The box was surprisingly well designed for a game that sold buggery squat copies.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently the world will end on 21^st December 2012. Then again, they said the same about the year 2000, and look how that turned out (clue: we’re still alive). Will people never learn? But all this talk about humanity’s impending and certain doom reminded me of one of my favourite games from my formative years: Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy. OK, maybe favourite is too strong a word, but it’s a game to which, despite questionable quality, I keep returning.

Released in the halcyon days of 1998, OLaD proudly declared itself a “realtime adventure game”. I’m still entirely sure what Interplay and developer Tribal Dreams meant by that. The game does feature a time limit, albeit a rather loose and ill-defined one. And there is an element of collecting and combining objects, but not in the traditional SCUMM sense. Perhaps “realtime adventure game” was the only way they could describe the game without sounding like complete nutters.

You see, OLaD is a strange game. You wake up in front of a demented jack-in-the-box, and listen as an unseen court declares the coming apocalypse and charges you with stopping it. A coloured light then flashes, and a pleasant tour guide voice instructs you to find the room displayed on the side of the box. And that really is just the beginning.

A platform takes you down to a street in the Village of the Damned (not that one). Where the Village is exactly, we’re never told. It could be a kind of purgatory. Or not. The only thing that matters is that the Village exists, along with its bizarre architecture. The visuals of OLaD were designed by artist Gil Bruvel, who infuses the game with a playful uneasiness. Imagine if H. R. Giger designed Disneyland, and you might have an idea of what OLaD looks like. Everything’s chunky, colourful and familiar, but there’s always something not quite right.

Movement is OlaD is similar to that of Myst: every location has a number of paths and doors coming off it, and clicking on these will propel you forward to adjacent locations. Once you’ve clicked your way to whichever location you were told to find, you discover that it is an “apocalyptic device room”. There are seven of these throughout the game, each one representing a different global catastrophe, from famine to war. Voices describe how these events could occur, and clicking on the devices themselves has the tour guide voice recite a prophecy pertaining to that event.

In the room are three artefacts, small objects such as a necklace or a dagger. Soon you are joined by three apparitions, who resemble floating deathmasks. The artefacts and the apparitions are linked, and, along with coloured orbs you find dotted around the village, they form the crux of OLaD‘s gameplay. Each artefact belongs to an apparition; each apparition corresponds to a colour; and each apparition is guilty of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s your job to steal the artefacts, take them to the correct sin room and use the orbs to flash the correct colour, thus redeeming the apparition.

And a very important job it is too. The more apparitions enter the village, the closer the apocalypse gets. The apparitions are being sent by Gar Hob, Dark Lord of the Seventh Millenium, who is hellbent on destroying the world and commencing his thousand year reign of darkness. To this end, Hob has kidnapped Angel Gemini (pronounced “Gemeenee”, apparently), a stripper who gathered a cult following preaching the end of days. As you wander the village, television screen will occasionally materialise in front of you, depicting a war of words as Hob and Gemini debate the future of humanity.

But back to the apparitions. They aren’t just random masks; each one represents a figure from the past (some real, some fictional) whose life was a masterclass in one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example, Xuanchiquel was the caretaker of a Mayan temple who would steal and eat the offerings left for the gods. When the High Priest found out, he left an especially delicious meal laced with baking soda. Xuanchiquel ate the meal and promptly exploded. That would be Gluttony, I guess.

As that little anecdote can attest, OLaD is full of humour, mostly of the dry variety. A lot of it comes from the unseen court, which applies the rigid and officious nature of legal proceedings to the chaos of Armageddon. But it’s in the architecture, too. The Sin Rooms, for instance, represent their respective vices in playful ways. Pride is a spotlit microphone in an empty theatre, while Greed is an all but empty vault protected by a network of laser tripwires. And James Woods (yes, that James Woods) lends Gar Hob a dry cynicism that clashes with Lolita Davidovich’s more preachy Angel Gemini.

I realise I’ve spent a great deal of time explaining what goes on in OLaD without really describing it. That’s because you need a blow by blow account of the first few minutes of the game to truly get a grip on just how odd it is. But odd does not necessarily equal good, and OlaD is the poster child for this. For all its visual splendour and rich pseudo-historical backstory, OLaD‘s gameplay is somewhat lacking.

Take the point-and-click navigation. It was fine in Myst, but that was 1993. OLaD was released in 1998, a time when great strides were being made in FPSs such as System Shock 2 and the Thief games. What worked for Myst just seems antiquated here. It also doesn’t help in the games more intense moments. Late in the proceedings you need to run from a series of powerful apparitions in order to lure them to the room in which you can redeem them. The problem is, the game can be picky about where on the screen you must click to advance, which can result in frustrating, and to be perfectly honest, unfair game overs.

Redeeming apparitions does get a little repetitive. The first three levels have you trotting off to the same rooms redeeming the same apparitions. The third level adds in a handful of new apparitions and rooms, but these do little to eliminate the growing tedium. The fourth and final level sees a change of pace with a puzzle disguised as a boss battle, but it’s just a standard “object X is next to object Y, but before object Z” affair. Not quite as climactic as the developers probably thought.

All of this might explain why OlaD didn’t sell. The adventure game was dying a slow death in 1998, and I imagine the bizarre art design put more than a few people off. Even so, I’m still surprised that I have never met a single person who has even heard pf the game. In fact, until I saw a couple of copies going on eBay, I was convinced I owned the only copy of OlaD in existence.

