New Mandate Trailer

I've talked about The Mandate a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't wait till the weekend to blog about this latest update on the Romanovs-in-space epic. Perihelion Games has released a cool new trailer for their game, featuring Brit David Bradley doing a kickin' voice-over as Admiral Suvarov for an incredibly enticing trailer for the in-development space epic. Now, I'm not familiar with David Bradley (I'm not a fan of Harry Potter or Doctor Who, and I'm too scared of fleshy bits to watch Game of Thrones), but apparently he's got about six miles of nerd-cred. For me, he sounds a heck of a lot like Adam Nicolson, British author of the book examining Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, Seize The Fire. (I absolutely love that book, and Nicholson's wry English consonants most recently accompanied me on a kind of creepy bus ride from Indianapolis to Chicago last summer.)


In addition to the awesome VO quality that we're going to get for this sci-fi gem, I just love the tone they establish in this game. This is going to be a game where NPCs aren't just faceless meeples that you stat-grind as a parallel leveling mechanic--they're an engaging, dynamic, and fragile element of the game. They're your friends and your resources, and nothing you do can shield them from the risk that entails. Your crew will suffer losses, and the way you manage that loss on a dramatic and tactical level is going to be a central gameplay mechanic. It is very Nelsonian in that way, which grabs me all the right ways. (Seriously, check out Seize The Fire--the author-read audio book at least.)

It also makes me think of how exciting and avant-garde Mass Effect was going to be back in the days leading up to the first game's release. In particular, there was this commercial spot that still resonates with me to this day:


The idea of having mutually exclusive, NPC-destroying, time-based decisions to make is so much fun, and we never quite got the pay off in Mass Effect that the above commercial promised. Each game had very specific set-piece decisions that would very transparently give you a choice to kill person X or Y, but it never made it a heavy, pressed-for-time, combat-based choice like you get from this 48 second commercial. The first Mass Effect came close with the Virmire decision, but that still was a very canned moment. No matter how many times your NPCs got railgunned to the face, they were immune to any real injury until the script suddenly decided they were mortal.

With The Mandate, though, they're repeatedly stressing that every time your ship's hull tears open, you're losing crew, and that loss will not only potentially kill off individual characters, but having to replace or evaluate crew will impact the character of your ship and your character. This dynamic will make it where even the most assured victories will still have weight, as you try to grab as much power as you can without losing critical crew.

Oh, man, if this game doesn't get funded to the moon and back, I will be so disappointed in you, internet.

100th Post!

...Took Long Enough

So here it is, a milestone I had intended to hit long ago. 100 posts. In a perfect blogosphere I would've cracked 100 posts over a year ago, but we're here now and at last. And still with a massive backlog of topics, rants, and columns that I need to write. I'll say this, as well: don't worry about me running out of nerd topics to lather over, and don't worry about the next 100 posts taking quite as long.

As we hit triple digits in posts, it occurs to me that I still haven't elaborated on a concept that is foundational to this blog. That is the divide between nerd and geek. Now, before I get all iconoclast on you, let me wave a disclaimer in your face. What I mean when I say geek probably isn't what you mean when you say geek (although if it is, you're probably an immensely cool person). So when I proceed to insult geeks and separate them from true nerds, keep in mind that I'm insulting my very specific classification of geek, which may or may not apply to you and yours.

With that out of the way, my definition. A nerd is defined by inordinate enthusiasm for activities not considered acceptable enough to be part of mainstream culture. The earliest use of it came in 1950 from Dr. Seuss' book If I Ran the Zoo, where the nerd was listed amongst several fanciful creatures. However, only a year later it was popularly considered synonymous with a drip, or a square. I imagine this leap came from people identifying a Seuss nerd as a goofy, unreasonable animal in his crazy zoo, which naturally evolved into identifying goofy people who seemed over-enthused with uncool things or activities. Now, with over sixty years in the vernacular, the term nerd is still about boxing someone into a classification over their interests.

Geek, meanwhile, is a term originating in circus culture. The geek is a circus performer who eats just about anything for the crowd--typically biting the head off a snake or chicken. So when I refer to a geek in a general, non-circus sense I'm referring to someone who is motivated by something other than legitimate passion. A geek appears to share those enthusiasms only so far as it provides some selfish gain, usually in the form of attention or money.

Here's the telltale aspect of my distinctions between these two terms: geek is generally used by outsiders in a more ameliorative sense while nerd is still much more likely to be pejorative. Why? Because to someone who considers themselves outside nerd culture and passions, the geek is defined as being useful. They're the "good ones" in our social minority group, and that's why we have the Geek Squad and Geeked At Birth as commercial entities and advertisement taglines, respectively. To be a nerd, meanwhile, is still all about your personal love for your hobbies, and so it's still open to ridicule and still used as an insult. Which is exactly why I make it a point to clearly delineate these terms--to clearly underscore that I personally esteem true, earnest nerds and group them quite separately from geeks. The bottom line is that a nerd, while not necessarily a dork, isn't afraid to look like one while having fun. A geek is totally willing to look like a dork for compensation.

In case the distinction is still eluding you, here are some illustrations.

Nerds

• Play games in their basement and forget that it's a bad stereotype until someone reminds them.
• Go to conventions in normal clothes and feel out of place for not wearing a costume.
• Fantasize about playing board games with celebrities.

Representin'

Geeks

• Get into cosplay just to build a fan-base, then move into modeling.
• Wear prescription-zero glasses to look smart/sophisticated/businesslike/full-of-crap.
• Insist on the label "pro gamer".

Yeah, it's pretty much like that.

Phoenix Jones: be that guy?

This is the promised second part of the Don't Be That Guy article regarding Seattle authorities and Phoenix Jones. My first article pretty well railed exclusively at Seattle for being at best unethical and at worst unconstitutional in some of its methods to antagonize Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superheroes Movement (RCSM) in the past. Now I'm going to look a little bit more objectively at Phoenix Jones and the concept of the real-life costumed hero in a slightly more analytical light.

First, I need to step back and announce my own bias in this issue. I was perhaps eleven years old when I first learned about the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964 (warning: if you haven't read about it before, it is a disturbing case). The case and the crime itself were both terrible and shocking to me, but the concept of the "bystander effect" was the most repugnant aspect. Few things rankle my sensibilities as a man and a human being as the thought of witnesses doing nothing to help Ms. Genovese in her hour of need. We have innumerable proofs that the "bystander effect" is alive and well today--just look at how many incidents of real violence you can find on Youtube or Facebook, all shot in calm, detached precision. Now, it's very easy for me to paint people caught in the "bystander effect" as villains and to idealize anyone breaking that mold as a hero worthy of comic books. And that's not necessarily fair.

I also don't know what Phoenix Jones is like as a person--what his true motivations are. I know what he says publicly and the smattering of disjointed real-life reports from the Seattle media and his own group's web presence, but I don't really know if he does it out of altruism or egotism. I do know, however, that I want to believe he's a genuine hero, like the kind idolized in stories predating our four-color magazines with the Scarlet Pimpernel or any heroes falling under Joseph Campbell's Heroic Cycle (all of which have to step outside of society in some way in order to help redeem it). But the cynic can plausibly say that Phoenix and the RCSM are dangerous glory-seekers with no place in these situations. I could not accept such a view, but it's a plausible one.

But the authorities of Seattle, with some shockingly high violent crime rates per capita (3,400 incidents estimated for this year in a city of only 600,000 people), are taking it upon themselves to expose, humiliate, mock, and denigrate private citizens who are, at worst, recklessly eccentric? Terrible.

Other than the assault charge I mentioned before that was used as an unethical ploy to expose Phoenix Jones to the city and then promptly dropped, I haven't found any criminal charges leveled against him. He's not breaking any laws, and even if he's nothing but swagger he still gives a lot of people a sense of optimism in the fight against crime. The word 'vigilante' is used occasionally, but it doesn't apply and just highlights an Asgardian grasp of the word (see my victory by English Major to elaborate on that reference).

