Attention

I have moved to: http://noiseaboutnoise.wordpress.com/

I like the layout a lot and the options there work well for me.
See you there!

Catherine: Smart and Sexy

I'd like to warn any readers that this review will not contain major spoilers, but might give away a little bit about the flow of the game. If you REALLY want to go into the game without expectations, I wouldn't read this.

Any of my friends can tell you, I'm an enormous fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series. Have been since Nocturne/Lucifer's Call came out (I think I even failed a class or two because of it). They're dark, adult, occult, deeper than most, and have varying themes. I've loved every game since then without exception. It's a love that I don't have for other series. I'm normally the type of person that will probably buy a game used when I get around to it, even if I was looking forward to it. I only just a couple of months ago bought Mass Effect 2 for my PS3, I get every Ratchet & Clank game second hand, despite the fact that they are the best platformers the market has to offer at the moment.

SMT games simply cannot wait. I pre-ordered Catherine, a measure I haven't taken since the last in the series, Persona 4, came out. Strictly speaking, Catherine isn't part of the series but it's the exact same team with the exact same style exploring the exact same vein of storytelling. So, even if it doesn't bear the spooky SMT pentacle sigil, it's still a spiritual part of the series and something I've been keeping my eye on for a while now, anxiously waiting to see what STUDIO4°C would place before me this time.

You see, from the very first preview, this game promised to be a step up on the grown-up scale. Not with gore or boobies, but through some genuine mature content. When the rating warnings on the back says, "mature themes," it looked like they wouldn't be fucking around this time. Most of the games in the series have caught a bit of controversy because of the occult aspects in them. They delve into some very interesting and deep ideas and concepts (Teddy's "true self" monologue comes to mind) but any serious musings about power, sexuality, suicide, the self or other deep and personal issues were stifled a bit by a few things. For one, they had to keep things at a reasonably tame level since a large part of their projected audience were teenagers. As a result, most of the time the characters in the games are teens themselves and since they tend to focus on issues that everybody faces (particularly Persona 3&4) attention was given to the trails of teens and highschool (granted, everybody was a bit more fucked up than your average youth, but they had to make it interesting).

Not today, folks. That's just the box art, too.

Not so with Catherine. Our main character is 32-year-old Vincent. He's a pretty cool guy who's good to his friends, but is coasting on a low-income job and his girlfriend, Katherine, is dropping serious hints about taking things up a notch. As in marriage. He has reservations about this as he's pretty comfortable going nowhere fast. At night he's started having recurring nightmares, where he's climbing a huge tower trying to get away from a huge monstrosity. Already, the tone is set. Nice guy who doesn't know what he's doing exactly but he likes it that way, and isn't keen on making major commitments. While he seems comfortable where he is, we already get the feeling that he's running away from his own indecisiveness. Sound familiar? It sure hit home for me.

One night, while he's at his usual watering hole, a gorgeous young blonde strikes up a conversation with him and before he knows it he's waking up in his bed with no memory of the night before but the girl from the bar (Catherine) is lying next to him. Thus begins Vincent's journey of guilt, self-sabotage and discovery. The coolest part of it is that they actually manage to make you suffer along-side him; yes, he cheated on his long-time girlfriend and is now two-timing. However, he is constantly trying to set things right but is sabotaged every step of the way by circumstance and his own cowardice.

As the game progresses you get several opportunities to talk to people and develop Vincent's moral code and flesh out what he wants out of life, i.e., Catherine or Katherine. How you play determines your ending. There are conversation options, or even text messaging while you are at the bar. The texting option is pretty cool actually, you can build them sentence by sentence until you have the complete text and it gauges the tone of the text, modifying the response of whoever you sent it to. Not amazing but I think it's neat. However, this sounds cool and all, but it just sounds like a lot of talking and cinematics. Where's the game part of the game? Well, remember those nightmares I mentioned?

Each night, Vincent has to make it through a nightmare where he is climbing the same tower. Other people from the real world seem to be showing up in the nightmare world as well (but only men... hm), only in the form of anthropomorphic sheep, with the promise that if they escape and reach the top they will attain "true freedom," but if he dies in the nightmare, he dies in real life. This tower kind of functions like an old arcade platformer. You run along on blocks and can move them around to create stairs and bridges until you get to the goal. Sounds weird, but it's pretty straightforward while still being challenging. Really challenging, actually. Really, really challenging. Catherine is a really fucking challenging game.

