Blue Ink Alchemy

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Movie Review: Frozen

It can be difficult to keep up when life throws things into upheaval. Most of the time it’s a matter of distractions or relaxation opportunities slipping away as we get pulled into one direction or another by so-called ‘adult responsibilities’. Sometimes the circumstances are a bit more tragic. And sometimes you just get born with a power over the elements that you can’t control and is tied closely to your emotions so things like insecurity and panic cause localized cataclysms.

You know, typical teenager problems.

Frozen comes to us from Disney, and instead of just one princess, they give us two this time around. Elsa and Anna are the daughters of the king and queen of the cold land of Arendelle. Elsa, the older daughter, was born with the aforementioned powers, in this case giving her dominion over snow and ice. At first, this is fine, and fun for Anna as this means the sisters can build snowmen and toboggan indoors. However, an accident leaves Anna without memory of her sister’s ability and Elsa without her freedom, locked away in the castle away from Anna. A tragedy leaves the sisters without their parents, which leads to Elsa needing to be crowned queen at a time when she is both emotionally vulnerable and reuniting with her sister in the midst of all sorts of ancillary drama. As you expect, this all goes swimmingly and nobody runs into any problems whatsoever.

I kid. The whole thing collapses like an awning buried in snow.

Disney continues to set the standard for visual impressiveness in animated features. Moving from hand-drawn animation to CGI has been greatly aided by the addition of Pixar to their stable, and the influence shows. The style skews more towards realistic humans in their proportions and structure, emulating the drawing styles of classics like Beauty and the Beast, but the computing power of the Pixar folks allows for some truly impressive snow and ice effects. It’s easy to believe that Elsa’s powers are truly magical when we see how she creates what she creates.

The characters feel very human despite their computerized construction.

I’m being deliberately vague and skimping on details, but that’s because Frozen surprised me, and if like me you’ve been hemmed in by winter already and haven’t gotten out to see the film yet, you should be surprised, too. It wasn’t a surprise in the style of a bait and switch, either. What pleasantly shocked me about Frozen was its whip-smart writing and its ability to present two very different female leads as both strong and empathetic. We understand Elsa’s struggle to both accept herself and present herself to the world, and we admire Anna’s upbeat attitude and the fact that she needs no permission to do what she feels is right. She’s more than willing to take things on all by herself, and her determination is inspiring.

Disney films in this vein are famous for their songs, and Frozen has got some good ones. There’s a reason ‘Let It Go’ has been so prominent for so long. However, the film feels front-loaded with its singing numbers. They come and go somewhat quickly, almost as if the film is in a hurry to get them out of the way so we can focus more on character and plot development. With characters and writing this good, it’s somewhat understandable, and it doesn’t really hurt the movie in any way. It just struck me as odd that the balance across the running time seemed off.

There are great lighting and weather effects, too.

Frozen feels confident. Much like its leads, the film is going to say what it needs to say regardless of how it’s received, and it’s admirable for that. The film itself is quite good, and young girls especially should be seeing it. While its overall quality doesn’t quite match the wit, pace, heart, and pure fun of The LEGO Movie, and its Pixar-esque qualities also invite comparisons to the superior Wall-E and Up, Frozen is by no means a film to be missed. The characters are fantastic, the songs are memorable, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and its message is one that deserves to be shouted from the balcony of any ice castle anywhere. If you have a family with young ladies, or just want to see what female empowerment looks like within the ‘princess’ genre, Frozen is right up your alley.

Flash Fiction: Extraction Team Seven

March 25, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I was challenged to tell a story in Ten Little Chapters.

Lieutenant Richards looked up from the orders with a frown.

“I don’t like this, sir.”

“What’s to like?” The colonel didn’t look at his subordinate as he circled the map on the table in the center of the room. “They’ve got intelligence, they’re pinned down, and they need extraction.”

“This is deep in enemy territory. In a civilian area, sir. And we may need to work around hardened positions equipped with anti-air.”

“That’s why I bought you in, Richards. You and your team are legendary for this sort of thing.”

Richards shook his head. “Don’t use that word, sir. It’ll go to their heads.”

“You told him this is bullshit, right?”

Richards looked at Sergeant McNally. The enlisted woman had her arms crossed, and her freckles were scrunched in a frown.

“Not in so many words, but yes.”

