As I type this, virtually all of my worldly possessions are sitting in a storage container, waiting for me to pick them up. This includes my DVD collection. I’ve always thought of it as a “DVD collection”, never as “clutter”. H. has always thought the opposite. Now, I’m beginning to wonder - who’s right here?
For two months now, I’ve been getting by with the stuff I brought with me in my suitcases. And the only thing that I miss is my Xbox 360. I really wish I’d brought that instead of my PlayStation 2. I could be playing Forza 2 and boosting my achievement score right now instead of playing through Kingdom Hearts 2 and hanging out with Ariel from the Little Mermaid. Which, let’s be honest, is pretty fucking fruity.
I tell you what I don’t miss though: my DVDs. I brought a handful in a CD folder – things like 2001, Idiocracy, Spaced – things I could watch again and again. And I’d say I would miss those if I hadn’t brought them with me, but what about the other 1,175?
Let’s pick an extreme example: The Tao of Steve. Will I ever watch it again? I seriously doubt it. It was a bad movie and I didn’t enjoy it when I watched it. I think the only reason I hold onto it is because I had myself convinced that my DVD collection was like some shiny communist state and every disc was equal. So I would no sooner get rid of “The Tao of Steve” than my three-disc Criterion Collection edition of “Brazil”.
But they’re not equal. Not even close.
Filling in the insurance forms for the moving company was also pretty eye-opening. Averaging a value of €10 per disc, the insurance on the DVDs alone came to €12,000. And considering the final value of everything was under €15,000, it got me thinking - is this still a collection? Or did it cease to be a collection the minute I started buying things like The Tao of Steve, or Jack Frost, owning them just to own them?
Of the DVDs I own, I reckon there are about 200 that I love. Really love. And I’d be upset if I didn’t have these. That leaves, what… 1,000 DVDs I could afford to let go of?
Anyway, it’s left me with this food for thought. Would I rather:
A: keep convincing myself that it’s worth holding onto films like The Tao of Steve, just in case Donal Logue dies a tragic death and its value suddenly skyrockets and I can retire early.
or
B: sell the cruft on eBay and use the proceeds to buy myself a Macbook Pro and maybe even a nice new Cinema Display.
I’m a total sucker for theme parks. When I was fifteen, my family went on holiday to Florida, home of a thousand theme parks, and I made sure we saw every single one of them. But the thing I love about theme parks isn’t so much the rides themselves but the atmosphere created around each ride. For example, when you’re queuing for the “Jaws” ride in Universal, the queue takes you through Quint’s boathouse. This is a perfectly realised model of the boathouse from the movie, with hundreds of incidental details dotted around the to help convince you that you are actually in a movie.
Also in Universal Studios is a ride loosely based on Dino De Laurentiis’ unsuccessful 1976 remake of King Kong. The audience rides in a cable car around New York being terrorised by the giant monkey, in a series of spectacular set-pieces. Kong appears, shakes the car and yells a bit, and scares the audience. But it’s starting to show its age now, and the animatronics can’t really fool today’s more effects-savvy audience. If you listen carefully, you can hear the hydrolics and steam motors driving every inch of your experience throughout the ride.
Ubisoft’s game of Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a worthy replacement for Universal’s aging King Kong ride.
Following the “classic” Kong story, the game also uses a series of cinematic set-pieces to drive the action forward. These range from rafting downstream while being terrorised by the natives of Skull Island to battling dinosaurs in the middle of a brontosaurus stampede. And when these succeed, they are marvellous, memorable pieces of gaming. One of the most spectacular moments comes when the action shifts - one minute the player is controlling Jack, who has no choice but to run from the larger beasts on Skull Island (a luger and a spear will not trouble a T-Rex). The next minute, the player controls Kong, who can swat these monsters away in a tremendous show of power.
The story is mostly told by the bits in between the set-pieces. Through some fantastic voice-acting by the cast of the movie, we are presented with personalities that are as three-dimensional as their graphical representations.
But it’s in the atmosphere the game creates that it really succeeds. The island, dense with terrifying creatures, feels like an actual living, breathing place. There are hundreds of incidental details littering the environment to heighten the player’s experience and convince them they’re in a movie. Or on a ride. This is also helped by the lack of a heads-up-display - there’s no bar to tell you how much health your character has, or how many bullets are in his gun. This is all done through brilliantly-implemented visual and aural clues. There’s a wonderful moment in the 4 minute clip of King Kong movie where you get to see Skull Island from Kong’s Mountain. And I thought “Y’know, from this angle, this place is beautiful. Down there, it’s horrific”, as if I’d actually been there.
