It's a-Me, Stereotype-io...

In 1993, one of the very first, and worst, video-game-to-movie adaptations were made. That movie was Super Mario Bros. And boy, was it a pile.

So I should start off that this isn't a Nerdview. My Nerdviews are meant to be exemplars of professional reviews, and a key trait of them is that anyone should be able to read one of my reviews and come to a contrary opinion of the movie. A fair, well-explained and contextualized review should allow for people who have opposing tastes to mine. A review should not tell people whether they should or shouldn't enjoy a movie, but whether they're likely to enjoy it or not. That's an important distinction, as nuanced as it is.

So this is not a review, because I'm going to flat out say it: you should not see this movie, unless you need to cure yourself of optimism for the video-game-to-movie franchise. In that case, Dr. Ben will prescribe 200cc of Super Mario Bros after eating--because it will ruin your appetite.

First of all, the plot of the movie was a mess. Inspired by the cartoony idyllic landscapes of the games, the plot naturally transplants the protagonists in a formless cyberpunk world of super-pollution and made Dennis Hopper King Koopa, the sleazier-than-usual president of a parallel dimension where humans descended from dinosaurs. Mario, played by the awesome Bob Hoskins, is dragged along by his brother Luigi, played by the toothy John Leguizamo, as they chase Luigi's best-girl Daisy across the ick-dimension. Daisy, played by Punisher-wife Samantha Mathis, turns out to be the long-lost princess of the suck-dimension, and for arbitrary reasons that makes her the key to Koopa uniting the dimensions and make him the de-facto ruler of both worlds. There's a lot of cheap fights with the most ridiculous little-headed goons of all time, a devolving-weapon that reduced Daisy's father into a fungus and other political enemies into goombas,  and the super-jump gimmick of the game is a pair of jump-jet boots that elicit some of the worst wire work in the genre.

The awkwardness of this screenshot is seconded only by the film's total fail.

Just reviewing my recollection of the film, I'm asking a dozen why's all over again. Why is Mario the punk of the plot? He's not initiating the action, central to the plot's conceit, or even getting the girl in the end. Why make King Koopa the president of a dystopian bolthole of retarded dino-men? How is that more plausible than a naturalistic fantasy land of colorful critters? And president, really? Way to make the story more accessible to the 7-12 year-old age range you were shooting for with your film. I'm sure they'll appreciate the mock election posters and "environmentalist" message.

See that "elect Koopa" poster? That makes it edgy.
Being edgy distracts from the stink, right?

Probably the biggest travesty of this film is that Bob Hoskins is actually good. As far as the cringe-worthy script and head-poundingly dumb directing lets him go, that is. He pulls off the swaggering of a Brooklyn plumber-turned-reluctant-attache-to-the-hero with his natural aplomb. And with this coming two years after his role as Smee in Hook and five years after starring in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I think he was positioning himself to play more kid-oriented roles. And then this was inflicted on his resume, the poor bastard. The production values around his veteran performance are just staggeringly bad when you bear in mind that this movie came after Terminator 2 championed early computer-generated effects and Aliens showed how effective purely practical effects could be. Not to mention that a little over a year later, Jurassic Park would be coming out and really rubbing our noses in how pathetic this movie's effects were.

The uber-intimidating badguys

Now, at the time, I'm sure every decision to deviate from the source material of the games was made on the assumption that literally depicting the game would be unbelievable to audiences. But in moving away from a surrealistic world that was already completely familiar and plausible to the target audience, the inept filmmakers made something that highlighted its own stupidity and failed to live up to the consistency of a cartoon world.

Yeah, burned.

But you can make something that starts with a familiar, real-world palette and then successively introduce fantastic elements that bring it even closer in line with the source material. And in so doing, you could make a Super Mario Bros movie that is both fairly faithful to the games and yet still accessible to non-gaming audiences.

As an example, and to apologize for dredging up bad memories of Super Marios Bros, I present to you: The Four Players.

I love this video, which depicts Mario as a gruff everyman who sort of goes through a more mundane Mr. Incredible workout routine to become the block-smashing bruiser of the game's stories. Just the label of 'the fixer' evokes many of my favorite hero tropes. Mario isn't just a happy Eye-talian--he's a hard-nosed man you count on to snake your toilets and rescue the princess.

Heshyeah.

Alright, I'm not crazy about Luigi going full pyro at the end there. If he would've stuck with breathing fire, or even just being a nutso pyromaniac loading up a rucksack of flower-powered molotov cocktails, would have felt much more natural to me. That said, I love the juxtaposition of Luigi as the strung-out bad brother who only reluctantly gets his act together when straight-shooter Mario comes a-calling. And who doesn't love the blunt characterization and drama of a well-done support group confession?

I need to watch You Kill Me sometime soon.



So I'll admit, that when Peach started singing, I was ready to roll my eyes. But cutting between the idealized club setting of the song and the 24-worthy torture scenes was genius and by the time the music crescendo'd, I was digging the song both on its own merits and for being so epically moving given this woman's circumstance.

Although regaining the fingers was kind of a cop-out, in my opinion. I like consequences in my story-telling, and I think an eight-fingered Peach would subvert the classic princess trope completely. When flesh-eating piranha eat your fingers off, they stay ate.

(Alright, now I'm getting sissy-weepy re-watching the video…)



Toad here as the soldier, is one of the most game-accurate visions of the character, but at the same time he's totally rocking the Guillermo Del Toro vibe. I could just see him riding a giant frog from beneath that tree in Pan's Labyrinth. Yoshi, anyone? Anyways, I'm a big fan of underpowered characters that get brutalized by their own heroism, so giving him the green mushroom (which gives an extra life in the games) is a great way to characterize the fanatically loyal soldier.

So there you go, cynics. You can make a video game adaptation from a really sparse, cartoony game and actually make something with film-worthy drama and consistency. It just doesn't happen. But at least we have awesome fan trailers to give us hope every once in a while.

Have a good weekend, nerds.

So so so wrong

(Oh, and Luigi should have a mustache. Nerdery out.)

Marvel Hype: Cinematic Universe Phase Two

(...And Maybe A Little Bit of Phase Three?)

I'm not sure how necessary this is to constantly reiterate, but for those of you just joining or with the attention spans of Labrador Retrievers: I am a Marvel fan. I love the comics, I love the cartoons (erm...animated features, I mean), I love the movies. I love Marvel.

And right now, I am excited.