"...I don't really know if he does it out of altruism or egotism. I do know, however, that I want to believe he's a genuine hero..."

America has a long and proud history of vigilantism, actually. It predates the creation of our country. The colonial Carolinas saw the creation of a group called the Regulators that tried to overthrow corrupt officials and sheriffs and establish their own ethical system of law. But American vigilantism is best known in the mid-to-late 1800s, when mob lynchings, mass jailbreaks, and regular townsfolk were known to assemble and violently oppose established force. But what vigilantism is, at its core, is an individual or group of individuals pursuing justice outside of the decision of the presiding government. An individual or group of individuals does not become a vigilante until it acts on solely personal standards of justice that somehow inhibit or exclude the government's standard.

Therefore, what Phoenix Jones and the RCSM do is not vigilantism. We don't really have a term for what they're doing--civilians interposing themselves into petty street crime in order to prevent and report said crime to late-coming authorities. I'd say an optimist might call that 'good samaritanism' and a pessimist would call that 'reckless meddling' or something. The point is, however, that they aren't necessarily breaking the law, however unwise one might think they're being.

And yet--at least according to comments on all his articles I've read--for anyone that doesn't view Phoenix Jones as a hero, he and his crew are criminals, stupid, and deserve punishment of either a legal or karmic nature. There's very little middle ground, apparently. Why is that? Why, with all his publicity and stated good will, is he such a polarizing topic?

The first issue for most is the costume. They see graphic design, costuming, and a certain amount of stage presence and they immediately identify it as phony and childish. For them dress-up is a thing you do as a kid for fantasy. Indeed, the only acceptable costumes for such people are uniforms--which are by their nature designed to squelch individual identity. The other benefits and factors relating to formalized clothing and appearance are lost on them--such as the intimidation of anonymity that is at once so distinct and unique as to be totally conspicuous. And, in a society in which everyone is at least superficially aware of comic book heroes, wearing a well-designed costume can probably also serve as unspoken shorthand for motivation or intent. Heck, just two weekends ago I threw my two year-old into the arms of a masked man for a photo op because he was dressed like Spider-Man. If some random grannie had tried to touch my boy without express permission, however, I'd probably slap her. A properly worn costume in the right venue can assure us even without it being an officially recognized uniform.

But. These same factors can go into the choice of disguise a criminal might wear--however much less likely. When I used to work at a bank, I studied nearby robberies with a peculiar passion. Someone coming into my branch might be the next robber in the wave, and it'd be up to me and my sturdy "next teller" sign to stand up for our customers' deposits. And there were a few costume elements used by robbers, especially around Halloween. The social effects of the right costume could work to make innocent people afraid as well as criminals. So Phoenix Jones' and the RCSM's costumes are only as effective as they are distinct and recognizable--and when they pursue those ends it becomes easy to look like tour-mongers.

"The word 'vigilante' is used occasionally, but it doesn't apply and just highlights an Asgardian grasp of the word."

Compounding, there's the fear as a cosplayer (or, rather, potential cosplayer at this point) that such incidents might make it more likely for people to understand wearing costumes for pure fun. Phoenix Jones himself might even have to deal with this, if he enjoys cosplay itself--probable, considering he highlights costume ideas for himself and his girlfriend on his Facebook page. When a uniform of community service or even of "vigilantism" is so similar to one worn for conventions and photoshoots, does it confuse the issue or even endanger participants on either side? I doubt it, but it certainly is a situation where I imagine neither party wants to be mistaken for the other.

Secondly, I believe there's an addictive quality to the "bystander effect", such that for some people it's odious and offensive to see someone stepping out of line and pointing their finger back at the crowd watching these violent crimes happen. I suspect this is the primary motivation for most people who really hate on Phoenix Jones, and there is a point to be had. Many of us end up clinging to the bystander behaviors because we regularly train ourselves to make the safe, reserved decision. The one that is most certain to end with me healthy and hale. We hear about people trying to save someone else from drowning only for them both to go down, and we adjust our requirements of ourselves. So of course when the RCSM goes out on patrol and does stuff we've already presumed stupidly dangerous, we have to insult and mock them. Because they can't be right. We won't let them.

From https://www.facebook.com/ThePhoenixJones

Thirdly, there's the "safety professional" arguments, which I believe are the least valid response to Phoenix Jones and the RCSM. It's also the most common. "If he wants to help people, he should become a cop or a soldier..." "He's just playing around. Grow up. Get a job..." are the general sentiments in front of these arguments. In a nation where only one in nearly two hundred people is a law enforcement officer, this idea is dangerously charitable to crime of all sorts in our society. It's tantamount to pledging that criminals and police are the only sides involved in a war, and that law-abiding citizens are neutral in the fight. Obviously, though, crime concerns us all, and to treat it otherwise is the worst kind of enablement. What people normally mean with this though is that trained, salaried professionals are the only trustworthy agents of justice in society, which is at least as bad. Training is one thing, but just because something is your job doesn't mean you're the only one culpable for responsible behavior. We don't have to be janitors to know that when you stop up the toilet boil, you really should do something about it. Saying it's not your job and treating that as license to be indifferent just ensures the mess will spread before the professionals can get there.

And, as an aside, Phoenix Jones stresses on his facebook page that he doesn't view Seattle's police negatively, despite their rocky and sometimes hypocritical treatment of him. He respects and works with the police--he just doesn't aspire to be one.

So what am I saying? That morally conscious individuals should be gearing up and taking it to the streets like Phoenix Jones and the RCSM? Well, not exactly, and funny enough that's not Phoenix Jones' message either. It's about waking up to being socially responsible for what you say and do, about not sitting back and waiting for other people to do what you know you should be doing. It's about helping first and foremost, without waiting to be asked. All it takes is being needed and responding to the needs of others rather than making excuses.

So, unfortunately, it's much more virtuous and insidious a calling than merely getting dressed up and patrolling the streets.

Tights would be easier.

Don't Be That Guy: SPD Advisor Wants Crack Down on Heroes

...Making The Streets Safe For Brawling.

You know, I have a pretty skewed impression of Seattle. On the one hand, Frasier Crane lived there and he sure made it sound like a swank place for muckety mucks and snobs to live.

On the other hand, they have stuff like this. Last year on May 1st, a gang known as the Black Bloc used a day slated for peaceful demonstration and activism to tear up the city, vandalizing a courthouse on the way. Apparently, the gang came out in uniform (dressed in black with bandanas over their faces), and they attacked people on the street, blocked city traffic, and damaged buildings as they went through the city.

And guess who was there?

Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superheroes, a group of real-life costumed heroes who patrol Seattle to crack down on drugs, brawling, and petty crime. The RCS got into the thick of it, and according to them they were defending the courthouse specifically while the police were outmaneuvered by the cleverly dubbed gang.

Picture from https://www.facebook.com/ThePhoenixJones

Sounds a little bit The Avengers meets Kick-Ass, doesn't it? Well, that's probably because Phoenix Jones is Kick-Ass in at least a few ways. I've had part of this article fermenting for well over a year--since October 2011--when, as a temperamental snub against costumed heroes, Phoenix Jones got publicly outed by the justice system.

Yeah, it happened. In Seattle, baby.

You see, Phoenix Jones describes himself as a concerned father who got tired of the crime on the streets of Seattle when a car break-in got his child showered with glass. Now, that'd make any of us mad, afraid, or cowed in spirit, but Phoenix Jones went another way by donning a black and gold protective bodysuit and patrolling the streets at night looking for crime. He's found it. Found it in spades. When confronted by a criminal act, he calls the authorities (which is sadly more than most do) and then steps in to do whatever he can (badassfully). He soon started a group--the Rain City Superheroes--and they watched others backs, supported each other, and helped to coordinate their efforts beyond a one-block at a time patrol.

