Seek the Original: M*A*S*H

64.2% of everything Hollywood does is adapted from a book, or short story, or comic. Never settle for an adaptation. Seek the original!

I had no idea M*A*S*H was a movie before it was a TV series. And then I learned it was a book before it was a movie!

MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
by Richard Hooker

Colonel Henry Blake calls the General and demands two more surgeons for the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near the Korean front line.

Hawkeye Pierce and Duke Forrest are transferred to the place to care for the wounded of the Korean War. In their tent is Major Jonathan Hobson, who is creepy about praying. Very creepy. So Duke and Hawkeye ask Blake to get rid of him, and get them a chest surgeon while he's at it. They're seeing more chest trauma here than they know how to handle, so they need a specialist.

Blake of course refuses, so Hawkeye and Duke kick the guy out of their tent and into the snow. Blake reads them the riot act, but in the mess hall, Blake is treated to fifteen solid minutes of prayer from this soldier. It annoys him so much he ships the doctor home and manages to get them a chest surgeon. Enter Trapper John, the best chest specialist the Army can get them.

In no time, this trio of doctors forms a club of sorts in the 4077th: The Swamp, because with the booze and gambling, their tent looks like one of those seedy places you have to go to a bog to find.

Such is the first episode. In another, the Catholic chaplain, John Mulcahy, seems to be better at curing near-dead patients than the doctors. For a brief time, patients miraculously get better after Malcahy performs rites. So one day, after a few drinks, the Swampmen decide to give Malcahy a human sacrifice as a thanks offering: the Protestant chaplain, Shaking Sammy.

They bound and gag him, toss him in the middle of a pile of old mattresses and make like they're going to light it on fire. It's all a gag, of course, but it's enough to get the MP's called on them. They weasel their way out of it by pulling rank on the officers, and it's back to patching up the wounded.

Then their resident dentist, "Painless" Waldowski, plans to commit suicide, so the Swampmen set up a mock living funeral for him, complete with placebo suicide pill to hold him over until he comes out of his depression cycle.

Each chapter reads like a self-contained episode. A problem resolved in some sort of comedic manner. With the hell they have to go through, who can blame them? Trapped in the middle of nowhere Korea, faced with death and carnage every day, and having to be the cleanup boys, they gotta let loose somehow.

I confess I could not read this without reading Alan Alda's voice as Pierce, even though in the book he is married with two kids and from Maine, not Boston.

Duke is a bit annoying, not because of anything he does, but because of his use of the word "y'all." It sounds wrong, like the author threw it in there because he didn't know any other way to establish Duke is from Georgia. Just have him say y'all in all the wrong places. It doesn't work, but oh well.

Some of the situations they get themselves into are funny. Apparently the Army assigns someone to inspect the soldiers for venereal disease. Hawkeye and Duke pay someone else to "inspect the weapons" instead. It's great!

But it's a narrative. There's no sense of being there while it's happening. It's a story told instead of shown, which is a bit disappointing because these little episodes could be funnier if they were told while they were happening instead of explained as this happened and that happened. It works well enough, but a lot of humor was lost to me because it was so passive.

The football game lasts two chapters though, and I couldn't follow it because I didn't understand the footballspeak at all. My problem, not the book's.

Tempers run short, people get on their nerves, but they get the job done. It paints quite a picture of what being in a MASH unit was like during the Korean war, and how some people dealt with the stress. It seems made to be a movie and a TV series.

Compare that to...





M*A*S*H (1970)
Starring Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, and Tom Skerritt

A book that contains such obvious farce comedy is begging to be acted out. Really, Richard Hooker's book has quite a bit of comedy routine that is told instead of presented, and it needs to be acted. What could go wrong when all the material you need is already written and you just have to show it happening? Ugh...

I know it was a hit in the 70's, but I don't get it. I didn't laugh.

The book tells both sides of the story: the horrors of what they have to face patching up the wounded of war, juxtaposed against the stuff they do to cut loose from it. Cause and effect. The movie focuses only on one side, the broad comedy. It makes the people of the 4077th MASH look like a bunch of idiots instead of military doctors on the front lines. A horny teen comedy set in Korea instead of High School. It shows some surgery, but no sense of how it affects anyone.



In the first half of the movie our three main characters (Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke) act more like middle school bullies than grown men. The jokes they play aren't funny. They're just mean, especially to Captain Burns and Major Houlihan. The book tells us why they deserve to be the target of the Swampmen's pranks, but the movie barely touches on it, so it just looks like the gang is picking on them. It doesn't make them look like good guys at all.

The book is full of deadpan funny dialogue. The movie doesn't do anything with that. It doesn't bother with anyone talking to each other. It's a farce comedy. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I like farce comedy when it's done well, but MASH? I didn't think it was funny at all.

