Spock Days, 2009

With Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock himself, making his long-awaited first visit to the town of Vulcan, I figured I'd go ahead and post this piece I wrote at last summer's Spock Days, which got the spike because I guess a Toronto newspaper somehow had something more interesting to run than coverage of a strange event that had already happened on the other side of the country. Go figure.

Abbot K'Obol Chang-K'Onor of Klingon Assault Group (KAG) Kanada, a fan club dedicated to the culture and costumery of Star Trek's fearsome warriors, is glaring at me through his space-shades, sun glinting off sharpened teeth. Handmade leather armor creaks as he sets his shoulders; a twin-headed flail, replete with wicked spikes, dangles menacingly from his gauntleted hand.

"Your understanding of Klingon philosogpy," he growls, "is... imperfect."

As a senior Klingon cleric, the Abbot (aka Doug Welsh of Halifax) would know. His head freshly sheared in the "Shave a Klingon for Cancer" event here at Spock Days/Galaxyfest in the town of Vulcan, Alberta, I made the mistake of asking how he reconciles such charity work -- and the dozens of other good-cause events, from MS fun-runs to fundraising daffodil sales, in which KAG Kanada participates -- with the apparent cruelty of survival-of-the-fittest Klingon culture.

"Klingon philosophy is not about destroying the weak," he explains, as patiently as is possible for a Klingon;"Klingon philosophy is about making the weak stronger. We think everybody should be Klingon!"

They're making a good start on it here in this farming community of 2,000 that's trying hard to turn the sci-fi cachet of its 94-year-old name into precious nerd-tourism dollars. A concrete-and-steel replica of the Starship Enterprise presides over the highway, in view of the seed-cleaning plant; the futuristic headquarters of the Vulcan Association for Science and Trek offers souvenir Spock Ears and a rather cheesy virtual-reality "Vulcan space adventure"; Trek murals dot downtown, and street signs are styled after Starfleet insignia. With the KAG's 20th-anniverasry gathering coinciding with Galaxyfest, the town's rolled out the blood-red carpet: a local cafe's menu board offers, untranslated, such Klingon delicacies as "Throck," "Mool" and "Bartas bir Jablu"; the tavern of the Vulcan Hotel is offering $1.50 mugs of refreshing "Klingon Beer" -- pisswater draft tarted up with lime juice and red food coloring.

It's a strange intersection of cultures. Without its spacey trappings -- out of costume, you could say -- Vulcan would be more or less the epitome of the dire little struggling farmtown, but GalaxyFest's combination of rural county fair and Star Trek convention makes for a surreal appeal. An elderly lady sporting pointy-eared prosthetics rolls by on a handi-scooter decked out in spaceship regalia. The local old-folks' home leads the parade with a replica Enterprise float, complete with command-bridge cockpit and laser sound effects. Characters like "Ysnap the Peace Klingon",  her costume a combination of star warrior and glam hippie, line up along with weatherbeaten farmers and truckers for bratwurst Spock Dogs. Another Klingon tries to wipe away tears without smudging his makeup as a woman on the Community Stage karaoke-sings a country tearjerker about childhood cancer. Local dudes at the beer garden out by the softball diamond horse around with town mascot "Ee-Cheeya", a furry cat-thing modeled after Spock's childhood pet.

"It's amazing," says celebrity guest Lolita Fatjo, a veteran of Trek TV and movie production crews and now operator of a company that books guest appearances for Trek stars; "I've been booking talent for [Galaxyfest] for six years. Everybody I've sent up here has come back and said 'Oh my god, that was so fun.' Usually we go to a hotel, we never see the light of day, we're in that hotel for two or three days..."

Suzie Plakson, who's played several Trek aliens ("I'm a multiracial, global trekkie-gal") including Worf's half-Klingon mate K'Ehleyr, agrees. "A mainstream convention -- and I don't mean this as derogatory -- the description is 'mercenary'. Because it kind of has to be. But this is just pure heart. There's something more... organic about the Trekhood of this town. It's something woven into everything."

Still, this is Vulcan the out-of-the-way grain town, not Vulcan the planet of calculating space-philosophers. In front of the Cinnastop cafe, whose windows sport a mural of what looks to be Captain Kirk and Scotty running toward an alien mirage of giant milkshakes and hamburgers, a pair of shimmery-cloaked Talosians (the bum-head aliens from the original series, remember?) stroll by pushing a dummy replica of crippled Captain Pike, Kirk's predecessor. A trio of old ladies watch them pass, bemused looks on their faces.

"Well," one remarks, with that inimitable small-town cluck of the tongue; "there certainly are a lot of strangers in town today."