Why am I excited? Well first of all, this past week was Thor's day. No wait--that's not just a terrible pun/allusion to the etymological origins of the word Thursday--it's the night of the US release of the second Odinson movie, Thor: The Dark World. Apart from being a mega awesome sequel title (woot for sequels without numbers in the title!), the trailers for this film have had me totally stoked. I really liked the first movie, and this one looks poised to amp up many of the elements I loved about the first. Plus, with Jane Foster getting thrown into the thick of things for this movie, odds are good she'll get elf-kacked and replaced by Lady Sif--booyah! Either way, expect a movie review to be posted early tomorrow.

Most importantly, though, is the revelation that 3D screenings of Thor: The Dark World will have an exclusive peek at Captain America: Winter Soldier. Not only does this movie look poised to hit all the right notes in this first trailer, (Robert Redford?! Booyah!) but Winter Soldier is one of the coolest Cap-related storylines, and one of the greatest overall plots in the Marvel Universe. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to check out the story arc--it's the first twenty issues or so of the Captain America series that began in 2004, written by Ed Brubaker--fantastic plot that brings back classic elements of Captain America and brings them to the fore with a shiny new appeal. It's like meeting your first crush years later and finding out she's just as cool as before, only now more clever, passionate, and into yoga. All-round win.

Throwing further fuel onto the fire of my enthusiasm, Marvel cinematic news is that James Spader is going to be portraying Ultron in the Avengers sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. What?!

Whaaat?!

I mean, first of all, I want to throw a Marvel-fan hissy-fit over Ultron being the main villain in the next Avengers movie, which will come out before Ant-Man. I mean, Ant-Man is the creator of Ultron, and a lot of his (really really compelling) character quirks as a villain are directly precipitated by Ant-Man's personal character. This is totally putting the cart before the horse. (I wanted to say 'literally' there for emphasis, but the grammarian butt-hole living in my head wouldn't allow it) So clearly Ultron isn't going to share a remotely similar origin story to the comics, but does that mean that Hank Pym is going to be fundamentally changed as a hero in Ant-Man? Pym is very much defined by his world-threatening failure in Ultron's creation, and it's often as depicting his more self-destructive character flaws. The suggestion, then, is that those demons won't exist. What's next, are they going to make him a decent guy who treats his woman nice, is loyal, and always takes it slow?

Bah, who am I kidding? This is Joss Whedon we're talking about. You can say what you like about his creative choices, but he makes really interesting bad guys. Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it. And James Spader, too? I mean, they've already let slide that they scanned his face for VFX, so it's safe to say we're going to see some awesome acting from the man who is the pillar of Blacklist's early success. But I also used to be a big Stargate fan, so the role I'm really wanting to see him channel is Daniel Jackson, the rambling archeologist outcast.

Most recently, Marvel announced last week that they'll be partnering with Netflix to create four 13 episode serials over the next two years. Focusing in turn on Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage, the four mini-mini-series will culminate in a cross-over mini-series that will be called The Defenders. I already jumped the gun getting excited that Luke Cage would feature in Agents of SHIELD, so getting to see Power Man doing his street tank thing will be awesome. Not to mention the prospect of Daredevil being redeemed from the Affleck treatment he got in 2003. If they feature the lawyer aspects of Matt Murdoch, the Daredevil serials should be really engrossing--that pseudo mundane aspect of his character has always appealed to me. Same goes for Jessica Jones' wry private investigator angle and the post-tights drama that defines her. And Iron Fist's handwaved wushu business should be a fun splash of highly choreographed action to contrast the other three.

"Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it."

Oh, the next phase of Marvel's cinematic universe is already shaping up nicely with Thor and Captain America, and even Phase Three should be killer with The Defenders adding a lot of street-level mysteries and small-screen drama.

What the heck was that? (Plus cosplay, charity, and campaigning for the year's end)

Blech. So another fat pause in posts, and when I finally bring myself back into the habit, it's with much less fanfare than I'd hoped.

It began, as so many things do, with the birth of my son, the beginning of many epic projects, and an all-but-inevitable slide into insomnia (or in-zomb-nia, as my loving wife insists I pronounce it). I saw several movies that I'd really wanted to write Nerdviews on, but things kept piling up and most of the movies this past summer were more disappointing than anything else. Perhaps in the coming weeks I'll write-up mini-digest Nerdviews, with just a couple of sentences (heh--yeah, sure--just a couple of sentences) to sum my feelings on a lot of the movies I've neglected over the life of this blog. I think the superhero sequel to the Dave Lizewski movie (keeping it family-friendly, yo), Oblivion, Pacific Rim, and Despicable Me 2 all merit mention, but I've also been kicking myself for not reviewing Dark Knight Rises and Amazing Spider-Man. And with Agents of SHIELD officially picked up for a full first season, I need to give that a write-up with a special surprise element tacked on. Filmatleven.

Most importantly, I've still got to get my most important new article series started: Nerds of Interest. Intended to be a series of features on different nerds I've met and taken an interest in, I should've posted the first article in this series months ago. I've already interviewed the really nice ladies behind Horsefeathers Cosplay as the first in this series, and I owe them (and you) a big apology for not getting that put up post-haste. They have helped inspire me to finally bite the bullet and get into cosplay fully and truly, and I definitely want to honor their influence and that of Cosplay4UsAll in my hobby insanity.

Along those lines, I made my first foray into cosplay. And as one should expect of me, it's been intense, grueling, full of mistakes and petty triumphs, and way too rushed by conservative cosplay standards. You see, October 10th was the one year anniversary of Star Citizen being revealed to the public and opened up for crowd-funding, and they made a modest event out of the observance. On September 19, they announced a photo contest to coincide with the event, which would close a mere two weeks later. Never one to let reason bar me from setting a goal, I decided that I would make a Star Citizen cosplay in that time. The (sorta) end result was a pretty feldercarb picture of a frakkin' awesome work-in-progress cosplay that didn't even place or get mention in the photo contest. I'll post more about this costume and my progress towards completing it later, but for now here's the underwhelming photo:

Those who follow me on Facebook or Google Plus can see some of my other pictures as well.

I'm not cowed from the hobby, but I don't think I'll put up any more pictures without taking the time to get some decent ones taken with a decent camera and photographer. No offense intended to my wife, but I felt like a motorized tripod with a remote would've been a better setup. Alright, I guess I intend a little offense with that comment. Anyways, the point is that this first frustrating entrance in no way dissuades me from cosplay. Expect to see a lot more on that in the future.



