elder god status a secret, Timmy must try to keep his beloved, much younger and less experienced and thoroughly chaste lover safe from Nyasdofijasdokmnfoia (pronounced Nie-ass-thbbbbbbbbbbth) the assassin of the gods.

That's it for my fifteen points. Expecting Lightwing23 to post his on his blog sometime soon.

This game was given to me via e-mail by an acquaintance of mine (who doesn't, to my knowledge, have a fanciful internet alias like the rest of us). You, reader, are welcome to play it too. In fact, you can either add or subtract a word before passing it on. I added "virago."

Fantasy by Warhol

This was inspired by Lightwing23's (referred to occasionally on this blog as Waffler) write up of the shamelessly derivative "Inheritance" novels. He's actually much nicer about them than I would be, but then, I've only read Eragon and found that to be more than enough. By contrast, Lightwing23 has read all three novels and is apparently willing to read the next one, assuming that Paolini can still get it published. Unfortunately, we already know that he can.

Actually, not all of the books whose covers I put on that image are terrible (Tolkien is certainly not terrible). What's terrifying is that even the worst of those books and series have devoted readers and die-hard admirers.

I've probably said more than needs to be said about tie-in novels, but the willingness of some genre fans to absorb the same crap in an endless cycle is never less than irksome. I mean, really, Terry Goodkind is a best seller? He's not even writing for a pre-existing fanbase. Unless you're counting Tolkien's. Or maybe Ayn Rand's.

This is probably one of the more obnoxious posts of late, even by the standards of this particular blog. I'll turn off photoshop and get back to playing Nightmare of Druaga.

Storm Warriors (The Pang Brothers, 2009)

When I was still a full time student, I had the luxury of acquainting myself with the considerable portion of my university’s student body which would openly admit to their abject nerdiness. I also was lucky enough to get to know various ex-patriot and exchange students who came from the Chinese speaking world. There was (and likely still is) a good deal of overlap between these two segments; plenty classmates of both origins regaled me of their opinions on Hong Kong movies and comic books and other Asian cultural imports that had made at least some headway into the United States.

One of those cultural imports was Ma Wing Shing’s "Storm Riders" comic book and Andrew Lau’s 1998 film adaptation. Early in my college experience, it became apparent that there wasn’t much parity between the American kids who were interested in Hong Kong film and the kids who actually hailed from the city and culture that created it. The Americans were usually into Jackie Chan, John Woo, and occasionally CAT III films, while the Chinese speaking students from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China liked to talk to me about the Young and Dangerous series, Stephen Chow comedies (Kung Fu Hustle had only just come out) and “arty” movies by Fruit Chan, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar Wai. They like Nicholas Tse and Daniel Wu, actors that some of the American HK movie fans couldn’t stand (honestly, though, I never met anybody in person who liked Edison Chen).

If agreement was ever reached on anything when these two segments interacted, it was Johnnie To and Andrew Lau's film, The Storm Riders. I’m not sure why everyone seemed to like this movie in college, but they did. Since Comics One was still in business back then, I was able to read a good portion of what was available in English, including translations of a “light novel” which narrated the early career of Nameless, an important character in the “Storm Riders” universe.

I preface this review of The Storm Warriors with this information because it is indeed pertinent, something that us amateur critics on the internet frequently forget, or otherwise ignore. I recall too, a media studies class in which we discussed critical and popular reaction to films, as well as the different ways films are received worldwide. Do the films change, or is it that viewers are different? The answer to that question is obvious, and I feel the need to point that out here, as that cultural disparity, however diminished you may believe it now is, clearly effects how people feel about The Storm Warriors.

As a movie itself, The Storm Warriors isn’t particularly good. It has literally no plot -- as in the classical sense of a cohesive flow of narrative events -- and the characters are two dimensional. When the trailers appeared online, I was annoyed by how much they looked like Zack Snyder’s 300, but the offending scenes are mercifully short, although directors Danny and Oxide Pang still overuse slow-mo. If comparable to anything, The Storm Warriors parallels the recent direct to DVD animated movies aimed at specific niche audiences, like the DragonLance: Dragons of Autumn and Twilight or Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. Where it diverges is in its huge budget and cast of respected or at least popular stars. Otherwise, The Storm Warriors is clearly meant to appeal to fans of the "Storm Riders" comics and will be impenetrable to others.