Touchscreen evolution

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Kate Winslet: Napoleon in a ball gown?

Fun times watching the Oscars with my wife last night, in suitably new-media fashion: laying abed, using an iMac to display a stream found somewhere in the depths of the tubes, with some random snarky liveblog crawl scrolling in the window next door, bringing a strange postmodern Oscar/slumber party vibe to our little house a million miles from anything resembling "glitz" (unless you count the many Bedazzled denim items available at the local charity thrift). We even got a little classic Oscar-party comedy: dude was casting the stream off his tuner and couldn't resist a teasing little joke, switching over to NASCAR right before Best Supporting Actress; 36,247 screams of terror reverberated through the fibre.

But there's a danger to watching television in bed, the danger of sleep. By the time broadcast Hollywood retired to its hideous wouldn't-be-caught-dead afterparties stacked with contractually-obligated B-listers (classic example of what my wife calls the No-Gift Fakeout: "It's an open bar... that only serves Disaronno") and the stream switched over to the unedited entirety of Kate Winslet's excruciating post-win Q&A, I was dozing. Problem is, I'd spent seven hours that day playing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on my DS, and you know how things get blended together in those half-napping reveries... I dreamed I was there, trying to get a quote from the star regarding the history and relevance of turn-based strategy games and the continuing influence of tabletop wargaming. Frustrating dream; Winslet thought "Avalon Hill" was a boutique production company specializing in Edwardian period pieces... then security started hassling me about my credentials and I ran out of the room, into a kennel where Mickey Rourke was trying to adopt out puppies he'd rescued from Florida dogfighting rings...

Anyway, Avalon Hill. Not a purveyor of tasteful costume drama but a seminal publisher -- since folded into industry-devouring behemoth Wizards of the Coast and relegated to an "all Axis and Allies, all the time" format -- of games designed to bring the minutiae of military strategy and tactics to the dining-room table. Every time I fire up something like Fire Emblem, I end up spending most of my playtime daydreaming about my encounters with the old AH library, of campaigning under the obsessive simulation of movement, morale, weather, entrenchment, zones of control, lines of supply and support and communication. Sleepless long weekends under the merciless tutelage of my buddy Dave, being drilled over and over again through Thunder at Cassino until I could, if not win, at least hold a bloody line for four or five turns. These were -- and are; wargamers are generally obsessive about keeping their shit together, and copies of old AH games in fine playable condition are readily available -- unforgiving tests of intellect, instinct and training... and fun as all hell.

With the roar of imaginary bombardments still echoing in my head almost twenty years later, it's damn hard to take something like Fire Emblem seriously. Craving old-school tabletop tactics, the simplicity of the gameplay in most mainstream military videogames -- even those as niche-pitched as this one -- fails to satisfy. No weather effects, no morale calculations, fog-of-war or reckoning supply lines. Adjacent friendly units offer no support while enemies on your flanks offer no hindrance, eliminating the need for attention to formation and discipline in battle order; even on "hard" difficulty, the battlefield is a cakewalk if you're patient and attentive enough. What complexity and challenge Fire Emblem does offer is all on the back end, in the tedious accounting involved in the micro-management of your forces' progress through their RPG-style levels, none of which is adequately explained in the printed manual or in-game tutorials. Long familiarity with the genre got me through it OK, but after a few hours the ridiculous incongruity of a child's-play wargame supported by utterly obscure mechanics intelligible only to hard-core tactical-RPG vets had me closing the lid and wandering off to the "real world" of red carpets and dead-editor montages.

And yet, as I said, even the plucky song-and-dance routines of Hugh Jackman couldn't keep gamy thoughts out of my head. The camera would rove across rows of famous faces and I'd wonder, how many of L.A.'s bright lights are or have been gamers? What... oh my God... what if they all were? What if somebody, back in the old Studio System days, had started a wargaming fad in Hollywood that continued on to today, movers and shakers gathering weekly around $80,000 teakwood tables in the hills, fuelled by benzedrine and White Lady, hashing out handshake deals between turns. Afterparty pickup shots show stars and entouragers hunched over Blackberries; what if they weren't texting "omg get me out of here amaretto triggers my reflex" but were flashing each other negotiations over their Diplomacy turns: "ok i'll convoy a-london -> belgium if you hold f-north sea... and give an assoc producer cred on slumdog 2"? In this scenario, Hollywood could even have its own awards night for gaming excellence... they could even maintain this wonderful new tradition of having a panel of past luminaries laud the nominees!