It’s a real shame, because Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy is truly a unique experience. Despite what Tribal Dreams might have had in mind, OLaD isn’t a “realtime adventure game”; it’s an interactive fever dream. You emerge into the Village, wander around, stare in wonder at the architecture, get accosted by floating masks, and become seriously creeped out. The game isn’t about collecting orbs or finding secret rooms. Like Killer7, it’s about telling yourself that it can’t get any stranger, then turning corner and discovering that you couldn’t have been more wrong.

Dir: Andre Ovredal, 2010

Accepted wisdom dictates that the visual effects driven blockbuster is the sole domain of Hollywood and its giant piles of money. Recent years, however, have seen various countries encroaching on Hollywood’s territory. Korea had the surprisingly intelligent The Host; Russia gave us the narratively incomprehensible but visually stunning Night Watch; and now Norway has joined the revolution with Troll Hunter.

Using the template pioneered by The Blair Witch Project, the film follows three journalism students on the trail of Hans, who they think is a bear poacher. It turns out (as I’m sure you’ve guessed) that Hans is, in fact, a troll hunter. A government sanctioned troll hunter tasked with keeping the pesky critters away from the public.

Writer/director André Øvredal takes great delight on playing with and subverting the dense Nordic folklore concerning trolls. His often live under bridges, but won’t challenge you to an eating contest (an apparent staple of Scandinavian folktales). Their fatal weakness to sunlight is given a scientific explanation, while their ability to smell the blood of a Christian becomes something of a running gag (as is its implications for other faiths).

This playfulness accompanies a wry sense of humour, embodied by Hans himself, played by Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen. Jespersen imbues Hans with cynicism and world-weariness. At one point one of the students calls him a hero, but he is no Sigmund. Instead, Hans reminded me of Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: he is little more than a bureaucrat, a civil servant who occasionally fights trolls.

Troll Hunter isn’t all laughs, though. When the trolls turn up, we’re treated to some of the best action scenes you’ll see this year. The trolls themselves are brilliantly realised. They are by turns grotesque and pitiful (the film shows a surprising fondness for the trolls, despite their status as mindless movie monsters). Despite the film’s obvious budget constraints, the CGI is very impressive. This is due in part to the mockumentary-style cinematography; deficiencies of budget can easily be hidden behind grainy, and sometimes night-vision, camerawork.

Speaking of camerawork, the Blair Witch-inspired cinematography is nowhere near as egregious as you might think. There is a fair bit of ShakeyCam when our protagonists are running (which, thankfully, doesn’t happen that often), but when the trolls are on screen, the camera is kept mercifully stable. This could be due, in part, to the decision to make the students journalism students, rather than generic teenagers a la Cloverfield. These kids know that when a story is in front of you, instead of flailing wildly, you keep the camera on it. Which is good, because as I said, the trolls are fantastic.

They no longer belong in our world, though. Towards the end of Troll Hunter, I got the feeling that the film is almost a Western. Hans is kind of a Scandinavian cowboy: part of the old world, and something the new world could do without. When the film’s climax rolls around, there’s a real sense of an era coming to a close, as in the last roundup at the end of The Misfits.

Troll Hunter is unfortunate to be released at the beginning of autumn, a time when studios and distributors dump their less than prestigious pictures before awards season begins. Perhaps the producers wanted to avoid clashing with the summer’s more expensive blockbusters? After all, how can a little Norwegian film compete with superheroes and ape uprisings? Rest assured: it can.

]]> http://guerillacritic.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/troll-hunter/feed/ 0 trilbynorton Troll Hunter http://guerillacritic.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/an-open-letter-to-publishers/ http://guerillacritic.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/an-open-letter-to-publishers/#comments Sat, 06 Aug 2011 11:41:16 +0000 Trilby Norton http://guerillacritic.wordpress.com/?p=339 ]]> Dear publishers,

I couldn’t help but notice your recent, rather ramshackle attempts at curbing the growing problem of piracy. It’s a serious issue, and I can understand your eagerness to see it go away. After all, who can blame you for wanting to protect your own property? Homeowners protect their houses with locks and burglar alarms, so why shouldn’t the owner of intellectual property be allowed to protect their investment with an assortment of activation keys, install limits and online passes?

As you can see, I have no problem with you wanting to protect yourselves from all the game-hungry pirates out there. What I do take issue with is your handling of the situation. You’ve tried many things over the years to get people to part with their cash: the simple product key, printed on the back of the box or the instruction manual; limiting the number of times a game can be installed (taken to the admirable extreme by EA with Spore and its outrageously reasonable limit of 3. A real shame those gamers wouldn’t stop whining about it, right?); and now Ubisoft’s “always on” DRM, which requires gamers to be constantly connected to the internet to play their games.

These are all great schemes, with their own individual successes and, unfortunately, individual failures. And that’s the problem. They are individual. Piracy is such a massive issue, we need to stop thinking on a case-by-case basis and tackle the entire industry as a whole. We need to unite, to pull together and make a concerted effort to rid ourselves of this menace.

I really think the guys at Ubisoft are on the right track with their “always on” DRM. Requiring the player to be constantly connected to your network to play your game is a fantastic way of ensuring that gamers must buy a legitimate copy to play. And if a player doesn’t have a stable internet connecton, well, that’s their problem. It’s unfortunate that the system was cracked so swiftly, but I have a proposal that may just put an end to that kind of flagrant behaviour.