Fans of the Storm Riders comic books, of course, aren’t going to be all that concerned about Cloud and Wind’s character development, or need an explanation of whom Nameless and Lord Godless are. They’re already quite familiar with these and other details. The Storm Warriors’ only redeeming aspect, and possibly the only concern of its directors, are its visuals. The visuals don’t redeem the movie to the point that one might call it good, but, in as much as the digitally crafted sets don’t call undue attention to themselves in their ubiquity, are comparatively admirable.

Asian critics (admittedly less so than audiences) found the movie passable, if not enjoyable. Westerners did not. In at least a couple instances, comments flew between reader and reviewer over whether or not the reviewer failed to get the appeal of The Storm Warriors because he or she wasn’t Asian. While I don’t pretend to know the mindset of the people who posted those statements, I feel that explicating and expounding upon them is my right. Of course you don’t have to be racially Asian to “get” a movie such as the one in question, just as you don’t have to be a fifteen year old girl to “get” Twilight or ethnically English to “get” Sherlock Holmes. It does help, though. And if you're not, having some understanding of where such stories are coming from and to whom they are directed helps too.

Ma Wing Shing’s audience, as best as I can tell, is largely comprised of young boys, and has been for decades.To a thirteen-year-old boy, a character like Cloud's brooding and flashy appearance are both an appeal and an idealization of an adolescent sense of masculinity. To an audience that has grown up with Wind and Cloud, for whom their brooding and flowy hair and cartoonishly designed swords are more than over-ornamentation, The Storm Warriors probably curries a degree of favor that it won’t from people who are familiar with them only through the 1998 film. This goes especially for those who only liked the 1998 film because it proved that Hong Kong cinema wasn’t completely dead after the ’97 handover.

Furthermore, The Storm Warriors exemplifies the part of the wuxia tradition least exposed to the west. When most Westerners think of martial arts movies (regardless of classifications like wuxia or chambara) they think of Bruce Lee. But well before Bruce Lee there was Buddha’s Palm and Temple of the Red Lotus, not to mention literary characters like Nezha or Sun Wukong. Complaints about the lack of authentic martial arts ignore the authenticity of storytelling and film. The Storm Warriors is nothing if not a distinctly Hong Kong film in terms of genre.

None of these things ameliorate those faults that other critics found with the film. Their responses remain valid. But I have read so much positive reaction to The Storm Warriors coming from people who would have grown up with it or at least with things similar to it and yet so much dismissal and even resentment from those who have not that the difference cannot be ignored. True art often transcends cultural boundaries. The Storm Warriors at least reminds us that not all foreign films are true art, and that the world is still not flat. It might be wise for some people to keep that in mind when they take an unambitious foreign film to task for not catering to their tastes.

Good Taste Exists Without My Consent

I wasn't going to direct your attention to this, as it's actually kind of a dick thing to do, but the person who reposted this sterling example of word-vomit decided to completely miss the point of Cormac McCarthy.

"His writing is worthless and an insult to everyone who writes." eh?

The person who wrote that about McCarthy decided to republish an article with the following sentences:

"Where else could we have found such art? Movies? Well, the Americans of my day didn't have Miyazaki's stuff on file, so that was out."

"I can imagine it now. Hordes of plump and skinny losers of all races, howling like mad, whacking the chained unbelievers on their way to the Gulag of the Cool with their FF VI cartridges, while a grinning 'ice teeth' Hironobu Sakaguchi – Mao Suit, liberation cap – waves to them from the castle walls."

"...that man was our libertine, our Byron." ( Yes, he's still talking about Final Fantasy 6)

"The saddest thing is that we still don't have the vocabulary – nay, the poetry – to celebrate Final Fantasy VI properly." (emphasis mine, lols)

"The War of the Magi has never really stopped and Final Fantasy VI will no doubt continue its unseen jihad, unnoticed and unheard until our blessed day of reckoning. When the silly works of today will be nothing more than a footnote in the Final Fantasy-era of art history."

Are you embarrassed too, random blog reader, for the sake of the person who authored those statements? How about the person who thought it was good enough to share with a wider audience and compares favorably to Cormac McCarthy? What was that labored description of a totalitarian-nerd Tienanmen square supposed to even mean?

I still love hg101. It continues to be one of two game related websites I regularly check, and this inconsequential article couldn't change that. Nevertheless, the editors might help themselves by not straying too far afield of subjects they actually understand. There be dragons and cool people and bloggers for whom purple prose is a humorous exercise in those places unknown.