Another article series that needs posting: Nerd Level Up Program. A simple series of fitness and general wellness goals I've set for myself, I've already hit enough of my modest goals that I've essentially backlogged two or three level up posts. This actually dovetails with my interest in cosplay, but working out regularly was one of those things that was always a part of my holistic life goals.



My RPG muscles are starting to atrophy. I haven't sat down for a proper tabletop session in well over a year, and the lack of RPG goodness in my life is really unacceptable. On the homefront, I'm this close to actually doing verifiable work cleaning out my dungeon basement game room and facilitating game play down there. On the blog front, though, I've been planning a couple of things for a while. The GURPS Centurion project is still under way--more character write-ups and eventually several comic pages.

I try to keep a bead on the search terms that bring people to my blog, and every once in a while I come across a really unusual set of search terms. Months ago, I found a particularly interesting phrase on my stats page: "GM tips for scaring their players." My my my. I just love that there is a GM out there looking for tips to scare their players. So at some point in the future I want to make an article of tips for getting emotional reactions from your players: fear, sadness, awe, and elation.



On the back of my embarrassing cosplay failure, I decided to throw myself into the concerns of others, like an infested Terran from Starcraft. In the middle of my clumsy cosplay sprint, I got in touch with one of the fine members of Grievance Gaming, Shrivasta, about helping their group with a charity drive for Extra Life. Here's a little statement from Shrivasta about the event, coming up November 2nd:

As many of you know, Grievance will be participating in Extra Life next month on November 2^nd, 2013.  Extra Life began in 2008 as a way of honoring a young lady named Victoria Enmon. Tori’s battle against acute lymphoblastic leukemia inspired the Sarcastic Gamer Community in a way that is difficult to describe. Members sent in video games and bought gifts to keep Tori’s spirits up despite numerous hospital stays and three bouts with the deadly disease.

 

Tragically, Tori lost her battle with cancer in January 2008.

 

Since then, the gaming community at large has participated in the Extra Life project, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in the US as well as Canada!  This year is no exception.  In November, thousands of gamers will be participating in a 25 hour marathon gaming session for charity!

 

This will be the first Extra Life team for Grievance, and we aim to make it an annual tradition.  We’ll not only be taking pledges for the hours played, but we will also be auctioning off items to the community to raise additional money for Extra Life as well.

I've been a fan of Extra Life for some time, and the Grievance Gaming guild is a fun group of gamers, so when I happened across Shrivasta on Facebook, I decided to do a little something myself. Since I'd made some paperweight-sized ODST (from the Halo franchise) helmets in the past, I thought it'd be great to make one with a custom base and a medic paint-job and add it to the Grievance auction. Here's a picture of the early print of the model, before I got really hands on with the piece.

Visit Extra Life to see about pledging, and check out Grievance Gaming.

Please spread the word about this worthy cause and seriously consider donating. And if you want your own ODST medic sitting on your desk, be sure to get in touch for that auction.


So all this stuff is nice enough, but it doesn't mean too much if I'm not going to post regularly, does it? Well, the number of followers I currently have means I need to post at least twice a week, but over the past three months or so I figure you readers have a back log of 31 posts. So as I get back into blogging here, I'm going to try my level best to put in an extra 31 posts (in addition to the two weekly you've already earned), so that by December 31, 2013 you should have just as many posts in the past year as though I hadn't been MIA the past three and a half months. I don't know how reasonable that will be, but it's a good goal to close out the year, and it's quite obvious I've got enough content lined up to fill those spots.

A Pregnant Pause in the Blog Sprint

Man, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.

On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.

If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) interview with Larry Hryb (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:

"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"

"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"

"You're not on the development team, are you?"

And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:

1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers. If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.

2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information. Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.


Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: they would reverse their DRM and online policies, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.

More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.

And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, jumped in to defend Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the Gears of War franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his eloquent erroneous defense of their plans, he's sounding off that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.




Kickstart: Fanciful Bloodsport, Musical Mystics, & Frigid Freaks

Fairytale Games

What it is: Fairytale Games is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a Hunger Games sort of scenario.

Why it's exciting: The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.



Anthymn

What it is: Anthymn is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.

Why it's exciting: This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)

Frozen State

What it is: Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's The Thing, throw in a global apocalypse and old school Fallout-style gameplay, and you have Frozen State, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.

Why it's exciting: I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.



Free RPG Day

Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year Pathfinder, Battletech, Star Wars, Cosmic Patrol, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.




So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?

Getting daddied up.

Again.

Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)

Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.

The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the Disney Alien Encounter, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.

And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.

So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.

Dream Game: Star Citizen

Today's post has been a long time in coming. Like 22 years in coming. Accordingly, it's super long.

A little while ago, I got to cross a big entry off my personal, nerdy bucket list. I got some actual stick time in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. Now it may be hard to appreciate why that was such a big life moment for me, so let me rewind things a bit. Say about, oh...two decades ago, more or less. When I was a lowly little five year-old with a whole nerdy life ahead of me.

My mother wanted to move down to Houston, Texas, where my grandfather was "living" at the time. I say "living" because after spending a summer and a half in Houston, I've determined that no one actually lives in Houston. At least not in the summer. Instead, they melt and dip in and out of a constant state of humid, clammy heat stroke while shuffling from one climate-controlled environment to another. Living in Houston in the summer is kind of like living in a state of reverse cryogenic freezing: you're only alive and active when in confined, artificially cooled spaces; the rest of the time you're in a state of quasi-death. And that's forgetting the insane proliferation of cockroaches in the area--huge, impossibly numerous, and insidious. Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout. In any case, my family decided to move down to Houston. Out of ignorance. And my mother and I moved down there in May 1990 to start looking for houses while my brother and father tried to wrap things up in Illinois.

So the two of us moved into a small Houston apartment, and with no friends and only a handful of toys to play with, I immediately fell back on my favored tools of entertainment: pencil and paper. I up-ended a moving box and slid it against a wall in the corner, and then I began plastering images on my large, double-wide pad of drawing paper. The first drawing was a space battle, with X-wings detonating Tie fighters while Star Destroyers looked on helplessly. I taped that to the wall just above the cardboard box. I then sketched out the cockpit controls for an X-wing fighter, which I knew by memory (I vividly recall as a five-year-old considering every visit to the video store a tacit pledge to rent one of the Star Wars trilogy). The controls I taped down to the top of the moving box. Then, sitting in front of the wall, I piloted my hastily improvised space fighter into harrowing dogfights and epic space battles, hands holding an invisible control stick and pounding the scrawled out buttons in quick succession to realign my deflector screens and adjust my targeting computer. I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast. I grew up on Star Wars and old scratchy VHS recordings of Battlestar Galactica, and space battles have always kept me up at night.

"Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout."

Another life support function in Houston was the arcade. In a region where the summer is full of weekly reports of heat stroke deaths, parents are rather less eager to pack their kids into plastic tubes in outdoor playgrounds, apparently. So everywhere we went in Houston we tripped over the most God-blessed bounty of video arcades I have ever known. Places like McDonald's substituted their playgrounds with attached arcades, and shopping malls had elaborate, sprawling video game arenas that compared to nothing else I've seen in my life except the ill-fated Disney Quest ten years later. Yes, Houston may have been the worst region to settle, in my opinion, but once there those Texans accidentally made themselves a nerd haven where you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a video game cabinet.

At the shopping mall my family went to, they had a massive arcade that featured a bank of eight Mechwarrior simulator cockpits that were the precursor to the Tesla Pods I've raved about in the past. They had surround sound, multiple monitors, and banks of sexy working buttons and control surfaces. I was in love. But my ten year-old brother, in a pique of superiority, informed me that it was way too expensive: a five minute match in the simulators would blow half of my arcade allowance. "And besides," he'd tell me in that big brother way, "you wouldn't know what to do with all those buttons and controls. It'd be a waste of money." But for my brother, apparently, it was right up the future pilot's alley, and the fifth-grade schmuck would proceed to hop into matches and whoop and holler and throw his Mad Cat mech into the thick of missile-firing fights and laser-burning bust-ups. He'd even had the audacity to occasionally pull some of my share of the arcade allowance to get in extra matches, and I was stupidly ensorcelled enough by the explosions and sci-fi gratification of watching from afar that I would usually let him.

"I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast."

We didn't move to Houston. My family collectively bailed out on the humidity capital of the country after less than six months. But the glories of the Houston arcade scene and the dream of the simulator cockpit (also known as a simpit) have stuck with me ever since.

Which I'm sure you've guessed by now.

That was also the year that a certain game called Wing Commander came out. A space sim in which the player got to slip into the cockpit of a fighter and partake in interstellar wars, it was the ultimate boon to my fevered brain, letting me fire blasters and pull extravagant maneuvers to shake enemies off my six. The following year, Wing Commander II came out, and we played that one to death, too. And when I say we, I mean I would harangue my brother into booting up the game on our cyclopean* DOS machine and then I'd bumper-car my way through space until he'd get fed up and take over. Which was often necessary, because I could get Angel killed in the easiest of fur-balls. Not to mention I had a knack for blasting through missions by the skin of my teeth and missing all chances for extra objectives and commendations. It was great. And it lasted for just one more year before we converted to a Mac family and my gaming life shifted to real-time strategy games like Warcraft and, eventually, Myth. Even when Wing Commander got ported to Mac, I didn't get as into it. Maybe it was no longer being threatened by my brother for every botched Immelmann turn, or maybe it was that the game lost its mystique when it wasn't hidden behind an inscrutable DOS command line, but I didn't keep up with the rest of the series.

Years passed and I always looked back on Wing Commander fondly. My brother and I got into Mechwarrior 2 and tossed around simpit ideas until he got fed up with my "strategy" of attacking his Atlas-class mechs with gnat-sized Elementals, which often resulted in five to ten minutes of me hovering around him, unable to cause any damage but impossible to hit with the mechanical titan. My brother joined the Air Force and relegated all our nerdy past-times to me while he went off and, y'know, flew actual planes. The Wing Commander movie came out, and I stubbornly still enjoy it no matter what the rest of the world says. Heck, I'm listening to its soundtrack right now. But there's been nothing like those years in the early 90s, when the Mechwarrior simpits and original Wing Commander games were freshly ingrained in my fantasies. Both genres declined--the first reduced itself to more and more shallow action games, and the latter faded away in the midst of game developer takeovers. Playing a worthy simpit game remained fixed on my bucket list, but it was such a dim hope I was barely conscious of it most of the time.

Then I got to play in the Tesla Pods last year, and reality didn't even remotely quench the nerd-fire that burned for simpits. It heightened its roar, and within days of that experience, I started in on ludicrous plans of building my own sci-fi simpit. I could start with a cockpit, and then maybe build off of that into having a simulated bridge for a capital ship--that'd be the ultimate family gaming experience, me barking out orders while managing damage control and ordering my son to launch a fighter and keep the bombers off us. Oh yes, that'd be sweet. I researched games that might fit these lofty ambitions, looking especially for ones that had good mod support so I could conceivably rework everything to fit my vision of space. There were a few that looked promising, but I passed on all of them for one reason or another. And then, most ridiculous of all, I began researching the idea of making my own game. Sure, it would be clunky and ugly as sin, but I could always make it look like a stylized icon system, right? It'd be just like the Command School from Ender's Game.

Not even my boundless enthusiasm could BS me for long, though. That was an insane idea that would never happen. I'd never make my own game, and no one was making the sort of game I wanted. Nothing was going to come along and justify the huge effort of building a simpit, and nothing would be worthy of it if I ever made one anyways. The space simulator genre was dead.

Then last fall brought with it a new dawn. A project popped up on Kickstarter called Star Citizen. It was the first game in ten years that Chris Roberts would be making.

Chris Roberts.

His name had tickled my ears the first time I saw the Star Citizen campaign page, but I didn't realize what I was in for until I watched the KS video and virtually soiled my actual chair:

"They said I was dead. They said console was the future. Now they say mobile and tablets are the future. I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am a PC game."

Waaah! Glory shot of the Bengal carrier.

"And I am a space sim."

Oh, those first 30 seconds of that video grabbed me by my childhood fantasies and has not let go of me since. I can't watch it without getting excited. Chris Roberts was the creator of the Wing Commander franchise, and he was coming back to the game industry to make something gloriously ambitious. I pledged to the campaign immediately and followed the updates doggedly, as every new addition to the project's goals brought it closer to everything I've wanted from sci-fi gaming:

Sprawling, fully-realized ship interiors. Star Citizen is going to allow the player to explore larger ships, walking down the corridors and into the bridge of carriers and other capital ships. What's more, since the game is going to feature seamless transitions (ie, no load screens) from in-cockpit action to walking around your mother ship, the interiors of the ships are actually going to be consistent with the physical shape of the ship. Unlike the Normandy from Mass Effect, which is depicted as physically smaller and the wrong shape to accommodate the interior spaces you explore in the course of the game.