WALKEN: "Your performance, Mickey, in containing the Ottoman advance on the Baltic States, was simply... inspiring. You reminded a nation, and a world, of what's possible when bold action combines with careful planning."

ROURKE: [Graciously nod-bows behind his Vuarnets, unconsciously rubs his lucky d20]

The game that plays itself

Delicate decision-making: what videogames to bring on my honeymoon? The best, most sensitive decision, the decision least likely to be greeted with howls of outrage were it discussed on a daytime talk show, would be to leave all the bleep-blorp at home, but... the hand-to-mouth nature of freelance livin' demands constant production; I had to keep working, if only half-assedly.

Then came the Facebook message: A friend has invited you to play Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures. Hey... a light RPG experience, delivered via a platform I'm going to be accessing at least once a day anyway, with that nerd-irresistible flavor of D&D branding? This could be the answer...

I have a long and loving history with Dungeons & Dragons off the tabletop, dating back through the Baldur's Gate games and Planescape: Torment, through the SSI “gold box” titles and on to the two Intellivision cartridges. These were both great carts, but while The Treasure of Tarmin dazzled with its first-person perspective and exciting lightning-bolt-throwing action, it was the earlier game – titled, simply, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – that provided what is still my all-time favorite onscreen D&D moment.

The thing about the Intellivision AD&D game was, it had no onscreen stats display, no radar or health bar or ammo counter. Everything was organic and immersive; in the highly abstracted mountain mazes you moved through, your health was represented by the color of your little adventurer dude, the proximity of enemies expressed through the sound of their moving and breathing in the darkness, your stock of precious arrows counted out by a series of clicks. There have been few situations in my life of videogaming that have given me goosebumps – I'm getting goosebumps now, just thinking of it – like the moment, standing at the threshold of a pitch-black chamber from which emanate the growls of a riled-up dragon, when I'd press the “count arrows” button and hear a single, dismal click. A wonderful expression of the mystery and terror of dungeon-delving, that was.

Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures on Facebook, not so much. You fire it up, choose your intrepid adventurer from a handful of pregenerated characters based directly on the illustrations from the pen-and-paper Players' Handbook, give him or her a name, and that's it for character creation. In fact, that's pretty much it for all meaningful player input. I'd stumbled upon the perfect game to review on a honeymoon: D&D Tiny Adventures, it turns out, is the game that helpfully plays itself.

Click on the “FIND ADVENTURE” button and select a mission, and your character moves through encounters at ten-minute intervals, with all ability checks and combat rolls taking place automatically whether the “player” (more of a “reader”, actually) is looking at the page or not. Click the button, walk away, and an hour later come back and read all about what your guy got up to in the spooky forest or dank sewers or abandoned mansion or wherever while you were taking care of important real-life business. After a little light loot management, you can just click the game's single control – FIND ADVENTURE – and start the process over again, a totally automated fantasy trip.

Under ordinary circumstances, this would be unacceptably lame. This past week, though, it's been a nice little diversion. I'll wake up and send halfling rogue Boson Darkmatter (character name ripped from Google News sci/tech headlines!) on some fantastic errand, go get some breakfast with the lady, do some shopping, maybe visit a gallery or museum, and when next I open my laptop, taking advantage of the WiFi at some bar or cafe, there'll be a whole little swords-n-sorcery (well, at this point, rusty-daggers-n-potions) narrative waiting for me. More often than not, it's a narrative of humiliation and defeat – the automated die-rolling algorithm has phenomenally cold hands – but, hey... it's not my fault!

Zero effort, zero frustration. Zero input, zero attachment. Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures might just be the future, the equivalent of no-calories, no-caffeine sodas, a completely virtual game experience for busy, busy people who can't be bothered with the hassle of actually playing something themselves. It's an almost mystical experience, transcendentally empty.

No! I wanna play dolly!

One of my favorite Simpsons moments comes during the hearing in which the family is suing the Sea Captain’s “all-you-can-eat” seafood restaurant for false advertising. Pressed to tell the court what they did when they couldn’t find another all-you-can-eat fish place to satisfy Homer’s cravings, Marge breaks down and sobs: “We went fishing!”

I’m right there, sobbing along with her. That’s what can happen when you get a taste of something and it simply isn’t enough; you take whatever you can find that might sate that hunger, desperately cast your line. But even the finest line-caught trout, shining silvery in your bucket, isn’t the same as a restaurant-poached salmon, or even a manky plastic basket of deep-fried shrimp, unless you can go all Gollum-style and dig in right there on the pier. Still, you’re so hungry for fish you’ll take whatever the water puts on your hook…

Extended metaphors aside (I’m not really hungry for fish; apparently, I have to cut down if I want future generations to know the joys of sushi), it has been a hard few weeks of craving, ever since those schoolyard pushers over at BioWare gave me my “first one’s free” taste of Mass Effect. But it’s not so much the sci-fi RPG gameplay itself I’m jonesing for – though, you know, duh -- it’s the primary, adventure-starting act of character generation itself. Those few sweet minutes of tweaking an avatar’s face, facts and stats have had me itching.

