Author: Alex Doenau

Last night I saw Sweeney Todd once more, but beforehand I stopped by the bathroom of the cinema. In this particular bathroom, every stall had the words “Mr. Moops” or simply “Moops” carved into either a door or a wall. In my careful selection process – for you can never be too careful with public toilets – I saw that one of the stalls had “Moops” written in it … but underneath someone had scrawled “Moors!”.

I laughed long and hard – it was a perfect intermission for a lovely evening.

I figured that it can’t hurt to have a bit of a book log going on. I suspect that the book writings will be even briefer than your average movie outing, because I’m not that certain of literary criticism save knowing that I’m not a big fan of Imperial pints of semen. So here we go, our first adventure: all of the books I’ve read post Cryptonomicon! (I suspect I may have left some out, in which case I will attack them in future instances).

First round: White Teeth, The Beach and Mort!

I updated my About page. Hopefully it will contain things to either interest or enlighten you. I’ve made a new vow: I will finish writing about 2007 before the Oscars, which I plan on not liveblogging this year because I got terminally bored last time (wait, they’ve got Jon Stewart back? Urgh, I might have to eat my words).

So I’ve got a week to do four months and the Arbitrary Awards. Which I still have to devise. I have to relocate all of my tickets, but it can be done folks … I believe in me.

I realise that a good few of my few good readers are big fans of Neal Stephenson. I do realise that if I say anything against him I’ll never be allowed to release any fiction of my own. I’ll start with some personal background for you:

I get through two or three books in the average working week. Snow Crash took me maybe a day and a half, and I had a good, brief time. Cryptonomicon took me in excess of two weeks. I had a mighty uphill struggle reading this book. You can’t say “But Alex, Snow Crash is only 230 odd pages, to Cryptonomicon‘s 918!”. Indeed, they are very different beasts. By the logic stated here, it should have taken me merely four times as long to read Cryptonomicon. Length has nothing really to do with the speed of reading; in the week after Cryptonomicon I read somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 pages.
No, friends, Cryptonomicon is dense. It’s dense and many things happen in it while, at the same time, nothing happens at all.

What the Hell?

CJ7, Stephen Chow’s latest movie, was released in China at the end of last month. It’s already showing at Reading Market City, in a limited engagement – and what the heck is it? I really couldn’t tell you. The allegedly heartwarming but more likely “what the heck?” adventure of a young boy, his impoverished father, and the alien that he brings home from the dump. It’s also an examination of how there’s no use in sending your son to a private school if he doesn’t do any work, and how OH&S is the most important thing in the world.

Dicky Chow is poor. He cannot afford toys. When the ball that his father fetches from the dump turns out to be an alien dog-thing, a new adventure is born!

Except there’s not that much adventure to it. CJ7 is an odd duck of a movie; the centrepiece of comedy, replete with shot for shot remakes of a scene from Kung Fu Hustle makes no sense – and then turns out to have been a dream sequence anyway. I spent a large amount of this movie turning to Oliver and Vanessa in the seats next to me and putting my arms up in the universal motion of “I’ve got nothing”.
Don’t take this as a negative reading of the film, though: I spent a great deal of it laughing, and part of that may have been due to my trying to figure out what the heck was going on. This is nothing like E.T.: CJ7 – for that is the name bestowed upon the alien thing by Dicky – has no interest in going home, but rather a simple interest in being a pet. Heck, there’s not even any controversy about government agencies wanting to come in and claim back the alien. There is conflict between the rich bully kids with their weird hairstyles and bad dubbing and Dicky, and conflict between Dicky and his father (which, blah blah, true heart of the movie), but none of it flows.

The unwritten law of these sorts of comedies is that they have to go super maudlin before they return to the super-happy status quo. CJ7 is no exception to this rule, and covers this ground in spades. On top of that, the theme song for the movie is “Sunny”, by Boney M. I don’t think there really is anything more that can be said than that. Americans can look forward to being confused by CJ7 in March.

