I think the one thing I miss about being in school is the fact that the holidays were longer. I mean, I could totally go back and do a DipEd except — oh wait — I can’t stand children. Or does that make me a perfect candidate for a teacher? I’m not sure.

Anyway, point being: Holidays gone, back at work.

Had the usual wild New Year’s party in Wollongong that saw us up playing Trivial Pursuit until 3am. I was in a group with braken, and we did not win. However I got to watch Mat in the ’smart group’ squirm over-thinking the answer to the question, “By what name is superhero Kal-El better know as?” Which was very frustrating, since everyone kept saying, “Superman?” and then rethinking and I was staring at a Smallville DVD the whole time. In fact, I think I even said, “I can see him from here…” Which in retrospect was not that useful¹ but, c’mon. It’s Trivial Pursuit; any superhero questions are going to be answered with either ‘Batman’ or ‘Superman’ and I’d already answered the Batman question several rounds prior. Trivial Pursuit is odd like that, especially team-based competitive Trivial Pursuit with a room full of smart people. So I get frustrated when people can’t answer easy questions about comic books, and in turn I frustrate people when I have no idea what the second season in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is (Note: Summer), and the confound them when I can easily answer a question about what Australian invention of the 1960’s revolutionized party alcohol (Note: Cask wine). Oh, and not to mention that despite the fact I have a political science degree I couldn’t tell you, say, which president presided over the withdrawal from Vietnam (Note: Nixon). Hey, it’s PolSci, not History okay?

Okay.

Anyway, we also watched I Am Legend and by ‘watched’ I mostly mean ‘talked through’. Much lulz were had over the observation that scientists in comic books² are always extremely buff as almost everyone in the room had a science degree (and the rest of us some variation on CompSci).³ The faux Superman/Batman movie trailer poster was also noted, and I was out of the room at the time but the murmuring through the walls seemed to be positive. Alas.

So the film itself wasn’t too bad for the first two thirds. I’d flipped through the comic previously in the Kino one day, however, and what I was really hanging out for was the ending. For those of you who haven’t read the original, the whole point of the book (and therefore the explanation of the title) is that Hero Guy is the last human on Earth, right? And everyone else is some crazy vampire. And finally he gets caught and put to death and for the first time he really gets to see the vampires en masse and there are mums and little kids and whatever and he realises that they’re all afraid of him. Because now he’s the monster who lurks in the dark and kills them; he’s their legend.

At least, that’s the comic ending. I assume the book is the same.

But the film (none of them, from what I’ve read) isn’t; it ditches the relativist twist for some schlock about cures and survivor colonies and everything is nice and Hollywood. I think perhaps that if I hadn’t been expecting something different I wouldn’t have minded so much because, well, that’s how all these films end, isn’t it? Except this one shouldn’t. Anyway, I quite like Will Smith and he does really well here considering that for the vast majority of the time it’s just him and his dog, and there’s a scene with a mannequin in a videostore that is pretty gut-wrenching. I’d recommend people see it, but turn it off after he gets strung up in the trap and just mentally addendum the ending above and forget what the film does for the next twenty minutes. Now that would’ve been great cinema.

And then on New Year’s Day we went out to see Enchanted. Well, E and I dragged our husbands and braken along, really, but whatever. And yeah, the film is pretty good; it straddles the line between mocking the traditional Disney tropes and continuing them, and it mostly succeeds. And sure, you know how it’s gonna end but that’s all, like, the whole point and the ending song even spells this out. Though the ending did make me think of this article in a kind of uneasy way. But the animation was great, so whatever.

And in gaming news, my download of The Witcher finished the other day so I’ve been giving that a crack. It’s… interesting. The production house it comes out of is European (and the book it’s based on Polish), and you can tell by the way it doesn’t shy away from sex and swearing. I’ve just grazed the second chapter and I’ve already had the opportunity to sleep with no less than five different women and, like, this isn’t done in some fade-to-black sort of way, either. Sure, it’s not explicit either — just some red-tinted groping limbs — but as far as video games go it’s pretty hardcore. Oh, and sleeping with women gives you a risque ‘art card’ in your journal. I’m serious. The characters also swear — which again is shocking for a video game — and it’s finally unseated Baldur’s Gate’s, “So I kicked him in the head ’til he was dead. A hur hur hur.” for the best random line said by a background character in a tavern with, “Your mother sucks dwarf cock.”

But is the game any good? Well, it’s okay… but I wouldn’t call it great. I’m not sure whether it’s a result of the translation but the dialog is frequently hokey and disjointed; everyone seems to speak in these pithy one-liners that make the storyline actually quite hard to follow in places. And that kinda worked okay for Pathologic but it doesn’t here. Like the whole deal with the witch and the Hell Hound and, fuck, I’m still not sure what the story was supposed to be there (did the witch call the dog or did it just appear?) and the only reason I sided with her was because the Reverend was a misogynist. There’s also a vast lack of cool equipment, which is generally a sin for any RPG (Tornment pulled it off okay but only because the writing was so shit hot), and far too many food and drink style items with no immediately useful purpose — expect for possibly getting more gamesex — and very limited inventory space.

The other thing is that the game (like the books it’s based on) is very heavily focused on being morally ambiguous. It shies away from the DnD RPG tradition of picking dialog option 1 for Lawful Good and 5 for Chaotic Evil and this means that you can’t really play Geralt as your own character; you’re very aware that you’re always playing Geralt, and for those of us for whom the Witcher franchise is a relative unknown this can be extremely frustrating. The consequences of keypoint decisions usually take several hours to show up and when they appear you get a cut scene and a lecture from Geralt letting you know exactly what’s going on, and there’s sort of this… it sort of feels like the game-makers have made it to deliberately punish people making ‘do-gooder’ style decisions. Or maybe everything always works out badly, I dunno. And while this aspect of the game has been praised… I dunno if I like it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind my settings bleak and seedy, but… if I want to be a shining paragon of moral virtue in a World Gone Mad, I want my game to let me do that.⁴ Because The Witcher had no problems with you being bad, just being good. And I have problems with that.

Still, I’d recommend picking it up and giving it a stab if you’re a PC RPG fan.

And finally, because you all need to share my pain; the aircon at work is broken. It’s 31 degrees in here!

Good thing my mini heater has a ‘fan only’ setting…

1. Though, to be fair, the owner of the house was on that team… though the DVD was probably his wife’s. ^
2. This one was my bad; I’d seen the comic but hadn’t at the time realised it in turn was based on a novel. Bad Dee, no Entertainment Pie Piece for you! ^
3. Incidentally, this conversation bought up an argument over whether or not Superman counted as a ‘proper’ scientist because he works as a journalist. But as far as I’m concerned that’s like saying Batman isn’t a detective because his day job is being an idiot, and that’s just crazy talk. So if anyone happens to have any pictures of Clark/Kal in a lab coat handy, I wouldn’t say no. ^
4. My Malkavian character from Vampire: Bloodlines had 10 Humanity. Suck it down, Golconda! ^

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