Any – or maybe just many – old-time Dungeons and Dragons players will tell you the same thing: the purest joy in role-playing gaming is the making of your character, the process of turning rules, points, dice rolls and wish-fulfillment power fantasies into a brand-new, never-before-seen spellcaster, karate man, mutant laser-eye dude or hired killer. A new character, all pristine on a fresh sheet unmarked by grimy eraser-scars and pop-stains, represents a pure product of imagination and fantasy, a clean idea not yet grimed up by the frustration, compromise, disappointment and tedium of actually playing the game along with four or five other nerds and their own (clearly inferior) little dream-puppets.

Role-playing video games – especially single-player games – don’t have the same limited-only-by-the-imagination quality of the tabletop, though, even when they offer as much freedom of characterization, or a convincing simulation thereof, as Mass Effect. The options for your character’s profession and background are relatively few, and choosing from a handful of dialogue choices isn’t the same as extemporizing your character’s words, but let’s be honest; in practice, imagination can be quite limiting. Ninety per cent of characters’ backgrounds are plucked straight off the stockshelf, and a similar portion of players’ improvised dialogue comprises hackneyed threats and other tough-guy inanities. More important than character itself is external detail: “Yeah, I guess my dad was killed and I swore revenge, whatever; anyway, I’ve got these glowing red eyes, right, and these two wicked swords that…”

The magic of character creation in a game like Mass Effect is exactly in these externals, starting with the hours spent tweaking your character’s appearance in the face-building tool. This can be obsession at its best, fiddling with the scores of little sliders that adjust your Space Marine’s skin tone, the length of the bridge of the nose, eye shape and size, chin strength, lip poutiness, brow thickness, cheekbone height, haistyle, makeup…

Makeup? Yeah, makeup; given the choice – in videogames, not on the tabletop -- my characters will always be girls. Maybe there’s some sort of theory-level psychological reason why this is so, something about being able to use a play environment to safely experiment with gender roles or something, but it really boils down to simple aesthetics: in a dialogue-heavy game like ME, the camera’s either right up in your character’s yammering face or following obediently behind, and if I’m going to spend 100-plus hours in this virtual world I’d rather have my field of vision filled with the face and backside of a simulated pretty girl.

But it’s not all Weird Science wank fantasy, a digital Pygmalion trip. Building a character at the facial-detail level creates a deep investment in the game world, a bond of significant power. My cravings right now are not so much for the opportunity to whip up some kind of fantasy asskicker – I’ve been desperately downloading freeware and shareware RPGs, the role-playing addict’s cheap fix, and they haven’t cut the jones – but for making that investment, feeling that bond… and then playing hundreds of hours of action-packed, sci-fi dress-up-dolly. I’d felt that connection forming at BioWare’s press day, and having my bonding time with “Irene Shepherd” cut abruptly short gives these pangs their special bite.

So, it’s back to Oblivion, I guess; I’ve got to do something before I go crazy and start searching craigslist for a local LARP chapter. Gronking again through that played-out world, trying to find bits of unplayed game, doesn’t really appeal to me, but that’s a secondary problem which can be smoothed over with gallons of Gallo; the character customization is there, the face-creation is there and the dress-up dolly is there, even if the novelty’s gone. It’ll be another couple of weeks before I’ll be served fresh fish, so for now I’m going fishing.

DSCrawling out of the dungeon...

“I went all weekend without playing Pokemon!”

We’re picking up the campsite, getting ready to leave North Country Fair behind for another year, and I fully understand my buddy’s pride, pride detectable behind the sunburn, behind the twigs in the beard, behind the post-mushroom, looked-into-the-abyss glaze in his eyes. There amid the weekend’s flotsam of crushed cans, empty cases, upended lawn chairs, half-collapsed tents and miscellaneous debris, I know how good it feels to come out the other side of this sodden, smoked-up annual hippie/hoser musical bacchanal without having crawled away into the glowing refuge of the DS screen -- because I’ve managed it, too. My body may be hung over, but my game-addicted mind is clear.