Even before October 2011, I'd heard of this small-time West Coast crusader. Local journalists had done walk-alongs with him, and the media even reunited him with a man whose car Phoenix had saved from having his car stolen. They also highlighted that he has a base of operations at the back of a local comic book store.

This all happened, folks. This does happen.

"...he calls the authorities (which is sadly more than most do) and then steps in to do whatever he can (badassfully)."

In October 2011, Phoenix Jones was arrested for assault after he pepper sprayed a group of people brawling in the street. No other arrests were reported at the time, just Phoenix. The group of a handful of people fighting walked away, though their anecdotal testimony that they were just fooling around was quoted by the police as the official version of events. As it turned out, the police weren't really interested in proceeding with the assault charge, as nothing was ever officially filed. That didn't stop them from trumping up a public hearing where they forced him to reveal his name and face. (Out of respect for what he does and his initial decision to be anonymous, I'll use his nomme de guerre instead of his given name.) Probably the worst part of this whole ordeal is that every time Phoenix Jones has received media attention--positive or negative--since that hearing, the coverage always includes his real name, as though trying to flush him out of his crime-fighting hobby. I've even read articles where they use his middle name, as though trying to make antagonizing him as easy and transparent as possible.

Skip ahead to last year May 1st, and the description with which I began this article. Phoenix Jones and his associated Rain City Superheroes found themselves once again in the newspapers, once more making the city of Seattle look like Frank Miller's Gotham City while they snag headlines alongside, or even ahead of, police officers. From that perspective, it's easy to see why Michael Hillman, a former deputy chief for the LAPD advising the Seattle Police Department, wouldn't like them. He advised that the Seattle Police find a way to restrict private citizens like Phoenix Jones going out and patrolling for illegal activity.

Yep, life imitating art even more. Surprisingly, though, the Seattle Police Department publicly disregarded that recommendation and said their only interest on May Day or any other day is stopping crime. Good for them, right? Phoenix even came out with some, perhaps, grandiose claims that he would be working with the police on a strategy for combating lawlessness on May Day.

He probably spoke too soon. This year the May Day events and the media's coverage of the Rain City Superheroes has been rather less than favorable. Articles I've read largely undulate between accusing Phoenix Jones and his crew of escalating situations or of being attention-seeking goons scuffling with clowns. And the SPD has been stressing that Phoenix Jones has never solved a crime. It seems that, rather than follow Hillman's suggestion to further infringe on Phoenix's consitutional rights, they decided to go the unquestionably legal route of shaming and decrying his proclaimed goal.



Geez, Seattle. J. Jonah Jameson much?

Now, I've got a bit more to say on the issue of Phoenix Jones specifically and the concept of "real life superheroes" in general, but I'll save that for another time. For now, though, I'll just say: Seattle, don't be that city.

Blog of the Dead

There are basically two types of blogs*: blogs that get updated regularly, creating a steadily growing pool of content that gains a popular life of its own such that it gets regular traffic even with less frequent updates, and blogs that stagnate, creating an embarrassing void conspicuous to the new reader that fails to impress that this blog is worth regularly following. Ben's Nerdery has always aimed to be the former.

So, what's been going on? Well, most recently, my family went up to the Fire and Ice Convention in Manitowoc Wisconsin for our second annual family outing there. Less recently than that, I had the bliss of wrangling a 23 month-old in an airplane for a 5 hour flight to LAX.

Woo.

Hoo.

Least recently of all--as in, last frakking October--I became a handynerd (one standard of deviation away from being a handyman) and had a zombie birthday party. Zombies, I tell you! It was a low-key, smallish party--mostly because the official invites went out late and people are turds--but we had a lot of fun. The party invites were themed to look like an emergency evacuation notice, and we made treat 'bags' that were themed after Left 4 Dead medkits.

A quickly thrown-together invite made during a lunch break or two.

  

Feel free to use this for your own zombie parties and games, writing in scrawled personal details in the blank space. I put in the party specifics in those spaces, using a font to make it look a bit like hasty handwriting. The medkits were simply boxes of folded cardstock, with a few themed treats inside. Everyone got a P-38 can opener, as well as: a tube of M&M Mini's labeled Phalanx--the zombieism placebo from World War Z; breathsavers with a wrap to look like shotgun shells; Tic-Tacs labeled 'Pills here!' with the Left 4 Dead logo; road flare Rolos; Fruit by the Foot bandages. It made for neat things to give out to guests that didn't really require too much work to do individually but definitely made the party theme come out. Everyone at the party except my beloved waifu dressed up as either a zombie or a survivor. I dressed up as a zombie, with moderately successful effect. 

Check out my friggin' Skeletor hand

Alright, so I feel a little lame that A) my costume was done about 15 minutes after the last minute; and B) it incorporated none of the crafty self-made ideas I'd been pondering over the previous weeks. However, it was a quick mess to slop on and fairly easy to get off, and was moderately cool-looking for the minimal hassle, in my opinion. The neck-bite kit's latex was a little fiddly and didn't feel too secure even after waiting the recommended 10 minutes. Then again, I'd hardly want to spirit gum my neck. The other big feature of my outfit was the teeth--hard plastic denture thingies as opposed to the cheaper flexible kind. Great googaly-moogaly they were uncomfortable. In addition to rubbing a sore against my upper left gums, the inside of the dentures kept pooling with saliva, leaving me in a state of partially drowning in my own fluids. This may be good for establishing the torment of the living dead, but I think I'll pass on it in the future.

Of course, that didn't stop me from saving them--just in case.

Little Shawn was too tired for photos that day

My son, dressed up as a certain zombie-smashing protagonist who's got red on him. I'm a big fan of Shaun of the Dead, and I wanted to see my little blond-haired boy running around thumping zombies with a mini cricket bat. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a safe cricket bat to buy for him, and I didn't have time to make one, so he went without. The little guy really impressed me with his development, though, displaying hyper-advanced cognitive functions by frakking narcing on me.

See, I was the one in charge of his costume, so before I zombified myself I threw some fake blood in his shirt pocket. As soon as my plucky electronic store clerk saw the thick red stain start to seep through his shirt, he began to mutter and moan. I dabbed it around into an ever-increasing mar on his white shirt, and accordingly the pint-sized party-goer began to sputter and pout, face wrinkling as he let me know that he thought the situation stunk. Once I'd finished and I suggested he go show his mother, he pounded on the bathroom door until she came, stamped his feet, and angrily accused "Da!" as he displayed his ruined shirt. Ah, memories.

(By the way, narcing is an example of advanced cognitive function because it established a layered taxonomy of thought, ethics, recourse, and guilt. He recognized I was changing his shirt in a lasting way, decided that it was not the way it should be, told an authority figure, and then proceeded to assign blame to the guilty party--me. That's m'boy!)

Now, there's a question that I've probably been asked a couple of times a year for nearly a decade now:

What's it with you and zombies?

Well, as grammatically suspect as that question is, it's one I'm fully prepared to answer. I've been enamored with the walking dead ever since I first played Myth in 1997 and saw a cut-scene featuring a mob of undead Thrall lurking at the bottom of a river, waiting to surface and overwhelm a nearby town. That visceral image is ever-present in my appreciation for the genre, and it is emblematic of the themes of the genre that grab me and never let go. Now, I also happen to be a zombie snob, and that goes to the point that there is one 'true' type of zombie and everything else--while it could very well be enjoyable--are deviations from the master zombie. This master zombie is a biologically and irrepressibly infectious creature that is devoid of a traditional human metabolism except for dependence on a central nervous system, possessed only by the urge to spread itself, which appears to be through cannibalistic attacks. So it's the World War Z zombie that I'm talking about here. The book, not the disrespectful absurdist movie (expect more rants on the movie in the future). These shambling zombies have no reliance on blood, tissues, or organs other than the brain, they desire to infect the living purely for the sake of viral reproduction, and they are limited by the rigamortis of their dead hosts. I'll doubtless go into the logistics and storytelling rationale of the superiority of this zombie iteration later, but for now I'll just gloss over the definition and skip to the essence of the question: why I like zombies.

