...You turn into a soulless automaton carrying out boring, repetitive tasks in the hope that in another two weeks you'll be handed a piece of paper certifying the dollar amount equivalent to your lost time. For my younger readers: things to look forward to. And that is enough angst for me.

So I've decided to pick up the blog again. I've actually been writing a lot over the past year, and lacking anything truly interesting to talk about, haven't blogged much. I've actually gotten into a pretty steady stream in terms of writing, so I can crank out a few pages of something a day and not have to sacrifice a massive amount of time for it.

And because some people have asked, I'll reiterate.

NO. I am not getting a facebook. Now shut up. Mom.

Anyway, on to Alan Wake.

I nabbed this right when it came out and ran through in a few days, and it really highlights one of my strongest opinions of video games as a medium: wasted potential. Essentially, Wake is a famous suspense/thriller author who ends his popular and long-standing book series and now can't produce. He goes away with his wife to a far-out resort town to rest, and she brings along his typewriter (aside, I'm getting a little sick of writers in movies and games always using typewriters; the audience already knows the character is an author because you friggin told us so let the aesthetic go). They get in a fight and then the wife vanishes.

Since I am obligated by the state of not being an asshole, I'll say it now: massive spoilers ahead.

In summary, there's an evil force at the bottom of a magical lake that needs a creative type to write it free, and it kidnaps Wake's wife and uses her as a reward for Wake writing a novel in which the evil force destroys the world. Which defeats the point if you think about it, but whatever, he's human. Wake, being smarter than the average writer, writes his own escape into the story so he can get away from the evil force and stop it.

Now, looking at the entire plot from start to shitty, unsatisfying ending, it can be taken as commentary on the act of writing, or more appropriately the creative process, itself, which I find oddly compelling. But since the storyline is completely linear, Wake seems to write a book in which he, as the hero, makes some terrible decisions, and we, as the player, have no opportunity to stop him.

Something tells me that game developers don't quite get the fact that what makes games different than any other creative medium is interactivity. Without giving the player a chance to truly interact with the game itself, it just ends up being a ten hour movie where the viewer needs to hold a piece of plastic the whole time, and the main character will occasionally die and then time will suddenly reverse itself to when he was alive again. Alan Wake is one of the least interactive games I've played in a while, and it has so many openings to allow players to mess around.

One of the ongoing missions throughout is that you'll find pages of Wake's manuscript which describe the action of the game. Sometimes, Wake will find pages that describe the next set of encounters that he has yet to face, though he takes no steps to avoid them and creates no strategy for dealing with them. I know that if I were given a creepy, glowing leaf of paper telling me flying tractor tires were going to try and bash my skull in if I went outside, I'd at least look over my shoulder when I went to buy cat litter. But Wake does none of that. The only use the pages serve to the player is a kind of early warning system for the next encounter, half of which ruins the surprise and half of which are in pre-rendered movies anyway.

Because the game is "Get from Point A to Point B while using Gun C to shoot Monster D," there's no real point in letting the player know about future danger if there is no way to avoid it. The pages could have at least revealed shortcuts through the levels or paths to hidden caches of supplies, but they don't even do that. There was a great opportunity here for players to really be drawn in to the game that is just glossed over, mainly because programming interactivity is hard. And since Wake was in development for more years that the US has been in Afghanistan, they certainly had the time to do it.

So that's that. I'll be putting my writing into PDFs (God I love Open Office) and posting them here. Whenever I get off my ass and decide to go through a couple mouse clicks. Exhausting work.

Being the movie buff that I am, I did not watch the Academy Awards...

Okay, I watched about five minutes of them. But around the time I saw Jack Black and Jennifer Aniston annoucning the winner of best animation, I decided it was time to go. Jack Black is not the kind of person I ever thought would be doing something like that - apparently enough time has passed for everyone to forget about "I want to fuck you slowly." Is Tenacious D even around anymore?

It reminds me of the constant double-standard of television. Take Fox for example. The cable channel runs all of those terrible news shows that preach about how all the sex, violence, people enjoying themselves, opinions and non-Christians on the Devil Box corrupt your children, and then the network Fox channel runs all of the sex, violence, et al. Or how MTV made a show called Banned from MTV, where MTV played music vides banned by MTV on MTV.

I don't like watching award shows for the same reason I don't really read reviews - they both have that vague sense that someone is telling me what I like. And the kind of clout reivews carry is sort of scary. I know people who won't go see a movie or buy a video game unless it gets above a certain score on a given website. I can sort of see that if the website matches your taste and opinions pretty well, but it does limit you from experiencing something just as fun/entertaining that got a very undeserved 3/10. Sales figures do this too, particularly in the game market. Some of my favorite games, such as Beyond Good & Evil, Fatal Frame, or Symphony of the Night did terribly, and they are now considered to be some of the finest, most beloved games in existence. Sure, everything is clearer in hindsight, but that doesn't mean we should all wait until the masses tell us what we like to go out and get it.

The other part of reviews and awards in general is that they're often slighted by the reviewer him or herself, and whoever is paying said reviewer. And with the internet, it is almost impossible to tell if people on Game Spot or Rotten Tomatoes who write their own reviews just really love the game or movie, or if someone is telling them they love it. Does anyone remember the "All I want for Christmas is a PSP" thing? When sony unvelied its new piece of crap do-everything-including-the-second-coming gadget, a blog popped up about this guy's quest to save enough money for his own overpriced slice of PSP pie. The blog got pretty popular pretty quick, which is strange in and of itself, and it was later revealed that the whole thing was an ad campaign at the behest of Sony.

On the rare occasion that I feel I should review something, I try to keep it short and sweet, and to always point out that there are some things which I simply like. It's subjective as hell, but its honest, and with the rush of reviewers trying to justify why you should like what they like - and sometimes being paid for it - I feel it is a merit.

Other news: if anyone is wondering what happened to my web projects, I am taking a break from them. Some personal stuff has come up - stuff that I've put on hold for way too long because of college or whatever - and it needs to be dealt with.

And to end on a sad note, my cat of 14 years Fuzzball passed away last week, after having a stroke. He was the friendliest, laziest and fuzziest cat ever and he will be sorely missed.