Bert Vandecasteele

Month: July 2008

  • LOST Via Domus

    You’re a fan, or you’re no fan. As far as LOST goes, I am a fan: I faithfully watch the episodes over and over looking for clues, write stupid reviews that rave on and on about the tiniest little things, I listen to the podcasts and actually enjoy the jokes about the wooden leg… so naturally, I got the LOST videogame, which goes by the name of LOST: Via Domus – a poor excuse for pig latin. How could they not get that right?! In fact – this question isn’t just valid for the title, but for the majority of the game and its handling of the reasons why a fan would buy it.

    Cross-medial Copying

    It is my opinion that TV series, as a format, are easy to transfer to a video game. Way easier than a film, to say the least, because how do you copy a two hour flick into an interactive experience that lasts about ten hours? In this event, the LOST videogame did just about everything right: they made a sidestory that spans over the course of the first two LOST seasons. This side story is told to us in seven different chapters, or episodes, each complete with its own “Previously on LOST”, a title screen and the ending screen. So it really does play like a television series. Using episodes also makes it easier for us to keep track of the story – middle parts of epic game experiences can sometimes drag alone a bit; it’s nice to see a cliffhanger at the end of every 30-40 minutes of gameplay to keep you motivated. In this way, LOST: Via Domus gets the job done. You just play “next to” the series, following great turning points as they go along (e.g. the opening of the hatch) and interacting with the Losties.

    And that’s where it kind of goes wrong.

    First off: let me say kudos to the production team for pulling this off. Some actors from the show decided they would help out and voice their characters (Claire, Desmond, Ben…). Absent from the list, however, were Jack and Locke, amongst others. So they had to get replacements. And while the replacements do sound like the real deal, you can just feel they’re not the real deal. And, however hard Ubisoft and abc studios may have tried to fix this gap, to the (extremely picky) LOST fans, they just fall short. On top of that, the characters just look plain awful – Locke looks too skinny and young, Jack looks like a walking zombie, Claire looks like a molten Barbie doll… It’s crazy and freaky.

    Illusion ruined! Or not?

    Thank God, we have the creative team behind LOST to help us out. They delivered us with a good, not great, story – carefully making sure not to break any LOST dogmas along the way – that kept me interested throughout the experience. In each of the seven episodes, there are several flashbacks in which we find out more about our main character: why he was in Syndey, who he was there with and what he was doing. This past takes a few very dark turns that apparently caused some players to detach themselves from the main character. It quickly became apparent, however, that in true LOST fashion, this story was going to be about a lost soul looking for the right path: redemption. In this way, the story was good enough. Not great, but good enough.

    On top of that, the surroundings were also decent. They ranged from sub-par (the crash site looked horrible) to wonderfully detailed (like the jungle and the Black Rock). It’s nice to finally walk around the hatch, and do all those crazy things the Losties did, like typing in the numbers, hiding from the monster and getting dynamite from the Black Rock. So, for fans – if you can look at the already mentioned disappointments – this kind of stuff is pretty cool.

    Questions, questions, questions

    So, given the fact that LOST: Via Domus is a mixed bag, should you play it? If you’re not a fan of the series, I don’t see why you should. If you are, however, it’s worth it for the few crazy, mindboggling plot twists alone. The ending to this one leaves you scratching your head, much in a way a season finale does. For that alone, it’s worth the few hours of “video game” before that. It just goes to show that LOST is what LOST does best: telling us a story, making us shut up and look at the pretty pictures.

  • Bioshock

    Never before have those three words – “Would You Kindly?” – had such an impact on a video game. Bioshock delivered me a rock solid ride that was just long enough, and touched me at a weak spot: narrative in video games. This narrative proves a lot, and puts just about every other one in a video game to shame. And yes, that includes Half Life 2 and Portal, who both have been critically acclaimed for their great storytelling.

    “Hurry, Mister B!”

    Bioshock is a first-person shooter featuring the ever-so-popular “silent protagonist”. In layman’s terms, this protagonist doesn’t speak throughout the entire game (one line excluded). Because the action is first-person, this is supposed to raise our immersion in the game: we are no longer supposed to identify ourselves with Mr. Angsty Teen #35 (I’m looking at you, Square Enix), but we can just imagine our little protagonist the way he is.