I'm not a fan of gore for it's own sake. Sure, I've watched every episode of Deadliest Warrior wide-eyed several times, but it's not the visceral violent spectacle that draws me to the zombie genre. It's that zombies are an indictment of human frivolity--or at least modern frivolity. Zombies are the sort of enemy that a rational and stoic human should be able to handle, whether in a modern or primitive setting. But yet the zombie--even if slow and simple-minded--manages to plod onwards and devour the resourceful but terminally-flawed humans.

As Simon Pegg said in an old article from 2008, zombies are supposed to be a manifestation of death itself: plodding, slow, unsophisticated, and only slowed or delayed by technology--never completely vanquished by it. But a good zombie yarn also condemns its characters to a degree, because after the initial outbreaks victims to zombie attacks almost always deserve their deaths. They die for curiosity, overconfidence, lack of cooperation with their fellows, or a general unwillingness to live in the post-modern world. That last part is a critical component of the survival aspect of most zombie stories since their 80s resurgence, because modern leisure has divorced most of us from useful, practical skill sets. And as such the struggle to become self-reliant and useful is a fixture in stories that have protagonists that are shop clerks (as in Shawn of the Dead), bike messengers (28 Days Later), Best Buy associates (Dawn of the Dead remake), game-playing shut-ins (Zombieland), and so forth. All of these characters need to learn hard, fast lessons and reform their character to survive. Static characters don't fare well in these movies: one gets torn apart and pot-lucked in Shawn of the Dead, another served up as an a-la-car zombie-snack  in 28 Days Later, one shrill one gets chainsawed in half for no frakkin' reason in Dawn of the Dead, and finally a famous one is shot in the chest for surprising an unassuming loser in Zombieland. In the novel World War Z, this point is especially elaborated in one chapter in the post-zombie West Coast of America. In it formerly rich white folks in America sit down and learn gardening and cooking raw ingredients from people who used to be their landscapers and maids. It's a fabulous message that gets lost as zombies become a faster, sillier threat.

Now you'll notice that all of my examples except Shawn of the Dead feature fast zombies (or 'infected' in 28 Days Later's case). This is deliberate, as these movies' focus strays toward gunplay, simple-minded action, or purely human threats. The dilution of the zombie's identity as a slow-but-hard-to-kill threat makes it less nuanced and requires you to move away from them as the focus of your story. People are more likely to die for reasons outside their own control and culpability, and the zombies themselves make less sense. I think it's pretty well-represented by the zombie evolution you see in the Romero remakes, where zombies are not only fast but become smarter over time to the point that they have individuals and leaders in Land of the Dead. And they keep waffling between alien, supernatural, and biological explanations as none of them are satisfactory ways to justify having fundamentally super-powered zombies that are fast, smart, and resilient to the loss of all but one organ. And most of all, these stories have to cheat to establish the initial world-wide infection levels needed to make a good zombie story. People just wake up one day and they're everywhere. How? With zombies that fast, that obvious, and infection turnover in terms of minutes or seconds, how could a zombie even get aboard a plane, let alone make it to cross an ocean from one continent to another? The transmission of a disease takes time, and the longer an infected host can move freely about a population, the more likely it is that the disease is going to spread. Fast zombies just aren't effective as a contagion because they are too deadly a threat as individuals--which also means that fast zombies are more likely to destroy a victim rather than let a wounded victim escape to infect more friendlies.

And there you go. A long, long overdue post that combined a few crafty ideas and a long-winded ramble on my stance on the zombie issue. And it took only...4 months? Don't worry, though, as my love for zombies extends to this deadly quiet blog, and I've got quite a few special things in store for you over the coming days.

*As much as any dichotomy can be true, that is. In algebraic terms, you can only say there are two types of things: A and not-A. More specific dichotomies are usually either simply false or misleading simplifications.

Don't be that Guy: Ray Muzyka Retreats

So I shared a freezer-burned post with you just a few days ago that acerbically responded to a blog post of BioWare's General Manager, Ray Muzyka. Well, now, it turns out that Ray is leaving the Mass Effect franchise, his company, and the entire frakkin' gaming industry behind. He's going into charity social entrepreneurship, whatever that means. Well, I'll tell you what that means, he's beating a hasty retreat in response to the tide of nerd-hate falling down around his ears. There's no other explanation for it. If you had just taken your own company's flagship product and dropped a lazy dump on its very existence and internal consistency, and then lied through your teeth to fans about being directly responsible and cognizant about its unpopularity, wouldn't you run with your tail between your legs?

Now, this will always be speculation, because as long as Mass Effect is a vibrant franchise, it's exceptionally unlikely anyone will confirm a correlation between Mass Effect 3's lousy resolution and Muzyka leaving, probably saying that Ray had been planning this for sometime, that he's wanting to branch out, help the poor social networking sites...blah blah blah. Mass Effect 3 was a huge financial success, he'd had the most direct creative influence over it, and it was clearly supposed to pave the way for even more in-universe games to branch out--probably to other genres and platforms. Who walks away in the middle of all that, except for someone who's either ashamed or being asked by EA to resign in order to ameliorate relations with Mass Effect fans.

I wish I could take some responsibility for this turn of events. If I'd been a good blogger and posted my previous article 5 months ago as intended, perhaps I could happily delude myself with the assurance that I had helped punish the man who dealt Commander Shepard the unkindest cut of all--a stupid ending. Instead, I'm happy with the fact that I'm convinced that the disgruntled collective of Mass Effect fans have responded with enough clamor that someone--either Ray himself or someone at EA--decided that he was no longer good for the franchise. In either case, I feel like this change can only be good for Dragon Age 3, which is in development and hopefully will be purged of any of Ray Muzyka's nutty ideas.

A Letter to Dr. Ray Muzyka, from some Mass Effect 3 Players

In mid-March, Ray Muzyka, the co-founder and GM of BioWare, used his own blog to reply to some of the overwhelming fan dismay at the ending of Mass Effect 3. This post, which will be spoilerific (unlike my spoiler-free Mass Effect 3 review), is a response to Dr. Muzyka and the rest of the creative team responsible for Mass Effect 3 and any upcoming changes to the game.

No really, the spoilers shall flow.

First of all, Ray, that blog post sends irate fans like me a mixed message. I understand that you're obliged to save a certain amount of face with this sort of public appeal. You can't outright apologize for a product you're selling. I get that. A lot of fans get that. But opening and closing a letter meant to assuage wounded fans with attestations to the critical receipt of the product is self-defeating, incendiary, and vain.  It's like book-ending an apology to your girlfriend with "I was right, and you were wrong. And simple-minded." We know Mass effect 3 is a mechanically beautiful game. The combat is crisp and precise, but the combat isn't what drives the hardcore Mass Effect fan. We thrive on the story, and that's imperiled by a sloppy ending that flies in the face of narrative elegance, ethics, and logic.

To recap, Mass Effect 3's final moments begin with Shepard and two squadmates charging towards a supply beacon in war-torn London. The beacon will beam Shepard into the heart of the ancient structure called the Citadel, where he hopes to activate a mysterious super-weapon called the Crucible to defeat the Reapers once and for all. The Crucible is based on the compounded designs of previous ages' greatest species, each of whom added to the concept of this anti-Reaper weapon before being extinguished by the race of genocidal machines. Under Shepard's banner, an alliance of all races have assembled a massive fleet and pooled their resources to finish the designs and construct this weapon without knowing anything about its function other than it needs to link to the Citadel to work. And so Shepard charges that one final hill in a mad foot-chase to destroy the enemies of all organic life--of all life, really, since they seem to be poised to destroy or enslave the robotic geth as well.