I'm never very good at describing what I like/dislike about gameplay but I liked the tower climbing. It was fun and hard. I'm kind of disappointed that the developers are still hanging on to the rpg-by-day, dungeon-crawler-by-night structure but to their credit it's always worked well with the themes. Which, in this case, are guilt and indecision. Everybody involved in the nightmare world is plagued by some form of guilt that makes them stagnate in some form or another. In Vincent's case, it's the fact that he's cheating and doesn't seem to want the same things as his beloved and rather than tackle the issues, he's dancing around them and trying to get his life back to the way it was without moving forward. As you progress you get to see how torn up he is over the ordeal and you really start to feel for him, despite the fact that it was his own doing. He's a guy you can have sympathy for.

So is Catherine, in the end, the big game changer I was waiting for? Well, yeah, but not as much as I'd hoped. It approached sexuality, interpersonal relationships and life stages in a way I haven't ever seen in a game before. It was a sexy adult drama/tragedy, rife with symbolism and a strong focus on it's themes. Anybody looking for gratuitous violence or nudity had best look elsewhere. Everything is done in a tasteful but completely unabashed way. Well done in that respect.

On the other hand, it's entirely too short. It didn't have to be RPG-length, but I did expect upwards of 16-20 hours at least. I strolled through it in 12. I was hoping for a little more time to get to know the characters. Also, the story is really well paced up until the last 2-3 hours or so, then it takes a turn for the wonky and speeds by far too quickly. However, as a counterpoint to that, the story is still awesome, if a little weird and a little fast. Thankfully it has some replay value, as it's not just the endings that change, but the tower itself can change depending on how you play during your daytime hours. Plus there are extra game modes once you beat it, but for somebody mainly interested in the story, that doesn't entice me much. Still, the tower is pretty fun so I might get a few extra hours out of it.

Also, while the game mentions a few times that there's no "wrong" way to play and that the morality compass is "order vs chaos," it's merely a thinly veiled attempt at seeming ethically impartial. One option is clearly good and the other is, if not evil then bad or at the very least, mean.

So, with all that said, fun levels will range from okay to awesome but it's something that I hope developers will take note of. I was hooked on the story from start to finish not just because it was cool and entertaining, but because it resonated with me on multiple levels and it even stuck with me and gave me something to think about. I sincerely hope this game gets a lot of attention because it's exactly the sort of thing I have in mind when I defend video games as a legitimate art form.

Is it the Goethe's Faust of video games? Well, probably not (that might actually belong to Silent Hill 2), but there are certainly similarities and it's really paving the way for something like that to come along soon.

I Totally Care About Cartoons A Lot, OK?

I am the type of person who often looks back at things that were happening either before I was born or at least before I was paying attention and think, "Why was everything back then so much more awesome than it is now?" Luckily, I have an older sibling who passed down his love for Transformers, Ren & Stimpy and House of Pain. Obviously, this isn't always the case but sometimes I can't help but think I missed out. Many industries get bogged down with the status quo, even if they follow the same formula as their revolutionary predecessors. The fact that they stick with it because it sold well and it's safe. It's one of the reasons I actually enjoy Spongebob Squarepants so much. It's not created by a committee, nor was it made to sell toys or merch (although it did after it's popularity exploded) or promote a network. It's just a visually appealing, creator-driven show. We more or less have one man to thank for paving the way for cartoons like that. My favourite great Canadian hero.

I'm speaking, of course, of John Kricfalusi, music video director, animator, brilliant character artist, creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show and voice of wisdom and creativity in an industry full of rehashed characters and beige, hack job ideas. He took full advantage of cartoons and what they are capable of. Strong, insane poses and huge expressive faces. I mean, just look:

Warning: partial cartoon Bjork nudity

Kricfalusi started watching cartoons during their Golden Age, went to Sheridan College, then worked on some cartoons in LA in the early 1980's. He's mentioned in interviews that it was some of "the worst animation of all time." A bunch of stuff happened between then and 1991, but I'm not really here to talk about how long it took to work his way up the ladder. The important thing is, he eventually started his own studio, Spumco, and started doing Ren & Stimpy. It was aired by Nickelodeon (because Nickelodeon used to be awesome) and the eventual result was a successful show that led to other cartoons in the 90's like Cow and Chicken, Aaahh!! Real Monsters, and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.

However, these shows began to disappear. We stopped seeing cross-dressing anthropomorphic characters whose teeth and eyes could fly out of their heads on command. They started getting replaced with kids and teens. Real people with real problems. Of course the real problems are always shallow and insipid because kids can't grasp complicated abstract concepts. It's not even the writing that I care about either, really. There were some great gang-of-kids shows like The weekenders, Rugrats, Doug and Hey Arnold! It's more the concentration on realism. No more noodle arms or magic dogs, these have to look like real teenagers! 6Teen looks like an advertisement for Ardene for Chrissake.