Best VG Novelization Ever -- Eat that David Gaider!

Marketing perversity reaches new levels of silliness.

Actually, the new Dante's Inferno game has been bringing out all sorts of stupid. I recall seeing somebody on IMDb's Video Game board refer to The Divine Comedy as "Christian propaganda," which makes one wonder when something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be labeled "naturalist propaganda" or if such a person would refer to Shakespeare's histories as "Tudor propaganda" under the impression that it's a relevant or unique observation.

The translation that's being used for this printing of The Inferno deserves much better than the fugly video game screenshot plastered on its cover. Since I don't own an Xbox 360 or a PS3, I won't be playing the Dante's Inferno game, which is probably for the best since it looks (honestly) hopelessly mediocre. Desecrating important literature that the developers and their audience probably don't understand is just an added bonus of being Electronic Arts, I suppose.

It'll provide plenty of opportunities for video gamers to show their intellectual and literary muscle on GameFAQs and IMDb's Video Game board, though. Oh, how I cannot wait.

I Dreamed a Dream of a World without Stupid Terminology Pertaining to Video Games

There's a NeoGAF discussion thread (that I found via the Hardcore Gaming 101 forum) wherein a bunch of gamers prattle on in pretend-intellectual speak about the words gamers use to define themselves and each other. I used to edit student essays for a college freshmen rhetoric class, so the tone of this discussion became terribly familiar less than half-way into the original post. But there's something admirable in much of what they say, even if some of the forum-goers aren't as capable of expressing it as others.

It does beg the question of what sort of "gamer" I might call myself. I hate the arbitrary term "hardcore," for all sorts of reasons, the least of which is that it doesn't denote anything concrete. The "esoteric gamer," the terminology proffered by the original poster in that thread, is even worse. Games are already esoteric to those who don't play them, and certain genres of games are obtuse to gamers who don't like them. The word casual now refers to people who play very simple games or buy non-game console software, like Wii Fit. I used to think of "casual" as a reference to people who play lots of Madden NFL 2Kwhatev, Halo, or some other simplified genre excursion. Those people are now referred to as "hardcore" by much of the gaming press, which I suppose is now comprised of little more than Game Informer, 1up, Kotaku and a billion amateur bloggers and forumites and youtube users.

But I also have to admit that I don't call myself a "gamer." Video games aren't my foremost hobby; I spend more time reading and watching movies than I do playing games. But even if video games took up more of my time (and I have been playing them more often, of late) I wouldn't want to personally identify myself with them. I wouldn't want to attach to my identity the title of "gamer." I've seen users on various forums and websites wondering why social networking sites have sections for favorite movies and books, but not video games. I never wondered that.

The matter of self-identification could easily solve itself. You're a "gamer" if you identify yourself as one. But that puts me in an untenable position, as I don't want to ascribe myself that kind of nomenclature, but I probably play more games than most non-nerdy people and know more about game history than the average Xbox Live loudmouth. The games that interest me are usually RPGs. I like dungeon crawlers and silly JRPGs with overly flashy graphics. I love Japanese developer Falcom, whom I make reference (and jokes) to pretty regularly on this blog. I'm also interested in arcade beat-em-ups, Koei/Omega Force games based on Chinese and Japanese history, and games from China and South Korea. I'm starting to think I'll give anything done by Vanillaware a shot.

My tastes are weird, and the games that I like are easily identified as games. I'm a firm opponent of the idea that games are art. (Not that they can't be, but that they aren't, generally) Am I a self-loathing gamer?

I think I've taken shots at Jeremy Parish, Christian Nutt, and Tim Rogers at some point or other on this blog. But really, I think that what they want out of games is more or less similar to what I want. I'll never agree with some of what Rogers puts on actionbutton.net, but I'm fairly (i.e. completely) certain he knows more about game design and the industry than I do.** I'll never agree with Nutt or Parish on some issues either, but the more I read of what they have to say, the less I think we're so different in what we like about video games. Yes, we all want a game that controls well and has fun/workable gameplay mechanics. But I think we're looking for some sort of human warmth as well. For me, that's Falcom's appeal, same for Troika -- even Blizzard at one point. I don't need a brilliant story out of Ys 7 or Temple of Elemental Evil. And I won't get them either. But those games feel as though they were made by people. People I might like.

