Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I love cats

They don’t bark.

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Sunday, February 28, 2010

I hate dogs

Yep, there you are, I’ve said it. I hate dogs. Can’t stand them. They drive me nuts, and their stupid owners drive me even more insane. I suppose dogs can’t help being what they are—they can’t help being stupid enough to bark all hours of the day and night at nothing, in an endless repetitive, sanity-destroying way. It’s not their fault that some complete fucking idiot bought them and then shoved them in an inner-city backyard for 23 hours a day. I understand that. But I still hate ‘em.

I had no real opinion about dogs one way or the other until I started working from home in inner-city Sydney. Then, slowly and surely, my opinion of them began to turn. I had to endure what so many of the dog owners don’t, which is the endless fucking barking of bored and stressed dogs with nothing to do all day. The owner comes home after work and they’re greeted by their loving doggy companion, but they’re blissfully unaware of the stress and grief their furry friend has caused the whole neighbourhood. And it’s just not people like me, working from home—what about old and retired people who stay at home during the day? Or disabled people? Who speaks for all of us, forced to listen to the same mind-shattering repetitive noise over and over and over for hours and hours?

Not the councils, that’s for sure. The advice from our esteemed council usually begins with ‘have a friendly chat with your neighbour about their dog’. Are they fucking serious? Do they have no concept whatsoever of the lengths to which people will go to deny any possibility of wrongdoing on the part of their beloved pet? You might as call into account the way they bring up their children. People have been shot—and I am not exaggerating. Shot. I politely tried to talk in a civilised fashion with someone about their barking dog once. I was verbally abused and threatened.

The next piece of advice is to get a petition together. Yep, walk around your neighbourhood getting people’s signatures about someone’s barking dog. I need hardly explain the possible consequences of such an activity. You as well paint a big target on your back.

So instead of the person who isn’t taking care of their pet properly having to take responsibility, the onus is completely on the poor people who are quietly going about their day to day lives without inflicting stress and anger on their neighbours. This is wrong folks, wrong. I should be able to call a council hotline and have professionals visit the owner’s house to inform them that there have been complaints about their dog and they have come to check on the dog’s living conditions.

There’s a yappy horror a few doors down, that has been barking its head off for the last four years. Likewise, another large dog that barks in an endless two-bark pattern at all hours. We have a shopping centre nearby where people leave their dogs to bark hysterically for hours while they go shopping. There’s one there that I can instantly recognise—it barks in short, vicious bursts that I can clealy hear even with the doors closed, a street away. I’ve seen it jump into the air everytime it barks. The owner has left it tied up there for hours, at least twice a week, for the last four years, and no one has ever done anything about it. A year ago I suggested to the shopping centre management that someone should talk to the owner. They treated me like a complete loony.

People buy dogs with no understanding whatsoever of the responsibility they are taking on, and everyone around them suffers. They apologise for them to the most unbelievable degree, even when they’ve just chewed some innocent kid’s face off. Amazingly, they seem to be completely deaf to the mindless noise from their pet, even when they’re at home at night and it’s still going off at top volume. And most incredibly of all, not the smallest iota of awareness, let alone guilt, floats through their tiny minds while their animal is driving neighbours to seriously consider selling up and moving.

Personally, I don’t think anyone with a yard of less than a prescribed size, and who hasn’t attended a comprehensive course on dog care, should be allowed to own one. Dogs should be on large properties where they can run around, and where their attentive owners know how to take care of them properly and keep them happy—and not barking.

OK, I don’t really hate dogs. I’ve met some nice ones, even though they do tend to be dumb and slobbery and smelly. I can think of one I even like. Just do me a favour. If you own one, don’t inflict it on your neighbours, OK? Take care of it, teach it not to bark, train it to be sociable, walk it twice a day. You’ve taken on a big responsibility. Remember not all of us love your dog.

PS: Since I wrote this a few days ago, across the street, yet another inconsiderate dog owner has moved in bringing with them yet another big barking dog.

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Monday, February 8, 2010

Modern Parenting

Overheard down at the shopping centre this morning—exhausted mother in a voice with no authority whatsoever to her sulky young boy walking around in a public garden trampling plants:

“Alright, I’ll give you anything you want if you come out of there.”

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Monday, February 1, 2010

Computer game review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Warning: Possible Spoilers. Playing two XBox games in a row, and finishing them both? This is unheard of! Work really must be quiet.