"It's like book-ending an apology to your girlfriend with 'I was right, and you were wrong. And simple-minded.'"

Just short of the objective, Shepard is hit by a secondary blast from a Reaper weapon, leaving him a bloodied, shuffling mess as he plods into the beam--apparently the only survivor of his part of the assault wave. This is where things start to go sideways, plot-wise, but nothing too bad. He finds himself transported into the heart of the Citadel, where he meets up with former CO, mentor, and all-round old-school butt-kicker David Anderson (voiced by Keith David), who is being held at gunpoint by the Illusive Man (Martin Sheen), the Benedict Arnold of the future. Though a cybernetic and psychic puppet of the Reapers, the alleged big bad guy still tries to convince Shepard how his plan to control the Reapers is feasible and imminent, now that he has access to the Crucible. The conversation is well-played between the three characters, but we're stepping on some old ground here--this is pretty similar to talks with Saren in the first game in this trilogy. And, as with Saren, it even comes down to you either shooting the Illusive Man yourself or talking him into committing suicide to snub the Reapers' control. Talking a bad guy into offing himself is a pretty cool proposition, but it shouldn't be made stale by getting repeat performances.

Still, the ending is decent-but-depressing at this point. And quite railroaded, too. But it's only after Shepard and Anderson sit down to bleed to death together that the plot nose-dives into something off of an inebrious cocktail napkin. Shepard is upraised on a lift to another chamber and greeted by a ghostly, child-like apparition. The apparition gives Shepard very little chance to get a word in edge-wise, but he has a lot to say though it makes little sense. The boy/ghost-thingie is the Catalyst--the last part needed to activate the Crucible. He's also the creator and controller of the Reapers, whom he created millions of years prior as a mechanism to manage organic-synthetic conflict. Apparently, little boy Catalyst decided that the best way to prevent the violent cycle of organics making synthetics and then killing each other is to make the biggest, baddest synthetic race imaginable--the Reapers--and set them loose on the galaxy, periodically wiping out all organic life when it gets too advanced. How does that end the cycle of violence? Furthermore, he goes on to offer 'options' which revolve around the concept of synthesis--a third faction, completely separate and superior to the synthetic/organic divide. Which makes no sense. Also, all of his choices amount to personal suicide for you and social suicide for all civilization in the galaxy, since it involves the exhaustive destruction of the interstellar transit network called mass relays.

The dumb and the stupid just pile up on each other faster than red hatchbacks piling up in the middle of a Wisconsin death-fog in late winter. There's no punch-line, no recognition of how bad the plot has turned. Just a blind careening of blanket, unfeasible statements and wild philosophical tripe.

Now, the Mass Effect series has more than enough homages to indicate that at least a handful of you guys are Serenity fans. So let me spell things out for you. If we apply the same principles of storytelling used in Mass Effect 3 to the climax of Serenity, this might have been what dedicated browncoats would have gotten in theater years ago:

I mean, really look at the elements. They're all there--all pure Mass Effect 3 in both the beautiful, heart-rending, ball-grabbingly awesome setup and the teeth-kicking so-called payoff. And the inclusion of the Catalyst boy is just as jarring as taking the worst element from another sci-fi property and shoe-horning it into the most emotionally charged part of the story.

Now, I originally wrote this article at the end of March, but I'd held onto it because Bioware had promised to release an 'extended ending' DLC to address fans' concerns with the crap ending. So I waited to see what the DLC's ending was, whether it at least shone some light on the rationale of the twist or revealed a bit more clarity on behalf of the writers when it comes to the odious implications of their opus' closing note. It didn't.

As you can imagine, I have more I could say on this topic. But, in the interest of diluting the nerd-rage, I'll save that for later. Right now, I'm going to watch The Avengers or maybe console myself with a ninety-ninth viewing of Firefly.

Almost 6 months!? OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Alright, this is not even funny anymore.

Nothing since April, really?

That's just wrong on so many levels.

So as you well know, I haven't posted on the blog here in nigh-on six months. Flippin' ridiculous. I haven't even logged on to Blogger in like four months, so early this morning I found a couple of comments with three inches of dust on them, still patiently awaiting approval. That ain't right, folks, that ain't right. Let's run down a few of the essential nerd-rants you've missed out on over the past 180 days or so.

A follow up on the Fire and Ice Convention. Geez, pal, go for the balls why don't ya? This was one of those 'next week' promises that I made that is now officially closer to 'next year' than 'next week'. And what hurts most is that I loved the con and want to be a cheerleader for it in the future.

About 30+ Movie Web Monday installments. Alright, if we want to get technical, those had lapsed from being a weekly feature long before the Great Gap of 2012. And for that, I blame Morgan Freeman. Enough said, for now.

Reviews of Snow White and the Huntsman, Underwhelming Spider-Man, and the Dark Knight Rises Falls Rises Falls, nope definitely Rises. I have a bit to say about these films. I saw them all on either the midnight showing or within the first weekend, and I can just kick myself for missing the opportunity to scam a few hits by dropping the names of more blockbusters on my poor, neglected blog.

Myth holidays. Apparently, I'm not the only one with a little enthusiasm for Bungie's long-past impeccable entry into the fantasy genre. People like that stuff, and by golly I've passed on the opportunity to cover the summer Myth holidays and their early harvest ones as well.

Kickstarter promotions. I've been bitten by the Kickstarter bug. Then it burrowed its head beneath my skin and wormed a long proboscis into my marrow, suffusing my entire being with a constant need to keep abreast of cool projects being presented directly to us, the nerd public. I wanted to talk about a couple of different Kickstarter projects that really got me excited, maybe getting you revved for them too while generating some slim cross-traffic. Well, there will always be more, but the ones that have already gone through weigh heavily on my blog-conscience.

So that's the butcher's bill. Pretty dang infuriating, isn't it? Ok, well, let's put things in proper order. This is the apology post, where I lay out excuses for those past lapses of blog activity and make a case for why you should have faith that this will be the last 30+ day delay in updates. But I'm not going to do that, because I'm cool, proud, and totally original that way.

I could blame the fact that my job in an unspecified tech field involving 3D printing has been progressively more draining on my creativity reserves, but that's BS--my creativity burns with the fire of a thousand suns with Joanne Whalley hues of auburn red hair and pouty lips...hmmm Sorsha...where was I? Oh, right, I'm an unflappable nerd. Seriously, I'm so nerdy that I've used it as a personal virtue in my last two jobs' interview processes. And even though my unspecified contract position is ramping up into an actual, in-company ID salaried job, there's no way it can be blamed for the malaise that has nuked this blogroll for the past half-year.

I could blame it on the house--since, you know, living in even a modest home like ours is a cursed burden on the owner in terms of housework, yard work, and generally deleterious ability to walk away from a problem project for months at a time without looking at it. But that's a load: I've been using my computer everyday for non-bloggy activities in the interim.

I could blame it on family--both immediate and extended. I've taken a trip to Canada, attended four weddings in this posting gap, and my wife and son don't exactly sit me in front of the computer to type a new blog post when I come home from work, now do they? But I'm not blaming them, because all of that stuff was awesome, fun, or eminently necessary. Or, in the case of my first visit to the socialist north, at least novelly eye-opening and a fun opportunity to share my unimpeachable Gollum impression with distantly related in-laws.

Or, if we wanted to look at really negative impulses from the past year, we could blame it on Mass Effect 3. I've been sitting on a 90% completed article about how much Bioware narratively junk-punched its fan-base over 6 months ago now. At first I was waiting for a token update after Bioware's release of the 'extended ending' of the game, which then turned out to be a much more dastardly and nuanced betrayal of the fans with a big obvious middle finger to critical gamers as the jerk-off cherry on top of one of the most half-assed game moments in industry history. But I won't blame them, because being pissed off can, in fact, be a great motivator for writing. As you will see in the future.

