The Englishman and I exchanged business cards, wished each other well, said goodnight. As soon as he was gone, I felt a tiny tickle of excitement in the top part of my stomach. I was alone, and that tickle was my body’s way of telling me that I was happy to be alone again. Was it typical for me to feel excited like this after a seemingly harmless chat? It was. It’s always been this way for me. Once, after a business meeting in a hotel barroom in Vancouver last winter, I stopped off in the lobby Men’s Room and caught a glimpse…
While cleaning my bathroom floor one recent Sunday afternoon, I was mildly shocked to discover that my toilet-reading material consists almost exclusively of back issues of Nintendo Power, a magazine that is designed to appeal to the sensibilities of A. readers between the ages of six and 12 and B. potato-headed morons. Once or twice a year, I’ll go to the newsstand and purchase the latest issues of publications that society would deem more suitable for a man of my age and stature. I’ll buy a copy of Wired, Architectural Digest, The Atlantic, maybe a Maclean’s Weekly. It never works. Two or three mornings later, I’m…
Three objects–a sombrero, an umbrella, and a diamond ring–have appeared without fail in all 16 levels of Donkey Kong (Game Boy, 1994) that I’ve played thus far. From the start I have assumed that these objects were nothing more than evidence of the type of surrealist logic typically found in videogames a la eating a mushroom to grow in stature, or shooting a snake which turns into an egg which one can eat for a health boost.
This is the eighth and final level of the Big City levels, which means I’ll be leaving the urbana, i.e. the trash cans, behind after today. What sort of new milieu lies ahead? Who knows. This is also one of those once-every-four-levels boss fights with Donkey Kong. First impressions of today’s level: it’s a fairly traditional-looking level. It has three tiers of girders, Pauline (screaming, per usual) at the top, Kong in the middle, and Mario (me) at the very bottom. Let’s begin. (more…)
Last Thursday afternoon I sat on a panel at the Merging Media conference here in Vancouver titled, “A Tale of Two Worlds: When Film/TV-Game Worlds Collide.” Fellow panelists included the current narrative director for the Halo franchise (Armando Troisi); the script writer for Steven Spielberg’s Big, Vague, Not-Boomblox Videogame Project from a couple years back (Adam Sigel); the writer for the Avatar and Lost videogame adaptations (John Meadows); a guy who is currently making an MMO based on the Family Guy series (Ian Verchere); and a woman from New York who specializes in something called “transmedia” (Caitlin Burns). “Transmedia” was only the second…
These days videogames tend to be fun, breezy little experiences. They are grin-inducing diversions that leave you feeling like a winner. Do the slightest thing, however banal, and suddenly the game is beeping and booping all over the place and raining virtual confetti down upon your laurel leaf-crowned head. “Well, now! Look at you!” games seem to say. “What a spectacularly gifted human being you are! I know that you and I barely know each other, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a guess that you, Handsome Face–is it OK if I call you…
>If you know me, even a little, then you know that I’ve had my struggles with booze over the years. I never drank every day, or doctored my coffee with schnapps in the mornings, or kept a flask on my person. I never loitered in barrooms often enough to qualify as a barfly. That said, whenever I did drink–typically anywhere from two to five nights a week depending on the kind of week I was having–I always did so to an extreme, with a sense of great purpose. I always drank with the desire to arrive somewhere else, someplace far…
>As you know, Xbox 360’s have failed me for the last time more often than Admirals failed Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. Most recently, after my Xbox 360 Slim gave up its ghost making it the fourth 360 (and counting) to fail me, I tried to suss out a way to transfer my data from the hard drive of my busted Slim to my older model Elite 360. Realizing that this process was both complex and risky, I decided to plug in the old Elite and simply start a brand new Xbox Live profile from scratch on the…