Even the bits they borrowed directly from the book are not funny, such as the suicide of Painless Waldowski. Reading about his mock funeral and last rites is funnier than watching it, and the reason he wants to commit suicide is more sophisticated in the book than in the movie. In the book, it's just a depression cycle. In the movie, it's because he thinks he's gay. I didn't expect that.

I liked the gag that Painless is the "best equipped" dentist in the Army, and men line up at the tent while Waldowski is showering to glimpse it. That was funny, and it's also in the book. Him thinking he might be gay is a bigger reason to want to end his life, yes, but watching them save his life is not as funny it should be. It's... dull.

Although the story of how Hot-Lips Houlihan got her name is much better in the movie. The soldiers sticking a mic under the bed while Houlihan and Burns are having sex is a much better reason to give her that nickname. In the book, it's not established whether or not they actually had sex; just the suspicion earns her the nickname.

Later, the soldiers want to find out if she's a natural blonde, so they wait until she's in the shower and tear the tent wall away, exposing her naked body to the entire camp. This is a much better reason for her to freak out and threaten to resign. In the book, she does this only because she's tired of being called Hot Lips.

These are the only two improvements on the book's material, but again it just feels mean-spirited because neither Hot Lips nor Captain Burns deserves it. We're told they kinda do, but it's not enough to make the Swampmen seem like heroes dishing out justice. Instead, they look like childish bullies picking on the nerd.

The movie also has a couple plot lines that go nowhere. For example, Pierce gives their Korean tent boy, Ho-Jon, drugs to keep him from being drafted into the military. But the Korean doctors see through it and keep him for more observation. And that's it. That's the last we hear about Ho-Jon!

In the book, that boy is drafted and comes back to the 4077th a few weeks later gravely wounded. The Swampmen patch him up and arrange to get him out of Korea by sending him to college in the states. The movie doesn't go anywhere with this, and there was potential to show how the war affects these people by having Ho-Jon die from his injuries! It would have at least been an attempt!

The whole going to Japan to perform chest surgery on a congressman's son is in the book, too, and it reads exactly like an episode of the MASH TV series. It sounds just like something they would do, go to operate on some kid just to play golf in Japan for a week. You'd think it would be funny to watch it happen. It's not. The story is barely told, the reason they're going there is barely established, so the absurdity of doing it just for golf is lost.

And the football sequence... It lasted long enough in the book, but in the movie it's painfully long and not funny at all.

Something is missing from the film adaptation. There's no sense of knowing these people, and they're not characterized very well. Far be it from me to dislike these actors, but I think the TV series cast portrayed the characters way better than the film cast did.





M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972 - 1983)

The movie was popular enough to merit a TV series spinoff. Even though the book and the movie end with Pierce and Duke going home, the series continues as though the movie never really happened. Burns is back in the camp and chaplain John Mulcahy is now named Francis for some reason. There are some new characters, like Klinger, who dresses as a woman trying to get kicked out of the Army. He's not in the book, but the idea of someone trying to get kicked out of the Army just to go home is mentioned in the book.

I can't say anything about the TV series that hasn't already been said a thousand times before. The series does everything the movie does not: humor from dialogue and character interactions, not just broad physical comedy. The series also shows the horrors of war and how it affects the doctors in the 4077th MASH, which gives them a reason to lash out in various, goofy ways.

Alan Alda's portrayal of Captain Pierce is perfect. His deadpan delivery of absurd dialogue matches his voice in the book. The Hawkeye in the movie is so generic he's not even there. Alan Alda's Hawkeye stands out no matter where he is, and that's exactly what he's supposed to do. The Hawkeye in the TV series frequently playacts and dramatizes, like a Shakespearean actor breaking into a huge speech in the middle of normal conversation, which is much more befitting the character than the movie's dry, laid-back depiction. It shows he's compensating for the stress of being a war surgeon. That connection is lost in the movie.

The TV series is the definitive version of the characters. It does what the book does, and what the movie should have, which is show the stress these people are under, and how they handle it by raising hell. The characters interact with one another, they have depth, we see them go through good times as well as tragic times. The movie leaves all of that out and tries to get by with pranks.

The movie's humor is dated, just like its visual style. (Yeah, just keep zoooooooming in on everything.) The series lasted 11 seasons, concluding in 1983, and it's still funny today.

It all started with a book. Check it out sometime, because it reads just like a sequence of TV episodes. Read why it made such a good series.

Seek the Original: Communism

Never settle for someone else's interpretation! Seek the original!

There's been a lot of anti-communist talk since Obama was elected. But how many people have actually read what Karl Marx proposed? How many actually know what Communism is? I decided to find out.


The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Does he say people should be stripped of all freedom and live in a police state to keep the peace? No. Does he say everyone should work as hard as he can but only be paid according to what he needs? No. Does he want religion to be abolished? No.