Out-of-cockpit gameplay. In addition to being able to simply walk around and idly explore in the innards of your big ships, Star Citizen is going to include a shooter-like experience for boarding actions. This integration and mingling of the two genres is going to be inspired, as you know I kept wishing for some space-combat crossover in the Mass Effect series and never got it. Now Star Citizen promises to give capital ship action, fighter brawls, and man-to-man gunfights in tight-packed ship corridors. It's like Chris Roberts has a checklist of my favorite recurring dreams. If there are cute redheaded witches, bottomless tubs full of spiders, and machine zombie hordes, it'll be official--he's ripping off my REM cycle.

A vast forking campaign based on performance and decisions. Long before Bioware ever gave you a non-choice at the end of an epic game, the Wing Commander series had them licked with a campaign that featured meaningfully divergent endings. Endings were based on direct plot choices and mission performance, so just barely clearing your mission objectives as opposed to wiping the board completely might change what your resolution was. They're going to be bringing that legacy back for Star Citizen, and since they've announced 50 missions for the main campaign of Star Citizen (called Squadron 42), I wouldn't be surprised if some of those missions were mutually exclusive based on what path you take your pilot through the plot. Tasty.

Persistent universe. The most exciting and lauded aspect of the game is Star Citizen's ongoing online experience. A variation of an MMO, Star Citizen proposes to let players shape a dynamic economy and play the game the way they want to play it. If that involves mining, trading, and exploring more than direct combat, that's cool with them. And that's very cool with me. I'm always a fan of games that let you go off the rails, even if I find myself not wanting to do so.

Playable capital ships. This was a later stretch goal met in the incredibly successful pledge campaign, and it promises to allow players to potentially gain control of ships as large as their mile-long carrier ships in the final version of the game. This goes hand in hand with cooperative and social play, as even some of their smaller ships are said to be nerfed if you don't have meat in all the crew seats. The 4-man Constellation ship, for instance, will feature two manned turrets and a detachable short-range fighter (a la the Serenity's two shuttles) in addition to the ship's pilot. Beyond that, you'd be looking at dedicated guilds needed just to get the most out of destroyer, cruiser, or carrier-class ship.

Mod support. With how great the core game is shaping up to be, and how visceral and engaging, I feel like this feature is almost perfunctory. But then I think about trying to model a full-scale battlestar in Star Citizen and scramble out in a viper (mk II, of course) to scrap a toaster onslaught. Ooookay...maybe I do still want mod support. And since they're talking about using that as a way to test the feasibility of fan-created additions to the game, I can definitely see me spending a lot of time turning some of my rough designs into something fully realized for this game.

Support for multiple monitors and multi-function displays (MFDs), TrackIR, and advanced controllers. And there it is. Star Citizen is going to support the ultimate simpit gaming rig with this simple promise. You want a three monitor display wrapping in front of you? Okay. How about a dedicated screen for your sensors? Sure. Joysticks, throttles, keyboards, and gamepads? Whoa whoa whoa now--you're a little nuts, aren't ya? That my friends, is a game that isn't simply worthy of the simpit I've been dreaming of these past 22 years--it demands one. Never mind that I'm a more artistic, fine detail sort of builder with minimal wood-working experience. Never mind that I've never wired anything like this before. Never mind that I will building the first PC of my very own from scratch to form the heart of the ultimate gaming rig (that I can afford). It is going to happen. It must happen. So let it be written; so let it be done.



Cloud Imperium Games is collectively working on realizing my dream game and the dream of tens of thousands of gamers all over the world. It's safe to say I'm going to be blogging more about the different aspects of this game in the future. I've already posted at least one article's worth on the subject of space mining in Star Citizen on the website's forums. I'll also be chronicling my progress as I work on my simpit and related projects for this game, so don't worry: I didn't run out of words with this article.

More's the pity, right?



*Seriously, Google spellcheck? You don't know the word 'cyclopean'?!?

The Speaker for Grandpa

Yesterday was Memorial Day, and though I already posted about the holiday this week, I have a bit more to say that strikes a much more personal note. But before I get started, let me offer two warnings. This post is something of a conceptual spoiler for Ender's Game. It's not a particularly bad spoiler--nothing you wouldn't get from reading the back of the sequel Speaker for the Dead--but if you are very spoiler sensitive, you may want to skip today's post. The second warning: this post is rather more serious than most of my articles on this blog. If you're new here, this post is an important link in the chain of my blog, but it may not be representative of the tone and content I strive to achieve here. I suggest reading some of my posts from this past weekend instead to get a better feel for Ben's Nerdery.

Seriously now, the spoilers shall flow. And probably also some sissy tears. You've been warned.



I've talked a little bit in the past about the profound impact Ender's Game had on me as a young fan of science-fiction. The drama and the kid-centric cast, the strategy and meditative tone, the spectacle of the battle room and the culture of the school, all helped it to affect me greatly. But nothing moved me quite so much as the concept of the Speaker for the Dead. The concept is introduced after Ender completely annihilates the alien Buggers threatening humanity and is confronted by the psychological immensity of what he did while conversing with the last queen of the entire alien species. It's a philosophical breakthrough for Ender, for the Buggers (Formics, to be politically-correct), and for the masses of humanity who read the Speaker for the Dead memoir and establish a cultural role around it. It's a cathartic moment of truth and acceptance, where Ender anonymously pens the misunderstanding from the aliens' point of view and in turn dispels the hatred, fear, and confusion left in the aftermath of his own actions. His work isn't just accepted as a way to honor the essentially-extinct Buggers specifically, it's also promulgated throughout human culture as a typical role at funerals. The Speaker for the Dead is a sort of investigator invited into the lives of the bereaved, hunting for truth and clarity. The Speaker isn't concerned with honoring the dead with flattery, but with objectivity and scrutiny, and when they speak at a funeral they share a sort of homily that conveys who the deceased really was--including their flaws, their secrets, and their impact on those around them. I find it a profoundly moving concept, and one I've carried with me for almost 15 years now.