After enjoying Assassin’s Creed II I was in the mood for a bit more gaming, so I popped one of my birthday presents in the noisy ol’ white and grey machine (it still amazes me that they let this thing leave the drawing board saddled with an operating noise like a 747 landing)—Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’d heard good reports about the game. Indeed, once I’d got over the fact that it wasn’t Creed III, I enjoyed it immensely.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-packed mix of combat, investigation, story and stealth. Let’s apply my earlier review criteria and look at it in more detail:

Story
Unfortunately, don’t expect too much from the story. The Joker takes over the asylum and throws a lot of goons at Batman while taunting him over the loudspeaker system. Sure, there’s a bit more to it than that—a few other classic Batman villains appear, Joker does have a vague master plan overall, but the focus here is on gameplay, not story. It’s a shame, because a few hallucination sequences (brought on by the Scarecrow) give a taste of how much more interesting things could have been.

Character
With such a long legacy of characters to draw on, B:AC doesn’t disappoint. The game is improved immeasurably by the quality of voice acting by actors from the animated series, most notably Mark Hamill (of Star Wars fame) as The Joker. However there’s really nothing new here to discover about these characters, and they stay firmly within the boundaries already defined for them in the Batman universe.

Gameplay
This is the strong department for B:AC. Using, as it does, the Unreal engine, which was created for first-person shoot-‘em-up games, it definitely feels like that type of game, but there’s also much more to enjoy here than just killing bad guys. Batman can flip into a Detective Mode that turns his surroundings into a kind of x-ray monochrome, identifying exits, grappling spots, and most importantly, little skeletal versions of the bad guys with feedback on everything from whether they’re armed to how nervous they are about their imminent demise. It’s a very thematic way of giving you as a player the edge that Batman would have in these situations, and works incredibly well. I especially enjoyed using the grapple gun to zip about the environments, or hanging upside down from a convenient gargoyle to silently grab an unsuspecting goon. You can also pop up from under floor gratings, skulk through ventilation shafts, crash through windows—all those sneaky tricks that make you feel like you’re the pointy-eared batty one.

I found the combat system excellent, since it replaced nitpicky button combinations with cinematic, free-flowing combat. Batman really does feel like he’s running rings around your average pack of muscle-bound goons, and every combat ends with a big slo-mo climatic blow. It’s great to see a game emulate the feeling of movie fight sequences so well.

For those who like that kind of thing, you can go back after you’ve finished the game and fight battles in Challenge mode.

Graphics
If I hadn’t just played Assassin’s Creed II, I would have been quite impressed, but I think the Unreal engine isn’t quite up to the same standard, most notably when it comes to outside areas. B:AC looks great, but it’s a stylised look, and natural features and vegetation can appear blocky and unrealistic. You also get that strange, somewhat dated, effect when you hit a place where you know you should be able to walk—a sloping roof, for example—but instead Batman just moonwalks on the spot. After the incredible freedom of AC II this is jarring.

There are some nice little touches though—for example the way Batman’s outfit appears to get progressively more tatty and torn as he progresses through the game; and in general the indoor areas look suitably detailed and grubby.

Difficulty
The difficulty level—for me anyway—is just about right, except for a few annoying spots. The worst offender is a terrible sewer sequence that made me feel like I was back in the bad old days of repetitive mazes in pre-rendered adventure games. Really, any game developer who mentions the word ‘maze’ when designing a game should be immediately strangled for the good of humankind.

Fights with unarmed opponents are usually pretty easy, and even the ‘boss’ battles never got so difficult that I couldn’t crack them after a reasonable number of attempts—even if I did have to give up in frustration and come back and try again later a few times. The game provides you with a hint or two if you keep dying, and thankfully doesn’t bring you back right at the start of a long sequence if you’ve already passed a mid-point checkpoint, and allows you to skip cutscenes. Nice.

Batman: Arkham Asylum’s clever blend of combat and stealth is definitely worth experiencing. It could be improved by more realistic outdoor environments and a more interesting and involving story, but otherwise it’s as close as you can get to walking in the caped crusader’s natty black boots.

Four silent takedowns out of five.

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Computer game review: Assassin’s Creed II

Warning: Possible Spoilers. It’s been several years since I posted a computer game review on the Hollow, mainly because I so rarely finish an entire game. Either I have a short attention span, or I demand more from my precious entertainment hours that endless repetitive button-mashing—probably a bit of both. However I always find that games—and I’m talking exclusively xBox and xBox 360 games, as they’re the only ones I have access to—tend to start off new and interesting, quickly establish their mode of play, and then set themselves on a cycle of rinse-and-repeat. Occasionally I find myself somewhat involved at the start, but then come up against some ridiculous bit of production team decision-making that completely stuffs up the experience. I’m looking at you, Dead Space, which was vaguely entertaining until I got to a stupid shoot-the-asteroids-out-of-space sequence that was as boring as it was hard, and made me throw the controller down in disgust and walk away.