Does he advocate abolition of private property? Yes. Does he advocate government takeover of private industry? Yes. Does he preach equality among labor? Yes. Does he want free education for all children by the state? Yes.

So many people react to these ideas and communism in general out of hand, but they don't take the time to listen to where he's coming from. Part one of this manifesto is the reason he advocates these things.

Exploitation.

Karl Marx lived during the rise of industrialization. He saw the early titans of capitalism, and what they were doing to entire nations, and he observed it was the same thing the nobles of old did to the serfs they owned. Exploitation of human beings for person gain.

That's what Karl Marx was against. He didn't want to take away the wealthy man's money and give it to people who didn't deserve it. He wanted to end the centuries-old practice of one human being using another human being for personal gain. He saw capitalism as just the newest incarnation of the cycle of human civilization. One group of people rises to the top to become the nobility, keeps the commoners in slavery and exploits their labor to make themselves rich. Marx observes that's the only reason anyone gets rich, by taking what someone else has and keeping them poor.

Part one outlines his grievances with industrialization and capitalism: how it moves in by force, selling its goods to people and forcing them to become part of their production. In doing so, capitalism strips people of identity, heritage and culture, remolding these civilizations into its own image, all for the purpose of using the people to produce cheap goods for resale. The competition among the upper classes drives them to push the workers further and further into poverty, and the longer this goes on, the more inevitable revolution becomes.

He mentions the economic cycle capitalism has created: it is dependent on perpetual growth. Always growing, always finding new markets, always expanding, always increasing capital. This is done because of competition between businesses, putting one another under pressure to reduce prices. The best way to reduce prices is to increase production, and this forces industry to do things like increase worker hours, decrease benefits, reduce pay, etc. But overproduction always leads to a surplus of goods, which leads to a recession. Poverty hits because production must scale back. People are kept in bondage to this, and he argues it has raised nobody's standard of living, only lined the pockets of the factory-owners.

He even outlines exactly how the (then) current elite class rose to power, and has used its influence to get the government to look out for them, and not for the people its supposed to represent.

In Marx's view, the pursuit for personal property is the very heart of all class struggles in every civilization throughout history. In a utopian society, one man does not enslave another. Remove the need to acquire personal property, and society will be free of class strife. Communism is not an attempt to force everybody to be equally poor. It's an attempt to end this exploitation of human beings.

He then addresses various criticisms of communism in part two. Here's one:

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois [the nobility's] property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
...
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
...
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

The irony is that Marx himself is all for the working man working for himself! He says so right here! He wants to end the practice of men using other men's labor for their personal gain, and return to working for himself. That was the original goal of communism, and that surprises me! The idea arose as a direct reaction to the industrial revolution and unrestricted capitalism.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

Marx is speaking to the ruling class. The well-off decry the end of personal property, but the only reason they have property is because the rich man has taken everything from the poor, so to be against anyone calling for the end of personal property is hypocrisy.

He's calling the rich parasites on the poor, which is what makes them poor to begin with. It's the counterargument that was so blatantly missing from Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand called the poor parasites who feed on the rich man's hard work. Marx describes the true nature of a parasite: it drains the host of all nutrition, leaving the host emaciated, weak and defeated; while the parasite itself grows fat and happy. He makes the exact same point as Rand, but directing the blame on the rich.

Considering the time period in which he lived, this observation makes sense. Capitalism was unregulated back then, and business-owners really did work people to death just to make more money. Workers suffered while the factory-owners thrived, and there was no hope of getting a job somewhere else where things were better because there was no better place to work. People with jobs made so little money they went hungry. They couldn't afford housing in the cities, and there was no transportation back then, so they were crammed into tenements, living in filth, and these were people who had jobs!

This was what capitalism looked like until laws were passed that limited what employers could do to people. Marx was appalled by the systematic destruction of entire nations in this way.

I'm still not sure how he expected people to work for themselves and enjoy the fruits of their labor without having personal property. I don't know how that would work... Marx is very vague on the details here. I would read Das Kapital to see if there is more information but HOLY SHIT that is not a book one should read just for the hell of it! It doesn't look like he addresses that topic at all, merely devoting his time to analyzing and deconstructing capitalism.

Part three mentions various misinterpretations of his idea and explains how they got it wrong, such as limited socialism that tries to make working conditions a little better for the workers but still allow the ruling class to remain in power; activists trying to please both sides; and deceitful variations that put on a front of being out for the people but are in fact little more than a public relations arm for the ruling class. Socialism, according to Marx, is a watered-down form of his idea and doesn't go far enough to kill the root of the recurring problem in human society: a class of Haves rises up and keeps the Have-nots down.