But I will level the blame somewhere this time. Really. I blame it on The Avengers. Because, as the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3, The Avengers was a pristine, polished, thoroughly researched and realized culmination of a fantastic series of movies. Sublime, in every glistening nerd-drooling moment. And I blame my long absence from blogging on it for being far and away the best movie in the genre and truly a great movie by any standard. So why blame it? Because The Avengers, hot on the heels on the loin-girding disappointment of Mass Effect 3, was the irresistible nerd-enthusiasm hitting my immovable nerd-rage. And it resulted in a full stop of my ability to rant (usually the outpouring of nerd-rage) or rave (the precipitant of nerd-enthusiasm) on my usual blog topics.

So then, what tipped the scale back towards writing on this blog? Guilt, of course. Guilt, which--like a social diarrhea--is the truest human motivator, that which separates us from the animals. Just last night I was at wedding number four of the year and speaking with family. Because my son was off running around and couldn't be my social shield at the time. Now, I'd just told my wife and my father (who feels it is his mission to serve as a human shot-clock for my blog updates) that I worried that people were still discovering my blog during my absence--that I was failing to hook new readers with fresh content while I dallied in the quandary of opposing forces of nerd motivators. Not ten minutes later, one of my aunts and a cousin began talking to me about my blog, and I felt the urge to purge myself of that guilt.

"...what tipped the scale back towards writing on this blog? Guilt, of course."

So here you have it: a fresh, toasty blog post, leavened with a triple-helping of guilt and left to warm itself on a slab of overly wordy dissertation. In pledge of new and exciting content, here's an overview of things I've done over the past six months that will be appearing in future posts.

Crying way too many nerd-tears and gnashing teeth in nerd-rage over Mass Effect 3. Over the past half-year, I've learned that I can't complain enough about Mass Effect 3's wretched plot turn. In addition to having a nearly prepared post on my first thoughts on the topic, I've been plotting a more thorough deconstruction that involves a complete critical rubric of the abject denouement to the sci-fi epic.

Watching a butt-load of Avengers. First I had three in-theater viewings of the movie over the course of its blockbuster release. Then I've also watched it about eight times on blu-ray since it has come out, including several partial viewings at work while pulling late night hours. And now my boy has gotten addicted to the cartoon version of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, to the point that when he woke up this morning he ran over to the Xbox, turned it on, and started chanting "I'n Man! I'n Man!" I'll definitely be posting a proper odor-beef-gravy-cheese review of The Avengers.

Playing in a frakkin' Tesla pod, tools! During an out-of-state wedding for one of my wife's cousins, I got to make an epic update on my bucket list by gaming in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. That's huge nerd points added to my lifetime total, and ended up being a sweet chance to share the moment with eight or nine family members, too.

http://getinthepods.com/pilot-experience/

Being immensely proud of my son for leaping years ahead in his development of advanced warfare skills. This is another one that is going to get a full breakdown later on, so look forward to an awestruck daddy post in the near future. But the skinny is that my son established a counter-intelligence routine to setup an ambush from an entrenched position and overcome superior opposition through guerrilla tactics, shock and awe, and biological warfare. Daddy so proud.

Actually shooting zombies. That's actually shooting, as in using live-fire weapons, not shooting actual zombies, which, you know, is impossible outside of the Chinese rural countryside. Just last weekend I knocked off another item from my bucket list by schlepping out to a shooting range in central Illinois and firing some real-life guns. Not too nerdy, you say? Well what if I told you it was a zombie-themed event in which I ran four courses firing at zombie-styled targets to help prepare me for holding off hordes of the undead? Yes, that's what I thought. Some cool video of one of the courses below:

Planning on throwing a slammin' Outbreak Party. With our first house bought and moved into, Missus Nerdery and I are planning a zombie-themed costume party at the end of this month. It's going to be an awesome time, and I'll probably post an article about some of the ideas, games, and prep before the party as well as some after-party coverage, as well.

Well, that's it for now. I'd like to get another post up and scheduled for sometime over the next couple of days, so please watch. Oh, and don't be shy about commenting. Getting comment notifications congratulating me on my wit and awesome is a great way to leverage both pride and guilt to keep me blogging faithfully. Filmatleven.

At least I didn't give any excuses, right?

Interval Error: Integer greater than 30--Whatthefrak?!

Bah, this blog has not been updated in far, far too long. With only one blog update in October and none so far in November, I have well and truly earned a big kick in the Star Wars Essentials. Worse, I totally missed the opportunity to make a timely post for Armistice Day. Thanksgiving, too. And there are at least five or six partially done articles awaiting me in my Blogger queue. Really unacceptable.

Now I could blame the fact that most of the past month and a half has been going through the painful transition of losing one job, searching for another, and getting settled into a new job--as this is my fourth week in a completely new, exciting field. And truly, time flies when you're waiting on a paycheck. Except when it doesn't. Concurrently, I could blame my laxity on my eight-month son--I'm sure he's been draining my batteries. Nerd dads can always blame their kids, right? Audumla and I are beginning to look for a house, too, and are getting into property-hunting frenzy over one piece of real estate we'd like to make our own Jotunheim in particular. It's not easy, let me tell you. Plus, I've been feeling ill, and I haven't had much time at home.

Also...also...also...

Eh, I'm a nerd. You know the truth. I've been playing around:

GMing my GURPS campaign with my game-serfs players. I've recently added a friend to our group, and the next session should see a sixth player joining our clutch of nerds. The game itself is on the edge of the slippery slope towards epic conflict, and as such I might start putting summaries of our sessions on the blog here in the future. I'd say the near future, but who the heck knows? Not you guys reading at home, that's for sure. In the meantime, I'll give you a snippet of where each of the player characters is in their personal development. Ten Green Gem Vine, warrior-monk of the emperor's guard, is moving towards becoming a bit more of a diplomatic sage and less of a combat troll--not necessarily because we've had like 3 session dry-spells without any combat. He's also investing in his teenage acolyte's sword-fighting skills. Vera Wealwa, the falconer huntress, has had to all but give up on her primary livelihood whilst in the capital city and is instead living on housekeeping skills--ignominy most foul! Keagan Na Anyon, the blowhard blacksmith, has recently had his foot shot off by a dwarven hand gonne--thankfully, the Heron Guard should be able to mend the wound and reattach the foot. Should. The beggar known only as Crow continues to operate on his own terms, and spent most of First Day celebration sparring with other Provincial ex-pats. The mysterious temptress Danlyra has revealed her last name is Filorin--a noble house from the eastern kingdom of Gower--and is metaphorically showing some ankle of her secretive past.

Playing the long-neglected Fallout: New Vegas. After trying--and failing, FAILING*--to get all of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's achievements in 2.6 playthroughs, I decided to move onto an older game that had been sitting unfinished on my game shelf for far too long. That's the newest Fallout game, Fallout: New Vegas. It's a fun improvement on Fallout 3's awesome system, and there's no inferior point of comparison in graphics, scale of sandbox, depth of story, or richness of challenges between the two games. It was especially fun to be playing a game with a proper economy and a huge list of purchasable equipment after Deus Ex's lackluster inventory system and paltry gear selection. Also, there's no being forced to shoot tied-down women in the face, so that's another way that Fallout was a refreshing change of pace from Deus Ex. Powering through about 100 hours of gameplay, I was able to beat one of the DLC (downloadable content for you old folks and jocks) quests and get about halfway through the game's main plot. It's expansive, fun, and engrossing. I can't wait to go back to New Vegas, but for now I've been waylaid by the newest pretty thing...

