So, getting around to showy conventions, for instance, is pretty doable where I live. Whether it be the big names of D&D gamer cons (Kublacon, Baycon) or anime (Anime Expo, Fanime), or comics (Comic Con), or Macs (Mac World), or video games (GDC, Es), none of them are that far away. Also, I’m used to paying high California prices for everything.

This week I went to my first attendance of E3, ever. After years of hearing about this Mecca of gamer experience, I was expecting… something a little more. The scene was pretty jammed with folks, but surprisingly not packed to the gills at all levels that I expected. Sure, the usual suspects had rings of fan lines around (Ninetendo, Sony, Ubisoft, EA, Capcom, etc.) but the rest of the show seemed remarkably easy to navigate. The booths were very nice as well, but few had the outrageous conceits of designs that you see at Comic Con. Nor large mechas just sitting around. The energy overall was pretty low, said a three year attendee I chatted with, and the swag was definitely subpar. The inside word was that many games expected to be launching at E3 were being pushed to next year instead, lowering the number of flashy demos actually being shown.

What I did discover is that most of everything I would want to see at the Expo was only being streamed online for their global audience. The whole setup is really just a media junket for press to come in and gawk at the new announcements. The free industry attendees, I suspect, were just being allowed in to make the whole scene looking happenin’. Those conniving bastards!

I guess that’s why I ended up just meandering about without much purpose. Waiting in long lines to play some of the games seemed a waste of good standing time, and instead I sought as many ways of sitting down as I possibly could. Which is why I only really ended up attending the one public announcement for Fable: Journey from Microsoft. Unloved and understated, it was actually a really impressive, kinect-intuitive game in development from Lionshead, with the usual pretty graphics as well as some cool magic effects.

Fable: Journey
The story of Fable: Journey will fill in some of the shadowy mysteries surrounding Theresa, the sister of the original Hero of Oakvale and an amoral instigator in her descendants’ destinies as well as the fate of Albion these centuries past. The player begins as a Dweller (a gypsy type) traveler 50 years after the events of Fable 3. He, or she, encounters Theresa fleeing from the darkness that the Hero of Brightfall defeated in Fable 3, far from her sheltered hideout in the Spire. Her appearance is much younger, and she has lost some of her future sight. The player, riding through the countryside in a dweller wagon pulled by your trusty horse, rescues her from the darkness in the woods and is tasked with taking her the 300+ miles back home to the Spire.

The player is a dweller, and unlike the Heroes of Albion past, is not a pureblood descendant of the Archon. He or she looks a bit different than the typical dweller, and is able to cast magic. Theresa is able to sense that the player is important, but unable to see further into why. Along the way, there are towns and NPCs to interact with, but the primary driving focus for the story will be moving the player forward, on his/her journey.

Fable: Journey is really designed as a kinect interface game, and the controls for the horse and carriage are the best example. The player is able to use their hands while seated to control the motion of the horse from a first person view. Flicking the reins, pulling on one side versus the other to make the horse go left or right. Leaning to the left in right while in this mode allows the player to view the world from the corresponding angles.

The magic system, too is geared for kinect. It’s designed as a “catch all” system for all combat. Whether you are a ranged fighter, melee, or spellcaster, all items will be created and executed using magic. It’s a simplified system that still allows for the visceral feel of a sword hack ‘n slash game, but with only 1 leveling system to worry about.

Spells and items are created by using certain types of kinect motion commands, which can be customized to suit the player’s style. A large gesture that frames the screen, for instance, can be done as a rectangular frame or a circle, and causes a time stop in the game. Rubbing hands together will generate friction for a fireball. And rolling and lengthening the hands in front of a player will “pull” a spear of magic that the player can then throw.

As you might expect from a Molyneux production, Fable: Journey is being sold as the most open, almost sandbox-like Fable where the player fan can create their own customized magic spell combos, (finally) run themselves off cliffs, and explore the Fable world from the ground up in a horse and carriage. It’s choices. Whether you like it or not.