“Should’ve used those words,” Corporal Collins offered. “Easier than beating ’round the bush.”

“So what’s the plan, then?” Corporal Nicheyev was never one for waiting. “Surely you have one, sir.”

“Of course he does,” McNally said, “and don’t call him ‘Shirley’.”

“Seriously. The four of us, this bunch of fortifications, and no air support?” Collins frowned. “This had better be good, boss.”

Collins listened closely to what he was being told. After a moment, he turned to the others with a shrug.

“He’s asking for a hell of a lot of money to show us the way.”

“He’s probably afraid he’ll catch a bullet.” Nicheyev shrugged, adjusting the rifle on his shoulder. “I would be.”

Richards rubbed his forehead, pushing the turban back a bit. It kept falling towards his eyes. “Collins, pay the man.”

“Sir…”

“Don’t argue.”

“You can win it back from me next time we throw down some Hold ‘Em,” McNally said with a nudge.

“You all suck.”

Collins paid the man.

“I want to go record that this plan sucks ass.”

“What was that, Collins?”

“You heard me, sir!”

“Half the town will hear you if you keep that up,” Nicheyev reminded his compatriot.

“Fuck you. We’re at least a klick outside of the town, I’m waist-deep in sewage, and I’ll need to shower for a damn year after we get these geeks out of Hotel de-”

McNally hissed, holding up her fist. The four of them froze, lowering their weapons from where they’d carried them over their heads.

The truck above them shook gravel loose into the sewer.

The nice thing about civilized areas is that they needed to put down walkways for sewer workers. The bad news was, the rusty grilles were noisy at anything faster than a slow walk.

“Nicheyev, get some eyes up there.”

The corporal slipped past Richards, the snake-like camera in his hand. He gently worked the tube up the pipe and took a look.

“Anything?”

“Not yet. Seems to be a bathroom.”

McNally glanced over her shoulder. “Hostage-takers gotta shit, too.”

“I know, but… hang on.”

There was a pause. Slowly, Nicheyev pulled down the camera. He blushed at the others.

“Wrong house. Definitely.”

Richards really wanted to ask Collins if this was any better. Instead, he crept forward another inch, gently probing with the barrel of his weapon.

The lights from their shoulders were hooded, and they didn’t want to risk more. That, however, made tripwires harder to find.

Like the one Richards found with a soft, deadly click.

He froze, and the three others behind him did the same.

“Claymore,” he hissed after a moment. “Nicheyev, you’re on.”

The corporal slipped past him, pulling tools from the pockets on his vest.

“Don’t move, sir.”

Richards started to sweat.

The manhole cover slid back, and one by one they climbed out into the street. It was dusk, and by Richards’ watch they were just about on schedule. They took positions outside the house’s back door, and waited.

The voice rang out around them, calling the faithful to prayer. Richards nodded at McNally. The sergeant thumbed the safety on her .45 and raised the suppressed pistol as she entered the door Collins opened for her.

Under the cries from the mosques, Richards heard the metal clangs of silenced gunfire. When it was over, they swept inside.

“How many, Collins?”

The corporal on the other side of the door poked his head out to look, only to jump back as cackling automatic fire peppered the wall and doorjamb with rounds.

“Two at least, sir!”

Richards touched the radio control at his neck. “Nicheyev, did you hear that?”

“Copy,” was all Nicheyev said. Richards said a silent prayer of thanks for this being a two-story house, and leaned out to deal some suppressing fire across the street.

When the return fire started again, it stopped abruptly after two loud shots from above.

“Got ’em, sir.”

Richards turned to McNally, who held the CIA man up on her shoulders.

“Shall we?”

McNally gestured towards the door with a grunt.

“After you, LT, by all means.”

His ears were still ringing from the rocket blast. Richards tried to keep the pace up, but he could go no faster than his sergeant. The operative was still delirious from drugs and torture, unable to walk on his own.

“It isn’t right,” Collins lamented. “We shouldn’t have left him.”

“If he survived, he can take care of himself,” Richards replied. “If he’s dead, we can’t help him.”

Collins was going to protest more, but then he stopped and turned back, carbine raised.

“We’re not alone,” he hissed.

Richards kept the ice pack on his head as the Colonel read the report.

“I’m telling you, Richards… legendary.”

“We got lucky, sir.”

“Your man Nicheyev survived a rocket attack, son, that wasn’t luck.”