As I said, Ubisoft’s system is a good one, but I don’t think it goes far enough. The speed with which the system was hacked proves that we need something altogether more drastic. That is why I am proposing something I am calling the Video Games Supervisory Scheme. The VGSS will not only eliminate piracy; it will completely revolutionise the way we play games, allowing for a safer and more user friendly community.

At it’s heart, the VGSS works on the same principal as the “always on” DRM. However, instead of merely requiring the user to remain constantly connected to the publisher’s network, the VGSS requires the user to remain under supervision for the duration of their session. Players will need to book, in advance, a time slot during which they will play their purchased game. (This could be anything: an hour, two hours; even a whole day. I do think a standardised time slot would increase efficiency, but I will leave the logistics to you!) A trained VGSS supervisor will then arrive at their home at the allotted time, authenticate the player’s copy of the game, and supervise their play session.

Imagine! You, the publisher (at least, a representative of you, the publisher), will be able to monitor exclusively every gamer as they play the games you have worked so hard to develop and market. Those with illegitimate copies of your games will be entirely unable to play them, as only the trained VGSS supervisors will possess the special software keys required to connect to the VGSS gaming network (a connection to which, of course, is required to play your games).

I am sure that the VGSS will not be without its share of controversy. Few of mankind’s great leaps forward have been. This is to be expected. Opponents will undoubtedly accuse the VGSS of limiting the consumer’s ability to use a product they have legitimately purchased. They will say that it is needlessly punishing the majority for the actions of a minority. Do not bow under the pressure of these naysayers. We will need to remind them that they have not purchased a game. They have purchased the licence to play a game. And as such, it is the publisher’s right to limit, in any way they see fit, the consumer’s ability to use this licensed product. It’s for their own good.

Piracy is the single biggest problem facing our industry at the moment (along with pre-owned games, but that’s another matter entirely). Lord knows we’ve been reasonable with gamers. £40 is a more than fair price for a product that can provide up to several hours of entertainment, and Day One DLC is a very generous incentive to buy these products. And yet these people continue to acquire illegal copies of your games. I hope you can see how effective the Video Games Supervisory Scheme could be at battling this problem. It could usher in a truly safer, more profitable era for the industry.

Yours truly,

Trilby Norton

But are we? Will 3D usher in a second golden age, or is it just another fad, destined to be forgotten when something better comes along? After all, 3D is still just a gimmick. Cinema admissions have been falling steadily over the past few decades, and the current resurgence of 3D is only the newest in a long line of tactics studios have employed to get people out of their homes into the multiplexes. And with 3D TVs set to become the next big thing, it’s a tactic that won’t last much longer.

Still, proponents say that 3D will change cinema in the same that sound and colour did. I can’t shake the feeling that this is utter rubbish. Sound has fundamental story-telling properties. The best loved stories told in the darkness of the cinema since sound was introduced would not have been possible without it. 3D has no story-telling properties. It can give artificial depth to a landscape, and throw things at the audience, but when it comes to telling stories, 3D is completely irrelevant.

Imagine watching Reservoir Dogs on mute. What do you miss? Everything. The story would be incomprehensible because there’d be no dialogue. The carefully selected soundtrack, which sets the tone for the film and underpins many scenes, would be gone. In short, it would make no sense and be nigh unwatchable. Now, imagine watching Avatar in 2D. What do you miss? A few spears thrust in your face, certainly. Some of the action set pieces or moments of scenery porn might seem a little flat. But other than that, the film is exactly the same. The story, characterisation and message in Avatar is in no way enhanced by an extra imaginary dimension.

I said the action scenes in Avatar may seem a little flat in 2D, which brings me to another point: does 3D make films more immersive? Those in favour of the technology say that it does, that the extra dimension gives the audience the sense that the action is playing out, not on a rectangular screen, but right in front of them. Even in less kinetic scenes, in which the gimmicky nature of 3D is less evident, it can seem as if the audience is actually there, living in this world and watching these characters.

But this is a shallow immersion which disguises the fact that a lot of the films utilising 3D are far from great works of cinematic art. Real immersion in films is created through a good script, good acting, good directing, sound design, editing. In fact, cinematic immersion is created by every aspect of the film working in unison to draw the viewer into the world of the film, into the moment by moment actions and struggles of the characters.

3D creates immersion by conjuring the illusion of space. 2D films can do this with clever use of framing and depth of field, but 3D can (supposedly) do it better. But this more convincing illusion may end up damaging cinema. We may yet arrive at a point at when filmmakers continually fall back on 3D and its imaginary depth, rather than utilise the whole array of techniques which have made the greatest films of all time just that.

And besides, 3D is not immersive. It draws attention to itself. After a century of films appearing on a flat rectangle, the bulging mise-en-scene of a 3D film is somewhat conspicuous. Whenever 3D is used to its full effect, whether that’s poking something into the audience or creating greater depth in a long shot, you cannot help but notice. You’re yanked back into your cinema seat to think, “This 3D malarkey is rather impressive.” Either that, or you’re continually taking your glasses off to see what the film looks like in 2D.

I’m not a narrow minded person. If a filmmaker can show me that 3D is more than just a gimmick, that it can truly add to the cinematic experience, then I’ll embrace the technology. But so far I haven’t seen anything other than cheap parlour tricks, nor have I seen any sign that things will change. Until they do, you can keep your silly glasses. Did I mention that they look silly?