When it comes to Runaway: A Road Adventure, I’m pretty sure I’m not trying anymore. I had forgotten how obscure video game solutions could be, and was grateful that Pendulo Studios were kind enough to have created a game that didn’t lead to horrible deaths or irreversible mistakes that set you back hours of gameplay (yes, again, I am looking at you, Sierra).

Mention of story and solutions to an obscure multi-year old game contained within!

A few weeks back, I got Megaman Powered Up for my PSP. You may have heard of the PSP: it’s that machine which is used to remake PS One games and not much else, really. Well, Megaman Powered Up is a remake of the original Megaman for the NES. It has all of the old levels, plus retooled levels which can be played as any of the other bosses.
Capcom, for the last twenty years or so, have blatantly been leading the field in sadistic programming. The “Powered Up” stages are frustrating enough, but in playing the old stages you realise just how watered down a challenge you’ve been handed down. I’m not fool enough to throw my PSP around when I die, but I am going to stomp the ground (and not in the dance movie sense).
Ice Man’s stage is enough to make me want to destroy the world. Precarious jumps, and I’m being shot at? Hells yeah, Capcom. Hells yeah.

So I decided that I would put down my PSP (and this story is a bit lie-filled, because I haven’t devoted myself to MMPU [side note: PU. Think about it.] for a couple of weeks and got it out tonight) and venture into the land of the PC. Having recently acquired a computer that can actually function without attempting to start a new ice age, I decided naturally to play Grim Fandango, a ten year old LucasArts adventure game. Controlled solely by the keyboard. Yeah, I know: what the heckfire? And whenever I access the menu, the sound cuts out. The patch only part fixes that.
I decided that, despite the game’s high interest factor and the fact that you’re playing as Betty Suarez’s father, I will put it aside for now because navigating with the arrow keys is sending me mad.

So I put in the other game that I bought today (and again, these are lies: I bought Grim Fandango about six months ago without having anything suitable to play it on – the other other game I bought today was the new Sam & Max Series One: Episodes 1 to 6), a Spanish adventure game called Runaway: Dream of the Turtle, which kindly came with its predecessor, Runaway: A Road Adventure.
I have a sort of love for adventure games; I say a “sort”, because this genre can be absolutely unforgiving. I would not be surprised if Roberta Williams had sent many men to premature graves – and not through Phantasmagoria induced fear heart attacks (or fear orgasms, dependent on who you are). Yeah, screw you, Sierra.
Anyway, Runaway: A Road Adventure has a strange appeal to it that makes you forget that the sight of the characters talking is enough to make your eyes explode thanks to the quality of the cel-shaded character models. Watching the characters with beards – well, if you dwell on it life will cease to be worth living. It follows a brand of logic that is somewhat frustrating in the age of the FAQ (and that’s another thing about adventure games: in their “golden age”, which coincided with the days of easy disk copying, the guide books sold infinitely more copies than the games themselves).
You can’t sequence break because Brian, your character, has to have a reason to be doing what he’s doing. For instance, you can’t take a coffee packet from a garbage bin until you need it (when, surely, in an adventure game, you should be able to take whatever’s on offer within reason, “just in case”), but for some reason you can steal a Mayan figurehead with a giant ruby implanted. The solution to getting the ruby is actually pretty clever, but why you need to steal it is a pretty obscure idea that I would never have come up with if I didn’t have an FAQ open in another window (and who uses liquid nitrogen to charge a battery?! There’s no suggestion that this might be an idea until after you do it!)

Anyway, I’m only partway through the game, which has so far only used very limited environments and has yet to lend much of a character to the protagonist’s female counterpart beyond her accusing your character of trying to bail all the time. It’s interesting to see such a “dead” field brought back to life, and with such a begrudging logic, at that. At least no one will shoot at me while I try to make a tricky jump from one moving object to another. Damn you, Capcom.

(Further proof that video games hate me: I finally got XBox Live this week – and accidentally started my account separate to my 18 months’ worth of saves and achievements. Seems that nothing can be done to rectify this situation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve gone completely off my 360 and am back into anime[!].)