    In Bioshock – much like in Half-Life 2 – our main character has a story, however. A story cleverly implanted in the convoluted web of storylines that is… well, Bioshock: a story that leaves behind all consensus on what a storyline in a first person shooter should look like. No, in this game, there are no aliens, no UFOs, no demons from hell… there is just the race of men, and their fear. The fear which caused people to run and hide on the bottom of the ocean, in a place named “Rapture”, experimenting with genetic experiments.

    The story is all around you; even though you are never talking, your surroundings are. As you venture through the underwater world that is Rapture, you find audio diaries, get calls, hear music, see posters on walls, look outside the window… This is a very sensoric game to say the least: it speaks to your senses, and even if you’re not really noticing anything in particular, you’re always noticing some things. Writings in blood splattered accross a wall. A record player playing Buddy Holly. There’s just so many little things in this game that makes every other game feel incredibly stale storywise. It just goes to show that the medium of video games really isn’t used to any truly outstanding storytelling. Bioshock is like a film by Tim Burton, in which the smalles details has been designed especially for the experiene. No room is the same, ever.

    Shooting Bees

    But what about gameplay? Bioshock is truly a game of this generation: it’s challenging, rewarding and almost never frustrating – three traits good games these days have to have (unless they are especially made for one trait – being especially frustrating for example). With the exception of one (fairly easy) moment, you can never truly die. Dieing takes you back to the nearest “Vita Chamber”, where you are revived. you get to keep all your weapons, plasmids… no penalty whatsoever. This keeps this first person shooter from becoming the next best Quickload fest.

    On the other hand, you are out of ammo a lot, which can get pretty frustrating at times. It should be noted however that about half of your arsenal – your “plasmids”, tonics you insert into your veins for special powers – don’t run on ammo and can generally be used a lot longer. Yes, they run on “EVE” (Bioshock’s fancy word for “that blue bar”), but I never had any problems maintaining my EVE level – as opposed to my ammo. The downside to this method was that plasmids tend to be more crowd control and less damage. And in a pickle, you’ll truly swear that you can keep freezing your enemies or send bees at them ad infinitum but never truly kill them. Alas, my plan on playing the entire game with only killer bees soon seemed to cumbersome to bother.

    A free man chooses

    Shooting things will only get you so far. In order to gain more powers aside from your plasmids, you need to gain a thing called ADAM. Adam enhances your body, giving your extra defensive or offensive abilities, more health, more EVE, … You can harvest it from “Little Sisters” throughout Rapture, and this is where the moral dilemma sets in. Little Sisters are, as you have probably already figured out, little girls. Upon getting to one, you have the option to either harvest it or rescue it – the latter results in fewer Adam for you to spend. On the other hand, it does make you feel better about yourself. Every little sister is in turn protected by a Big Daddy; you have to get through the Big Daddy in order to get to that sweet, delicious Adam. Big Daddies take quite a punch, and you’ll have to be quick and resourceful in order to take them down.

    So you can either harvest, rescue little sisters, or even choose to leave them alone. The key word is choice; a key word that swiftly summarizes the entire game: you’re free to choose what you do. You can play it passively, relying on crowd control while sneaking in a corner; or you can go all-out damage. The choice is up to you – and who knows? Trying something different might make for a wonderful second playthrough.

    The Sweat of Your Brow…

    Bioshock is more than a videogame. Bioshock is a piece of contemporary literature – or at least based off of it (Ayn Rand). It perfectly summarizes the spirit of the people in the first half of the twentieth century: a time where insecurity and fear of nihilism within people led to belief in charismatic leaders who would without a doubt create a perfect society. A society where everyone would be pretty, healthy and smart. More than fifty years later, we of course have long since realized that a society like this is impossible. Bioshock, however, manages to perfectly capture the mood of the era without mocking it. And it is this strange kind of seriousness towards the era and its quirks that makes Bioshock the closest thing to literature, and thus “art”, to date.

    And while we wait for a game that will rival this one in its greatness, we might as well ponder the answer to the following question: “Is a Man Not Entitled to the Sweat of His Own Brow?”