Read any game-related message board on the internet, and you’ll find countless threads attempting to identify the culprit. They blame everything from cross-platform pollination to executive meddling. But gamers are wrong to point their fingers at these as the cause of the decline. They talk as if this is a problem that has appeared suddenly, that has snuck up on the genre and got it in a headlock. That isn’t the case. The RPG has been going downhill ever since the genre came to computers. And what’s more, it’s all your fault.

It’s a bold statement, I know. But it’s true. There are a number of factors that have, over the years, nudged the RPG down the road it so clearly walks today, and you are complicit in all of them. You are the sole reason why there were fewer abilities in Mass Effect 2, why Dragon Age II took place in a single city, and why every game and its dog feels the need to inexplicably include experience points.

You don’t believe me, do you? Perhaps I should explain.

Let’s start with graphics, shall we? When the RPG was first thrust into the electronic limelight all those years ago, the graphics were primitive, to say the least. Game worlds were represented with the most basic of images, with little to no animation. Some games, like Rogue, even resorted to plain ASCII graphics. What attempts were made at more complex graphics, such as Wizardry‘s first-person perspective, looked like crude versions of those wire-frame computer images they sometimes have in Eighties’ science fiction films.

The upside of all this was that, due to the lack of processing power given over the to graphics, these games tended to be mind-numbingly complex. In Nethack, for instance, just about every item you find can be used in just about any way you can think of. But, of course, as the technology advanced and the genre’s popularity increased, demand grew for better graphics. Developers began using tilesets, and then pre-rendered isometric backgrounds, until finally the 3D era dawned in the mid-nineties.

But what does this have to do with the decline of the RPG? Well, I’m no programming expert, but it stands to reason that the more space on a disc taken up by graphics, the less space for everything else. So on one end of the spectrum we have something like Ultima, with its simple graphics but complex gameplay. And on the other end we have something like Mass Effect 2, with its impressive graphics but apparent lack of traditional RPG complexity.

But all of that isn’t your fault, right? Wrong. You have always demanded better graphics, and if a game’s graphics aren’t up to snuff, you will criticise it. And developers will take this criticism into consideration when making future games. Take the Dragon Age series, for example. One of the biggest criticisms you threw at Dragon Age: Origins was that its graphics were relatively primitive compared to other major releases. Bioware took this on board, and with Dragon Age 2 set about updating the graphics. How much manpower do you think was diverted from the real meat of game design to create a brand new graphics engine?

Admittedly, it is a small segment of gamers who prioritise graphics over everything else. But in an industry whose consumer feedback is gathered indiscriminately from the internet, it is the vocal groups who will be listened to, no matter how small. And the graphics whores are nothing if not vocal.

This idea of consumer feedback brings me neatly to my next point, namely the relationship between gamers and developers. The advent of the internet has given gamers unprecedented involvement in the development process. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the games industry has more consumer involvement that any other entertainment medium. More and more, developers are looking to message boards to gauge fan reaction to their latest releases and gather intel for the sequel.

It’s a fantastic relationship. Imagine if the film industry could benefit from something similar. We probably wouldn’t have two god-awful sequels to a god-awful Transformers film. But this relationship has its darker side. You see, gamers are a lot of things, but articulate isn’t one of them. Ask the average gamer what they thought of any given game, and they’ll probably say that this feature “sucked”, or that feature was “awesome”. Developers can easily find out what parts of their game you didn’t like, but when it comes down to how to improve those parts, you are useless.

Case in point: Mass Effect. The consensus among gamers was that Mass Effect‘s inventory system was unwieldy, at best. During the course of his adventures through the future, Commander Shepard found countless armour suits and upgrades, and most of them were nothing but vendor trash. You told Bioware this, and Bioware listened. Mass Effect 2′s inventory system was stripped down to the bare minimum, with only a handful of armour pieces and upgrades available. And you hated it. You accused Bioware of dumbing down, of abandoning the hardcore in favour of the casual.

But your anger was misplaced. You shouldn’t have blamed Bioware. You should have blamed yourself. Had you told Bioware what you wanted from a new inventory system, rather than just bitching about the current one, none of this would have happened. Bioware should be praised for taking the time to listen to you, but instead you demonise them for lacking the ability to read minds.

You want a hell of a lot from your games. Better graphics; a more cinematic experience; fluid gameplay. You tell developers you want these things, but you don’t tell them how you want them done. So developers grope blindly for what they think will please you. And despite their best efforts, when they get it wrong, you act as if you’ve been betrayed.

It comes down to a misplaced sense of entitlement. You think, because you can go on the internet and demand that a game be made the way you want it, that you play a vital part in the development process. You think this gives you the right to berate developers who “get it wrong”.

This is bollocks. In all but the most commercial of examples, artists do not create for an audience. They create for themselves. The audience is a secondary concern. Of course, publishers are in it for the money, and so they take passing interest in the audience. But developers, first and foremost, make games for themselves. All artists create works that they want to experience. The best directors make films that they want to watch. The best musicians make music they want to listen to. And the best developers make games that they want to play. It’s when fans are pandered to that problems begin. It’s these problems that have been dragging the RPG down these past years. Problems created by you and your insistent, vague and often contradictory demands.

But has the RPG really been in decline? Are we approaching an event horizon, at which the RPG as we know it will cease to exist, crushed into oblivion and absorbed by the greater gaming morass? I’m not convinced. Sure, if you play Wizardry and Dragon Age 2 back to back, the first thing you’ll notice is the relative lack of complexity in the latter. But what Dragon Age 2 has over Wizardry is a far greater focus on narrative and character development. It’s this focus that has been driving the genre for the past ten to fifteen years. Think about it. Would Baldur’s Gate 2, Planescape: Torment or Morrowind be as great as they are without their detailed, consistent and immersive worlds?

What I’m trying to say, in my rambling, barely coherent way, is that the RPG is not declining. It is changing. There have been a few missteps along they way (all your fault, naturally), but by and large the RPG has undergone a metamorphosis from esoteric pseudo-spreadsheet to fantastical world simulators in which we, the players, are allowed to define and play a role. It’s a transformation not to everybody’s taste, but ultimately it has allowed the genre to spread it’s wings and give us some truly brilliant games. Now, can we please stop all this bitching just kill us some dragons?

Writing: Like I just said, repetitive sidequests are part and parcel of the RPG experience. But most RPGs (the good ones, at least) coat their sidequests in a veneer of good writing. For example, in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, almost every quest involves traipsing to some fort or cave, killing everything, and possibly collecting an important item or two. What Oblivion does to hide the soul-crushing sameness of these quests is to bookend them with context. You might be retrieving a lost artefact for a god, or collecting treasure for a wealthy buyer. Whatever the reason, the quests become more than just repetitive tasks; they have meaning.

WoW doesn’t care for meaning. When you click on a questgiver, you’re treated to a few paragraphs of pedestrian prose which offers some vague context for the task. When the quest is complete, you’re given some congratulatory remarks and a reward. The writing is so basic to be almost irrelevant, and it’s impossible to care. This is exacerbated by the fact that most people don’t even read the text. All they’re interested in the reward and the experience. Which brings me to my next point.

Incentive: Possibly my favourite RPG (and one of my favourite games) is Planescape: Torment. The game opens with you waking up on a mortuary slab and discovering that you’re immortal. Based, as it is, on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, levels are almost irrelevant. There’s also only a few areas in which you’re forced to fight; most of the game is based around conversation and decision-making. All of this means that the players’ incentive for continuing is not, “When will I reach the next level?” Instead, the incentive is finding the answers to the game’s questions: “Why I immortal? Who did this? How can I get my mortality back?”

World of Warcraft is the complete opposite. There is no complex narrative, no questions that demand answers. The player’s only incentive is the next level up. This is fine for some people; the success of games like Tetris and Bejeweled prove that people like mindless monotony. But a lot of gamers (including, I suspect, many WoW players) want more than cutting up swathes of woodland critters.

Role-playing: This is perhaps my biggest gripe with WoW. While many still cling to so-called “RPG elements” as the defining mechanic of the genre, the RPG is fundamentally about assuming and defining a role. Planescape: Torment, Mass Effect, Oblivion, the Baldur’s Gateseries and countless others all allow the player to craft a unique persona and directly impact the events of the game.

Not so in World of Warcraft. There are role-playing realms, but these only require that the player observe guidelines concerning character names and out of character chat. There is no scope for actual role-playing; the only character-based decisions you could feasibly make would concern which quests to do, or whether or not your character would wantonly attack a certain type of spider. Despite WoW’s status as an MMORPG, the focus is still on mindless quests and beating on funny-looking animals.

I understand that many of the problems I’ve discussed in this series are a result of WoW being a MMOG. There are simply too many players with varying system specs and levels of commitment to warrant deeper gameplay mechanics. But as one of those “game as art” hippies I can’t help but think that, with the absolutely colossal amounts of money pouring into their bank accounts, it would not be difficult for Blizzard to improve the overall quality of their game. A talented team of writers and gameplay incentives beyond simple experience points could only help to World of Warcraft away from the object of scorn it’s rapidly becoming.

Of all the many aspects of WoW, the Horde is the one I find most interesting. Partly this is because everyone I know who plays WoW is part of the Alliance, so the Horde appeals to the non-conformist in me. But mainly it’s the races. While the Alliance allows you to play as the standard RPG races of Human, Elf, Dwarf, etc., the Horde gives you the chance to play as what are otherwise conventional RPG cannonfodder. There are Orcs, Trolls, big Minotaur guys, and zombies.

Creating my second character, I choose to join the legions of the living dead. The Forsaken, as they’re known in WoW, are an oppressed and misunderstood minority, a situation they respond to by killing everything. I like them already. I choose to stick with the Rogue class; the Night Elves’ contribution to the noble thieving professions may have been rubbish, but perhaps if I stick with the class it’ll surprise me.

Another intro video. The camera pans through a supposedly haunted forest; a variety of demonic-looking animals scurry around. The movie-trailer voice natters on about banshee queens and underground cities. Eventually the camera enters the small settlement of Deathknell, charges down the corridors of a ruined house and comes to rest behind me.

Turns out I’m recent addition to the army of darkness. There’s no explanation of how I became undead; I’m just some poor schmuck who died and was recruited by a horde of ravenous zombies. A kind of necromantic conscription.

I know the drill; I click on the nearby questgiver. My first task is to kill a random number of zombies lurking around outside this settlement.

Wait, what? Why am I killing zombies? I’m a zombie. I’m informed that these particular zombies are not civilised fellows like us, but “Mindless Ones”, nothing but unenlightened ghouls. Essentially, freelance zombies. It seems the undead are having union troubles.

