September 16, 2005
Art and Gaming
It's Friday and I'ma write about video games. Anyone who has a problem with that is invited to bite me hard.
Anybody who pays attention to gaming media outlets has seen the massive hype campaign over Shadow of the Colossus. The game, which comes out Tuesday, is from the same team that made Ico which was a big-time sleeper hit, and has been wideley praised by gamers with a taste for the artistic. SotC looks very much like it will continue in the Ico mold.
Basically, the story involves some guy who has to go around and kill some number of really big beasties in order to save some girl. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Where it gets interesting is in the presentation. The game is absolutely gorgeous. The expansive, beautifully rendered environments are totally engrossing, and the utter majesty of each colossus imparts a measure of tragedy into every victory.
There are innovative elements to the gameplay, as well. Given how big your quarry is, most of the game is spent figuring out how to fell each behemoth. Also, to tide gamers over until the new Zelda comes out, there looks to be rather a lot of horseback combat.
All of that said, it doesn't take much time hands-on time with the game before you realize that the gameplay is very much in service to a greater artistic vision. In part, that's a roundabout way of saying that a lot of gamers are going to be very bored by this game. Maybe not even so much bored as just generally put off by
This is significant, since it points to the development of an almost avant-garde movement in games. It started when console technology first allowed developers to incorporate greater cinematic elements into their games (Metal Gear Solid being the clear paradigm here). But now as they're squeezing the last bits of muscle out of current generation platforms and gearing up for the next-gens, the movement is towards putting gaming elements into the cinemas. What's important to notice, however, is that instead of pushing games back to a fully action-oriented model, the trend has been to stake out a third way where cinema and and gameplay are almost completely integrated. SotC is very much at the leading edge of this trend. As are Capcom's wildly divisive Killer 7, and (I hope) Indigo Prophecy.
Naturally there will always be shoot-em-ups, and beat-em-ups, and racing games, but with the way things are going now in the twilight of the PS2/Xbox and the impending next-gen, there's a lot to be excited about as gaming stakes a legitimate claim to being a form of artistic expression.
Other Gaming Stuff
Speaking of next-gens, I can't think of too many things in this world that I hate as much as the recently unveiled controller for Nintendo's Revolution. Wow. The more I read, the more I become filled with hate.
It's worth pointing out how awesome a release day next Tuesday will be, with SotC, Indigo Prophecy, and We ♥ Katamari all set to drop. Too bad I can't play any of them until after I take the damn LSAT on October 1.
Lastly, GameTrailers has the TGS trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4!! You'd better go look at at it now before Sony makes them take it down.
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July 11, 2005
Living or dead, shooting at folks is a fun thing to do
Faithful readers of this weblog know that I like to let my geek flag fly from time to time. Still, I don't often show my uber-geeky gamer underbelly unless it's for something really special. Well listen up, people: Resident Evil 4 is really special.
For the life of me, I can't figure out how Capcom made a game this beautiful with the Gamecube hardware. Just try not to be a little breathless when you realize that every single minor enemy you encounter in this game is rendered with as many polygons as the main character in Metal Gear Solid 3. The game really does look as good as anything we've yet seen for the next-generation consoles, but on a platform with a literal fraction of the computing muscle.
For Christ's sake, the cutscenes are all rendered in the game's own engine instead of being CG (as is the case with most heavily story-oriented games). Once you play the game, you'll see how impressive that is. This also has the benefit of allowing the developers to make some of the cutscenes interactive (it's really never safe to put down the controller), all of which makes for totally immersive gameplay.
Truth be told, I've hated all of the other entries in the RE series that I've played. The awkward control scheme and the awful camera system took all of the fun out of killing zombies--and you have to try really, really hard to make me not enjoy killing zombies. However, in RE4 almost all of those issues have been completely resolved. The result is a gorgeous game with a gripping story that handles like a dream.
As uncomfortable as I feel saying this, I really think that I like RE4 as much as any installment of the Metal Gear Solid series. That's fucking huge. Honestly, if you don't have a Gamecube, it's worth buying one just for this game. It is being ported (with a handfull of extras) to the PS2 later this year, but all of the shots i've seen so far of the new version seem to have some issues with aliasing and jagged edges.
Some people are quibbling about the faked (non-anamorphic) widescreen. Those people are dorks.
Find some way to play it. At the very least, you need to check out some video of it online, but you should definitely try to play it.
Posted by matt at 09:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2005
On a Roll
I know you guys all think I'm a pretty cool guy...