Some time ago I mentioned a rather unpleasant experience where my wife, toddler, and I took a flight out to California. That weekend was for my grandfather's funeral--the last of my grandparents, and the one I've always wanted to understand and know the most. I never really got to know him all that well, but his legacy permeates my mother's family and everything I am today. And I can't think of a better time to be his Speaker for the Dead than the day after Memorial Day. It's worth pointing out that I'm neither objective nor an investigator, and I do want to honor my grandfather's memory with love as well as truth. So while I'm a poor Speaker in that sense, this needs to be said and would never be said by anyone else.

"Seriously now, the spoilers shall flow. And probably also some sissy tears. You've been warned."

When I talk about Grandpa, let's get an outrageous assertion out of the way: he's a greater hero than Captain America. I don't just refer to his heroic service in World War Two, but also to his legacy as a father and later in life as a stubbornly social and outgoing person. For the faults he certainly had--the ones I recall and the ones I'll never know about--I truly wish I was more like him, and I'll always feel like every mistake I make is falling short of his example.

Grandpa grew up in a patriotic family of four high-spirited brothers and three sisters. Each of the brothers were named after a president of the United States. No kidding. Grandpa was the second youngest of them, but that didn't prevent him from joining his older brothers in fights that always sounded to me like sober bar brawls. Their father also supported Germany in the 1930s, and as Grandpa's oldest brother saw the way politics were going at the end of 1941, he took it upon himself to set his brothers straight: they should not talk about their father and his political views to their friends. They would disown him on an ideological level. Grandpa was maybe 14 at the time. I can't fathom what that was like, and I thankfully will never have to. My greatest divide with my father is over watching subtitled movies.

Not only did my grandfather distance himself from his own father's views, but in 1944--at the age of seventeen--he enlisted, underage, into the United State Marine Corps, trained at Camp Pendleton, and was shipped out to fight in Okinawa, Japan. He fought throughout the close of the Pacific campaign, and in the process he brought back his share of incredible stories, scars, and a spiritual side delivered through an artillery shell. A side he certainly never had as a brawling German boy in Texas. He'd been sitting in a foxhole in the Pacific, huddled in the dark of night as bullets sprayed the area and a heavy barrage of artillery was tearing shrapnel through the air. He'd say that the artillery would come down in these arcs of ground-shaking explosions across the landscape. Boom. Boom. Boom. Tracing lines of craters as they demolished men in their foxholes. And he could here a line of death coming towards him, the shells raining down closer and closer to his position. Boom. Boom. BOOM. Thud. Just as the shells had zeroed in on him, a dud landed just feet away from him, within his own foxhole. And that's when Grandpa decided to talk to one of the chaplains in his unit.

"The Speaker for the Dead is a sort of investigator invited into the lives of the bereaved, hunting for truth and clarity."

He became a marine chaplain's aide, later going to seminary to become a Baptist pastor and raise a family in Southern California after the war. He married and had five children living in California. And then he got divorced, stepped down from the church he'd been ministering to, and moved to Texas. I never knew much about this more than what I just shared. Something happened, and growing up I knew never to ask my mother about it--a sage decision based on how she'd cry whenever I tried to pin down details. And as my Grandpa married a woman my mother's age in Texas and had three more children, the assumption in my mind growing up had always been that he had done something. He left, he abandoned my mother's family when she was in college and her two younger siblings still at home.

My mind naturally inserted slander to connect the dots of what I knew had happened and what must have led to it. There was no malice in it, and I wasn't even that far off in my conclusions, but they were still just assumptions, and I had nothing to put in its place in my perceptions until I was twenty-six years old. And even then, my mother could only share it with my wife--I've never heard the details myself. My Grandpa had been having affairs, and between his own guilt and the rumors, he soon was asked to leave the church in the midst of his marriage breaking up. With my grandmother raising the children, I suppose it was all he could do to get away from the stigma to head back to Texas, where he'd grown up.

My grandfather aged and lived his life in Texas, quite separate from the rest of my mother's family, for some time. I wouldn't say he aged gracefully, but he aged exuberantly. He rode horses and played pranks and was always a social bee. He got divorced a second time, had a couple of heart attacks, and finally a stroke drove him from his home in Texas back to California to be attended by his eldest daughter. I'd visited him a few times in Texas and knew him then as a head-strong crazy driver, a witty back-talker, and spoiling push-over who couldn't say no his younger kids or his grandchildren. But it was only after the medical problems, the wandering through his empty house and helping pack up his belongings, that I started to get a picture of the man. He was proud, ashamed of getting old, and had trouble letting go of the insanely fit young fighter he once was. The war still haunted him, especially so later in life as his health and focus declined, and above all he never stopped loving everyone he met. We'd be at a restaurant and he'd strike up a conversation with a bus-boy or try to hook the waitress up with my older brother. He never had trouble seeing the person behind the role or the function society placed on them--he always saw and addressed the individual in front of him.

Not long after Grandpa's stroke the World War Two memorial in Washington, DC was completed. My aunt and cousin brought him out to DC, where my family met them and spent the weekend touring the capital. Grandpa was only able to walk a few steps at a time, and even then he needed someone to hold onto him and keep him balanced. If no one was attending him, he'd lean progressively further and further forward, his short bow-legged strides becoming a faster and faster shuffle as he'd inevitably fall over. My cousin was a high-schooler at the time and she'd never exactly been built for helping one hundred sixty-pound septuagenarians around, so I took it upon myself to be his wheelchair chauffeur (and walker when he got too stubborn to point). I was eminently proud of myself that weekend. Not for the service itself, but for being attached to a man that I'd respected so much--and in a place specifically geared to honor him. I was his color guard--a slack, unfit civilian in glasses to guard a hero from Okinawa from falling on the concrete.

"...a head-strong crazy driver, a witty back-talker, and spoiling push-over who couldn't say no his younger kids or his grandchildren."

When we got to the memorial itself--the field of gold stars projecting out from the marble arc--Grandpa just had to get out of his wheelchair. Wearing a light jacket and USMC WWII Veteran cap, his arms and legs quivered as he pushed off of me to come to the best state of attention he could manage. His eyes slowly surveyed the memorial, and by that point I was certain that each one inspired a vivid memory from the war--and probably also of a time where his body wasn't constantly betraying him with frailty. Then he saluted, and stood a little bit taller. I held my hands just below his armpits in case he started to lose his balance, but he held that salute for what felt like a good minute before slowly going back at ease and wobbling back into my arms. Drained, he sunk back into his wheelchair, probably as out of breath from the emotions as from the exertion itself. My whole family was worked up at that point, and my mother and her sister were gushing over Grandpa and hugging him when a woman a little bit younger than my parents came up to him.