It was a near thing, let me tell you.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote of my frustration at being teased by Legend of the Unemployed Ninja into a futile desire for a portable roguelike game – that is, a handheld version of one of the many dungeon-crawling games that follow in the footsteps of the1980 computer game Rogue, which featured totally randomized levels, minimalist text-based “graphics”, unforgiving difficulty and total addictiveness for a certain kind of nerd. The idea that I could get netHack, Angband, Moria or somesuch on my DS seemed like a ridiculous daydream; such a thing could never be commercially viable, would never be published or distributed.

I’d somehow forgotten that commercial viability, publication and distribution have never been issues for the roguelike genre; it’s the nichiest of niches, developed and evolved over the years by legions of obsessed hobbyist/hacker/fans. Of course somebody was going to cobble up a DS roguelike. All I had to do was look for it.

I’ve followed the videogame homebrew scene in a casual, almost osmotic, way throughmy blog-reading, but I’ve never actually downloaded anything. I “upgrade” the firmware of my PlayStation Portable with Sony’s regular anti-piracy – therefore anti-homebrew – updates, and I never bothered with the flash RAM system that’d let me get that action going on my DS... until I discovered DSCrawl, the answer to my longing. One borrowed piracy tool later – buddy wasn’t using it since his machine had been wholly given over to Pokemon – and I was once again down in the crudely yet efficiently depicted dungeons I love so well.

DSCrawl is a port, by a programmer who goes by the handle Sasq, of Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, a roguelike in a fairly conservative tradition. With its 26 player races and a like number of character classes, its 400-something monster types and its dozen-deity pantheon, Crawl is deeper (mathematically if not narratively; roguelikes are infamosly story-light) than any commercial RPG, while still much simpler than what many of Rogue's offspring have developed into. It’s basic: fight your way to the bottom of the dungeon, get the magic thingamabob, and fight your way back up.

I’d thought the lack of a keyboard would pose an insurmountable problem for a portable roguelike. Straightforward as the game’s objectives may be, they’re accomplished through a bewildering array of commands, with nearly every key of a standard keyboard mapped to some function and most doubling up – “d”, for example drops stuff, while “D” dissects slain monsters into gross but (maybe) nutritious slabs of meat. Sasq has put together a control scheme, making intuitive use of all the DS’s shoulder and face buttons as well as a soft keyboard on the touchscreen, that actually feels smoother, more "gamelike", than traditional keyboard controls once you get it ingrained into your hands’ muscle memory.

It might take a while to get to that point, but a while is what I’ve taken. This game, with its constant treadmill of die-retry-die-retry-etc. – “winning” a roguelike is the gaming equivalent of driving a hole-in-one, or bowling a perfect game – got its hooks into me, hard. I must have taken two hundred characters (I usually make myself a Sludge Elf Monk, despite the poor survivability of that race/class combo; I just like weird kung-fu dudes) into the pit over the last couple weeks. I could honestly play it all day, just zoning out, crashing down through the levels on glazed game-zombie autopilot. So when North Country wrapped up with my DS still fully charged in the bottom of my bag, it felt like an accomplishment, a triumph of social ability and will to party over demanding geekdom… or maybe the thought of being in the roguelike headspace while on mushrooms scared me off; I can’t really remember.

Now, consider; it has no commercial slickness, but DSCrawl is pretty much my favorite DS game ever… and I had to go through Nintendo-disapproved greymarket channels to play it. Officially, I shoul dnever have been allowed its enjoyment.

There is hope, though, for these impossibly specialized games. Just yesterday, Nintendo announced their “WiiWare” initiative, a system by which smaller independent developers will be able to create and publish original downloadable games for Wii. Lower development and distribution costs mean more risks can be taken – this is going to be the model for much of the games industry as the cost of mega-blockbusters increases and gaming mainstreams (and niches) itself away from the hardcore. That’s good, and we’ll see some cool games out of it – already indie web sensations (flOw, Line Rider, N, Alien Hominid) are being regularly picked up for consoles and handhelds. In the future, games like Crawl will more often and more easily find their way out of the dungeon and into the light.

Carcass Zone

As in, my inert carcass will be in "the zone" after I download Carcassonne off XBox Live Arcade this Wednesday. You know I love me some tile-laying action, and you know I've been elbows-deep for weeks now in the XBLA edition of my second-favorite German board game. What you might not know is that I'm going off the 9-to-5 and back to full-time freelancing next week, so... I might be ever-so-slightly doomed, especially if I give in and renew my Gold membership and start nerding it up online-style. Unlike Settlers, though, the Live Carcassonne will support a four-player local hotseat game. So, yeah... actual, present friends!

Seriously, check this out. Dig those screens. Feel that love.