Kid's shows aren't the only thing that isn't safe any more. Cartoons for grown-ups have lost their anarchic twist as well. Every [adult swim] show either badly drawn flash animation or cardboard cutout flash animation. Us late night stoners like visually appealing things as well as stupid humor, you know. Cartoons can do things other mediums can't, and they seriously aren't even trying any more. (Apologies to fans of Futurama, Super Jail, and Adventure Time, which are all awesome and amazing shows.) I feel like I'm an old man yelling at people about how we did it back in "my day," except instead of something important like how hard we worked, or what we did or didn't complain about, it's about how modern cartoons aren't up to par like they were in the old days.

I'm a bit of a cartoon artist and often times my stuff starts to feel stale and boring. If that happens, I'll watch some Ren & Stimpy or Ripping Friends and have a total revelation every time. I heard Kricfalusi tries to never draw the same pose or expression twice and forced his animating team to do the same. It's a great exercise and very telling of his dedication to making things visually appealing and his attitude to cartoons as being something you should push and develop. Almost like a real art form or something.

To him, making cartoons was "To make something look real and alive, nothing can be symmetrical because nothing in real life is symmetrical. You have to make it look organic."

"Organic," eh? Is that what it's called these days?

Why I Gave A Damn If Video Games Are Art

Whenever this debate comes up, somebody always eventually says something to the effect of, "Well, hang on. Let's define 'art' before we go any further." Which in turn, makes me want to punch people. We all disagree so often and so ferociously on what "art" really is that it's almost become a silly statement to make. Art is universal, or at least it's supposed to be, but so many people scoff at something that thousands of others claim to be so fantastic that it changed their lives. The dictionary is no help, either:

• The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

Well by the first part of the definition, video games certainly fit the bill. The second part... well, people are divided on it. Since the popular opinion is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there's no point in trying to define it in the first place, right? (I should mention that I do believe art to have a certain objective nature in some respects.) So it almost seems that whether you say video games are or are not art, you'd still be right.

A little over a year ago, Roger Ebert published a blog entry defending his position that video games are not and can never be a valid art form. I'm way too late to really weigh in on this with any kind of relevance, plus there have been better and more eloquent people than myself who already have. I'm not writing this to pick apart his argument (although I do have a few rebuttals to make, and I will), despite the fact that I strongly disagree. However, there are a couple of things I'd like to say now that the dust has had a while to settle and we can take a look at the aftermath.

First, I'd like to thank Roger for saying what he said. Anybody who thought of video games as art, whether casually or vehemently and actively, was whipped up into a frenzy. From blog entries to water-cooler discussions, gamers everywhere, who had merely accepted them as the next medium for artistic expression, were now seriously considering what it was that made them think that, and why it mattered. Many people took it as a direct insult (I don't blame them, it was easy to take the article as very, very condescending); others merely re-evaluated what they defined "art" as. I have faith that many game developers that had previously been cautiously crossing boundaries are now pushing a little harder; while developers who have been making artistically driven games for a long time now, like Valve, BioWare, Thatgamecompany, Naughty Dog, Square Enix, Konami, Double Fine, Atlus etc. now have an even louder base to support them. So first off, thank you for pissing us off. We needed that.

My next point is half observation, half rebuttal. I'll bring up a decent sized chunk of part of his closing remarks:

"Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy."

Ignoring the extremely patronizing tone, I take issue with this for two reasons. First, that performing in a sporting event isn't the same as creating a game. I understand that he is talking about how basketball and Mah Jong aren't art forms, but there is no room for development, expression or innovation in said games. They have stayed the same for years Even so, physical competitions are sometimes described as artistic, think about figure skating, dancing, Olympic gymnastics events and so on. Comparing video games to sports would be pointless to the argument if it were accurate. Which it is not.

My second issue is that Ebert seems to think that it doesn't matter if nobody called it art. Nothing would change, right? Unlikely. What would you say if I said writing, painting or film wasn't art. If you're a fan, you would likely get upset. That's because, not only has it trivialized a form of expression you cared about, but it has also taken the onus off the creators to hold their work up to a standard. When a medium is called "art," there is suddenly a whole lot of responsibility that goes with that. It silently requires that people innovate and develop new skills, refining the medium into something extraordinary.

