Shopping Cart Hero 2

Supermarket sweep, meet MXC.

It took me around 400 rolls down the hill to master both the Monkey-in-hot-air balloon and the Giant Worm. In the process, Britt and I accomplished triple spins, distances beyond 1000, height over 1500, and many shuttle taps. Of course, first we had to die as many ways possible. If I keep it up, I'll break off the arrow key on my keyboard a la GTA2.

The simplicity of the game at first glance is deceptive. Stick figures give way to beautiful pirouettes, graceful baseball bat dumpster flips, and perfectly executed front and back Superman shopping cart holds. I haven't seen anyone have this much fun in a cart since that time in the strip mall parking lot before a Monster Pete show. You can get extra points easily with the tricks and flips with multiple people in the cart. I haven't played the iPhone format but I imagine it's similarly addicting.

The game could be improved with better record keeping, including max distance and height statistics. OK, back to TetrisFriends.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (PS2, 2003)

(I finished this game several months ago and just now discovered that I never finished - or wrote, really - anything about it. Here's some shizzle jotting.)

This is an RPG that thinks outside the box, for better and worse. I typically have a serious aversion to dying in an RPG - I take it very personally on some level. Maybe it speaks to some sort of empathy or identification I feel with the characters I'm playing as, or maybe I'm just averse to even temporary setbacks or down moments in a game where I'd rather imagine myself on an inexorable upward trajectory toward mastery over everything the game could throw at me.

(I should say as a caveat that I only feel this way when I play an RPG. If I were playing Mario, for instance, I'd think nothing of dying as many times as I had lives as long as I got through a level, and I certainly wouldn't expect myself to clear a game without losing a life. Something about seeing that "GAME OVER" screen in an RPG, though, tells me I just failed at things I think of myself as somewhat good at: resource management, upkeep and maintenance, preparing adequately for tough situations.)

I am also, I have discovered, a story player where RPGs are concerned. I typically ignore the "% complete" display should a game attempt to taunt me with its not saying 100%, and I would rather hit up walkthroughs than scour every town looking for the one NPC who I need to talk to to get some door to open halfway across the world. And if I'm underleveled facing a tough boss but there's a sidequest that will get me an overpowered weapon to take him out so I don't have to grind, you'd best believe I'm going to go and complete that sidequest, walkthrough-assisted, so I can beat the boss and get the next bit of story. And once I've seen the canon ending, I don't play the game again or engage much in post-game challenges. Those are where the game reveals itself to be a bunch of numbers and dice-rolling and lose the plot completely. Not having it.

Dragon Quarter has very little use for either of these attitudes toward gaming. First, the game expects you to die, repeatedly, before you can level up enough to get through even the first part of the game. (Your experience and some items carry over each time you restart.) Second, additional bits and pieces of the story are revealed to you only after dying and restarting several times. Third, the game uses extremely rare items to limit how often you can save. There's a temporary save every time you quit, but you lose it when you load it. Fourth, and what pushes this game into the crazy/innovative area is the ultimate-kill attack: you can use it to beat any boss with only a few hits, but use it too often and the game is over. Like, you have to restart the game, over.

As I'm sure a reader can infer, I tend to see games as games, not challenges, so I was reduced around the halfway point to tiptoeing through each successive dungeon clinging to a walkthrough for dear life. The walkthroughs tell you where you need to be in the ultimate-kill meter and how much of it you need to use up with each boss. And I still had to backtrack (gahh!!! breaking the fourth wall!!) to get the meter back from a few boss fights that I squandered ultimate-kill points on.

Regardless, actually finishing games is something I've become very sure that I do, and I did "beat" the game, though it brought only the accomplishment of barely surviving an ordeal rather than mastering and savoring a great experience.

(Speaking of not savoring an experience, a quick note on the A/V. Post-apocalyptic underground steampunk environment leads to 1) soundtrack having some bad-ass electronic-orchestral hybrid music, but 2) an aggravatingly claustrophobic series of low-ceiling passageways and corridors that contributes to the unpleasantness.)

The Princess and the Frog // Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) // District 9

Q: What do these three movies have in common?

A: Human to non-human animal transformations.

OK, Brain Candy doesn't really have that, but people do go comatose. Pretty close. The real answer is that I saw them all this weekend.