[Link (Destructoid)]

Way too much of a not-even-all-that-good thing

OK, so... here's a video of like 200 Slave Girl Leias arranged on and around a life-sized Jabba statue. How many men can you spot? How many babies? Compare answers with your friends!

Pass the wiimote on the left-hand side

Sitting around a cozy kitchen table in the late-afternoon cool of the year’s first real summery Saturday, the requisite Coronas – sunshine beer! -- washing down a loaves-and-fishes joint of scavenged cheeba, the conversation somehow (my fault?) turns from whatever it had been – gardening, travel, Arrested Development, poutine – to the topic of videogames and their mind-bending near future.

I think it was the upcoming release of the Opera web browser for the Nintendo DS that got us started; at least, that’s what I gather from my notes scribbled on the back of the Wild Rose Brewery & Taproom flyer promising me of 15% off any drinkable, eatable or wearable next time I’m in Calgary. Stoners who care seem to agree: the combination of dual screens, touch interface, full wi-fi web browser, massive installed base and commodity pricing – and also, you know, games – means… something. Something big. Much of my noted discussion is obscured by a later sketch diagramming my plans to camperize my minivan, but from what I can make out we were excited about the possibility of some kind of internet phone application – no more quarters to The Man!

Easier to make out, in big block letters laid down with a firm hand, is a phrase I wish I could seal in a Quantum Envelope and mail back in time to the Beat poets:

“MOTION SENSING IS THE NEW RUMBLE”

No surprise the party partisans are down with the Wii, when they can get it. All that arm-waving and carrying-on not only provides a fun vector of entry for non- or casual gamers (that’s code for “girls”) but also acts to counteract the screen stereotype of the slack-jawed stoner, swaddled in a stinky alpaca poncho someone left at his place, twitch-clutching the control pad as Super Nintendo bleeps and explosions emanate from the perfectly good TV somebody just totally left in the alley, dude. Images of fun-buzzed young hipsters prancing around like giddy fauns with wiimotes are going to be key in our upcoming “Today’s 420!” image-rehabilitation marketing campaign, alongside chic lady CEOs with posing with their Vuitton vaporizers and smiling astronauts hotboxing the ISS. Coming soon to a bus shelter near you.

Anyway, the New Rumble. In a recent entry on games blog Destructoid, poster Reverend Anthony ran down his list of the “top five gameplay innovations to look forward to this year,” and right there in the middle – between the “procedural generation” of Will Wright’s Spore and the real-time conversation system in BioWare’s Mass Effect -- was the first thing my Friends Indeed and I thought of when the Wii concept was unveiled: swordfighting! Specifically, true motion-tracking, one-to-one swordfighting, unlike the, sub-Morrowind slash-triggering of Red Steel, which was as disappointing as getting a “Lettuce Garden Kid” for Christmas in 1983. Realistic blade battling of the type wishfully mimed by every nerd who picks up a wiimote would be the killer app for motion sensing; how you gonna keep ‘em down on the button-pressing farm, once they’ve seen sword-swinging Paree?

Deep technical and design problems lie in the way of realizing our D&D dreams. One that worries me is a sort of feedback deficiency: onscreen, your flashing blade will now and then be blocked by solid objects – other swords, trees, people’s skulls, etc. – while your actual arm goes wwhiffff through the air. How do we get that delicious curtain rod-on-curtain rod feeling of contact that makes fake swordfighting so fun? The wiimote’s anemic rumbler is inadequate to the arm-rattling task; what we need is a special swordfighting wiimote with beefed-up feedback, a heavy-ass hilt packing one of those old-school pinball kickers that’ll splinter your damn ulna. OK, one problem solved.

More fundamental: you ever watch people playing Wii Sports tennis – or, dear Lord, Wii Sports boxing? It’s random, frantic, desperate and not a little dangerous to bystanders. Any swordfighting game is going to be Dark Honor: Legends of the Blademaster on the box but Random Beating: Flailings of the Spastic in play – especially in a multiplayer game; might as well simulate seal clubbing, or a LARP session. But we – our ancestors, actually -- may have solved this problem, according to another bit of scrawl from the flap of a pack of du Mauriers. See, at the dawn of the modern age, dudes had a similar difficulty. It was necessary to turn the barbarity of sword-butchery into a gentlemanly pursuit: fencing. Over time, a complex framework of rules governing the flow of combat were developed. Basically, the first fencer to “establish a threat” has priority, or “right-of-way”, meaning his hits will take precedence over those of his opponent, even if said opponent has… he…zzzzzzzzzzzz…

Huh? OK, maybe not such an exciting idea. I’m sure Nintendo or one of their third-party developers will figure out how to make swordfighting work on the Wii. Or… well… hey! It doesn’t even have to be on the Wii! Sony’s launching a new camera peripheral for the PS3 that could support decent motion-tracking capabilities, and their controller infrastructure already supports Sixaxis tilt-sensing… shit, it all adds up! Motion sensing is the new rumble; Sony’s going to sneak out from under the cover of their dark cloud of early marketing mistakes and eat Nintendo’s lunch with a wiimote knockoff!