The original Assassin’s Creed was a rare exception, and despite some repetition, and a truly atrocious ending, I enjoyed it all the way to the end of the ride. The stunningly recreated medieval cities, the freedom of movement, and the various side missions made it an entertaining way to pass a few hours now and then.

Assassin’s Creed II however, blows it out of the water. This is quite an amazing piece of gaming entertainment, and while it still has some strong flaws, I enjoyed virtually every moment I spent directing the assassin Ezio around the streets and rooftops of the cities of Renaissance Italy.

So let’s have a quick look at what I think are some of the things that make up a good video game, and how Assassin’s Creed II measures up:

Story
For some bizarre reason, most games place a good story last on the list after graphics, gameplay and just about everything else. How many times have the same old sci-fi and fantasy storylines been rehashed? How many character stereotypes have been recycled over and over? AC II comes out of the gate strongly in this department, but rapidly loses steam. The contemporary story, where your character Desmond enters through an ‘Animus machine’ into the world of the Renaissance Italian assassin Ezio, is an ingenious framework on which to hang all the technical processes of the game, and it works well in that capacity. As a story itself however, it falls flat and goes nowhere. Every return to the modern setting just makes us realise how much more interesting is Renaissance Italy.

The journey of Ezio is far better, but there is still something missing, something that a really good writer would have added: an emotional engagement with the storyline. And that kind of engagement doesn’t come through ye olde ‘you killed my parents’ plot hooks and twists, it comes through creating characters we really care about. Bringing me to …

Character
Closely tied to the success of the story, of course, are the characters you meet in a video game, and how engaging and ‘real’ they are. AC II tries hard in this department, but only gets it right a few times. Ezio himself is kind of interesting, but he rarely goes past his ‘searching for vengeance for the death of my family’ schtick. The best of the lot is a young Leonardo da Vinci, who despite having the most repeated scene in the game (“ahhh, Ezio, you’ve brought me another Codex page to translate”) somehow comes across as the most interesting person in the game, probably because of his endless quirky cheerfulness. Unfortunately, the parade of bad guys all tend to blend into one another, and despite hours of portentious dialogue as they discuss their evil schemes and treacheries, you never quite know or care what they all want.

Gameplay
In this department, AC II is a triumph. It’s as though the entire production team were determined to avoid the accusations of repetitive gameplay they received for the first game. There is so much to do here that it’s almost ridiculous. Some of the tasks between the main storyline feel like afterthoughts—I can’t imagine anyone, for example, feeling the need to find and collect all 100 feathers scattered throughout the game—but others provide much needed variety and excitement. There’s something for everyone to enjoy here—interesting combat moves, puzzle solving, set collection, Tomb-Raideresque platform jumping and timed puzzles, races, side missions, and of course, the pure enjoyment of running and jumping over Venician rooftops, or watching the sunset from the highest point of the Duomo in Florence. Which brings me to…

Graphics
Surely, this is where AC II trumps them all. How the programmers manage to squeeze in so much graphic detail and complexity is a complete wonder to me. There has obviously been a lot of thought put into historical accuracy as well. There’s nothing to compare in gaming with experiences like strolling into the main square of San Gimignano and actually recognising it from my real life visit there, or having the freedom to swim, punt a gondola, or leap over the canals of Venice, or climb the Campanile di San Marco. Throughout, AC II is an astoundingly beautiful game. And its use of real world artworks and photographs is excellent as well—younger players might even learn something. (Gasp!)

Difficulty
Gauging the difficulty level must be one of the hardest tasks when creating a game, and this one, for the most part, gets it right. I find nothing more frustrating than suddenly coming up against a brick wall of difficulty in a game; this often happens near the end, where I imagine some programmers think that a suddenly impossible task will stretch out the gameplay a bit longer. Thankfully, AC II doesn’t have to rely on these tricks, and while veteran gamers might find it all a bit too easy—I never felt that I was going to run out of funds, or, armed with a good supply of health potions, encounter an enemy I couldn’t beat—I never got bogged down, or came up against anything I couldn’t get through after a reasonable number of attempts.

In fact, it’s interesting that my last computer game review was for Thief: Deadly Shadows, because in many ways this game series is the spiritual successor to the Thief games. I’m excitedly awaiting what they come up with next in the Assassin’s Creed series. I just hope that all little more attention is given to professional storywriting, dialogue and memorable character development.

Four and a half leaps of faith out of five.

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