The Disney film returns to the company's hand-drawn animation roots. It feels like Jungle Book, touring the swamp and New Orleans. There's a cute alligator playing the trumpet, snakes that act like dogs, and voodoo galore. The music, going from jazz to zydeco to gospel and back, was decent. Dancing too. Say what you want about voodoo religion having a bad stereotype, I don't care. Because the voodoo priest in this film, the bad guy, was really badass. He's a total pimp. His shadow even kicks ass.  Of course, the film retreads stereotypes about princesses marrying to make everything OK.  But my real gripe is that the hot princess was a frog for most of the film, even though she made a pretty sexy frog.

Brain Candy was the midnight movie, part of the SF Sketchfest, a comedy festival. The crowd was rowdy, and I kind of resent paying $12 for a midnight movie, but at least there was parking. I noticed that the recurring scene where all the gay guys come spilling out of a door, implying there was lots of illicit gay sex going on behind the door, was ripped off by There's Something About Mary (when Ben Stiller stumbles over the naked guy at the rest stop). I like the message, that it's OK to be depressed sometimes.

District 9 was a little disappointing. Sure, plenty of people got liquidated by alien weaponry, and the POV cameras made it feel like a video game, and there were alien prostitutes, but.... wait a second, this movie was awesome! The cliches were jumping off the screen -- using 'live' television coverage as exposition as well as for dramatic tension, and setting up an obvious sequel by telling the protagonist he'd be saved 3 years after the movie ends -- but at least there's no everything-is-back-to-normal ending. The South Africa setting threw me off, as I wasn't sure whether the quarantined aliens represented Apartheid-era blacks or the more contemporary and obvious Palestinian metaphor. For some reason, though, South African whites (Afrikaners) make really good mercenaries. See Blood Diamond and The Constant Gardener. They're just convincing. Something about history, maybe, I dunno.

It Might Get Loud (2008)

I was excited going into this, and underwhelmed coming out. But I am amused that the publicity for this film emphasizes director Davis Guggenheim's last movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Because if there's one thing where the subject matter overlaps like no other, it's environmental warnings and guitar wankery.

Tough to say who this is for. You couldn't pick three much more different guitarists than Jimmy Page, U2's Edge, and Jack White. I appreciate all of their contributions on different levels, though technique-wise Page could wipe the floor with the other two with plenty of jet-engine-imitating facial expressions to spare. If you're already a rock music fan you probably already know the significance of the places they visit to pad out the runtime: Headley Grange for Zep, where IV was recorded- seeing the room where the Levee Breaks drums were recorded is pretty sweet- and U2's high school, where the band met. White doesn't have that legendary lore attached to his backstory (will he ever? the verdict is out), so his sections make do with a lot of old/lo-fi fetishism, all "Son House was standing in a room stomping and singing, it's my favorite record, technology sucks."

I kind of wish there had been some kind of fireworks between White and Edge at the "summit" where the three sit in a fake living room on a soundstage and learn each other's songs, instead of the litany of poker faces we're treated to. "Yes, yes, show me again how to play Seven Nation Army. That one's tough." (Quotation marks indicating, in this case, something no one actually said, but the level of emotional honesty and willingness to debate is about on that level.)

It seems clear that Guggenheim was hoping for *some* kind of discussion of differences in approach or values to emerge by bringing these three guys together- the technique master, the technology wizard, and the feeling-over-complexity, back-to-basics advocate- but his subjects aren't willing to oblige. If I remember the press material correctly, he made sure the three never met before taping the meeting. And it feels like that, like total strangers feeling each other out and scared to do or say anything stupid...which is the total opposite of what music, and artistry in general, is about.

It's like some kind of host-less music talk show, three guests just biding their time until they can take off. A more interesting approach would have been a round-robin covers thing, where for instance, Page would learn Sunday Bloody Sunday, Edge would learn Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, and White would learn In My Time of Dying, and then we could compare how the song retains or changes its shape in the hands of another artist. Then they'd have something to talk about. As it is, it's like they're practicing for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame show and are trying to decide what songs to play, in a uniquely passive-aggressive musician way. "Hey how about that one of yours. That one's cool, let's try it." [originator plays song and other two half-ass their way through it] "Yeah, that one's cool...Oh, how about this one instead?"

Final Fantasy X (PS2, 2001)

(Howdy RGB. It's a new decade and I'm ringing in the year by keeping the ol' girl running.)

Don't let that iconic picture of a sartorially challenged beach bum standing in the ocean with a hundred-pound sword fool you, and fight that urge to rip out your eardrums so you can't hear yourself scream when he speaks. Get ready to suffer some bad voices and a clunky early-00s control scheme, because despite its flaws, this one is really great.