  • Ep. 12-13-14: There’s no Place like Home

    Ehm, wow. Where to start? This was no ordinary episode of LOST – this was a mastodont, filled with tons and tons of info, action, emotions, revelations, excitement… I’ve never had a LOST episode like this before: it made me laugh, it made me angry, it made me jump up yelling profanity, it made me cry. All these things, LOST had already done to me on some point or another… but not all at once in one huge angry motherfucker of an episode.

    So, where to begin? How about this: In what might be described as the wildest roller coaster ride ever on LOST, the fourth season has come full circle.

    The episode…

    I’m so, so, so damn glad I watched this episode in one go – as I’m quite sure it was meant to be watched. As predicted, the ending and the beginning were the same: the show started with a flashforward showing how the Oceanic Six set foot on the mainland again, and practically ended with that very flashforward becoming the new present time (before it switched over to something different – but more on that later). As I said: this was no ordinary episode of LOST, it was more like a full-feature, two hour film.

    I agree with the fact that the first forty minutes were a big set-up for what was to come (the bomb on the freighter, the Orchid, Keamy, people moving around and making it even more complicated) – but since I didn’t have two weeks to actually think about that set-up, the episode didn’t seem as straightforward as they had told me it would be at all. And, with LOST, I like the surprises to blow me away.

    One thing at a time, starting with the island. So, they did manage to move it after all. Whatever that means, however, we did not find out. Cuse and Lindelof are on to something here: the most insane part of the entire episode, namely the orientation film on time travel and all that followed, was introduced with humour (Ben sticking that room full with metal whilst Hallowax was clearly telling this was not the way to go). It’s really nice to see how humour can still be packed into a part of the story where the stakes are this high.

    I’m not one for huge action sequences, but the fight between Keamy and Sayid was one of the most awesomely shot scenes in LOST ever. With Keamy being such a dickwad, you really wanted Sayid’s punches to hit hard and below the belt. On top of that, this fight comes really early in the second part of the episode, so you’re kind of uncertain whether Sayid will win this one (Keamy being the season vilain and not being able to go down that easily). I’m really glad Richard interrupted the brawl – someone other than Keamy just might have gotten hurt. On a related note: I jumped when the Orchid’s elevator started going up again. Everyone knew who was coming, and the slowness of it all made it look like the part in the Godzilla movie where the monster looks you straight in the eye and then kills everything in sight. …But, that didn’t happen – thank you Ben for going Sweeney Todd on Keamy and killing everyone on the damn freighter.

    The freighter. Is it time to say bye bye to both Michael and Jin? I say “yes”, but only for 50 %: I think Michael’s dead (solidified by Christian), but Jin is still alive. Honestly, if he isn’t, they’re missing out on quite the reunion scene, if it is anywhere nearly as well acted as Sun’s reaction to the freighter going boom. Now that the cat’s out of the bag and we know what Sun thinks happened to Jin, we can finally understand the whole deal about the lying, the date on the tombstone (the date of the crash)… that puzzle is complete. I’m kind of annoyed by the fact that Michael is presumably dead. They have hyped his coming back for ages, and then kill him off after one season? I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. I don’t like Harold Perinneau, but I do like Michael as a (tragic) character, and I really had wished for him to reunite with Walt. Now we won’t get to see any of that, I think, and that just makes me feel like they got Michael back as an excuse to focus more on Walt and his… “specialty”.

    I love how the fourth season managed to connect all the flashforwards together, and how all the loose
    ends were tied. We now know when Ben’s flashforward took place (boy, it didn’t him long to return to the action after being banished from the island). We now know what happens to the Oceanic Six in the first few years after they got rescued (people are saying three years, because the Jack-with-the-beard flashforwards take place in 2007) and what happened between them. Apparently, not everyone is alright with Jack’s decision to lie about the rescue. Oh, and the fact that he turns into quite the pill-popping dictator. Also nice to see is that we got the wrong impression on Sayid, who did not turn into Hair Conditioner Hitman after all – does this make Ben the good guy?

    Benjamin Linus is just about the most complicated character to ever appear on a television show, I think. Every time you think you know him, something happens which makes your ideas about him shift completely. He didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse for killing Keamy and thus blowing up the freighter. But he was willing to give banish himself from the island in order to save it. Why is he so connected to the island, and why is this connection a one-way street? I honestly haven’t got a clue anymore; all I know is that I really, really think there oughta be more Benjamin Linuses on television. They make things interesting.