Alas he did not live to see the greatest misinterpretation of them all: Russia. From what Marx describes here, Russia was not communism. The point of communism is to get rid of the ruling class that oppresses the people and keeps them poor. The paradox is that Marx himself says various things must be turned over to State control to prevent those things from becoming oppressive (such as factories), which entails there being an administrative body above the people, which is--dun dun DUNNNNN!--an elite class.

Marx certainly had a noble cause, but his outline for how to implement it is open to interpretation, and that left room for various dictators to seize and use it to justify horrors such as forced state labor and the abolition of religion. Nope, Marx never says religion should be abolished. His intent was to get rid of the exploitation.

Marx first wrote this in the 1840's! Coming up on 200 years later, much of it still rings true today, and that's eerie! The recession of '08 brought a lot of things to light, such as the double standard of law. Businesses get bailed out for their actions, but the people are foreclosed. Businesses cut jobs, and then business-owners and the politicians they buy blame the people for being out of work. Laws are biased for the benefit of the businesses, not the workers. It happened in the 1800's, and it's still happening today, although in a much nicer form thanks to the laws that keep employers from outright enslaving us.

All Marx wanted to do was end the cycle of human civilization. I don't think even he knew exactly how to implement his idea, although he seems to favor man returning to work for himself, instead of being forced into a system where he must work for someone else. A system that rewarded the abuse of human beings. To people of the late 1800's who were victims of the nobility and the industrialist getting rich off their hard work, this must have seemed a perfect answer to all their problems.

As Orwell so eloquently showed in Animal Farm, the implementation of these ideals has not been so successful. It doesn't seem possible to create a classless society without creating an upper class to keep people from rising up too high.

It's plain to see where a lot of his ideas came from though, and where these ideas went wrong in the execution. Marx's concept that everyone should be allowed to have a job comes from capitalism's tendency to hire and fire people at will, thus controlling their means of survival. Marx wanted everyone to have a good job instead of being at the mercy of profit-hungry factory-owners and economic cycles, but when people tried to make communism happen, the State ended up forcing people to work against their will.

The concept that no man should be allowed to rise up and command the labor of others implies that everyone should be paid equally no matter what job they do. And since it's impossible to pay everybody high wages for even menial work, everyone gets paid a low wage, which has the effect of no incentive to do more work. This isn't in Marx's proposal, but it seems to be what happened when it was put into action.

Marx says there should be no private property, but he doesn't explicitly outline who property belongs to. It seems obvious it belongs to the State, but what exactly does that mean? If one can't have personal property, why have money? Why have factories? Why have work at all? It does seem to have the effect of forcing people to stay down, be meager subsistence farmers.

After all, if personal property is not allowed, how do you divide up the State-owned property equally among everyone? That would be too difficult, so it's easier for everyone to have nothing. This idea that no man should be allowed to become a rich nobleman implies everyone should be kept poor so nobody will ever be able to rise up and enslave the people.

None of this is what Marx really intended. Soviet communism was not Marxism. Chinese communism was not Marxism. Marx apparently counted on the people willingly going along with this, without a need to be forced into it. It's not supposed to be oppressive, but a mutual desire among the working people to end the practice of men using other men to make themselves rich. The idea behind it was to get rid of the nobility that keeps people down, and willfully live in a way that won't form such a ruling class again. But the pigs always end up becoming human.

My view of Marx is the same as my view on Bob Black's The Abolition of Work. Noble and dead on accurate in its analysis for what capitalism does to people, but impractical, idealistic bullshit without a solid proposal for an alternative system.

Schizm: Mysterious Journey. A belated review

I mentioned Schizm: Mysterious Journey in my reflections on deceptive box art.

For everyone too lazy to click the link, back in 2002 I bought Schizm: Mysterious Journey as a way to celebrate my then-new computer. The box art featured gorgeous graphics, and I was so thrilled to have a computer that could handle them now. But when I installed the game, what I got were graphics so compressed and blocky you couldn't see a thing.

It turned out the company released two version of the game: a CD version and a DVD version. The CD version featured these awful, ugly, poorly-compressed visuals, while the DVD version contained the beautiful imagery I saw on the box. But the company used the graphics from the DVD version on the CD game's box art! Since it was 2002 and DVD drives were not standard equipment on computers back then, I was stuck. $50 I paid for what I expected to be a gorgeous game, but instead they gave me shitty graphics. One thing I was always curious about was why no one but me seemed to notice the terrible graphics. Now I have confirmation that I was not alone!

Well, I finally got the DVD version and at long last I played what I paid for.

Yes, there will be spoilers.

The premise behind the game is explorers came across a planet that was completely in tact, but deserted. No evidence of war, or desertion, or anything. The people were just... gone. An entire planet abandoned like the Mary Celeste. So scientists stayed there to learn more about it. Now they're disappearing, too. Hannah and Sam are two crewmembers on a resupply ship that crashed, and they must explore to find out where everybody is.