The clock has just turned on making this game nine years old instead of a mere eight. I'm currently a little sour on the whole experience as I'm at the very end and the difficulty hits an inflection point right at the final dungeon. While I understand the motivation for the game suddenly becoming pretty hard right at the moment the majority of the sidequests become available, if almost all the game is going to be such a walk in the park, it really throws me when out of nowhere they expect you to grind and explore the crap out of every last corner.

Up to that point I had been enjoying the game more as an extended interactive movie than a grindfest, and I was unhappily forced to switch gears just to see the end. By the time I was actually ready to take the final boss down, I had lost the narrative thread. It's certainly a credit to the game's hold on me that I stuck with it through to the bitter end...which in my case judging by the play clock, consumed a full 1/5 or so of my total play time. (I was somewhere around 64 hours when I hit the last save point and lost, and at a robust 81:16 when I came back with the goods.)

Incidentally, DQ8 suffered from the same thing. I'm too easily swayed by what the NPCs are telling me to do, in games and IRL, but when all anyone I find in the game wants to talk to me about is beating that final boss, it's hard for me to remember that I'm trying to collect some monsters on a mountain I went through 15 hours ago so some guy will give me this item that I combine with another item to open two seals to get the best summon. Or worse, they're still talking to me about beating the guy after I already beat him! I mean, come on. Next time don't set your world up so that winning the game means the immediate end of all possible enemy encounters. Actually that would be pretty great, a game where you go through all this trouble and then you beat it and playing after the "end," people are all mad at you because they expected you to solve all their problems.

I enjoyed some of the mini-games (the Cloisters of Trials were very Myst/Ico-esque, a huge plus in my book, except they should have taken a cue from those games and cut out the aggravating music) and hated others (Blitzball...just so, you know, wtf). There are a few moments where an ambitious or at least interesting attempt to change up the gameplay falls flat, due mostly to not giving the player any clue how to proceed. I.e., don't just stick me in a room with randomly generating icicles and spheres and a number in the corner of the screen and expect me to know what to do. If this was Wario Ware, maybe; but again, the game to this point has been all but holding my hand showing me how to play it, and in that context it just seems cheap to go another route without warning, rather than "challenging" or "difficult." More to the point, the execution of that room in terms of presentation is so bad and out-of-the-blue that it feels like a half-finished demo screen or a beta version of a future final version.

And how hard would it have been to include navigating the world via airship? I get that the maps are 3D-rendered rather than the 2D overworld maps of previous games, but I would take the fade-out/in to switch between the two over what the game gives you--a button saying "board airship" at save points and a list of locations on the airship's nav screen. Not once do you see the airship move outside of the cutscenes, and you never get to control it. I might as well be teleporting to places in Spira from another dimension, or Tidus's mom's house, given how poorly this mechanic integrates the airship with the map. There's no sense of "let me explore this world!" when you get the airship, which is a classic FF moment in games where you can navigate the world map. Instead it's "let me teleport to this save spot so I can run backward trying to remember where this place I have to get to was."

So that's all the sucky stuff. And Tidus being a complete tool until he grows a pair, which still doesn't make his voice any less whiny. And not being able to move the camera, which I'm sure was an innovation a few years down the road, but which would make doing things like finding treasure chests or, say, avoiding randomly generating icicles much easier.

What's good? The characters, story, and world. The music (hearing "To Zanarkand" at the Distant Worlds concert last month, scored to the FMV of Yuna performing the sending at Kilika, prompted me to get this game from a friend, finally overcoming my nigh-irreparable Tidus turnoff). The battle system and sphere-grid leveling system. Some of the visuals, particularly if you're a generation or more behind like I am. As far as landmark PS2 RPGs go, I still prefer DQ8 because there's a bit of uncanny valley to the faces in FFX and inconsistency between how they look in the in-game cutscenes vs. the FMVs (Tidus gets bony and Wakka gets jaw-y), plus I prefer the old-school-cartoon feel and music of DQ8 overall.

Basically, there is more than valid reason to love this game. I focused on my gripes because it's not perfect. But I was surprised at how good it was. Despite its flaws I think it's better than VII. Eat that, Eight Winged Angel!

PS YouTube is so great. Watching an FFX-2 walkthrough as I write this so I don't have to actually play it. It's like a surreal alternate-reality FFX, or like a bunch of random junk that should have just been optional material after the end of FFX. "How much can we undermine the mood of the visuals from the first game with wildly inappropriate music? Funk, anyone?" And this is coming from someone who doesn't mind J-pop, but as a soundtrack to a slog up a barren rocky mountainside it's just off. And, still the faux airship.