Anyway, I begin the increasingly familiar routine of venturing into the forest, killing an arbitrary number of things and returning for congratulations. I do this several times; I’m sent out to eradicate spiders, demonic dogs and big bats. Eventually I collect enough loot to buy a whole new wardrobe, so I wader back to town to find a merchant.

While looking for shops, I come across something new: trainers. No, not stylish footwear, but characters with skills to impart. Each class has their own specific trainer, who will sell you a variety of class-specific abilities. My local Rogue trainer has several interesting abilities: backstab, steal and, most tempting, stealth.

Unlike the Night Elf’s hide in shadows ability, proper WoW stealth lets you move around undetected. This is especially useful when used in conjuction with the backstab skill, as that is only useable when behind an enemy.

I empty my bulging wallet and buy all the currently available skills I can. The Stealth ability is indeed better than the Night Elf’s, but Backstab leaves a lot to be desired. Enemies unaware of my presence move around so much that it’s difficult to time a backstab effectively. And in the middle of a fight it’s almost impossible to get behind an opponent. Stealing is also largely pointless. I can only steal from enemies, and they rarely have anything good on them.

With that said, it is nice to have some proper thieving abilities, even if they don’t reach my exacting standards. I decide it’s high time to blow this one horse town and set off in search if grander adventure. According to my map, there’s a larger settlement someway to the east. I make sure all my weapons and armour are up to scratch and head off into the big wide world.

The monster’s in this area of the forest are considerably stronger than those back at home, but luckily I gained quite a few levels performing mindless repetitive tasks for exclamation marks. There is one strange thing about the monsters here, though; they’re exactly the same as the ones in Deathknell. Except for their names. What might have been a Flabby Hellhound is now a Well-toned Helhound. Feasibly, if I were to reach a high enough level, I’d start encountering Ultra Mechanised Atomic Hellhounds.

After decimating several entire woodland populations, I reach the town of Brill. It’s larger than Deathknell, with a variety of shops, trainers, exclamation marks and other players. Having hardly walked three paces into town, one of these players asks me to duel him. I decline. Instantly, a message pops up in the communication centre at the bottom of the screen: “Plz duell me ”. I reply with a firm “no” and walk away quickly.

It’s in Brill that I come across the first semblance of a narrative in WoW. A questgiver on a horse wants me to deal with a group of Scarlet Crusaders. The Scarlet Crusaders are a medieval Christian-style military organisation apparently hell-bent on the eradication of the Forsaken. So obviously they have to be stopped.

The problem is, once I get to the Crusader camp, they seem more than happy to let me wander around unmolested. It’s only when I proceed to stab one of their number in the face that they become hostile. Which is quite reasonable, really. Are we sure that these Crusaders are the vile eaters of kittens they’re made out to be? It doesn’t really matter; I kill them all and return for my reward.

I do a few more of these Crusader quests. As they progress, I’m tasked with killing ever escalating numbers of them, or pilfering McGuffins from their camps. The Crusaders eventually become hostile (my reputation precedes me), and that’s when the problems start.

When facing off against multiple enemies, I like to use the Baldur’s Gate Strategy (so called because I first devised it whilst playingBaldur’s Gate). This involves edging just close enough to a group of enemies to lure a small number of them toward me without alerting the whole group. It’s a strategy that’s served me well over the years.

I can’t use the BGS in WoW, though. It’s as if, by virtue of my very existence, every enemy in a (stupidly wide) area knows I’m there. The problem comes to a head when I’m asked to take out a Crusader captain. He’s holed up in some fort and is, of course, surrounded by an entire battalion of Crusader cronies. Whenever I get within spitting distance the whole lot of them descent upon me like monkeys at a safari park. It’s all I can do get away without dying.

After countless attempts and one death (which, incidently, sends me to the nearest graveyard as a ghost, whereupon I must search for my corpse to rise again – I shit you not), I give up. And I don’t mean just the quest: I give up on World of Warcraft. This might seem like an extreme reaction to a problem that could have been solved with a few extra levels, but to tell you the truth, I’d been looking for an excuse to stop playing for several hours.

Find out why in Part Three, in which I discuss my many problems with World of Warcraft.

Part One

At the last count, Blizzard’s all-conquering MMORPG World of Warcraft had 11.5 million players. That’s more people than live in Belgium. Anything that garners a following that large will attract curiosity. From me, at least. That’s why I recently decided to give theWoW’s free trial a go. This is an account of my brief stay in Azeroth.

The first thing to decide (after installing the game and ignoring no less than three licence agreements) is which realm you want to join. Realms are like gameplay modes; each offers a different experience based on the players preferences. There are four types of realm: Normal, Player versus Player (PVP), Role-playing (RP), and Role-play PVP (RP-PVP).

Normal is your default playing experience: kills things, collect loot and complete quests, while your social life withers and dies. PVP lets players kill each other; I can only assume it consists entirely of high-level twats slaughtering every newbie they see. Role-playing is more in depth; you must stick to certain strict rules governing behaviour and communication. Finally, RP-PVP is high-level twats slaughtering newbies because it’s “in character”.

After weighing up my options, I choose Normal; this MMORPG lark is complicated enough already with some internet Dungeon Master watching my every move while a high-level twat stabs me in the face.

I’m then taken to the character creation screen. “Finally,” I say to myself. “This is what RPGs are all about.” Unfortunately, WoW offers one of the most basic character creation tools I’ve encountered. You can choose your race, class and hairstyle, and that’s your lot.