The graphics on the DVD version are much better, but in just the first ten minutes something becomes apparent. Something that wouldn't normally bother me too much because it's a game. Something I normally ignore because you have to be more forgiving about it in video games--but this time I couldn't help but notice the acting isn't just bad. It's atrocious.

Hannah is the first character players will listen to, so I'll talk about her. Her voice doesn't match her character's picture, and she isn't unemotional so much as she says her lines using the wrong emotions. It's so bad you have to notice. And it's not just her--it's everyone! Watch! You'll understand.



On top of that, the puzzles are not logical. They are not part of the world, the story, or the atmosphere. They are blatantly artificial and needlessly complicated. The first real puzzle you'll encounter is the tulip puzzle. Simple enough, but there is no discernible pattern to the switches. Trial and error is how everyone solves this.

The next two puzzles in the living ships segment I did figure out on my own (the lantern and the ship coordinates). Those are fine. After that, everything requires huge leaps of logic to understand. Take the gas-collector puzzle, which you can watch here. Even after reading two walkthrough solutions (1, 2) to it I didn't understand why it worked. Here's one:

Inside is a message for you and two complicated looking gas collectors. Leave them for now and go out the other passage. Outside and to the left, if you look down, is a floating something. Nothing else to do here so go back inside and experiment with the gas collectors.

The message from the scientist spoke about one of the gasses being twice as strong as the others - but which one? If you press the levers, gas is collected in the 10 bulbs. Press the central button and the indicator to the right measures the combined strength of the gas. Turn back to collector and press any lever to inflate one of the balloons in the airship (which is what you saw outside) with the gas from that collection point.

The trick here is to inflate the airship with the powerful gas - none of the other gasses are enough to keep the gasbag inflated. The problem is that there are two collectors and a mistake deflates both gasbags and changes the where the gas is collected. You can solve the problem by trial and error but there is a more elegant solution.

Press any of the levers once, its neighbour twice, the next lever three times and so on all the way round until the last (tenth) lever which needs to be pressed 10 times. This should give you a total pressure of 55 (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10). Now press the central bulb and the indicator gives the actual pressure. One notch on the outer ring is 12 units and one notch on the inner ring is 1 unit of pressure.

When I played, I had an indicated pressure of 63 (5 x 12 + 3). This meant that the powerful gas was in the 8th collection point. Pressing the 8th lever inflates one of the gasbags on the airship.
Top Tip: when you have got it right, save your game.

Now turn to the other gas collector and do the same thing again. If you have got it right, the ship will rise to the top - if not then you need to try again. Note that a failure resets both collectors, which is why you needed to save your game.

Was that supposed to be obvious?? Did anybody deduce that solution without looking at a walkthrough, or did they leave it up to trial and error? I don't get how anyone is supposed to arrive at that method on their own.

Then once you make it past that, you hit another roadblock. Prayer bells and tower height!

I understood I needed to match certain bells with certain colors to make the correct phrase that will open the trap door, but geeze, the bells are so similar they're almost impossible to tell apart, let alone draw for reference! The spoken words are so garbled and go by so quick it's damn near impossible to write them down--and fuck the sequence needed to open the trap door! The ghost says it so fast it's indecipherable!

And then you have to calculate tower heights? It's not enough to record the measurements; now you must figure out relative distance and somehow calculate it?! There is nothing that clearly indicates you need to do this, or how. The walkthrough shows a barely visible mural in the temple, but where is it stated the distance to the symbol is 10 units? How can you figure that out on your own? How can you figure out how to calculate the height of the towers on your own??!! Why would you even need to?

The symbols on the measuring device are so pixilated they're illegible even on the DVD version! How did anyone manage on the CD edition!? Why aren't the numbers here the same as the numbers on the living ships? That might've made some things clear, but no, the numbers are totally different and for no apparent reason other than to make things more complicated!

It is awful! The puzzles are completely arbitrary and obtuse. Trying too hard to be like Riven. Riven's puzzles were mean and complex, but they were also part of the world, tied to the story, so the solutions to them were discernible within that context. Schizm tries to mimic only one half of the equation, and the puzzles come across as stupid because of it. They require so many leaps to figure out I can't imagine anyone finishing this without a player's guide.

No, Schizm is not engaging, or fun, and the acting kills what little story there is, so there's no reason to be interested in what happens. I've read the game only gets worse. You then have to calculate new coordinates? I don't see how it's possible for anyone to deduce these solutions from clues in their environment.

So fuck Schizm. I'm done with it. One frustrating leap of logic after another. 50 bucks wasted either way--not only did they misrepresent the game by using the DVD-quality graphics on the CD version's box, they made a game that is nothing but a long string of frustrating, arbitrary puzzles!