I'm not really upset about the article, really. It was sort of the first time somebody from outside the realm of video games really took a serious, grown-up stab at it. That alone is something to appreciate. It wasn't what I'd hoped for, or expected from somebody as smart as Roger, but what can you do? It all worked out for the best, anyway.

Women in Video Games: Why BioWare is Awesome

Girls are becoming a much larger part of the gaming demographic, or even gaming culture as a whole. In fact, I think I know more women that play World of Warcraft on a regular basis than men (and I know a lot of WoW players). I could be imagining things, but it seems as though more and more companies are acknowledging females as a viable target demographic or at the very least they are including them as a group to keep in mind when developing video games. I'm not just talking about having girls in games, that's been going on for a while now. I'm talking about realistic women. You know, the kind of woman that would actually inspire a ragtag group of warriors and unite them under the same cause. The kind of woman that kicks ass, takes names, and wears proper ass-kicking attire.

Seriously, that's cool and totally sexy and everything, but come on. What the hell?

To be fair, that was taken from Bayonetta, a game with more over-the-top fight sequences than all three Matrix movies put together. It's not exactly going for realism. However, how many times have you seen an RPG with big manly men, covered in armor and spikes, only to find that the girl in the group fights in a chain-mail bikini; or the group of commandos with warpaint and uniforms, accompanied by the girl who runs her ass off in a mini-skirt? Even when you see a female warrior with full plate armor and a giant spear, she's wearing goddamn high heels (she's a badass but with a hooker twist).

Sex-appeal sells. I get it. Hell, I totally love it. Not every game needs to look like an issue ofHeavy Metal magazine, though. You can be realistic about it. It's not really all about the look, either. Hell, the female version of Commander Shepherd of Mass Effect has outfits that look like a dominatrix outfit, but made of kevlar. She's accompanied by a girl, Miranda, who's ass is nearly exploding out of the latex (I'm assuming) that contains it; and another, Jack, who's covered head to toe in tattoos and you can see almost all of them. However, Miranda is cold, calculating, precise and loyal but sometimes a little uncaring. Jack is hot tempered, destructive, vindictive and anti-social, yet she approaches sex casually. Real, strong characters.

Even Shepherd, whom you control and can shape into many different characters, is worth examining. She is, in all her incarnations, a no-nonsense, strong and inspiring military officer. Her voice is low and firm without going too far or sounding butch (which is fine, but it's good to know that people don't think that independent women are mostly shaved-head lesbians). In fact, when I compare it to male Shepherds voice, he sounds like a total chump. Even if the first game had the option to be female as a tacked-on afterthought, they certainly did a good job in both games, particularly the sequel.

"Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you. Getting a lot of bullshit on this line"
Awesome.

Bioware is one of my favorite companies for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons is because of the emphasis they put on writing. They create realistic characters. For example, not every female has to be a stone cold murderer to do it right. Dragon Age II had a character by the name of Merrill, a Dalish elf blood mage who is half runaway, half outcast but completely confused with herself. She goes with you because she's totally helpless, despite her frightening power, and hopes that you can help her out somehow. The cool thing is that she doesn't fit into that stereotype of a damsel in distress. Part of her character is that she is bumbling, sheltered, easily embarrassed and unsure of herself and your job, if you like, is to help her on her way; not to rescue her. Not only is she an interesting character, but a cool juxtaposition: a trembling and adorable flower that commands horrible, forbidden demon magic. Neat, right?

If you took sex appeal out of games completely I'd be just as unhappy as if it were running rampant. It doesn't have to go, it just has to make some fucking sense.

Chris Cunningham: If Lovecraft Directed Short Films

In my late teenage years I had a slight interest in video editing and short films, something that never really blossomed into a career path, but I still maintained a moderate interest. One of my siblings gave me a copy of The Work of Director Chris Cunningham. I cannot possible describe the mindfuck I went through. You might not know it, but you've probably seen his videos. Many people are familiar with the Monkey Drummer video he did in conjunction with Aphex Twin.

Pictured: penis drumming.

Speaking of Aphex Twin, Chris has done a large portion of his work for him. The videos he creates are just as bizarre as the music.

Warning: lewdness and... uh... what-the-fuckery. When you're done that,

watch "Come to Daddy"

There's a longer version of that, but you get the idea. However, the coolest part about Cunningham's works are some of the tricks he uses. You think Gondry can come up with some cool camera tricks? Well, you know that scene in 300 where they consult the oracle (a truly disturbing part, that I can't say I was a fan of for various reasons,) and she's floating around, seemingly like she's underwater? Yeah, she was underwater. They filmed her in a tank in front of a green screen. Chris Cunningham figured that out way back in 1998 when he directed Portishead's Only You.