The characters just make no sense. The familiar act like strangers and the strangers act like they’ve known each other for months. The relationship anomalies aside, the characters themselves are all oddly accented with character flaws that make them more disgusting than charming and I find myself genuinely disliking the personalities despite my initial bias of wanting to like them very much. Only Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester lives up to the over-hyped Glee rep, and her slightly-addled but dangerously sharp-toothed bully of a Cheerios coach is everything the much hyped media had promised, and then some.

On the other hand, musical productions really have never needed an excuse to flaunt themselves, and classic film studies have often noted the connection between an exuberant, passionate musical number and the climax of a story. So, I wonder why it’s taking so long for this bloody show to realize that about itself and just move on to doing the things it’s good at. Drop the lame attempts to throw plot my way and just give me a thin premise to string all of the musical numbers together, already. It’s basically soft core musical number for the home television set, so get it on already, Glee!

The fairy tale of Rapunzel is an odd story, but often retold. A poor man’s pregnant wife craves the rapunzel plant from the witch’s garden next door, and out of desperation, the man raids the garden of the witch in order to get it. The witch catches the man and he’s forced to promise his firstborn child in exchange for the exotic foodstuff. Soon after the women becomes with child and on the day the girl child is born, the witch comes to whisk the newborn away and locks her in a tower forever.

Years pass and the girl’s hair grows long and golden and fine. The tower that the witch locks her into has no door and only one window. The witch is allowed entry only when Rapunzel lets down her long golden hair. One day, a handsome prince arrives and witnesses this performance, and sees Rapunzel and falls in love with her. After some surprise and introductions, the two eventually conspire to kill off the old witch and return to Rapunzel her freedom. And thus the two are able to ride away happily ever after by not dealing with any of the logistical and motivational issues that plague this fairy tale more than others.

In pure Disney tradition, Tangled, of course, is all cuteness and light, but speckled with some darkness and an interesting case of Stockholm syndrome. In this rendition the movie makers put an answer to a very important plot hole in the Rapunzel mythos: which is that why would an old witch want to keep a screaming infant and raise it? And the mother-daughter relationship between the main protagonist, Rapunzel, and her captor/parent Mother Gothel, lends some extra depth to an otherwise very shallow premise of a fairy tale.

Indeed, Mother Gothel is the cunning villain that connoisseurs of villainy everywhere can relish — she’s clever and sultry and vivacious and persuasive. She is a woman driven to win, and in the end, she is undone by only her own greed, which blinded her to the possibility of any other value in the world greater than what she’s got.

The characters of Rapunzel and her love interest Flynn Rider, on the other hand, are your typical cliches of the genre, and I think the filmmakers should have been slapped upside the head for too many close ups of our protagonists looking with yearning away from the camera. Sure, it’s a great way to showcase your CGI, but every such indulgence dramatically slowed down the pacing and made the movie drag out far longer than it needed. For a movie as shallowly unselfconscious as this, I find it contradictory for Tangled to have had so many moments of watching itself.

These past few week I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching the remastered version of the 1990s BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Something like watching a good performance of Shakespeare, I feel as if every reiteration yields yet another juicy tidbit that I had missed in the view before. Oh! the tantalizing lines, the delicious furtive gazes, the surreptitious smiles, and the relish that every actor delivers his or her lines. The characters are all so brilliantly painted by the actors, and with such… amazing spirit, such insight into their roles. It’s very much like falling in love with your beloved all over again — all of the first nuances, the quirks, the funny little habits and sayings that you first grew to adore. And so many catty, witty, smug little lines! I know there is some unfaithfulness between this and the original, but I really feel as if the adaptation is true to the spirit of the novels, and moreover, genuinely expands upon the storytelling of the original with modern tools and conventions.

I have an overwhelming desire to speak archly and loftily in large, round words accompanied by an English accent now, but unfortunately, my ability to mimic any accent is appallingly bad. I’d just have to settle for  rather pretentious sentence structures and heavy prose power posturing for now instead.

Now, the previous Fables were always really fun for the laissez faire approach to relationships, including multi-city families and the naughtiness of infidelities that you could develop over the course of your Hero’s life story. But, somehow, with this character and her background, I couldn’t find it in my heart to have her court anyone. Instead, my story ended up with a virgin Queen beloved by her people with a brood of adopted children. All of the people dear and beloved to her were dead, and the confidants she had developed over the course of her journeys all left her. So, really, she was left with no one in her confidence but her faithful Jasper after saving Albion.