With those disappointingly slight tools at my disposal, I decide to be a Night Elf Rogue with purple hair. I chose to be a Rogue because ever since playing Thief: The Dark Project ten years ago, I’ve a soft spot for stealth-based characters, and the Night Elf race offers the ability to hide in shadow.

With that done I enter the game proper. I’m treated to an introductory video. We’re in a forest. The camera swoops through trees and little foresty houses as a deep film-trailer voice drones on about…stuff. Something about immortality, magical trees and druids. So far, so clichéd.

Eventually the camera settles behind my avatar, and I’m in control. I give the controls a little test. Movement with the arrow keys seems easy enough. Moving the camera by holding down the right mouse button seems unnecessarily awkward, but the mouse is mostly used for the cursor, so I guess it was unavoidable. There’s a jumble of icons at the button of the screen, but I assume I’ll learn what they all do as I play.

The game prompts me to speak with the “questgiver” in front of me. Questgivers are guys with big exclamation marks above their heads. It makes them look like they’ve just had a fantastic idea. Which, in a way, they have: get 11.5 million people to perform arbitrary tasks over and over again. Anyway, I click on the questgiver. Turns out he’s Elfy McPointyears and he wants me to kill some blue cats and a few orange pigs.

And so it begins. You see, quests in WoW fall under two categories. The first is “Collect X amount of McGuffins.” The second, like the quest I’d just been given, is “Kill X amount funny-looking things for whatever tenuous reason.”

The reason in this instance is because there’s too many blue cats and orange pigs. These Night Elves are quite violent for forest-dwelling hippies. But anyway, off I go to slaughter innocent animals. How very vegan of me.

Combat is simple. Click on an enemy and you start basic attacks. You can use abilities, either by clicking on the icons at the bottom of the screen, or by hitting their hotkeys. It’s suggested that each attack gives a certain number of combo points. Some abilities can only be used when a certain amount of combo points have been gained, and others do more damage based upon how many combo points you’ve chained together. It’s not very clear, though; sometimes I’ll think I’ve got X amount of combo points, but when I try and pull off an ability which uses them, I’ll be told I haven’t got enough.

The Night Elf’s hide in shadow ability is a bit pants, too. I turn invisible, but as soon as I move, the ability ends. I really can’t see the point, unless there are hidden lesbian slumber parties later on.

Whatever. I kill the required number of beasties and return to Elfy McPointyears. “Well done,” he says. “Here’s a wrist band.” Turns out you can get armour pieces for every conceivable part of the body: wrists, arms, legs, chest. I wonder if there are special cod pieces?

With my first quest under my belt, I wander off to find more. The area I’ve started in is built around a small settlement seemingly occupying a giant tree. There are ramps climbing up to various buildings in the branches, and other players and NPCs milling around. I find another exclamation mark and initiate a conversation.

“Dearie, dearie me,” moans Mrs. McPointyears (no relation). “My friend has gone missing, possibly next to a giant spider nest. Find him.” Serves him right for hanging around giant spider nests. But hey, that’s part and parcel of RPGs, saving idiots. So I head over the giant spider nest and tell Mrs. Pointears’ friend (who is strangely unharmed) that she’s looking for him. He thanks me, and then remains where he is. Wonderful. I return to Mrs. McPointyears with the news of her friend’s stubborn stupidity, and she seems unfazed. That’s friendship for you.

After two quests, I’m already bored of these Elves. Everything is so unoriginal, and there’s a crushingly-forced quaintness about the quests. I’m only level 2; perhaps I should abandon this Elf and try out another race?

Tune in soon for Part Two, in which I join the ranks of the living dead and steal everyone’s shit.

Dir: Shion Sono, 2008

It’s not easy, being brought up a Catholic. I remember the elderly priest who would visit our primary school every week for confession. I’d sit in that tiny room with him, racking my brains for something, anything to tell him. I was a child, years from puberty. What sins could I possibly commit? I stopped attending Catholic school by the time I entered puberty, but I dread to think how those confessions would have gone had I stayed. Between noticing the existence of the opposite sex for the first time, and those initial, hesitant stirrings between my legs, they would have seriously strained any loyalty I might have had to the church.

It’s this interplay between desire and religion with which Shion Sono’s four hour Love Exposure deals. Yes, you read that right. Four hours. This no slight comedy drama you can watch on a whim. It’s an epic examination of love and faith that takes myriad bizarre detours through upskirt photography, cults and cross-dressing. In fact, there’s so much packed into those four hours, it’s a wonder Love Exposure works at all. But it does. Somehow, it does.

The film follows Yu, a Japanese youth whose mother, before she died, told him to find his own Virgin Mary. Yu’s father becomes a priest, and for a time they live a happy life. But he soon becomes obsessed with sin, and his increasingly paranoiac confessions drive Yu to begin actively seeking sin. This leads him to a group which uses martial arts techniques to take surreptitious photographs of women’s underwear.

Trying to describe any more of Love Exposure‘s plot would be pointless, partly for fear of spoiling it, but mostly because, running as it does for four hours, it’s so dense as to make succinctness impossible. Sono introduces new characters and twists with startling frequency, creating a labyrinth of relations which, thanks to deft pacing, never overwhelms. Things may get complicated, but the tight focus on the film’s three protagonists means that the narrative never spirals out of control.