    Two moments in this episode sent shivers down my spine – moments which were no plot twists at all, just things I had not expected to see. The first one: from such a reserved woman as Sun, I had not expected to see such a brilliant form of histeria. When that freighter blew up, Sun literally went insane. She really was capable of pulling a Sawyer (jumping down), and that particular performance really impressed me. The second moment was when Desmond saw Penny again: I know there are no happy ends on LOST, but still… I’m really happy to live in ignorant bliss until the fifth season starts.

    It’s nice to come full circle: the third season finale left us with the question what was in the coffin, and the fourth season finale answered that. People were furstrated because in a way, they feel the series has not moved since the last finale, but I beg to differ. We found out a lot of new things, and even though we knew how it was going to end, it was damn exciting to see how they got there. Anyway: the coffin. John Locke. That’s certainly interesting… so now we are presented with a new gap – it’s not about the Oceanic Six and their rescue anymore, it’s about the island, the Others and John Locke’s… demise. I can’t wait to find out – apart from Hurley and Sun, I don’t really care about the Oceanic Six. Not counting all time favourite Desmond, of course.

    The questions…

    We finally know who got off the island and how they did it. I’m impressed with the constant moving around of characters – it’s almost as if they were pawns on a huge chess board. Maybe they were playing against Ghost Eko? Concerning Taller Ghost Walt (question 2): I think there’s a difference between the Walt on the island and the Walt off the island. Walt on the island – the notorious T.G.W. – was a manifestation of the monster. The Walt off the island? Not so much: he’s the real deal. I hope he re-joins the cast in the next season – he’s such a good actor. Now we also know where the lies came from (question 4): they did it to protect everyone who got left behind. I figured conspiracy, but I guess I was wrong. It’s all Jack and Locke.

    We still don’t know anything about Jacob (question 5), the fact that he uses dead people to talk on his behalf. We did get another confirmation about an ancient civilization this season (the frozen donkey wheel is the next four-toed statue) – I reckon Jacob will have something to do with this. Moving on, question 9 (what’s up with Annie) gets a little nudge: maybe Rousseau’s not Annie after all? Maybe Annie… is Charlotte? Charlotte finally “returned” to the island – maybe she was one of the Dharma Initiative? Maybe she’s Annie?

    Read with me. This is what I said about “the man in the coffin” (question 10): “At first, I thought it was Locke. Seemed like the most obvious person to be in there. After rewatching the episode, however, and seeing the news paper’s transcript, my money’s on Michael. The article mentioned something about leaving behind a teenage boy – I’m quite sure we’ll find this out in the next batch of episodes. It won’t be important, though.” Man. Have I ever been more wrong than this?

    So what’s next?

    I absolutely loved this episode – it felt less like a television series and more like a full-feature film (which can honestly happen more often). I can’t help but wonder what’s up for next season though. So here’s a little prediction – unmarked by any possible spoilers out there, because frankly, there are none. I think next season will see another shift in storytelling: the main story will be off-island and will focus on everyone getting back, while the on-island flashbacks catch up with this off-island story (thus showing us what happened to Locke). I don’t think there’ll be a lot of catching up though… as I predict the island will have moved in time… to 2007. The bearded Jack point. The point where Bentham starts showing up. Along with this, I expect to see quite the shift in cast. We might be seeing more of Charles Widmore. We will denitely be seeing more of Penny Widmore (I still dread the day she comes accross Benjamin Linus). I hope to see more of Walt. I hope Lapidus will make return, but I don’t count on it. Even though… we still haven’t found out why he was unable to fly Oceanic 815… right?

    Oh man, I can’t wait until season five starts.

    Favourite Quote: Hurley: I can’t believe he did it.
    Jack: Who did what?
    Hurley: Locke. He moved the island.
    Jack: No, he didn’t.
    Hurley: Oh, really? ‘Cause… one minute it was there, and the next it was gone, so… unless we, like,
    overlooked it, Dude, that’s exactly what he did. But… if you’ve got another explanation, man, I’d love
    to hear it.