And this atmosphere isn’t confined to within the game itself. Along the way, you unlock “extras” within the game. These mainly consist of “galleries” of WETA artwork for the movie. But instead of presenting these as flat image files, we get to experience them as though we were walking through an exhibit in a museum. And this is so perfectly (yet simply) realised that you can almost smell the dust in the air.
There’s a lot to praise about this game, which is made even more stunning by the fact that it takes roughly 10 hours of average playing to complete. Now, there’s a whole other post about value for money with games you can finish over the course of a weekend. But for this one, I’ll just say yes, it is definitely worth it.
I’ve been pretty busy for the past few days and I’m still catching up with the stuff that happened last week. Like the Manhunt 2 furore.
For those of you that don’t know/care, last week, the [Irish Film Censor’s Office](http://www.ifco.ie decided to make a prohibition order against the upcoming game, Manhunt 2, making it the first videogame ever banned in Ireland. A moot point, since over in the US, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board gave Manhunt 2 an Adults Only (AO) rating and the three console manufacturers have said that they will not allow AO-rated games to be released for their systems.
So lets ban any story, film, news report which contains violence and go about life in ignorance, as they want us to. God help us all, next thing banned will be the great sculpture of David done by Michelangelo because it contains nudity.
Personally, I think the idea of completely banning any game from a country is an outrage, and a blatant infringement of civil liberty.
That still makes me giggle.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with the censor. In their statement regarding the prohibition order, they said
IFCO recognizes that in certain films, DVDs and video games, strong graphic violence may be a justifiable element within the overall context of the work. However, in the case of Manhunt 2, IFCO believes that there is no such context, and the level of gross, unrelenting and gratuitous violence is unacceptable.
And you know what? This all sounds perfectly reasonable to me. John Kelleher has proven himself to be an extremely liberal censor, and prohibition orders are typically reserved for the most hardcore porno. Think about it like this - this is the film censor that let Hostel through. This means that Hostel, one of the most brutal exercises in Gorenography I have ever seen, has more of a context for its violence than Manhunt 2. (For reference, here is their ruling - “strong” across the board.)
I also agree with the censor because I am not convinced that, on its own, classification of movies or games is an effective way of preventing children from being exposed to indecent material - I just don’t think it actually works. As someone who was exposed to a ridiculous amount of horror films as a child (thanks, Gar, for letting me watch the Exorcist at age 5), I believe that if you don’t want children being exposed to something, you should make it as difficult as possible for them to get their hands on it. In most cases, by banning it.
This goes double for videogames, where lazy parents often dismiss the graphic content of games simply because they are “games” and will happily buy Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year old just to keep him quiet for a few hours.
Hardware Solution
The big “however” at the end of all this is that all this could be easily avoided if the rating system was used in conjunction with parental controls. These days, most media-playing devices (including modern games consoles) have parental controls built in. If you want to watch a movie or play a game above a certain age-rating, you have to enter a password. But the problem here is that hardly anyone uses these parental controls because hardly anyone knows about them.
Maybe it’s time they were turned on by default, and bugger the inconvenience?
Greg Packer started queueing on Monday, June 25th at 5pm. Outside Japan, is this the first time people have been started queuing days in advance for a PHONE?
When I moaned about Italian music before, I admitted I hadn’t looked very hard to find something good. And, in my defence, it’s easy to be a little dismayed when you’re bombarded by Michael fuckin’ Buble in all the shops. But things are picking up! Here are two songs I like right now.
Tiziano Ferro - E Raffaella È Mia
This guy seems to be like the Italian Robbie Williams, back before Robbie Williams turned into an enormous, pulsating cock. The song is about Raffaella Carrà , an Italian actress and TV host, and its lyrics are really easy to understand (“And Raffaella sings in my house / And Raffaella dances in my house”), so I like that too.
But I’m actually having trouble with the song. Is it catchy in the CSS kind of way, or is it catchy in the Ketchup Song kind of way? Whatever. I’m not ashamed of what I like.
AntiAnti feat. CapaRezza - Picciotti della Benavita
Caparezza (the dude with the giant ‘fro) is an Italian rapper. His solo stuff is kinda like System of a Down, which is no bad thing. We’ve had a hell of a time trying to buy this album on iTunes (which I’m sure I’ll blog about soon). Fuckin’ twenty-first century my arse.
johnke.me