They had to digitally remove any bubbles, and back

in the stone age that was really hard.

However, all the videos I've shown are either grotesque, or at least very bizarre. I could go on about more videos that fit that description, like his live work, or the forever disturbing Rubber Johnny (those images will stay with me to the grave.) That seems to be his forte, for sure. However, he's no stranger to creating pretty and uplifting things. He directed a video for Bjork's All Is Full Of Love that blew the top off what was considered possible for a music video. It's now on permanent display at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Keep in mind, this was filmed in 1999 and it still holds up today.

Ok, so Bjork-faced, lesbian robots is weird. However, it still proves he can make "nice" videos. In any case, that's not the only award he's received. It won "Best Special Effects," and "Breakthrough Video" at the MTV Music Video Awards (which meant a little bit more at the time, I hear). His Windowlicker video won "Best Video" at the Brit Awards and he was the first person ever to have a music video win a Gold Pencil at the Design and Art Direction Awards.

He is one of my favorite directors. He co-founded the Directors Label DVD series with two other phenomenal directors: Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. It is a series dedicated to collections of short works of other striking directors. Their website seems to be down now, but you can find many of them online, and I absolutely suggest you get them.

Even commercials aren't safe from his creepiness.

Skrillex - My Novice's View of Electronic Music

My knowledge of electronic music, particularly more elusive sub-genres like dubstep, fidget and breakbeat, is extremely limited. While there are people out there who can differentiate between the bajillion different styles, I'm still to new to really pin it down with any sort of authority. This is in no small part due to the fact that I had the unfortunate experience of being subjected to exactly the kind of electronic stuff that I would never like in a million years, so I was immediately turned off.

I didn't mind listening to Daft Punk when somebody threw it on, but I wasn't going to rush out and buy a record; I liked Aphex Twin, but mainly because I'm such a huge fan of Chris Cunningham music videos. See where I'm going with this? When I wasn't hating it as a whole, I was ambivalent about it at best. Ignorant to the point that it was all "techno" to me. Don't forget, I grew up in the generation of Napster-spread techno remixes, which didn't sit well on my aural palette.

Speaking of Daft Punk, it wasn't until they released Alive 2007 that I began to take an interest in electronic music. Two things I wasn't particularly fond of at the time: Daft Punk and live albums. Who would have thought that this would be the album to wow me into a world of which I had barely even scratched the upper crust. Still, a love-hate relationship with said world persisted for quite a while. The stuff I was more inclined to like was repetitive and not very sophisticated. Not to say that it has to be, but it seemed to be better DJ food than something that stands well on it's own (suddenly, liking Alive makes a lot more sense.) I've been told that I just don't get it, which is entirely possible, and naturally there were exceptions (among them, Danger Mouse, Justice, or whatever electronic stuff Mike Patton ever worked on.)

In any case, I'm getting extremely tangential. The point I'm trying to get to is that, after much frustration, I accidentally came across work from a guy by the name of Sonny Moore, better known as Skrillex. I almost passed over him without a second glance, after seeing the word "dubstep" attached, but I listened nonetheless.

"Yeah... ok, we've been here before. Doesn't sound too different from anyth--h...holy fuck."

To be fair, he's not just a dubstep artist. I have it on the word of somebody with a lot more authority on the subject of this type of thing that he defies classification but that dubstep is certainly a major part. We'll probably figure out something to call it sooner or later, but just let it be known for now that it's in the "FUCKING AWESOME," section of my musical library.

The beats are steady and simple, the drops are heavy, distorted and down-tempo, but the production and compositions are, to these untrained ears, flawless and sophisticated.

As a friend put it. He has the Midas Touch.

When I plug in to his album, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, I feel a hundred feet tall. It's infectious stuff, and fortunately he's been getting some good exposure in the last two years. Signed on to Mau5trap in 2010, and just recently had one of his songs used in a trailer for the video game, Uncharted 3, was the DJ for the Woodie Awards, had a song used for a commercial for the new Mortal Kombat game, and released a song with KoRn.

Mortal Kombat track (duhr), and a personal fav

His stuff was good to start with, and has only become more pristine and fleshed out. Very excited to see what he does next. Unfortunately, that might take a while longer than everybody originally thought, due to the unfortunate theft of his laptops and hard drives. That equipment had his next album on it. Whoever you are, I hope you die in a fire.