"I'm sorry, but could I just say thank you for what you've done?" she asked. "For serving this country?"

Now, I have a defiant streak in me a mile long, and this was after I'd read The Things They Carried, so I felt an urge to go Tim O'Brien on this woman. "For what he's done? What do you know about what he's done? You want to thank him for wearing a cap and looking like a sad old man, a great photo op, but do you care about what he's thinking right now? Probably hating that the prime of his life is tattered by these traumatic memories, that memories of youth for him are memoirs of death? I'm sure him being here, weak and emotionally raw, just makes your day, lady. A real nice visit to the World War Two Memorial..." But Grandpa was a better man than me that day.

"I was his color guard--a slack, unfit civilian in glasses to guard a hero from Okinawa from falling on the concrete."

"What's your name?" he asked, weakly shaking the woman's hand as she started to well up with tears. He then talked to her, and asked if she had any family who had served. I don't remember her replies, but I remember the way Grandpa, in a moment where I could only imagine feeling bitterness and resentment, took the time to talk to a random stranger and focus on making her feel good. Of course, we were surrounded by women at this point--the stranger, my cousin, my mom, and my aunt--so making her feel good meant that they all started sobbing while I stood amazed at the long-suffering smile on my grandfather's face.

That was nine years ago.

Since then I'd made countless pledges to chronicle Grandpa's life--to sit down and interview him while his senility still left him a spry conversationalist. College stymied that for a little while, and then his health slipped. He lost the ability to reliably focus on phone conversations, and the last time he visited, five years ago for my wedding, he struggled to keep conversations going at the best of times. I prayed that he'd get better, and swore that when he did, when I could interview him, I would write down his story, in his words, and know the man.

He never got better. And then, years later when I brought my family to his memorial service and held my son while talking about my hero and a man he'd never meet, it struck me how unfair it all was. That I'd never hear these stories in his own words, never learn how a German scrapper from Texas ever became such a mild and playful pastor. Never how he endured the shame of his own weakness and divorce, or what he was thinking when he first enlisted. Instead, he's dead. Dead and gone to a better place. And I'm left with only a vague composite testimonial instead of a relationship with my grandfather. I want to be bitter, to indulge in it. But then I think of that day in DC. I think of those feet shuffling in worn loafers across the concrete, and the way his stride would get faster and faster and then finally his knees would buckle under the strain of his pace. And on that February day, as I listened to family talking about Grandpa, I understood the man: he wasn't falling. His body may have been feeble, but he never lost his eagerness, that sparkle in his eyes that was just as likely to come from a visit from his nurse as talking to a janitor at his hospital. He had limitless energy, and that shuffle wasn't a fall--it was him rushing. Always eager, always wanting to set his own pace. And even in the end, when I'm sure it seemed like he was falling to the limits of his body, I know my Grandpa--he was just in a hurry.



I know this has been a long post, and I appreciate anyone who's read it through this far, since there's been scant humor or conspicuous nerdiness. But in being the Speaker for my Grandpa, I want to share with you a little bit of what drives me as an individual, a father, a son, and yes, even as a nerd. You see, Captain America is a great cartoon figure--a stylized and gratifyingly entertaining symbol of the greatest generation. But Grandpa, he simply is the greatest generation. He joined when everything stood against him and fought just as bravely as any man did. Then he went home and lived a life and fought a thousand other battles. He won and lost some, and even his family misunderstood him, failed to appreciate him, and abandoned him at one point or another. He still failed, still loved, still tried, and still reached out to family, friends, and strangers with a warmth I will never fully understand. He was a fighter. He was a flawed man. He was a soldier. Grandpa.



I hope you had a great Memorial Day. And I promise more snarky humor and frothing fandom tomorrow.

Filmatleven.

A Day in the Nerdery: Power-Armor-Shattering Pelvic Thrusts

A Day in the Nerdery: Being a nerd is fun. There's a peculiar level of joy that can only be enjoyed by someone who knows how to properly visualize 'power-armor-shattering pelvic thrusts', 'brace-for-impact bathroom breaks', or 'thing-foot'. I'm here to share that joy, whether you like it or not.

This is a childish bit of whimsy from years ago. Pardon my nostalgia.

I used to be a big Games Workshop fan. I may be a jaded iconoclast of the company now, but when I first heard as a seventh grader about their store's grand opening near my home, I was immediately struck. My friend, Chris, had wandered into their outlet in the local mall, and his reports were intoxicatingly imaginative and strange sounding:

"They have this game, it's called like Sword 5,000 or something, where you have armies of models fight each other. There are these guys in big suits of armor--but not like knights' armor. It's like high-tech armor."

"Like Starship Troopers?"

"I dunno, I haven't read that yet. But it's like Aliens, except the armor doesn't have gaps."

"Like Exo-squad?"

"Maybe. But they're fighting these space pirate elves in purple, spiky armor, and they're in these buildings that have been destroyed somehow. You move your guys 6 inches, and then you roll dice to shoot at the enemy."

"Sounds awesome."

"It is awesome, but you don't even know. When you get close, your guys can charge into melee..."

And so it went, until I harangued my mom into driving me there the next day. I played a demo game of Warhammer 40,000 and didn't leave the store until I'd plunked $80 down on a boxed starter set, paint kit, and hobby supplies. Within hours, I was thick into laying a foundation in a hobby of poring over rules and charting the perfect force composition, nicking my fingers with craft knives, and eyes watering at the near-sighted strain of late night painting sessions. Two years later, I had three armies of miniatures, each numbering at least 50 models about the size of a fat thumb. And kind of a fourth army, too.

See, within a couple of weeks of that first purchase in the hobby, I became an insufferable proselyte for my nerdy addiction. I went to school with my rulebook, and spent passing periods, lunch time, and study hall either outlining my future unit purchases or showing off the fantastic illustrations to my friends. In a middle school of maybe sixty kids, it's accurate to say that I was known as "Ben the Wargame Kid" by the second Friday.