There's probably a lot of people who feel that way about Valve, or the long defunct Looking Glass, or Treasure. Or at least, something like it.

Video games are made by people who have idiosyncrasies and personalities. I like seeing the evidence of this. Whatever title the game journalists, forum goers and other pedants and didacts would like to assign to this, I'll be happy to take it.

**Please Note: Rogers' site's design makes my eyes shout their safe word. If your eyes don't have a safe word, you should probably sit down and devise one before entering actionbutton.net.

Nerdy; not a nerd: An Extemporaneous Guide Telling You Things You Already Knew

In the past, I’ve been given more than what I think should be my share of insulting compliments, usually starting with “you remind me of…” and ending with something like “…my brother” or something worse. Usually, this comes from women, thus I cannot tell if they actually mean it or are trying to turn me down in such an obnoxious way that I’m glad to be rid of them. That sounds paranoid, but I’ve as many reasons to believe as to not.

I thought I heard a new insulting compliment the other day, coming from a classmate who told me that for all my nerdy obsessions, my demeanor was distinctly non-nerd. I write a blog dedicated to my enjoyment of kung fu movies, fantasy novels, and RPGs/video games; I thought that she just was dicking with me, until I realized the company that I keep at my university. For your reference: the first day of class, another guy sat next to me, and immediately started talking about his home made arcade unit (a PC in an arcade cabinet running MAME) without any sort of introduction or anything to indicate that he had any reason to start talking to me about his own unique brand of nerd shit.

I don’t claim to have come up with the idea of being nerdy without being a nerd, or post-nerd, or post-geek (ugh) or nerd-cool. But I do know that to some degree, I have attained enough of whatever that is for somebody of the opposite sex to comment on it in what I don’t think was an intentionally insulting way.

Now would be the fortuitous time to proffer a guide to being a nerd or a geek or what have you, not just because somebody acknowledged that I am one without seeming like it, but because the pursuit of what was once considered nerdy has become a part of the mainstream. Frat boys who never heard of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament play Halo; the academy recognized Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations; everybody blogs and twitters and brags about their gadgety, gimmicky cell phones. The trick to being a nerd in such an environment is to constantly appear to know more than everyone else, both what came before and what is on the horizon. The trick to not appearing like a nerd and a tool is to know what to talk about (and when to stop talking) with people who have only a cursory knowledge of stuff like video games and fantasy literature.

Unfortunately, I have no ability in the writing such things. I can offer basic advice: keep the video-game/franchised t-shirts to a minimum. Shower. Don’t talk about anime. (No, not even Satoshi Kon or Mamoru Oshii) There is never a good reason to vociferously defend the AD&D 2.5 rule set. Ever.

If you have to be seen reading science fiction or fantasy, do us all a favor and spare us the ugly-ass cover art from your licensed, video-game franchise novels. If you’re too illiterate to read literate SF/Fantasy, at least read an old paperback and pretend you’re doing so out of irony. Don’t read Gor, no irony exists there.

I don’t know if it was a regional misconception, but by-and-large, people I knew in high school thought that the appreciation of video games and Japanese cartoons and other nerdy crap denoted a person of minimal athletic and social ability who (assuming he or she wasn’t a devil worshiper or a lesbian) was quite smart. That wasn’t true then, and it still isn’t now. In my experience, it’s the least intelligent people of like interests that tend to be the most insular, if not the most socially retarded. The “cool geeks” and the more acceptable nerds generally included people who displayed actual intelligence as opposed to worthless knowledge of arcane trivia.

But don’t these things go without saying? I recall joking a few weeks ago among friends that although we included female friends and girlfriends and fiancés in our nerdy conversations, we could easily expel them by bringing up something of uber-nerdiness. I offered Nihon Falcom RPGs as an example, and immediately lost the attention of the lone female member of our conversation. Call it Pigsy’s Law: Falcom repels women IRL. That went without saying as well, but I had fun saying it.

That might be the real secret. It’s really all about not being a pedantic asshole.

IGNorance

IGN.com never provided worthwhile original content, but the site’s visitors never really demanded it. Or at least I don’t think they did, because they have a huge number of visitors and staff for each console, yet so little that’s actually worth reading.

