This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: Coffee Based Superpowers. Naxhxela finally spills the beans on how to obtain superpowers and remove coffee stains. Also, Monster Hunter!

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Here is a recent Trailer for an upcoming Transformers game that left in in tears… from laughing.

So what I think happened here is that Black High Moon Studios tried to pull an effect like in the infamous Gears of War Mad World Trailer. Back then, the trailer surprised by putting very slow, emotional, famous music with poignant lyrics over quite violent, masculine game-play. The mismatch was effective because it completely blew past any expectations. And yet, there was some logic to it. Gears of War depicts a once rich world that has been devastated by war. The glimpses of it’s former glory make up a melancholic lining that the trailer picks up against the apparent mismatch. Even then, it’s still quite a stretch.

Beginning of this year, The infamous trailer for Dead Island showed the pitfalls of the strategy. The Trailer also features very violent, pop culture infused images set to slow, sad music. Together with some clever editing, it hints at the kind of emotional depth many video game enthusiasts have been looking for in their games for years now. It became almost immediately clear that the game itself would never be able to live up to than kind of expectations. Indeed, the ad turned out to be a hollow, misguided marketing ploy. It’s debatable if it helped Dead Island in the long run. On the one hand, it generated a lot of publicity for what otherwise would have been a mediocre game. On the other hand, it added a sting of disappointment what indeed was a mediocre game.

But apparently, it wasn’t clear enough because here we are again. This time around, there are no redeeming arguments. Transformers is pretty much as shallow as pop culture gets. It’s giant robots that transform into cars, space ships and dinosaurs as they wage an eternal battle of good vs. evil. And that’s ok as long as you just accept them for what they are – a flashy pretext to make things transform and go boom. The original War for Cybertron game seemed to understand that. They took a lot of cues from the Saturday morning cartoon and avoided the any references to the less honest, cinematic version.

Not so much now. The Trailer evokes a depth and significance that is utterly, unmistakably absent from the Transformers universe. The Transformers are giant robots, they live on a completely alien planet. They are emotionally empty as the toys they are meant to sell. There is nothing humane about them. The Trailer evokes notions of loss and struggle. But is death for a machine the same as for us? Optimus Prime died like 5 times already. How are new Transformers born anyway? What did they lost due to the War? How did life look like on their planet before there was war? Do they have families, lovers? Do they have art? If so, where is all that culture now? What did they used to transform into before they transformed into fire-breathing space dinosaurs?

None of this is and ever will be topic of the game. And to be fair, it wasn’t focus of any of the Transformers series either. It’s not why people watch Transformers, it’s not what Transformers CAN address. The Trailer in an embarrassing, involuntary pastiche. It’s unbelievable that Black High Moon Studios would misunderstand the material they working on in such a hilarious way.

Yet the idea behind the trailer is clear. Games want to have the same kind of emotional impact as other media. So big game productions are keen on squeezing their lemons a little bit extra to produce that special juice we are all after. But what they forget is that in order to have lemon juice, you need to get dirty. You need to dig into the soil. You need to make the plants grow and bear fruits. But that’s never what the game industry did. They always went for the simple solutions. Always catering to the fans, always going for the popular choice instead of laying groundwork to nurture generations to come. So they have no lemons now. All they have are plastic lemons. And when you squeeze that plastic lemon, you don’t get any juice. You get a squeak.

EDIT: I originally wrote Black Moon Studios instead of High Moon Studios. I apologize.

Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning for sexual abuse. I saw Sucker Punch the other day. I have been putting it off since it received such bad reviews like this one:

The most widespread criticism was that the movie is sexist. It has pretty actresses kick butt in pretty elaborate nerdy fantasy scenarios while wearing lingerie. The problem here is that while kicking butt is usually “empowering”, the fact that the actresses wear sexy costumes objectifies them. This undermines the “empowering” part. They just fulfil male fantasies after all. Those fantasies just happen to involve them kicking butt.

Now I’m not really a Feminist. And that’s not because of idealistic reasons. On the contrary, I’m absolutely a supporter of gender equality. It’s just that as a heterosexual white male, I often find myself in a position where I am told to be responsible for gender inequality pretty much by sheer existence. I sometimes find myself reading feminist writing that fails to envision a male role which would be gender equal. So I’m unsure if I actually can ever clearly associate myself with that label.