“He also nearly lost a leg, sir.”

“Did Collins really carry him the kilometer back to the extraction point?”

“He and McNally took turns with carrying duty, sir.”

“Unbelievable. I’ll see to it you all get full honors for this.”

“Thank you, sir. Even if we can never talk about it.”

The colonel nodded. Richards reached for the bottle.

From the Vault: Gratuitous Failure, 80s Style

March 24, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

You know it’s a rough day when a post doesn’t go up until the evening. Oof. Anyway, here’s a bit I wrote about failure. Probably appropriate! My actual review of Hotline Miami can be found here.

I’ve been writing a lot about failure lately. This is partially because I believe that we do learn more from our failures from our successes, and also because I know there are folks out there who like to know they’re not alone in the struggles they’re encountering. I am, admittedly, one of them. I continue to maintain that the important part is not the failures, but rather our reaction to them; does failure prevent us from moving forward, or inspire us to redouble our efforts? I often find a microcosm of this frustration and determination in video games, especially uncompromising ones like Hotline Miami.

For those of you unaware of the game, here’s a quick overview. It’s the 80s, an era infused with bright neon colors and oversaturated sound, and you are cast as a nameless individual taking job offers from your answering machine. They sound innocuous enough: babysitting, taking out the trash, and so on. But it’s all code for killing. You’re a contract killer and you walk into house after house, punching and bludgeoning and shooting your way to victory. You do so while wearing a rubber animal mask, just one of many indications that whoever you are, you aren’t right in the head.

What sets Hotline Miami apart from other games is the overall feel and timbre of the gameplay. You enter the homes of your targets from a top-down perspective, something not often seen in modern games, and everything is pixelated and vibrant in color, rather than rendered in 3D and drenched in modern, realistic palettes. This is probably a good thing given the level of brutality on display. People, human beings, are punched hard, have their bones broken, get their skulls smashed repeatedly against hard floors, and are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and sliced to death. They even get savaged by dogs. And more often than not, this will be happening to you, since you’re not going to get it right the first time. You’re going to fail.

Much like Super Meat Boy, the appeal of this game comes from the challenges it presents the player. Without hints, without cheats, without even a clear indication of how the player should proceed, the game sets up the pieces and lets the player have at it. I think this is part of the reason that the graphics look the way they do: the violence is not the point. Oh, it’s visceral to be certain, but reduced to this fidelity it verges more on goofy than disturbing. The true meat of the game is in its challenges, not in blood and bone and bullets. It doesn’t teach players to shoot people with different skin; it teaches them to keep trying even after you fail over and over and over again.

The message of Hotline Miami is not one regarding violence or madness or the 80s being even more fucked up than we remember. Those are just the trappings, the rails on which the story hums along. Within that story, through its mechanics, the game’s message becomes more clear: You’re going to fail. Keep trying anyway. Bludgeon the challenge the way you bludgeon that mook with a shotgun. Sooner or later, you’ll get it right, and it will feel awesome when you do.

I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’m okay with turning a few pixelated faces to paste to get that awesome feeling. And I know I’ll get it in other areas, too.

500 Words on Space Dandy

March 21, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Space Dandy is a dandy guy. In space.

One of the first anime directors I was introduced to many years ago was Shinichirō Watanabe. Folks who know the genre will likely recognize his name as the man behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. He’s worked with legendary anime studio BONES before – this is the studio that gave use Fullmetal Alchemist and Wolf’s Rain – and their latest collaboration is truly something to behold. The series is called Space Dandy, and its lead character of the same name is, in fact, a dandy guy. In space.

Space Dandy hunts aliens. Specifically, he looks for alien species that have not yet been documented, as registering new alien species earns you a substantial reward. Dandy’s dream is to use that cash to buy a chain of themed “breasteraunts” known as BooBies so he can hang out there for free. He flies a ship called the Aloha Oe, and is aided by his souped-up Roomba-style robot, QT, and a Betelgeusean (read: space cat) beatnik named Me#$%* – everybody calls him ‘Meow’.

Oh, and there’s something about an intergalactic conflict and Dandy’s being chased by some malevolent monkey-person wearing a hat pilfered from Bootsy Collins who takes orders from a twenty-foot tall dude with a flaming skull.

In case you haven’t noticed, Space Dandy is not a series to be taken terribly seriously. Where Cowboy Bebop was, by Watanabe’s own math, 80% serious and 20% comedy, Space Dandy is the opposite. There are hints of a narrative through-line here and there, but it really never imposes too much. Or at least, it hasn’t yet. The show is still being shown both in Japan and here in the United States.

That’s part of what’s so fascinating about it. On top of the absolutely breathtaking and smooth animation, and plenty of legitimately funny moments, there’s something to be said about the fact that new episodes are premiering on the same day on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. The nature of the collaboration has lead to very similar quality in terms of dialog when it comes to the subtitled version one sees on services like Hulu and Crunchyroll, and the dubbed version on Adult Swim. For someone who grew up with some truly wince-inducing dub work in early entries back when it was called ‘Japanimation’ on what used to be referred to as ‘The Sci-Fi Channel’, this is really impressive stuff.

There’s a lot to like in Space Dandy. Every alien we see is the brain-child of a different animator, the Narrator frequently forgets key information he was supposed to dispense while also confirming that in space there is no fourth wall, and the whole thing feels steeped in the sort of ray-gun aesthetic you’d get if Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon hung out in Margaritaville. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and I’m very curious to see how the series continues to develop.

It’s music is catchy, too, but this is Watanabe we’re talking about, so that’s a given….

Tabletalk: Your Table’s Real Estate

March 20, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Courtesy Theology of Games

Space at your common table, be it in your dining room, den, or boudoir, is precious. It needs to be used wisely when it comes to entertaining. You need room for everyone to sit and be comfortable. Room for refreshments is always welcome. Games that occupy the table should make good use of whatever remaining real estate their is, holding the attention of your guests and keeping them involved and interacting. This is one of many reasons why Monopoly sucks – most of its board is full of negative space.

It also never changes. Board games that I’m finding myself thoroughly enjoying have gameplay that varies from session to session. When a galaxy in Twilight Imperium is created by the players around the table, it is going to be completely different from any scenario setup or previous galaxy, adding another element to the strange brew that makes it fun to devote eight hours to a single game. Quantum is similar in that the ‘board’ is mutable and can be altered or changed drastically to change up the experience. Games like Mage Knight, Archipelago, and Escape: The Curse of the Temple take it one step further by making their boards what would be called ‘procedurally generated’: the board is revealed and assembled as you play, guaranteeing a fresh experience every time.

Other games like to decentralize the action. Galaxy Trucker may have a central board to track everyone’s position in the convoy, but all of the real action happens on the players’ individual boards, as meteors and laser blasts render your cobbled-together space truck back into the shoddy spare parts you used to build it in the first place. Suburbia gives each player their own space to build their SimCity-esque metropolis, with its bank and goals in a central location. Seasons may have a calendar in the center of the table and a single, shared scoreboard, but players will be interacting with their own decks, tokens, dice, and boards to manage the careers of their chosen adorable aspiring forest-wizards.

While board games continue to provide new and interesting ways to make the most of your table’s real estate, card games remain some of the most economical entertainment to grace that same area. While deck-builders like Dominion and Eminent Domain centralize the pool of cards players have to choose from in constructing their decks, Boss Monster takes the route of games above that sees players focused on individual areas just as much as the center of the table. Chez Geek and Munchkin encourage players to keep track of both their own area and those of other players as competition for victory becomes more and more rapid and cut-throat. Finally, hidden role games like Bang!, One-Night Ultimate Werewolf, The Resistance: Avalon, and Coup bring the eyes of the players up from the table and into those of the other players, the game play arguably more about bluffing, gambits, and deductive reasoning than any information provided at the center of the table.

Just to reiterate a point made earlier in this post, Monopoly sucks. Its gameplay never changes and its board consumes too much real estate on the table. Many games make better use of the space, even with similarly sized central boards; Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, SmallWorld, Lords of Waterdeep, and Battlestar Galactica are all examples of recent games that require a good chunk of your table’s space but make the most of it by varying gameplay elements, getting players involved and interacting, offering challenges or emergent narrative, and so on. It’s these things that make the game I’ve mentioned well worth the space on your table (and your shelves), and will more than likely bring people back for more, time and again.

Page 67 of 331

Movie Review: Frozen

Flash Fiction: Extraction Team Seven

From the Vault: Gratuitous Failure, 80s Style

500 Words on Space Dandy

Tabletalk: Your Table’s Real Estate

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