So I knew that Michael Thomsen’s “Citizen Prime: Is Metroid Prime Our Citizen Kane?” would probably leave me in a fit of giggles and self-loathing snobbery. Upon finishing it, the latter was unexpectedly the dominant emotion. I don’t like looking down on people for what they enjoy, or their reasons for enjoying it. What Thomsen writes, however, is so lacking in self-awareness and humility, yet so discordantly earnest, that I want to pretend that he didn’t really annoy me as much as he did. But the more I think about it, the more it irritates me.

If I understand correctly, his argument is that Metroid Prime holds a position in the canon of video games similar to that of Citizen Kane in canon of film, because Metroid Prime utilizes the elements of gameplay to create narrative and thematic cohesion. I’ll let Mr. Thomsen speak for himself:

"In the same way that Citizen Kane harnessed every technical component in film to express its post-mortem reassembly of an irrepressible and heartbroken man, Metroid Prime uses all of its technology to recreate the experience of a woman abandoned on an alien world inhabited by the ghosts of its prelapsarian inhabitants."

Destructoid.com already declared this “one of the single silliest statements you’ll ever read.” (Questionable grammar, but understandable sentiment) I don’t know that it’s in any way arguable that Metroid Prime doesn’t utilize all available methods to immerse its players. But that isn’t really the issue. The real issue is whether or not the mastery of cinematic technique is really the reason why Citizen Kane is Citizen Kane. Apparently realizing this, Thomsen is quick to add:

“The great achievements in any creative medium have always been rooted in empathy, often where it's least expected (e.g. King Lear, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Lolita, The Godfather).”

But Citizen Kane isn’t great because the viewer might feel empathy for Charles Foster Kane. Neither does empathy define the greatness of “King Lear,” and certainly not Lolita (at least, not Nabokov’s Lolita). The directorial and cinematographic methods of Citizen Kane develop the narrative's themes; they weren't designed solely to evoke empathy. And any empathy for Humbert Humbert is of the reader’s own creation; I remain fairly certain that Nabokov, by the end of his novel, did not want for his readers to feel sorry for, much less like a man who sexually preyed upon a twelve-year-old girl. (I fear to read what Thomsen might have interpreted Lolita to be, if his ludicrous conflation of Nabokov’s fiction with the rape-simulator RapeLay is anything to go by.) Martin Amis described Lolita as a novel about tyranny, from the tyrant’s perspective. He’s right: Lolita is not a romance classic, and wasn’t intended as such.

So what is it about Citizen Kane and Lolita and “King Lear” that makes them so important? What doesn’t? Each engages not just hearts and minds, but the soul. Each possesses that ineffable quality that makes us aware that such qualities exist in us. Such works that exist in the canon of worthy human endeavors not only remind us of the mysteries of what it is to exist, but hopefully, cause us to ponder them. They are technically proficient, as any logical critic can see. But other films are technically proficient, as are other novels and plays. Knowing when something is truly great is not a matter of logic, but intuition.

A few decades of hindsight helps too.

Does Metroid Prime really do for the soul what Citizen Kane does? Not for me. The few things that Thomsen claims about the game’s intrinsic worth as a work of art are that it evokes empathy through masterful command of the medium’s formal elements; that the story is told through various visual touches (which aren’t a unique formal element of video games); that the game constantly reminds the player of the role he or she is playing. These, along with some similarities between their respective production processes, are what make Metroid Prime the gamer’s Citizen Kane, according to Thomsen. A generous person could describe such a connection as tenuous, but a person who takes money for his thoughts ought to know better than to so forthrightly state something tenuous not only on a game website, but to ABC News.

Thomsen is serious, though. He takes pains to defend himself from his critics. He’s written follow-up posts on his blog. The reactions from the online peanut-gallery range derisive ad-hominem and incredulous, occasionally profane rebuttals. The consensus is that Mr. Thomsen is either a faux-intellectual or a hipster-douche.

He is one, but not the other. To be a hipster, Thomsen would have to be part of an in-crowd, and he is not. He desperately wishes he were which is why he is trying so hard to defend his segment/editorial. In fact, the question, “what is the Citizen Kane of video games?” is founded in this insecurity of so many video game journalists and fans. Not content to enjoy games for what they are, these people wish for others to acknowledge games as a legitimate form of entertainment, as if that would somehow make it so. Thomsen and his ilk don’t seem to realize that such comparisons only work by minimizing the accomplishments of auteurs like Orson Welles (in this case, by saying that it’s greatness lies in editing and cinematography that create empathy for its central character). In actuality, it only makes video games appear worse for comparison.

Thomsen states the following at the start of his essay:
“Writing about videogames is a strange vocation and not one I had imagined for myself five years ago. There's a well-established tradition of writing for game fans, but I always struggle to justify why everyone else should care. Why does my friend the high school teacher need to worry about Space Pirates? Does my mother, a retired oncology nurse, really need to know the differences between an Ice Beam and a Plasma Beam?”

Basically, Michael Thomsen is insecure; his entire article testifies to this. The florid prose -- “eerie parallels” and “vibrant arrays” abound, and he ascribes Metroid Prime the title of “Odyssey of traversal” which is just redundantly repetitious -- and the vehemently (sophomoric) academic tone of his essay not only remind his readers of his insecurities, they make him look pompous (hence the hipster accusation). That approach won’t make anybody care about video games. In fact, it seems that competitive multiplayer is what attracts people to games, or intuitive, fun control schemes, if the success of the Xbox 360 and Wii are anything to go by.

If it could actually do any good, I’d tell him that his mother doesn’t need to know that the Ice Beam freezes enemies, but the Plasma Beam does more damage. So he shouldn’t worry about it. Chances are, his mom doesn’t need to know about forced perspective, deep focus, or the influence of German Expressionism in Citizen Kane either. But deeply rooted fears over the legitimacy of one’s favored past time are not easily abated.

Games are just games. Acceptance. Let it set ye free.

And don’t forget: you can’t spell ignorance without IGN.

The Legend of the Generic Title

Localization isn't easy. I think that everybody can at least agree on that. Nobody ever agrees on how mainstream appeal and fan service should be balanced, though lately, the situation has improved. Remember the early days of DVD and Dimension's releases of various Jackie Chan and Jet Li classics? It's easy to forget that only a decade ago, nobody could expect original language/subtitles or an uncut version of a Hong Kong film on DVD. But even now, distributors screw up in really weird ways, particularly when they try to market these films. Knowing that most customers at brick-and-mortar stores probably won't buy a Tang Dynasty retelling of Hamlet with a bunch of foreign people doing fancy, flighty kung fu, it should surprise nobody that The Weinstein Company's subsidiary, Dragon Dynasty, tried to make Feng Xiaogang's clunky Oscar-bait, The Banquet, seem like a more conventional wuxia/fantastic martial arts film.
But did they really have to give it a title reminiscent of the most uncreative kind of pulpy fantasy?

Not to pick on it too much, but "Legend of the Black Scorpion" combines the three words nobody with any taste ever wants to see in sequence. "Legend," in spite of the logical evidence to the contrary, is actually an anagram for cheese. You have no reason to complain about a cheesy movie if it's known as "Legend of the..." because it tells you what you're getting right in the title. Another problem: "Black Scorpion." That wouldn't be so bad, were it not preceded by "Legend of the," which makes everything sound worse. If I saw a movie which said "Deathhammer Valkyrie Bikini Vixens" and picked it up only to find "Legend of the..." in tiny script, my estimation would rapidly diminish.

Also, the black scorpions really aren't a particularly large plot point in The Banquet, and it really isn't a giant cheese fest. I understand that a good portion of the audience that Dragon Dynasty caters to wouldn't be interested in a period drama that takes its cues from Shakespeare. But still, that's one damn goofy title.
Dragon Dynasty isn't the only the distributor to make that mistake. New Line Cinema actually helped produced Kim Young-Jun's 2005 wuxia film, Shadowless Sword, which received fairly good coverage from fans who were reminded of the fun that early nineties Hong Kong used to offer. Now, Shadowless Sword sounds plenty evocative to me, but somebody at New Line decided that "Legend of the..." simply made it better. I still think it sucks.

This practice of simply dropping "The Legend of..." before an adjetive and a noun began with Dimension's release of Swordsman 2 as "Legend of the Flying Swordsman," for which there are actual, justifiable reasons. The same cannot be said of Sony's retitling of Corey Yuen/Wong Jing's weird unofficial adaptation of the "Lone Wolf and Cub" manga, New Legend of Shaolin. The original title sounds generic enough, but Sony's new title makes it sound like what a bunch of marketing shills have mistaken for a generic kung fu movie title. That's worse -- I'm sure of it.

Not every martial arts movie receives the lazy designation as a legend of whatever. Equally popular in the days of Dimension Home Video releases were titles that went "The __________" -- you can insert your own tough and/or cool sounding word. The most annoying was "The Legend" because it has "Legend" in the title, and the film it was applied to, Jet Li's comedy kung-fu vehicle Fong Sai-Yuk, deserved a more interesting title. In a fit of sheer ridiculousness, when Dragon Dynasty re-released it, they did so under the title, "The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk." Bleaaoashdoaghdfhahaghagh.


Ugh. The worst of these actually came in the form of "The Enforcer." The dubbed, cut version of another Corey Yuen/Jet Li collaboration (Wong Jing was involved too), My Father is a Hero, Dragon Dynasty actually offended many fans when they re-released the Dimension DVD almost completely unchanged, without any audio options or even substantial bonus content. Now, if you'll notice, "The Enforcer" doesn't sound anything like My Father is a Hero, and while the intended title is damnably cheesy, "The Enforcer" just doesn't say anything at all.

Not to pick too much on Dragon Dynasty, but their recent release of the big-budget period epic, Battle of Wits, received one of the worst re-titles of the bunch. Aside from not being a martial arts film, Jacob Cheung's Warring States era drama highlights the battles not only of armies and strategists, but of the era's prevailing philosophies. What did Dragon Dynasty choose to call it?
Yes, making your movie sound stupid will really help sales there. So, a battle of warriors? I'm glad you guys cleared that up. I might have thought I was watching a battle of intellectuals, or a battle of actors, or a battle of underpaid People's Liberation Army in costume. Also, thank you for reminding us that a guy who choreographed stunts and fight scenes for one hit movie, also worked on this one, even though his input clearly wasn't a driving creative force. Awesome work, guys.

Dragon Dynasty looks like its going under. Bey Logan stepped down from his position within The Weinstein Company (DD was his project) just a few days ago. Let's wish them good luck in the future, and shed a quick tear for all the movies that they didn't have a chance to release, and then package in a totally silly or intentionally misleading fashion. No matter what, the fantastic visual quality, bonus features, and erudite commentary that often accompanied their releases will be missed.

Finally, if anything annoys me about kung fu movies, its the title "Faster Blades, Poisonous Darts." I don't know when this title first came into being, but it's used on all sorts of movies. IMDb is still confused to this day whether "Faster Blades, Poisonous Darts" is the Cheung Pang-Yi film, Lone Ninja Warrior (and this one has a billion other informal and bootleg titles) or the Chu Liu-Xiang film starring Adam Cheng, Night Orchid (which is also known as Demon Fighter, etc). Granted, the incompetence of IMDb's staff and users will one day be immortalized in song, in the great halls of nerd-Valhalla. I understand there will be Mountain Dew.

I could go on; I could tell stories of bootlegs with titles like "Chessboxing Matrix" and "Thugs, Hoes and Scrillah," but there's no need. For all of its problems, many of us love this genre. But the hobby would be more fun without the stupid re-titles.

Kakuto Chojin -- Game Review

Kakuto Chojin didn’t get a fair shake from the video game press when it came out. It doesn’t come close to being the game that its developer, Dream Publishing, obviously wanted it to be. In fact, rumors persist that the game shipped more or less unfinished, and that it started as a tech demo to showcase the Xbox’s impressive graphical capabilities didn’t much allay that suspicion. The actual reviews are far more forgettable than the actual game, but one of the common complaints was that the game was simplistic. According to the websites that still have their old reviews of the game available, Kakuto Chojin is simplistic, derivative and boring; they usually compare it to Tekken -- the first Tekken. It's understandable if you look at the cover art.

It means little now to say that they by-and-large misunderstood the game. The really impressive combos require split-second timing (literally, they are frame specific, and the game runs at 60 fps) and generally accomplished through juggling. There are two methods of playing each character, the second being unlocked after completing the character’s story mode, which means another set of combos. Rather than being too simplistic, it is brilliantly simple, rewarding the skillful use of a few moves rather than including tons of moves to keep button mashers happy. It is the same approach of that many of Dream Publishing’s members used for the development of Tobal No. 1 and Tobal 2, when they were known as Dream Factory.