Since Armistice Day, playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This one I've been waiting on for a while now, and the wife and I even schlepped out to the nearest GameStop for a midnight release of the game. And we bought the huge special edition game guide, which clocks in at about 700 pages--with two bookmark ribbons. Two! It's made by Bethesda, the same geniuses who made Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Unlike those previous three games--all of which were based on the same utilitarian game engine--Skyrim is based on a new game engine that makes everything prettier, more crisp, and a lot more dynamic. The Scandinavian-themed setting is full of cloud-choked, snow-capped mountains that you can freely explore, and the characters are detailed to a new, fabulous degree that helps to make everyone appear distinct even amongst members of their own race. There's a huge bevy of quests that is almost overwhelming for completionists like myself. It's been a fun, engaging little not-so-little derailment in my personal life.

Reviving my wargame juices. I played role-playing games at a young age, but it was the wargame Warhammer 40,000 that first really got me into a lot of the games and hobbies I play today. After many years of being a willing pawn in Games Workshop's soulless nerd farm, I'm no longer a true fan of their products. I've even divested myself of my first army (space marines, go figure) via eBay over the silent interim. But I still have hundreds of minis and find the occasional need to purchase other companies' minis to represent RPG characters or to flesh out some other wargame system. One such system that I'm finally starting to get around to playing after owning for over a year is Two Hour Wargames' All Things Zombie. Now, Two Hour Wargames is a small game company that makes rules sets but not miniatures. I like companies like this, because if they don't make rules tailored to their own miniatures it means I can use my own vast stable of models, and these sorts of rules sets tend to be more inclusive because of their generic nature. The Two Hour Wargames rules sets also have the unique advantage of being playable competitively, cooperatively, or even solo. That's a huge bonus for me, and I've gotten to play a more involved cooperative game in the past couple of weeks that has helped to cement my enthusiasm for this system. Expect to read more about it in the future. I've also fallen in love with a generic space battles game that does a great job of simulating Battlestar Galactica fleet action. Expect to hear more about it--Colonial Fleet Battles--in the coming weeks as well.

Netflix. Darn you, Netflix. What days I have had at home when one of the above distractions haven't grabbed my free time by the ruge have inevitably been lost to the lure of the Netflix Instant Watch. At the click of a few buttons, I can spam a day watching Frasier or Malcolm in the Middle episodes back-to-back-to-back, watching a half season or more in one sitting. Its insidious convenience means that I'll watch crap movies not worth a complete viewing (Season of the Witch, why would you do that to Ron Perlman?!) in the hopes of finding that unknown gem you didn't know you were missing out on (Ironclad, you scratch my siege-warfare itch). On the bright side, there's a lot of fodder for future blog posts, but it's certainly no help in meeting a personal deadline.



In conclusion: I'm still here. The blog will still be getting updated--more regularly, I assure you. A perfect storm of life hiccups and nerd traps have momentarily pulled me away from the keyboard, but I will keep updating, and I will expand the breadth and scope of the Nerdery.

Filmateleven.

*Insert angry, impotent fist-shaking here. Shake harder, boy!

Things That Should Be In Mass Effect 3, But Probably Won't Be (Part Five)

I love Mass Effect. The third and final installment--with little more than one teaser trailer and one gameplay trailer released so far--already has me grabbed by the wrinklies, and I'm certain it's going to be a truly epic end to a great saga of heroism and hard choices. But there are a few things that I'd really love to see--that I think are very possible for the Bioware team to make--that I'm fairly certain won't make the cut. These are things that should be in Mass Effect 3, but probably won't be:

I want to have some direct sway over the inevitable epic space battle's action.

Why I want it: In the climax of the first Mass Effect game, you had the opportunity to tell the Earth Alliance fleet to either rush into the final battle, trying to help the embattled Citadel fleet, or to bide their time and wait for the enemy fleet to present a better opportunity to catch them off guard. It was a fun--but all too small--chance to exercise a little tactical control over a space battle that in the end just slightly modified the final cut-scene and whether or not the Citadel Council survived. In Mass Effect 2, the final space battle cut-scene was determined by which upgrades you had bought for the Normandy, if any, and that in turn affected which crew and party members might get injured in the fight. Both of these elegant teasers were well-executed, but they weren't very ambitious. ME 3 should give the player a chance to direct the final space battle with the Reapers in progress--along with a few Paragon and Renegade options that only unlock if you maxed your alignment by the end of the game. This, of course, supposes that this sort of massive fleet combat, composed of the Reapers on one side and a rag-tag assortment of all species' ships on the other, will be the immediate prelude to Shepard's final struggle to wipe out the machine overlords.

Picture this: Joker jumps the Normandy into Earth-space well within the lunar orbit, with a smattering of Migrant Fleet destroyers, turian dreadnoughts, batarian raiders, and volus gunships following in close formation. After a moment's delay, the viewscreen fills up with hundreds of Reapers as they lift off the planet to intercept the allied fleet in low Earth orbit. Immediately, the volus commander begins to freak out--because that's what space-bankers do when galactic poop-storms show up on their viewscreen. Shepard can tell the volus commander to retreat, fall back into a support formation, or to go into a flanking surprise attack. A renegade Shepard can threaten the volus, telling him that there's always time to blow up a retreating gunship, or a paragon Shepard can appeal to his sense of honor and outrage: "These things wiped out your homeworld, they're here to enslave you all, and you want to retreat?" At which point the volus will shout something humorously overblown and charge his vanguard into the center of the Reaper blockade.

Imagine getting several meaty choices like this in the course of an epic space battle leading up to whatever the game's climax will be. Really, nothing less would fit the galactic scale that is the Mass Effect universe, and making it so thoroughly interactive will engage players to a new ridiculous degree that will make them want to play the game's climax over and over to experience all the permutations of the battle. And having the conversations tree direct the course of the battle would be an awesome recognition of this scope and Shepard's authority as Big Damn Hero over the forces involved.

Why I won't get it: This is mostly pessimism, really. There are very few good space battles depicted in video games. Most of the time you're shown the bare minimum to accomplish a sense of urgency. The most common iteration along these lines is a randomly exploding internal corridor if you're on a ship, or a lot of orange bubbles bursting in the night sky if you're on the ground. Bioware really impressed me with the battle at the end of Mass Effect, and though it was smaller scale and shorter, the ME 2 ship battle was also engaging if simplistic. I have a feeling that Shepard's method of fighting the Reapers in ME 3 will be something more innocuous than a space battle, but it's possible that they will need to break a Reaper blockade or something in order to deploy the anti-cthulhu-bot super-weapon effectively. But Bioware will probably downplay the interactivity to reflecting a few prior choices in the game and at most two choices at the moment. Given that the space battle in ME 2 was fully rendered--a resource-consuming process--I'm certain they won't want to eat a lot of development hours and disc space with all of the set piece shots they'd need to make an interactive space battle. If they made the space battle based on the engine like in Mass Effect, though, then ME 3 should be able to accomplish something like this without too much technical overhead.

I want more Spaceship porn.
Why I want it: Over the course of Mass Effect, players become intimately familiar with Shepard's ship the SSV Normandy. Like Serenity, fans easily memorize the layout as they live in the space between their adventures, and memorizing how the specific spaces of the ship lead to beloved characters makes that connection a much more real, emotional tie to a fictional inanimate object. In the prologue to Mass Effect 2, fans wept as the beloved spacecraft died a hard death, particle-beamed to pieces, puffing smoke, with secondary explosions ripping through exposed bulkheads as it tumbled into a planet's atmosphere.

Then, at the close of the game's first act, we were treated to this--the unveiling of the Normandy SR2. That's finest piece of sci-fi hull-plating I've ever seen. It's an utterly decadent indulgence in the cool design and emotional attachment players feel to the character of the ship and the crew to which she's home. Beats the pants off any car commercial or Michael Bay money-shot I can think of at the moment. I love it and want more of it. There was a whiff of this effect when players first saw the Destiny Ascension in Mass Effect, but the moment doesn't compare. When those cargo bay doors opened for the shot of the ship leaving port, I was a drooling mess, soon to be mumbling "I have to load my last save so I can watch that again." As a game developer, if your players want to load-save to experience the same content over again immediately after first witnessing it, you're doing something right.