I ought to be snobby, dismissive, indignant or otherwise fanboyish about Sony’s biting the Wii thing, but somehow I can’t muster it; the daydreaming legions of gamer-stoners are getting impatient, on side with whoever manages to deliver the rattle and clash of real-time swordfighting to their flag-curtained squats.

I mean, to their airy urban-minimalist lofts. Today’s 420!

Claim the Crown of Command!

Every eighteen months or so the old fever comes back into simmer, triggered by a book rediscovered in clutter-clearing, a casually nostalgic conversation, a heavy-metal album cover. This time, it’s sixty-odd-dollar lunch-hour impulse purchase that’s relit the fire under my affection for tabletop fantasy role-playing in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular; the gently-used hardback Monster Manual sitting casually on the toilet tank, the Player’s Handbook seductively arranged on the coffee table, the mysterious Dungeon Master’s Guide perched on the lectern of my bedside box.

Mind filled with the old familiar magic words and names of power--saving throw; displacer beast; prismatic wall; gelatinous cube--I spend my days in a state of wild fantasy, of dreams beyond possibility. Not dreaming of stalking bloody-bladed through corridors of death, or of charming a Duchess of the Realm with a preternaturally glib tongue, but of something more fantastic: of sitting around a table in the late afternoon, prepared and confident, with a group of relatively sober and attentive friends and colleagues, getting down to playing some rewarding D&D. It’s a vision almost too lovely to bear.

Word’s got out that I’ve been thinking subterranean thoughts again and the usual suspects have expressed their usual interest, most of them knowing not to get their hopes up. The old student days of spacious days and bachelor nights are gone, and the leisure-time-consuming work of building a campaign–just say ‘No’ to boxed adventures and off-the shelf settings!–and then reconciling the nine-dimensional schedule of a five-player group seems daunting to the point of tears. I do feel sorry for my oilpatch engineer buddy, the one bright-eyed hopeful; he’s gone both-feet with this one, spending his endless hours of Haliburton-hotel downtime swimming in the numbers and charts and modifiers of D&D’s internal kabbalah. I doubt his meticulously spreadsheeted custom Ranger class will ever see the roll of a die.

Of course, even back in the carefree college years of skipped/dropped classes and not much better to do there were times when we needed a relatively quick fantasy fix and the commitment of a full game was out of the question. It’s in these occasions that the fantasy board-game genre found its market, and might just find it again. From the simplistic plodding of the old TSR-produced Dungeon!–an elementary-school favorite–through a massive modern abominations like the World of Warcraft tabletop game, these boxed wonders supplythe animal pleasures of a role-playing game–constant combat dice-rolling, avaricious gathering of imaginary riches–without the argument-resolving hours of leafing through Bible-thick rulebooks and the frustrating cat-herding inherent in collaborative storytelling with a bunch of narcissistic nerds. And of these games, the undisputed champ is Games Workshop’s Talisman.

The Talisman high concept for the non-nerd layman: Dungeons & Dragons meets Monopoly. As in Monopoly, players roll dice to circle a board, facing fickle fate as random cards are drawn, until one player has become heavy enough to crush the rest… except instead of a boot or a flatiron or whatever, you’re a Barbarian or Wizard or one of countless other fantasy weirdoes, each with their own especially fantastic way of bending the rules. It can’t be said that Talisman was a really good game–it was too random, too unbalanced and usually too long–but it was fun. We played it for hours upon hours, bloated it up with countless expansion sets, took it up to the barroom of RATT and played a liver-wrecking drinking-game version until we couldn’t see the board. The last edition of Talisman was released 13 years ago; quality copies of this geek touchstone auction for hundreds of dollars, a price I could never justify.

This week, though, just as my D&D despair was at its darkest, Talisman reappeared to me in all its shining, pointless glory. First, it was announced that videogame developer Capcom was preparing a multiplayer, online version of the game for release on XBox Live Arcade later this year, and via that announcement I heard that a new tabletop edition was being readied for October. The importance of this news to a certain type of gamer of a certain age can’t be overstated–imagine, I don’t know… a Fleetwood Mac reunion? A new Dallas series? A Beastmaster sequel? It’s going to be awesome.