In fact, they would return to that name, developing various games based on anime and manga for the PS2 and a couple of UFC games for the Xbox. But Dream Factory is no longer a fanboy darling as they had been when “GameFan” trumpeted the virtues of Tobal 2 for months, and then lamented the lack of any publisher interest in the US. The landscape of gaming has changed much too, with a recent resurgence of interest in fighting games led not by the 3D gameplay of Tekken and Virtua Fighter, but tried and true 2D seen in Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue. Microsoft’s sharing a larger part of the console market actually coincides with console gamers’ new found appreciation for Western developed shooters and sports games and such. So why is it, when nobody is interested in such a game as Kakuto Chojin, that I cared enough to spend twenty dollars for used copy of it?

It’s because the Muslims don’t want us to play it.

Well, that and other stuff. Kakuto Chojin perfectly captures everything that is the early Xbox game library, in that it practically screams “we don’t know how to appeal to this market!” Its characters look like plastic (oily plastic, in this case) and the environments sport all sorts of now commonplace effects like lens flare, real-time shadows, and colored lighting effects as though they were the most interesting thing anybody had ever thought of putting in a video game. Furthermore, the actual aesthetics reek of trying-too-hard, as every attempt is made to make essentially rote character designs and environment seem “edgy.” The Bruce Lee clone looks emaciated, the Muay Thai fighter is a heavily tattooed Somali, and the American street fighter looks very much like a pink-haired Brad Pitt from Fight Club. Microsoft clearly wanted the game to appeal to the same players that liked games like Tekken and Dead or Alive, and Dream Factory’s usual style of anime style character designs probably didn’t seem fitting on the Xbox, which at the time already had a weird mix of platform games featuring mascot-characters, action RPGs developed from PC franchises or tabletop gaming, sports games, and shooters.

Just looking at Azurik should illustrate how strange the Xbox was for its first years. While you’re at it, look at Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Dead or Alive 3, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Halo, and Nightcaster. Microsoft either published almost all of those titles, or they were exclusive to Microsoft’s platform. Obviously, Kakuto Chojin belongs with Blinx and Azurik and Nightcaster as a game that exudes the stench of Microsoft’s desperation to bait the previously Nippon-centric console audience into playing with American toys.

Looking at Kakuto Chojin with the unfair authority of hindsight makes it even funnier. I popped it in after I bought it and looked at the character select screen, and saw that there was a Norwegian Tae Kwon-Do fighter, named Vegard. My brother, who was as amused by the ridiculous character designs as I was, thought that he was named Varg, which caused even more laughter as we now thought of a buff, anime helmet wearing, blue tattooed Tae Kwon-Do fighter as representing Varg Vikernes. I found out that I could actually play quite well with him, of which my brother observed “the CPU’s not having much luck against Varg.” To which I replied, “That’s because Varg’s opponents have nowhere to pray after he burnt down their churches.”

Another exchange: “Hey, what’re those pouches on Varg’s belt for?”

“Oh, probably material for arson, knives, pens that drip with the blood of Christian enemies. The usual.”

Much enjoyment was had by all until I fought against Asad, the previously mentioned Somali Muay Thai fighter. Varg was apparently so busy being a TR00 KVLT WARRIOR and burning down churches that he forgot all about Asad’s mosque, because Asad pretty much owned Varg’s face. And this is where the most amusing part of Kakuto Chojin’s history becomes relevant.

As many of you know, fighting games typically feature theme music for either the characters or the levels. Kakuto Chojin’s theme music for Asad, who is identified as a Somali and makes references to God in his pre-match speech, utilizes passages from the Quran that aren’t meant to be used lightly. In the defense of Dream Factory and whoever it was that wrote the music, it’s actually a pretty cool track. Nevertheless, it apparently caused the government of Saudi Arabia to protest, and the game was recalled, never reissued, and more or less stricken from Microsoft’s software release records.

I don’t intend rant about this issue. On the one hand, I might find it worthwhile to remind Muslims that many of us tread lightly around their culture out of courtesy, not obligation. On the other, Dream Factory should have known better, and Microsoft too.

But I’d like to finish this review smiling, not angrily pounding my keyboard. Thus I point out the silliness of the video game industry, and especially that of Kakuto Chojin. Has anything really changed for the game industry and the nerd-culture that surrounds it? Admittedly, certain elements are different -- there are far fewer ‘tude filled mascots than even the last console generation -- but the difficult questions of where games overlap with politics and religion and when such things become relevant to gaming persist. Recently, a game called Shadow Complex has renewed such a discussion over at Gamasutra. Frankly, I can’t believe anybody actually manages to take games seriously when the most polarizing issue gamers are dealing with is Orson Scott Card and his unfettered homophobia that said game has little to do with.