Why I won't get it: I actually think I've got a good chance of getting this one. In Mass Effect 3 Shepard will once more be operating outside of Cerberus' control, so it's a reasonable assumption that there might be a Normandy SR3 money-shot in the works. Of course, it'd be great to get some shots like this of other ships in the Mass Effect universe. The Reapers are a shoo-in for this kind of treatment, but in a more kinetic, I'm-vaporizing-the-Eiffel-Tower-and-looking-oh-so-sexy kind of way. And when the cavalry fleet arrives and the player gets to take cursory control over the proceedings, there ought to be a glorious passby for the flagship and a handful of the notable combatants.

So come on, Bioware. Polish up those hulls, prime that starport's lighting, tune those lens flares, and get started with the spaceship porn. And Normandy, I don't care what anyone says, you can still move it with the best of them, even if you have put on a little weight. Work those canards, baby.

Well, that's it for Things That Should Be In Mass Effect 3, But Probably Won't. Barring any startling revelations I just have to blog about, I'll clap my trap shut on this topic and wait for the game's release.

Anticipating the Captain America movie...

...or "Why America the world still needs Captain America"

In 1940, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were worried. A pair of American comic book makers, they were looking to create a lasting, iconic new superhero property. But unlike the creation of many other heroes, they began with the hero's arch-nemesis: Hitler. Creating a hero who was empowering to pre-war Americans but nowhere near as haughtily indestructible as Superman, they made Captain America--a kid who was in many ways typical of his idealistic, naive generation. Even in 1940, though, Hitler and Nazi Germany weren't quite considered the universal bad guys we judge them today. A lot of Americans were still insisting on neutrality in the mounting European war, and a minority wanted to side with Germany at the time. If you looked at most other American comic books at the time, many of them were ignoring the war in a move that seemed to be hedging their bets when it came to popular opinion. Many celebrities and companies were quietly investing in German companies, either actively supporting the Axis powers or operating on the assumption that it would be good to invest in them should they win.

Simon and Kirby's creation, however, stood staunchly against Nazi Germany, and its tremendous patriotism made it a hit as the war consumed American headlines and consciousness. But it's critical to understand that when Captain America was released there was still no mass understanding of the atrocities the Nazis were committing--in December of 1940, most Americans still identified Germany as yet another European belligerent, however more aggressive they may have been. Heck, the first issue of the comic is predicated on the concept that high-level Americans were actively supporting Germany. Captain America as a comic wasn't just about sucker-punching an easy real-life villain. It was about actively coming down on a side with an unequivocal moral judgment when most other Americans were trying to 'wait and see'.

This weekend, millions of people around the world are going to see Captain America: The First Avenger. I'll be one of them, and it will be the first time I've seen a movie on its opening weekend in years. If you spot a scruffy nerd wearing a Thor and Captain America t-shirt in a Midwest theater getting teary-eyed entirely too early on in the film, that might be me. But there's already a bitter rind of complaint that I've seen floating around the net about how this is "just another superhero movie", "a movie-length ad for the Avengers movie", or "Captain America doesn't matter anymore." This article is a big inappropriate gesture to all of those depressing pariahs of enthusiasm. Captain America is all kinds of relevant--largely for the role he plays in reminding us of the virtues our fathers and grandfathers esteemed that hardly factor into modern sensibilities.

I've intimated my own anticipation of the film in the past, but I'll elaborate further here. Because that's how the Nerdery rolls--elucidation upon elucidation.

"If you spot a scruffy nerd wearing a Thor and Captain America t-shirt in a Midwest theater getting teary-eyed entirely too early on in the film, that might be me."

Captain America is the sum and total of almost all of the best qualities of this country, and to say he's no longer relevant is to say that America doesn't need virtue anymore. There are a lot of people in America who clearly feel that way--who posit that concepts of justice and social responsibility are archaic concepts in a pragmatic world-- but I don't know any who'd come out and say it in those stringent terms. Steve Rogers, who would become Captain America, represents a kid who wants to do what's right regardless of his ability to succeed. Scrawny and sickly, the universal opinion that joining the military at the war's start would equate to suicide doesn't phase him, despite the constant reminders from those around him and his own personal history of getting regularly beaten up. Captain America is determined that one's inability to produce change should never sway one's concept of right and wrong. He knows in his heart what is right and would follow through with it even without the benefit of the super soldier serum, which is regularly invoked as the reason why he is worthy of that power.

This is important. This is true. Thousands of young American men who joined the armed services during the war did so under false pretenses--especially in regards to age. The draft board might hold that under eighteen was too young, but many Americans found their way around those guidelines to ensure that they weren't left behind when their friends and brothers went to war. Audie Murphy, one of the most widely decorated heroes of the war, joined and served under a false birth-date. As did my grandfather, a marine in the Pacific Theater. And, if the testimony of every documentary I've ever seen or read is any indication, so did a multitude of others across the nation. No one wanted to stay home and wait for their birthday when they could be out there helping put a collective boot on the Axis' throat.

"Captain America is all kinds of relevant--largely for the role he plays in reminding us of the virtues our fathers and grandfathers esteemed that hardly factor into modern sensibilities."

Today is another matter entirely. We're victims of skepticism, pragmatism, and bean-counting. A war today isn't worthwhile if it costs too much in terms of money and life--but mostly in terms of money. The pundits that try to manipulate public opinion and its rationale would tell us that today there is no Nazi Germany, no evil nations or mad dictators trying to wipe out innocent people or ruthlessly invade their neighbors. That's why we don't rush to aid other countries. But deep down, we know that isn't true. Not even the first world can claim ignorance of the genocides and atrocities being committed on small and large scales around the world. But we don't do anything about it. Because the cost of righting wrongs would be too much, and the rigor required to proactively be involved in world affairs would be too high. Shame on us.

The accepting, fraternal nature of Captain America the comic book is part of its great appeal and effectiveness as a symbol of America, as well. Despite the tendency of its contemporaries, Simon and Kirby's work didn't paint the Nazis as an ethnicity--there were Germans amongst the protagonists as well, clearly outlining a standard of acceptance with the fact that the serum's creator was himself German. Add to that the offhanded congeniality of the down-to-earth hero and the international relations he displays with America's allies throughout the war plots of his comic, and you can see that Cap represents the pinnacle of American involvement and the nature of America as an alliance-making coordinator on nearly every front around the globe.

And Captain America, unlike other heroes of his day and today, has always been a team player. While other heroes slide in and out of publisher's 'team-ups', he fights alongside his fellows. In the war era, Cap led the way as troops stormed beaches and cleared out military bunkers. Later, he defined a revival of the Avengers as a premier title, stepping into a key role of leadership and accountability as a voice from a more honest time in our history. When the Marvel universe split in Civil War, he served as a dynamic leader of the conscientious objectors/rebels. This characteristic emphasizes the cooperative frailty of Captain America--no matter how powerful he may be, his greatest strength is in his ability to rally like-minded heroes, whether they have powers or not.

"Captain America is determined that one's inability to produce change should never sway one's concept of right and wrong."

This isn't a war-mongering post. It's a recognition that today when we feel ire over injustice, we still fail to act. I think Captain America is just what we need to get a little conviction over our collective sense of passive entitlement. And the movie looks like it's going to be true to those themes. Just look at these pictures. The first is the cover of Captain America #1, which went on sale in December 1940. The second is a limited edition poster given out to the cast of the most recent movie.

Just look at that, appreciate the sense of history and the honor given to the source material, right down to giving der Führer a right hook in a recreation of the original cover's pose. Only this weekend will tell whether the movie lives up to the legacy of the world's greatest superhero, but all indications so far look good that Captain America will be making a strong return to Americans' collective consciousness.

A hero of ambition, determination, and moral certainty that fights alongside others, not on his own in a far-off plane. Because he has a lot to teach us, to remind us, and to show us. Because we need him.