Surprisingly and despite my best exertions, Chris never got bit by the bug he gave me. He never picked up any models or books or got any deeper into 40K than a couple of shallow games we played with that starter boxed set. But oh, did we play those starting forces to death. No 30 models in all the hobby were as thoroughly used and abused as those 10 Space Marines and 20 Dark Eldar (space elves) with which my hobby began. And I did manage to recruit one of my friends. My buddy Tyler latched onto the game in much the same way I did, marveling and pondering over the huge swathes of arcane fiction in the rulebook, enjoying the endless plotting involved in devising a potential army's makeup, and the painting.

No, not the painting. Tyler hated the painting. Assembling his models was good fun for him--a much more utilitarian and rewarding hobby than the four or five unfinished military models he had at the time. But painting was a gross requirement to expect from Tyler. His first army was the Space Marines' Blood Angels chapter, and his preferred method of detailing them was upending the Emperor's Finest one at a time and dunking them into a paint pot of blood red paint. It looked awful--as anyone familiar with paint, models, or even nail polish could guess. I begged him to let me paint his army, and being the good, lazy friend that he was, Tyler let me. Making his force my kinda-fourth-army.

"...it's accurate to say that I was known as 'Ben the Wargame Kid' by the second Friday."

Those first years were great for us and our hobby. We made monthly purchasing trips to the local Games Workshop, and once our armies were ready we went to the mall every Thursday after school to play 40K against other kids. Of course, this is when GW's fanbase and target demographic was a lot older than it is today, so by other kids I mean 3 high schoolers and a dozen overweight bearded guys. I loved it.

But we ended up playing a lot more at Tyler's house, confiscating his family's large dining room table for games once or twice a week. At that point, Tyler had a plus-sized Blood Angels force with a passable paintjob commissioned from me, and I was fielding an army of fancy-pants Eldar against him. Tyler's army revolved around two tanks, some heavy support, and a cheesy overpowered guy in gold plate named Lord Dante. Now, Dante isn't a specific model--he's the El Guapo* of Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition. Dante is that guy or effect or level in every hobby that makes nerds gush with ire and overused jargon. When you walk in on a bunch of kids arguing over Pokemon, getting way too worked up over the ultimate evolution of the best undefeatable Pokemon, they're arguing over Lord Dante. When D&D nerds talk about that old school dungeon from the 80s that was insanely cheap and impossible to beat--they played Dante. Dante is the unfair cheap-ass bogeyman of nerd hobbies. My Dante just so happened to be the actual Lord Dante.

A single miniature only slightly bigger than any other infantry model, Lord Dante would lead Tyler's forces into the thick of my superbly painted sissies and have his way with them wielding a master-crafted power axe (sci-fi turkey cutter) and a inferno pistol that makes every raygun in everything else look like a hair dryer by comparison. And he had a jetpack. Now, Tyler didn't always win. In fact, I'd say I won more often than not, but Lord Dante always defied me. Either I'd have to redirect my entire army of proudly garish Eldar to focus their puny might against him to bring him down, or even in the face of my victory he'd survive--an immortal atom left in the wake of his force's slaughter. My answer to Lord Dante was Baharroth--a brightly painted Eldar with a peacock helmet, Swooping Hawk wings, and basically half as good at everything as Lord Dante. Baharroth got it rough from Lord Dante almost every time Tyler and I played. And I got trash-talked a lot because of it.

"Dante is that guy or effect or level in every hobby that makes nerds gush with ire and overused jargon."

Oh, the trash-talk. As a pair of nerdy junior high boys with no aspirations for girlfriends at the time, we took trash-talk to a new degree of obscurity. Sometimes the trash-talk was just stage-whispered proto-swears and crude gestures, but for most of it we really elevated our banter to match our nerdy pursuits. At school we'd randomly throw insults at each other about how the other one would doubtless fall beneath our mighty tank treads and cry for mercy (Tyler's trash talk), or how the other guy would get turtled over onto his armored back and drowned in the blood of his own fellows (my trash talk). Or it'd be as simple as saying that the other kid couldn't know the right answer in history class because he couldn't roll a 3+ on four dice to save his command squad. In the middle of class.

Yes yes, it is good we weren't angling for girlfriends at that phase of our lives.

But one particular night, when Tyler and I were bargaining over territorial rights over his dining room table, there was a moment of absolute epiphany. Lord Dante and a couple of over-powered minions had cleft their way deep into my Eldar formation's glass flank. Desperate to humiliate the shining compensator, I dropped Baharroth and ten of his Swooping Hawk meat-shields bodyguards subordinates directly on top of the assaulting marines. It was a bloody mistake. Dante and his wingmen turned and let into my fiery-painted turkeys like they'd just gotten back from a day-long hike. A turn later, and the fracas had dissolved down to Dante and Baharroth. It was a familiar scenario that always ended with the Phoenix Lord of the Swooping Hawks spread-eagled and whimpering at Dante's feet. Only this time, Baharroth's rolls were teasing me:

6. Roll again to keep striking until I miss. 6. 6. 6!

I did a pissy-giddy dance, pat-pat-pat in place, clapping like an idiot as I racked up a respectable final blow against Dante before he'd inevitably counter-attack and blood eagle me. All Tyler had to do was make a couple of armor saves.

1. I giggle. 1. A gasp and with my hands primed and held in upraised fists. 1!

"Bam! Lord Dante goes down to the queen of the sugar-plum Eldar!" I shout and throw down an epically-scaled series of table-shaking pelvic thrusts. "Do you feel that?! Those are the power-armor-shattering pelvic thrusts of Baharroth ruling Lord Dante's dead body!" I crowed as I pronounced the ultimate trash-talk of our gaming lives.

Funny enough, Tyler's dining room table was like a six-foot-long four-inch-thick oak monstrosity, and I bruised the heck out of my hip mimicking Baharroth's victory corpse-hump. So the power-armor-shattering pelvic thrusts also happened to be pelvis-shattering pelvic thrusts.

Now, the Eldar and Blood Angels are sold--eBayed off to pay bills and free up shelf space long left untended. But those memories will never fade. The nostalgia is eternal, and only highlighted by the contrasting ire I now feel for Games Workshop and what has become of Warhammer 40,000. And always, always there is the eternal joke of the power-armor-shattering pelvic thrusts.

I hope you've enjoyed this unannounced detour down my memory lane. If not, mental bleach is available for a small secondhand premium. You can have it as soon as I wash away the rest of Disney's Star Wars dance-off from my mind...

Ha. Now you need a double dose of mental bleach. That'll be two premium fees.

"Bam! Lord Dante goes down to the queen of the sugar-plum Eldar!"

*Three Amigos reference, folks.

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.