Yu becomes embroiled in a barmy love triangle with two girls, Yoko and Koike. Yoko was abused by her father and abandoned by the succession of surrogate mothers he paraded by her, and now harbours a deep seated hatred for men (with the exceptions of Kurt Cobain and Jesus). Koike is the regional administrator for the enigmatic Zero Church, a cult which seems intent on eradicating all human desire. She takes a perverse interest in Yu and Yoko, and her machinations form most of the film’s second half.

As Yu attempts to win the affections of Yoko, and is thwarted at every turn by Koike, Love Exposure runs the risks of veering into melodrama. It’s Yu’s optimism and energy that saves the film. Even facing setback after setback (which never seem contrived, thanks to Sono’s expert pacing), he never falls prey to navel-gazing. He bounces back, ready with another oddball scheme.

Stylistically, Yu is helped by manga-inspired title cards and chapter headings, along with a handful of brief but extreme spurts of violence. The cinematography and set design bely the film’s low budget, but instead of holding it back, the inexpensive look gives it a realism that contrasts bizarrely with the film’s comic book trappings. It’s as if the film takes place in the real world, but just below the surface. Scratch away at your every day routine, and you too could become entangled in a world of cults and kung fu photographers.

The long and the short of it is, Love Exposure is a very strange film. Strange, but also human. It’s themes of desire and faith may seem stuffy and pretentious, but the film handles them with such a left field sensibility that “stuffy” and “pretentious” couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, the phrase that was most clear in my mind when the end credits rolled was, “What the hell did I just watch?”

Much to my delight, stop-motion has seen something of a revival in recent years, evidenced by Henry Selick’s Coraline and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox both receiving nominations for Best Animated Picture at last year’s Oscars. Unfortunately, stop-motion visual effects (as in stop-motion featured in a live action film) haven’t fared so well. This is a real shame; just as stop-motion feature films offer a good counterpoint to assembly-line CGI movies, a resurgence of stop-motion visual effects could be a viable alternative to ubiquitous digital effects.

Because stop-motion is better than CGI. That’s a fact. The visual effects in Michael Bay’s Transformers were impressive, but if those robots had been animated by stop-motion, the film would have been infinitely better. But why? What is it about stop-motion that keeps audiences and filmmakers coming back to it? Let’s find out.

First of all, stop-motion has soul. Giant CGI monsters can be cool, but they’re often lifeless, so much digital trickery. When CGI creations are imbued with life, such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings or the “prawns” in District 9, it’s because real actors were used to enhance the digital performance.

Stop-motion, however, is brimming with life. This is partly because stop-motion animation is such a laborious process. Admittedly so is CGI, but not quite on the same scale. A CGI-heavy blockbuster might employ an office-full of digital artists to create one to two thousand effect shots over the course of a year. Compare that to one or two animators spending 6 months creating the effects for a single scene. A huge amount of effort goes into animating a single minute of footage completely by hand, whereas digital artists are helped by entire computer programmes that can predict and act out movements and reactions.

Stop-motion can take so long because every movement is meticulously planned and animated. The upshot is that this results in quirky and often touching performances. Ray Harryhausen invariably imbued his creations with such personality. In Jason and the Argonauts, Talos’ clunky movements belied a colossal strength twinned with a limited intelligence. The Allosaur in One Million Years B.C. attacked with an adolescent aggression. And there’s a poignant vulnerability to Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger’s Troglodyte.

One of the biggest problems that faces CGI is photorealism. Digital effects are meant to look realistic, but that is often not the case: the textures might be a little off, or the lighting is wrong. On the other hand, stop-motion, by its very nature, can never look completely realistic. The materials used invariably won’t match exactly those of whatever is being represented, and there is always a slight jerkiness to the movements that reminds us that we are watching a carefully crafted construct.

It’s this lack of complete realism that lies at the core of why I love stop-motion. In his book I and Thou, Austrian philosopher Martin Buber laid out his theory of “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships. An “I-Thou” relationship involves a deep emotional connection which can make us forget that “I” is separate from “Thou”. Conversely, in an “I-It” relationship, we are constantly aware that “I” is separated from the objectified “It”.

It may seem a little abstruse, but when applied to film Buber’s theory can be quite revealing. Most films engender an “I-Thou” relationship; we experience directly the events of the film and identify with the characters to a greater degree than their fictional nature would suggest. When we watch stop-motion, however, we experience an “I-It” relationship; we are aware of the creatures’ status as constructs, and as such they  are objectified.

Conventional logic would suggest that, if this is the case, visual effects would abruptly pull us out the film. This is certainly the case with bad CGI. These effects are meant to look real, but because they don’t, a conflict results which hampers our enjoyment of the film. With stop-motion, however, we already know that the effects are not supposed to look real, and so ironically their objectification actually heightens our enjoyment of the film.

The main reason for this is that stop-motion effects’ obvious status as constructs reminds us of the sheer amount of effort put into creating them. CGI can also remind us of this, but digital effects are supposed to blend seamlessly with the film, and when they don’t our “I-Thou” relationship with that film is broken. Stop-motion, however, combines the “I-Thou” with the “I-It” and somehow creates an even stronger relationship. The jerkiness of the skeletons at the climax of Jason and the Argonauts reminds us that Ray Harryhausen spent 4 months animating that sequence on his own.

Maybe stop-motion effects are a thing of the past, and the stop-motion feature film will fade into nothing but a curiosity. But the form will always hold a special place in the hearts of audiences and filmmakers. CGI may allow us to visit places and meet creatures unimaginable even twenty years; but for truly spectacular effects, nothing can beat stop-motion.