I come to you today to bring you news of what's pretty much the funnest thing ever. It's a game for the Playstation 2 called Katamari Damacy. In the game, you're the little, green, oblong-headed Prince of the Cosmos. Your Father, the King of the Cosmos, has accidentally destroyed all of the stars in the sky, and it's your job to replace them. You do this by pushing around a ball that picks up everything it rolls over. When a ball gets big enough, the King releases it into the sky, and it becomes a star. Simple, no? As the Katamari (as the ball is called) gets bigger, you roll up bigger and bigger things, starting with thumbtacks and dice at the beginning of the game, and going all the way up to stadiums, islands, and rainbows at the end.
It's a ferociously original idea, and the whole affair is so impossibly adorable that it'd be totally engrossing even if it wasn't ridiculously fun to play, but oh my god, it's so ridiculously fun to play.
I honestly can't imagine somebody not having oodles of fun playing this game. If there is such a person and they are in your house, you need to leave immediately and call the police from a neighbor's phone.
If you have a PS2, buy this ASAP. If you don't, find someone who does and make them buy it. Maybe we'll have a KD party at greenideas HQ. That'd be hott.
Posted by matt at 01:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 11, 2005
Damn.
American literature has lost one of its strongest voices. Arthur Miller died this morning at the age of 89.
After all of these years, Death of a Salesman still stands up as one of the most compelling portrayals of sheer human tragedy in all of literature, as well as a knockdown refutation of everything Horatio Alger every wrote. This is a very sad loss.
We're sorry if greenideas has seemed like the obits these last couple of days, but we couldn't let these losses pass without comment.
Posted by matt at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2005
Orange Revolution
This is what we get for not paying enough attention to art. Just last weekend, we were saying how the Gates project in Central Park was never going to get done. Now we see that it'll be done by Saturday. Then, when we were walking to our office on Central Park North in the morning yesterday, we said that they'd never put them up in the relatively run-down UES area where we work. Sure enough, we walked under several of the weirdo orange arches on the way to the train after work. Shows how much we know.
The idea seems pretty cool, but at the risk of being a stick-in-the-mud, we can't help but think that the massive orange gates are going to take something away from the Olmstead & Vaux masterpiece that's already there. Isn't it enough that there are 843 acres of green in the heart of New York City? That kind of aesthetic juxtaposition seems pretty radical to us as it is. We can't shake the feeling that injecting the city's verdant sanctuary with this kind of artifice is essentially hijacking the intentions of the park's designers, and so taking something away from the city outside of the park. But then again, what do we know?
We'll reserve judgement until we can see it all in place.
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January 05, 2005
Losing a Legend
One of the greatest and most influential artists of the last century has died. Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, died Monday follwing quadruple bypass surgery.
Eisner's work has influenced several generations of comic artists, from Steve Ditko through Alan Moore and beyond. His impact on the industry is plainly evident from the fact that the most prestigious award in all of comic art, the Eisner, is named for him.
Eisner will most definitely be missed, but his presence will continue to be felt as long as people put ink to paper to tell stories about heroes.
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October 05, 2004
Beauty Prosthetics
Hello, you lovely people. If there's one thing we've been remiss in discussing, it's art (or maybe television, perhaps. Some of you sure do like the jumping box, don't you?). So here's a little prose-snifter of info about one of our favorite companies on the interweb, Aesthetic Apparatus. They're based in Minneapolis, and it's only two guys (Dan and Michael). They love music, and are extremely artistically talented, so they combined these two attributes into a poster-making company, and have just blown up so hard. Their concert posters (which is what they specialize in) are gorgeous: heavy-weight stock, thick, rich color, and freakishly imaginative design/layout. The Shins poster on the left (the text is kind of hard to read, but it's advertising a summer two-night show the band played with Rogue Wave and Calexico) is goddamn near one of the coolest things we own, and by far the most well-rendered piece of art we've ever seen on a concert poster (thanks JW), even though it is, you know, the pink-and-brown severed head of Sir Thomas More. We'd recommend signing up for their mailing list, since their posters often sell out immediately after release (check out their sold out gallery if you go by the site, it's well worth it), but also because Dan and Michael write some of the most self-deprecating and hilarious emails this side of an Insound update.
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September 15, 2004
Ardor Music
The Labor Camp Orchestra might not be in possession of, um, the most marketable name ever, but they definitely make some interesting music. There are well over 175 mp3s of their work posted on the website, and if you're any kind of fan of experimental music (like we are), then you'll do well to stroll interwebbily on by their site and get to downloading. Hard.