But I find the problem fascinating and I’m eager to learn. So naturally, Sucker Punch made me think.

Because as we know, lingerie is the best body armor.

Yes taken out of context, the above mentioned scenes are absolutely sexist. But what I rarely hear anybody do is to consider the context in which they appear. I’m not going to go too deep into the plot. The important part is that protagonist Babydoll is trapped in a Brothel and plans an escape. She has the special power of performing an incredibly seductive dance that puts everybody, especially men into a trance. This allows her and her friends to secretly prepare their escape numerous times. But the actual dance is never shown. Instead, the movie goes into the above mentioned fantasy action sequences.

The most common interpretation is that the sequences show fantasies that Babydoll escapes to while performing. And sure, that kinda doesn’t make sense. After all, why should Babydoll objectify herself in her very own fantasy? On the other hand, my friend Gabe Glick pointed me to this article discussing how such fantasies could actually be considered realistic.

But my interpretation was different all together. The fantasies involve every possible cliché a modern nerd would interested in: Zombies, Nazis, Mechs, Dragons, Steampunk, Robots, Samurai, Machine Guns, Magic, Nukes, Katanas.. you name it. But Babydoll never seems to be somebody who would be interested in that kind of stuff. It doesn’t even fit if you consider the era the movie is set it. So I don’t see the action sequences as Babydoll’s fantasies. They are the audience’s fantasies. They are a metaphor for how the men in the movie see the dance, translated into the language of male nerds in the actual movie audience. It’s a quite ingenious twist. It puts the male nerds at the same level as the creepy brothel visitors in the movie and exposes the depicted fantasies as what they are – hideous things men make women do for entertainment. From this perspective, it makes sense that the actual dance and actual escape attempt is never shown. The dance/fantasy covers up what is really happening for the creeps in the story and for the audience.

But even from this perspective, I still feel like Sucker Punch is somewhat a flawed movie. If the goal was to expose nerd fantasies as sexist, the ending kinda falls apart. What would be really necessary would be some kind of wake-up call, a distancing effect. Something that truly shatters the fantasy. But that call never comes. Until the last scene, Babydoll remains the wanking material she is initially introduced as. Instead there is a weird analogy with marriage being like lobotomy and men being victims themselves, just of a higher order. I don’t know what that was all about.

Also, nerd fantasies don’t have to objectify women and aren’t exclusively enjoyed by men, as Tom Bissell recently learned the hard way.

And finally the action scenes themselves are just not that good. They are way over the top and turn out quite bland as a result. Despite of the training, the actresses just aren’t martial arts experts and it shows. The blue-screen effects make everything feel fake and unconvincing. If they are the analogy to a seductive dance, the dance just fails to seduce.

In any case, the analogy never really hits home and the argument becomes a strawman argument either way. Too bad, because I think there is more to the movie than most critics seem to recognize.

EDIT: I found this interview with Zack Snyder, which confirms that the above interpretation was indeed the director’s intention.

There were a lot of new developments with TRAUMA recently. Probably the most exciting one being the fact the game was featured on the App Store. But instead of listing everything that happened, I wanted to point out a particular interview I gave recently:

Pause:Continue Arc 2 – Episode 3, Trauma

The interviewer was with Peter Willington aka. Xero from the InRetroSpect Podcast. Now look. Releasing TRAUMA gave me a great appreciation for games journalism. I have given a couple of interviews already – oral and written. I noticed that there is a huge spectrum of quality. In a bad interview, the interviewer has no clue what the game is about and is only going down a list of standard questions designed to make me say the things he they were supposed to research in the fist place. In a good interview, the interviewer actually researched the subject and perhaps even has a context in which discussing the game makes sense. So the basics are taken care of and we can actually talk about the important bits and ideally both find some new insights.

Luckily, especially the oral interviews were usually from that latter part of the spectrum. And the InRetroSpect one in particular is a prime example. I was enjoying it a lot. So I thought you might too.

Time for another backlog update. I finished another 9 games. During all that TRAUMA business, I completely forgot to do an update! Also funny thing: the actual games I end up playing often turn out to be very different from the list I initially come up with. On the other hand, I did play a lot Catherine and Demon’s Souls and might finish them very soon. I just happened to finish other games in the meantime.

1. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Finished this shortly after the last update. I thoroughly enjoyed it! It is a vastly superior game to Harmony of Dissonance. I already wrote about it. In fact, I loved it so much I moved on to Symphony of the Night. But I got distracted mid-way through which means I will probably need to re-start it.
2. Dinner Date I had the opportunity to play Dinner Date by Jeroen Stout at the NotGames Fest. It’s not a long game. It’s not a game in the strict sense. Nevertheless, a beautiful and inspiring and smart experience I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in games as means of expressing ideas.
3. Dear Esther Another NotGame I played at the NotGames Fest. Mind you, it’s not the breathtaking high-end Dear Esther everybody is so eagerly waiting for. It’s the original student project that is the basis for the new one. So it’s on a very different level visually. But it’s an incredibly powerful piece nonetheless. The focus on voice-overs as a means to provide contex is something I really enjoyed. But you know, I’m biased.
4. ICO I recently got the HD collection and re-played ICO as part of the CGL Game Club. I realized I haven’t really written about it, except a short blurb on the CGL Blog. I recorded a very cool video of a commented speedrun playtrough. But the recording cut out midway trough and the speedrun I attempted haven’t worked out either. I might record some of my thoughts at some point. But really, there is hardly anything I can add at this point. Instead, I recommend the Experience Points Podcast.
5. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Started it some time ago. Finally decided to finish it on one weekend. Despite what I wrote on it’s difficult bosses, I actually loved it. It pleasantly smears a couple of genres to a beautiful audiovisual experience. Yes, there is a hick-up every now and then. But it’s also brim-full with great ideas and moments. Again, haven’t written too much on it. But there is the beautiful quote from a recent post-mortem I can totally see and wholeheartedly get behind: “… solve game issues with something other than game solutions.”. Amen.
6. Amnesia Again, a game I played for the CGL Game Club. It wasn’t technically on by backlog but it’s an indie game so I decided to play it anyway. Needless to say, I loved every second of it. Because we are going to discuss this at Game Club, I collected a ton of information on it, too. I posted some of it on the recent article about gameplay without mechanics. Note the similarity to Sword & Sworcery. Zeitgeist anyone?
7. Penumbra: Overture After Amnesia, I was left craving for more. And I was interested how Amnesia came to be. So I went back and played the first game by Frictional Games, Penumbra: Overture. This one was actually on my backlog. I got it with one of the Humble Bundles. It is a fascinating game, especially when you know Amnesia. You can clearly see the learning process of the studio.
8. Penumbra: Black Plague And I also played the second part of the Penumbra series. The game was released episodically. I went ahead and got all parts. I think Black Plague is the best part of the series. It has some moments, which are very close to Amnesia in terms of sheer terror value. They actually even do a lot more with experiments with “insanity” than in Amnesia. But they are just individual scenes instead of being an integral part of the game. Still, it’s pretty much the missing ling between Overture and Amnesia. I will write some more on it soon.
9. Penumbra: Requiem And I recently also finished the third episode from the Penumbra series. This one is a fascinating experiment. It’s a departure from the story-driven adventure game the studio has been using until then. Instead, it’s pretty much a riff on Portal. No wonder, it was released shortly after the original Portal! I’m not sure if it’s the best idea. And the studio clearly went away from it. But it has some clever moments. I particularly enjoyed the disjointed narrative.

So I finished 9 games. With the 2 I already had on my last update, I’m at 11 games. This mans I allowed myself to add two games to the Backlog. The new backlog additions are Xenoblade Chronicles (because of Operation Rainfall) and Torchlight (Impulse buy. Needed to kill things and collect loot).

And this also means I already have a yet another played game in the bank and need only 4 more to finish the next batch. Here are some ideas.

1. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night I started it shortly after Aria of Sorrow. Sadly, I got distracted so I will need to re-start my attempt. On the other hand, I was enjoying it a lot. If I get a solid, uninterrupted week or two, I should be able to plow through it.
2. Catherine I actually finished it twice already. I still wanted to unlock some of the endings and special features. I just got distracted at some point. Will certainly get back to it soon.
3. Demon’s Souls I got back into this big time actually. I was playing this a lot and I’m very far ahead. I think the reason why I haven’t finished it is because I started obsessing about Trophies. It’s one of the first instances of Trophies spoiling a game experience for me. I think I will just let them be and play it on my own terms.
4. Torchlight And of course I’m eager to play some Torchlight. It’s a good game to play while listening to podcast to enjoy in the evening. So I might finish it very soon actually.