I ought to feel bad about feeling sort of OK about the possibility of once again setting aside my plans for a politically charged northern-wilderness indigenous-elves-versus-human-developers Dungeons & Dragons campaign, for once again faking out my sphere of fantasy-friendly hosers. But now that Talisman’s coming back, I know that just around the corner of the year lies an afternoon or two of tabletop fantasy. It won’t be the full role-playing experience I crave and will never stop craving, but it’ll be what Talisman always was: an evocative facsimile that dulls the pangs, magical methadone.

Coolness Simulator

A burning question: are professional guitarists naturally keen at Guitar Hero II? They should be, right? The controller’s a fake fucking guitar: five colorful fret buttons below the head - a single string of sorts to strum - a Whammy bar for chewing on the long notes. Size of a parlour … uh, axe. Odie-tongue red. Obviously, I already scratched my initials into it. But is there a road and stage advantage for pros?

Only one way to find out = party. My drunken, train-hoppin’, post-BeerFest panelists include Red Ram’s Mark Feduk, the Secretaries’ Tash Fryzuk, singers John Guliak and Corb Lund, Twin Fangs’ Paul Coutts joining on this side of the river. So. What happens first is you invent a band name, usually pornographic. Thus far, the righteously assembled have chosen in an AC/DC font: Emotionz, Shittickets, DNK, Devildyke and Truck, the night’s winner. By now, every available towel is slurping up spilled beer and some kind of leopard-skin liqueur Jenny Jenny from the Sun brought in.

Even this early, the “coolness simulator” has us all laughing and some ooh-ing at the sublime cartoon art of the menus. We pick our weapons, a fine exercise in gender-swapping – Manga-scrawny Judy Nails on the Cherry Blossom Gibson Les Paul, for example. The first four songs show up.

Lund to this day ignores Wolfmother and goes for Shout at the Devil, where everyone else usually picks Cheap Trick’s Surrender. Psychologists would do well to cross-section these choices. After some serious play, the list grows – G’N’R, Spinal Tap … even War Pigs. Solid.
“It’s not really a guitar, it’s a Whac-a-Mole!” Coutts exclaims. He’s right. As notes colour-matching the fret buttons speed down the infinite neck, your job is simple. Hit the fret button at the same time you strum, matching the oncoming target note with precise timing. The easy level (where you don’t make money to buy more songs, outfits and guitars) uses only the top three frets. And no chords. Easy. You basically play a pared-down rhythm guitar initially. Expert level, on the other hand, crushes your hand into a furry albino lobster claw which doesn’t matter much because you’re head’s screwed right off your neck anyway.

The game is a hit. Rock poses are struck. Sitting while playing appropriately mocked. Fryzuk screams and drops the thing laughing while hound-voiced Guliak slags himself, but gets the general hang of it. “I give myself ½ star out of five,” he laughs. With my own band, Hebrella, I quickly notice out loud how effective this game is as a role-playing device. Just like real musicians, you’re deaf to how great you just played, obsessed with and chatty about the notes you missed. Uh, great post-gig conversation, in other words.

Hard-rockin’, grey-wearin’ Coutts, meanwhile, generally refuses to pilot any videogame. But while a dance party forms in the music room, there he is, strumming to Danzig all by himself. A heartwarming crossover.

Side note: Someone clever should mix Guitar Hero with bar karaoke. Add virtual drums and keys. Instead of going out to see music, you’d make it! In the meantime …

Lund, it turns out, starts taking names after the typical pro-to-nerd translation fumble. His pro advantage kicks in. He rises to the top of the musician heap. The metal set list has him especially going. “Someone had good taste there,” he muses. “I could imagine it becoming very involved.

“Then again,” he points out the obvious, “it might be a better investment of time and energy to actually get a real guitar and apply your efforts there. But who wants to do that, right? Not like there’s any money in it.”

Thus: Guitar Hero’s ultimate drawback, this early version, anyway. It’s different enough from the real thing that if you can’t already play a real guitar, you’re totally pissing your time away.
Guliak and Lund happily spending the next hour on Wii Sports golf, well, that’s another story.

BACKBEEP: IBM Machine Language music programming (1985)

How cruel our junior high teachers were, making us program an entire song in machine language! Each note was something like “6348.” To go through and program all of Talking Heads’ Heaven without the ability to read music was the first time I stayed up all night on an assignment. Bah! All for a C+. But, you might say, was not a thing learned? Oh, yes. As stated: my teacher was a dink.