The guy responsible for the LCO is from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which since it's in Minneapolis is pretty much automatically great. Thanks to JW for the link.
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July 19, 2004
Utter Disappointment
We're sure that many of you out there are just as fascinated as we are by certain regional discrepancies in snackcake nomenclature. In particular, we've always wondered what the difference between Ding Dongs King Dons was. Well, last night kismet provided what we thought was the beginning of a major breakthrough in this Scooby-sized mystery.
It all started with a lively bar-room discussion of certain region-specific brands of snack foods (e.g. Tastykake, Drake's, Dolly Madison). Continuing along those lines, we raised the issue of the Ding Dong/King Don controversy.
In case anyone hasn't been introduced to this mystery, it goes a little something like this: See, the fine folks at the Hostess company marketed their chocolate-enrobed, cream-filled, hockey puck-shaped snackcakes under the name "King Dons" in the Southeastern US, but as the more widely known "Ding Dongs" everywhere else.
So, in what amounted to a bolt-from-heaven-sized stroke of luck, someone at the bar happened to have a couple of books handy which were essentially pictorial histories of American junk foods. Thumbing through one of them, we noticed a Ding Dong package with a picture on it of King Ding Dong, the once and future king of snackdom. We thought that this was a bona fide eureka moment, since it finally established a material connection between the two products.
A further wrinkle is added to the story when you consider that there was actually a third name for the same product, namely, "Big Wheels." Accordingly, Big Wheels had their own spokescake, Chief Big Wheel. The Chief adds the further possibility that there was some concern for political correctness in the constellation of names for this one delicious treat. The plot thickens...
...Or so we thought. When we excitedly took to the interweb this morning to get to the bottom of this once and for all, the answer we found was bitterly disappointing. Here is the rather boring genuine story, straight from the mouth of Twinkie the Kid himself.
When Hostess introduced Ding Dongs in 1967, the advertising campaign included a ringing bell: hence the name Ding Dongs. However, the eastern United States Hostess opted to package the cakes as King Dons to avoid confusion with a competitor's product. Hostess consolidated the King Don and Ding Dong name in 1987, packaging the cakes as Ding Dongs in all regions. Six months later, Hostess decided to go back to using the King Don name in the eastern U.S., again, to avoid confusion with a competing product. But, today the issue has been put to rest and only Ding Dongs are sold nationwide.
How lame is that? Where is the intrigue? When we started looking into this, we half expected to find a Mulder-sized web of deceit, replete with secret recipies, and evidence of collusion between Henry Kissinger and Fruitpie the Magician. Also, we figured that Reggie Jackson must have been involved somehow (he's on both boxes).
You know what, we're not satisfied with this. It's just too tidy.
This isn't over...
Posted by matt at 10:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 07, 2004
Art and Science Converge?
Envisioning Science, a new book by MIT researcher Felice Frankel, urges scientists to consider the aesthetic aspects of the images they produce in their research. It has also sparked a mini-debate about how much art should be found in the scientific image. Eric Heller, a colleague of Frankel's at MIT, has been working hard at creating representations of his own investigations that pass aesthetic muster.
Looking at the images in Heller's gallery, however, one is immediately struck by their overwhelming nerdiness. At best, they look like blacklight posters. More often, though, they have the look of the early, clumsy attempts at computer-generated 3-D "art" that your high-school computer teacher had calendars of. Those old pictures, just like these new scientifically-created ones, had bizarre, unreflective palletes which only made them seem cold and alien. Perhaps that was the intent of some of the first generation of computer artists, but by now there ought to be a movement towards a synthesis of the computational and the organic.
For our money, the acme of scientific art has got to be Vesalius. His De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) not only revolutionized the science of anatomy (he was the first person to systematically document human dissections), but also serves as an early touchstone of naturalism in scientific renderings. His engravings capture every minute corner of a human body while situating them in the context of a whole body that was once a whole person. Until contemporary scientists can match this level of care, the images they produce, while they may be thought-provoking, will never be art.
Posted by matt at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Broadway's Warm Fuzzies
Not since The Muppets Take Manhattan have puppets had such a red letter day in New York. Last night, Avenue Q won the Tony for Best Musical (along with the nods for best book and best score). How on Earth it beat out Caroline or Change we'll never know, but we say more power to them.
If Avenue Q and Caroline are any indication, we've got to say that things are really looking up for musical theater. It's thrilling to see such vibrant, groundbreaking works emerging as rejoinders to dreck like Bombay Dreams or whatever Nathan Lane is in. Let's hope that these shows are just the opening salvos in the war to revitalize of The Great White Way.