It's a shining example of just how difficult it is to make a good adventure game. One person's leap of logic may be another person's insight, and it's very difficult to know which is which. Consistently striking just the right balance between the two throughout an entire game is very difficult. I think the best way to balance it out is to tie everything to the story. Puzzles will rise organically out of the environment, and within the context of an engaging story, one can find insights into what to do. That's what Schizm lacks, so the designers tried to compensate by making things really complicated. It didn't work.

The graphics are gorgeous though. Schizm was far ahead of its time in that sense. And the music is outstanding. It's the game's only redeeming quality. Really, it is.

Bioshock Infinite

Since my computer won't run Bioshock Infinite, I rented it for PS3. Right away I started off with a handicap: I have never played a FPS on a console system! I've been using keyboard and mouse so long it's difficult for me to play on anything else.

Took me half the game to get proficient with the controls. Not good, just proficient. I died way more than I should have, which was frustrating because I know I could have done better if I had keyboard and mouse. But I did get better. I did learn. I did adapt. I played. And I finished the game.

And what a game. Fucking epic and incredibly well-done. The world isn't as interesting as the previous two Bioshock games. Of course it wouldn't be. I'd call it impossible, as Rapture was a very hard act to follow, and Andrew Ryan was an intelligent, fascinating man to learn about.

Columbia isn't nearly as interesting. Instead of a city under the water it's a city in the clouds, and instead of being founded on Ayn Rand's principles of unregulated capitalism, it's founded on the idea of racial superiority. It's a fitting theme to explore. This mentality was everywhere in the early 1900's, such as the belief in the Aryan Race, which the Nazis would later base their mantra on.

But that's not why Columbia exists. A man named Zachariah Comstock was pissed off America freed its slaves, and founded Columbia on the belief that inferior races needed to stay in their place. White men were naturally the rich businessmen, and everyone else are workers. It's the natural order of things.

Booker Dewitt is sent to Columbia to bring back a girl. But this isn't a normal job. Things will go badly.

I like how this city is still a thriving community when you arrive. In Rapture, everything went to shit more than a year ago, so everyone is insane and out to kill you. Columbia, however, is still a normal, active, beautiful city. There are many times in the first half where you're not fighting, but wandering the streets and nobody is shooting at you. This is very refreshing. Things don't go to hell until you show up because you see, the non-white races are tired of being tools white men use to make themselves rich. Revolution is brewing.

But this isn't even the main story. It's just background!!! The main story is about the girl you're escorting, Elizabeth. Once she's with you, it's an escort, but you don't have to protect her! Finally, an escort mission that doesn't suck! In fact, she helps you by tossing you health and ammo during combat! She's not helpless like most girls protagonists are sent to rescue.

The real story is about parallel universes and quantum possibilities. This is what happens when you start messing with it. Things get confusing.

I've written about the "no consequences for death" trend in games today. In most games, once you die, you come back to life and everything is just as you left it. Why bother including player death at all if the player is just going to respawn exactly where he left off? Normally I bitch about this dumbing down of games, but in this case I was glad for it because of my PS3 handicap. And in Bioshock Infinite, coming back to life after death is integrated into the story fairly well. It has a hinted reason to be there, and it makes sense. More sense than the vitachambers in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 did. I didn't mind it this time, though I still stand by my disdain for the practice in general.

My only real complaint is the vigors are not explained. They have no stated place in the world. No reason to exist. In Rapture, the plasmids were part of the world, and the whole ability to alter one's body to shoot fire and bees is what made the world what it is. All of that doesn't make sense on Columbia though. Why can men buy the ability to shoot fire? Why can they summon crows to attack people? What purpose would it serve on Columbia, and how would it come about? Fucking cool as that is (Murder of Crows is my favorite vigor!), it's not explained, and without the integration it wasn't justified.

It shouldn't have been called Bioshock, but it is a great game. Lives up to its hype, definitely.

I wish I had more time to replay the game, but when I do that, it will be on the PC, where I'm more comfortable. I did well enough with the PS3's controls, but I'm sure I'd die a lot less if I could play it with keyboard and mouse.



Discussion on the ending (SPOILERS)
{
I hear a lot of people are confused by the ending, but it does make sense if you think about it, and if you're paying attention to the audio logs and dialogue all through the game.

Comstock himself says: what if the man who is baptized moves on from his sin, while the man he left behind still exists somewhere else, sins in tact? What if, indeed. All through the game we're hit with alternate realities, jumping from one to the other, pulling things through, alternate realities merging, etc.

Booker is Comstock from a different world. Booker Dewitt is what Comstock would have become had he decided not to take the baptism and stew in guilt for his sins during the wars he fought. Comstock is what Dewitt became when he did accept it and chose religion as a way to deal with his sins during the wars. They are the same person who made two different choices.

The scientists were playing with multiple universes on Columbia. That's why everything is so messed up here. Comstock couldn't have a child of his own, but he did have a child in other universes. He took his daughter from another universe (in which he did have a daughter) to be his heir, and remake the world as he thought it should be... where savages stay in their place and never make waves--which is, according to Comstock, the reason for all war, isn't it? Blacks and Indians and Chinamen and the Irish just won't accept their status as servants of the white man and stay in their place.

He himself calls Columbia "another Noah's Ark." He intends to rescue everyone who agrees with him and destroy everyone else who does not. Comstock wants to do this in not just his universe, but all of them.

The only solution is to destroy the man at the point where both of them exist. At the baptism. This is possible because, as the scientists say, time is not a river, but an ocean. It will correct things across every universe.

It does make sense, and I enjoyed it. It should be a movie! It's a cinema-quality story with professional-grade acting in game form and it's excellent.
}

What Went Wrong? - Star Trek Enterprise

A followup to my reflections on the Voyager finale, I want to talk about Star Trek: Enterprise.

I followed the series into its third season when it originally aired, and then I gave up on it. Since then I've looked back on many of the episodes I missed after I quit (including the series finale) and I see I didn't miss much.

The episodes were stiff and often boring. The characters stale and flat. The series had a lot more action than any other Trek series, but most of it was actually boring. The series finale? Even more rushed than Voyager's.

It seemed like such a terrible idea to make a Star Trek prequel series. It led to all the predictable problems: the "past" ended up looking more modern than the "future" in the previous Star Trek series. And for 40 years we've come to know that Kirk did this first, Picard did this first, Janeway did that first--then Enterprise comes along and says wait, no, Archer did all of that first!

Why bother? Why go backwards and retcon everything? Why not move Star Trek forward?

Well, I read an article in Star Trek Magazine just before the premier that stated Enterprise was going to feature a very loose crew. Since the series takes places before Starfleet solidified, the rank structure would be less rigid, the chain of command would be nearly nonexistent, and you're more likely to see people wandering the corridors in jeans and t-shirts.

It sounded like a good thing, and it gives some insight into why the producers chose to make a prequel series in the first place. The Trek formula was old. Four series in a row all following the same style. There needed to be a shakeup to keep it fresh. Making a series after the Dominion War wouldn't have allowed them to do that, but going back to the beginning of Starfleet would. That was the whole point of Enterprise.



What went wrong?

Well, for starters, the show had the goal of changing the Star Trek formula, but ended up following the formula even more rigidly. The rank structure was as hard and fast as any Starfleet vessel. There was no casualness among the crew. Nobody walked around in civilian clothes, and they socialized as human beings even less than on Voyager. In other words, they still did not act like normal people, but like Starfleet officers.

Captain Archer was supposed to be this loose, easygoing guy who doesn't really pay much attention to rank and makes friends with the crew like they're his drinking buddies. That's what the article promised, too.

What we got instead was an unemotional, pacing captain who spent all his time trying to be commanding. He wasn't easygoing or friendly at all. We're told he fraternizes with the crew, but we never see it, so as far as the audience was concerned it wasn't true.

As I said before, I can see why the producers picked Scott Bakula as the new captain. He is a very loose, easygoing kind of guy. If only more of Scott Bakula had ended up in the character of Jonathan Archer. If only the writers and producers had let the actors be loose, friendly and casual on the set. It might've saved the show.

Going back to before Kirk also lent itself to uncomfortable retconning. No, Captain Kirk didn't do that first; this guy Archer did it first. No, Picard wasn't the first to encounter the Borg; Archer encountered them. It didn't make sense. If Starfleet knew about the Borg, and if a cure for assimilation was that easy, why wasn't Picard's crew prepared for them?

This is the big danger of doing a prequel: not matching up with established show history. Instead of shaking up the formula, the first two seasons of Enterprise really are more of the same, but with retconning. It was unwelcome.

It seemed the only thing the producers did to shake up the formula was try to make Enterprise into an action series, like the original Star Trek. But most of the action sequences weren't interesting to watch, nor were they very exciting. It was like they were still following the Trek formula in the action, so all of it ended up being passive. And it wasn't TV limits either. Firefly, meanwhile, was doing way more exciting action. Personally, as a viewer, I think it had to do more with inexperience. The producers were so used to the Trek formula they didn't know how to break out of it, so when they tried, they were only able to go partway.

As evidence, I cite the use of transporters. The series is set before transporters became commonly used on people, so they don't use transporters to visit planets. They take shuttle pods. They stuck to this rule except when the plot needed them to board an alien vessel and get out in a hurry. Even as late as season 4 they were using transporters to pull people out of tight places. The producers were so used to transporters they couldn't figure out how to do Star Trek without them.

The end of season two saw the NX-01 entering The Expanse to save Earth from a superweapon! In any other context, it would have been cool, but I remember what I was thinking at the time: if Archer went into the Expanse and did all these things first, why isn't he remembered in the future?

Once the NX-01 went into The Expanse, the rank structure became even more rigid because now it's a military ship, complete with an entire army of red shirts! It didn't come across as an exciting development. It was so rushed and contrived it came across as a desperate attempt to save the series from cancellation. Just pump more action and sex into it; that'll do the trick!

My shark-jumping moment came when T'Pol practically stripped on camera. Star Trek resorting to sex to get ratings? What network is this? Fox?! That's when I quit.

The series did have a couple good moments though. Seeing how Starfleet met the Ferengi in "Acquisition" was fun. "Minefield" and "Dead Stop" were also outstanding. Made great use of the retro setting. A problem that would've been easy to solve in the future is pretty complicated here. But my favorite episode is "Singularity," in which radiation from a black hole causes the crew to exhibit obsessive behavior. It's funny in a very dark, dangerous way. Alas, the series never really found a stride.

The Temporal Cold War introduced in season 1 and finally concluding in season 4 was never a very interesting idea. Soldiers taking orders from their future selves...? We'd had enough time travel crap thanks to Voyager, and the idea just made no sense. Wouldn't their future selves know they're going to fail? What's the point?

The only other moment from the series I can remember that actually made good use of the retro setting was the three-part story with Brent Spiner as Dr. Soong trying to recover the embryos from the Eugenics Wars. That was a very good idea, too. We know very little about the Eugenics Wars, and it was nice to have a little more background on what they were about. There was some decent action there, but even then much of it was pretty slow-paced and passive.

Then the series finale. All that buildup to Archer's speech, and we don't get to hear it. We don't get to see what a difference Archer made and how he is basically the savior of the quadrant for founding the Federation. It would have been bold, but also awkward because Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and every other character in the future doesn't mention him once.

Enterprise was quite a gamble, but I think it was doomed from the start just for the retcon risk. It's easy to judge in retrospect, especially for somebody who wasn't involved in the production, but as a viewer and a lifelong Trek fan, this series bugs me so much.

Looking back on Star Trek: Enterprise, it was very courageous of the producers to try changing the formula. But it was clear nobody involved in the production actually knew how. They tried to pump more action into the series, but it only went halfway. Starfleet was supposed to be new and loose, but the crew sure didn't act that way. They still acted like Starfleet officers to the core.

Maybe if the formula had actually changed, things would have been different. If Archer really had been an easygoing guy more likely to share a drink with his crew than to order them around; if the crew had been loose, friendly, and not so duty- and rank-oriented; if the show hadn't retconned Archer as first to do everything we already knew Kirk or Picard did first... We might've had a good show. Instead, the series adhered to the Trek formula just the same, so all it did was retcon itself into Trek history.

Thinking about it this way, I do respect the producers for trying to change things up. I wish it had worked, but at the same time I'm glad it didn't. Star Trek needed to rest. Now if we can only convince J. J. Abrams to stop retconning Star Trek, it can rest in peace.

The Internet Speaks for Me 2

Allowing the internet to say things which would be unwise to use my own words to express.

Antichamber

Wow.

Imagine going through Portal without the computer to keep you company. Imagine stripping the story from Portal, and all you're left with is a mind-bending world to explore. A world where spatial relationships don't always match up with what the eyes see. Many reviewers describe this as an M. C. Escher mindfuck, and that's probably the most succinct way to put it.

The artistic look of the game is what attracted my attention at first. The graphics are so simple and clean. They almost feel homemade. Several spots reminded me of Mike Oldfield's Music VR (Tr3s Lunas), but that's just on the surface.

Rooms shift and move all around you. Walking down a corridor may lead to a dead end, but then you walk back the way you came, and now you're in a totally different room. Walking backwards down a corridor may take you to a completely different location verses walking forwards. It's akin to being in a maze that's constantly changing, but even that isn't accurate because the world never actually changes. It's all very logical, but totally unexpected. The game is full of impossible spaces and corridors that wrap back around on themselves without curving. It really does fuck with the mind, but it's all logical, and if you learn the game's internal logic, everything does make sense.

As if that weren't enough, you're then given a device that creates and destroys cubes, so now you have to get used to manipulating those. How you manipulate cubes depends on how far you've upgraded the device (I don't want to call it a gun). More areas become open to you, and they're full of wonder.

Took me about 8 hours to finish the game, and I never needed a walkthrough. It's superbly designed, perfectly balanced, and damn near flawless in every way possible. Antichamber is the most satisfyingly mind-bending game I've ever played. Everyone who likes games that are won by problem-solving and not by trigger finger needs to play this.

(Official site)