Which is why in head canon, she eventually abdicates the throne once a suitable heir is raised, and disappears into the southern desert, taking the last of the royal Archon lineage with her. (Although my previous Fable II hero was a bit of a wanton, so there may be illegitimate bastard relatives lying around who still have that good old timey Hero lineage.) All in all, it was a sad, tragic story that played out, though the natural pep of the PC character helped to balance a lot of the sorrow.

Next time around, maybe a male hero who’s a bit more emotionally driven in his decisions. I’d like for at least one of them to end up happy, dammit.

It’s fast approaching another milestone in my years and I am having just a troll of a week. Nothing in particular, really, just a general sense of impermanence and lackluster feelings towards work and life in general. Part of my supposes that I just might have put a bit too much in terms of hopeful expectations of  how this week will pan out, and those inflated expectations may have more than a little to do with my current sense of listlessness. Part of me is just tired, and probably in need of a vacation.

So, naturally, I turn to you to provide. Please send me your love, internets. kthnxbye.

Wall street journal article: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/07/21/legend-of-korra-the-creators-of-avatar-the-last-airbender-on-the-new-spinoff/

But I probably need to start by saying: I am also a shameless blockbuster movie fan. Six years of studying literature in academia and I still have no qualms about punting a declared modern classic of autobiographical drivel for trite, Hollywood-fueled extravagance. Which is *not* to say I have no standards — the recent remake of Transformers, for instance, tried my patience harder than the original 80s movie cheese. But Iron Man 2, I have no problem.

Contrary to current popular votes of expectations against it, I’d even go as far as to put it on par with the first Iron Man movie Favreau’s team made. And why not? As a banter-loving explosion aficionado, I laughed where I was supposed to at all the superficial literary references and giggled whenever a character made a snappy comment. (e.g. At the description of a missile so advanced, “It will make Ulysses look like it was written by a child in crayon; and then read it back to you.”)

I do enjoy a good, silent villain, and Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko was nothing but terse and hardworking. It was refreshing that the villain didn’t feel a need to run around killing people all the time or shooting things in order to be evil. He did his bit, beat up Iron Man, and then spent most of the rest of the movie sitting around looking smart w/very stylish glasses on his nose. It was like, “Yeah, we already saw you half naked earlier, so your badass credentials are good.”

Pepper Potts and Tony Stark’s bickering crescendo showcased the two actors’ chemistry at its best. Neurotic, insistent, and yet charmingly familiar, their sputtering, non-canon romance underscores an interesting dynamic of two people who know each other’s habits all too well, and yet seem to know nothing about the other at all.

Scarlett Johanson, playing her “stony face” siren role (wait — does she have any other?) rocked the Black Widow leather as secret S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff, and to the choreographer and director’s credit, they gave her several a semi-realistic scenes of combat wherein she actually takes down a her opponents in several short, blink-and-you-miss them moves across the floor. Admittedly, I still can’t figure out why the hell she needed to be in this movie at all, but it was nice to have some real curve candy on screen instead of Gwyneth Paltrow’s skinny, shapeless butt.

I did miss the amiable face of Terrance Howard, however, who fell out of favor with the movie because of a contract dispute and was replaced by Don Cheadle. Replacing Rhodey took away from the established familiarity of the characters, and I couldn’t help but picture him instead in Cheadle’s place. (Don Cheadle, you will forever be to me Hotel Rwanda, so get out of my heartless blockbuster movies, already!)

Some people complained about this movie having too much going on, and I agree, but in the darkness of the theater , the pacing and story unfolded just right. And at the end of the day, it comes to this: can you, or can you not enjoy the adventures of a megalomaniacal narcissist who claims, “I have successfully privatized world peace”? Because I can.

Wacky side characters kept me coming back to the show even when the female lead, Daisy, annoyed me to pieces. She eventually grew on me, but it’s characters like Brian, the indie artist, and the desperate land lady that really made the story fun. But watch out for the Phantom Menace jokes.