Since we're talking about theater, why didn't anybody tell us that Peter Krause is starring in a revival of After the Fall? One of the finest, not to mention coolest, actors of his genearation (yeah, we'll stand by that) stars in a play by one of the top five American dramatists, and we have to find out about it in the theater ads in the Arts section?
We're not mad, just disappointed.
Posted by matt at 09:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2004
Was Puffy 'Raisin' the Roof?
Sorry. Really.
Last night was P. Diddy's Broadway debut in the new revival of "Raisin in the Sun." So naturally, we were hoping that, this morning, there would be all manner of reviews panning his performance.
It's not so much that we think that people shouldn't try new things, it's just that when people do try new things, they should be severely punished for it. And when you think about it, how many people deserve to be punished more severely than P. Diddy? We count six, tops.
Unfortunately, the rebukes were not nearly as harsh as we would've liked, and everybody said pretty much what you would've expected them to. The NYT said that Diddy came up short, while The Post exuberantly gave him props. No surprises there.
Okay, it's certainly possible that Diddy might actually have some kind of raw theatrical talent. It's not the case that his abyssmal flow on the mic should have anything to do with what he can do on Broadway. We sincerely doubt that John Gielgud could impress anyone with his rhymes, unless they were put into his mouth by Shakespeare. And sure he's not going to be Sidney Poitier, but what if he turned out to be something wonderfully different? Nonetheless, we can't help wanting to throw our hands up and say "Come on! It's P. Diddy! How good could he possibly be?!"
The prudent thing to do here would be to actually go see the play and make an informed judgment. However, as with most things, we prefer to just save our money and assume that we're probably right.
Posted by matt at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 26, 2004
Paint the Town Iceberg Red
This is the work of Chilean-born Danish artist, Marco Evaristti. It's an iceberg off the coast of Greenland that he dyed red using 3,000 liters of paint, diluted with seawater.
There's a much bigger, hi-res version of the above photo on Evaristti's site. We still can't tell if it's beautiful or terrifying.
"Danish artist builds a better (redder) iceberg" (Globe & Mail)
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March 22, 2004
Inside the Actor's Mausoleum
As a service to our friends across the pond, we wanted to give notice of a casting call in London. If you are dead, or plan to die before May 11, and would like to be in the premiere of a new show called "Dead: You Will Be," please get in touch with 1157performancegroup.
The theater troupe is looking for a corpse to star in the show, which will run for 24 nights. They hope to challenge taboos about death by... making people stare at a corpse for two hours, we guess. Hrm.
Of course, if you asked that Philosophical Counselor guy about your fear of death, he'd probably tell you that Heidegger called death "Da-sein's ownmost nonrelational possibility not-too-be-bypassed." And who needs theater when you've got Heidegger, right?
This reminds us. Isn't it about damn time for a new season of Six Feet Under? Come on, people! The Sopranos are great and everything, but we need our post-Sports Night Peter Krause fix real bad.
"Dead body wanted to star in show" (BBC)
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March 09, 2004
In Memoriam
You were a storyteller. You were genius. The world will be the worse without you. We hope you found whatever it is you were looking for, and we will miss you.
"Spalding Gray, 62. Actor and Monologuist, Is Confirmed Dead" (NYT)
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February 22, 2004
Philosophy Under the Proscenium Arch?
We realize that not many of our readers will get as big a kick out of this as we do, but we couldn't resist mentioning the little blurb in today's Arts & Leisure section about playwright, Kate Fodor. Fodor's play, "Hannah and Martin" dramtizes the tempestuous affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Not only is it funny to us that someone wrote a play about two philosophers, but Fodor herself is the daughter of one of the most famous living philosophers, Jerry Fodor (look, "fame" is relative), and psycholinguist, Janet Dean Fodor, both of whose publications are piled up all over greenideas HQ. Seeing Jerry's name in the Arts section of the Times is pretty funny, but seeing it on the page opposite a blurb about A.C. Slater's sassy paramour and notioriously nude "showgirl," Elizabeth Berkeley, is just priceless.
Okay, that's it for the vanity posts for a while. We promise.
Posted by matt at 03:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 06, 2004
Sidewalk Art
The above picture is of a sidewalk painting by Kurt Wenner. It's kind of brilliant, right?.
For more examples of Wenner's work, check out this Snopes article as well as the gallery on his own site.
Posted by matt at 01:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack