Gaming Project 101

I'm on vacation this week. Sort of on vacation. I'm going East to visit my family for a few days. Which, I don't expect, will be terribly relaxing. (It never is.) We always drive all over the place, visiting a million relatives. And my parents yell at each other. And I sit in the backseat and completely regress. My dad is having trouble seeing out of one of his eyes these days--his name is Bob; and I've started referring to him as "Bobclops"--which should make riding around with him driving A LOT more exciting than it normally is.

Whenever I have a few days to play what I want to play--as opposed to playing stuff that I have to review for work--I almost always take on a gaming project. A gaming project is when you pick one game and focus only on that game for the duration of your vacation time. Example: Over the Holidays a couple years back, I worked my way through Shadow of the Colossus in its entirety, defeating one colossus per day.

It was not unpleasant.

Gaming projects are a good way to fill in gaps in my gaming resume. Usually what I do is this: I pick a vintage game that I've been meaning to finish, but never quite got around to finishing. Mostly, it's just a good excuse to go back and appreciate the old crap.

Ah, old crap.

On Friday, late in the afternoon, Vic came into the office--he's off too this week--and announced that he was planning to get every last star in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Which surprised me, because I thought the whole "gaming project" thing was unique to me. Apparently, other people do these gaming projects too.

Or maybe it's just Vic. Who knows.

Over the weekend, while contemplating what my gaming project was going to be, I popped in the 360 version of Clash of the Titans. I was kind of excited for it. I enjoyed the movie far more than I thought I would. And I do love my God of War knock-offs. So the game had a lot going for it. Plus: The PR company who sent me the game also saw fit to include the Clash of the T.'s Blu-ray.

Good will = generated.

The game was originally supposed to come out when the movie was in theaters. But at the last minute, it was delayed. Which I read as a good sign. They realized the game needed more work, so they held onto it and decided to work on it some more. I'm always OK with that. I wish more publishers would make these kinds of executive decisions. There would be a lot less crap/junk in the world.

Clash of the Titans: The Videogame blows. It blows about as much as anything I have ever played in my life. I can't even describe how terrible it is. I can't believe that the WB and Namco would even bother to lay this big, damp turd of a game on the world. Poor world!!!!!

I played for about an hour before taking the disc out of the 360, boxing it up, then literally hurling it across my living room. (My living room is small, so the game didn't have very far to travel.)

What total and complete shit. And Sam Worthington looks like Sloth from The Goonies for some inexplicable reason. (Durrrrrrrrrrrrr! Durrrrrrrr, durrrrrrrr!!!)

QUESTION: HOW DO YOU FUCK UP A GAME ABOUT FIGHTING GIANT MONSTERS WITH GIANT SWORDS?

ANSWER: THIS IS HOW.

As the English would say: What rubbish!

This game is so bad that it has, as an unfortunate side effect, retroactively diminished my opinion of the movie. Fuck this movie. I never want to see this movie again. And Liam Neeson: The Allman Brothers phoned. They want their wig back.

So.

Back to my gaming project I went.

I've been meaning to get around to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for awhile now. I've been thinking about the game a lot for some reason. I've decided that this is my week to get it done. I sank about 4-5 hours into Majora's yesterday.

I go back and forth on Zelda as a franchise. Twilight Princess bored me. I tried to finish it TWICE. Both times I got so bored that I quit. Wind Waker was boring too. All that fucking sailing! And the ending just went on forever. (What do you mean I have to RE-FIGHT all the bosses again? What??????)

But A Link to the Past is ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMING MOMENTS OF MY LIFE. Man, I will never forget sitting in my tiny apartment in Chicago, eat gyros from the Greek place across the street, and playing through that game. I just loved it so much.

So Zelda: You will forever have a place in my heart, no matter how many boring games in a row Nintendo makes.

Majora's Mask always interested me because it seemed like such a dark, dirty little diversion when compared to the other games in the series. And man, is it ever dark! That weird cackling mask dealer in the clock tower! The Skull Kid and his weird dances! The grimacing red moon, looking like the creepy moon-face in the George Melies' 1902 movie.

It's all so strange and morbid. And great.

Beyond great.

Again, I'm left wondering why we even need these high-powered machines like the PS3 and 360. Man, we do not need all that power! We do not need more realism, and more pixels and more polygons.

We don't.

This game manages to be both silly and profound. It's almost 11 years old--it came out, appropriately enough, just before Halloween in 2000--so it looks crude by today's Modern Warfare 2 standards. Yet it somehow, someway manages to evoke a sense of wonder and mystery that is pretty much unmatched by almost anything I've played recently. Playing the game is akin to having a lucid dream. Everything seems familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It's so strange.

And great.

Did I mention that it's great?

Well. It is.

There are a couple of scarecrows who I've encountered on my journey so far. Or maybe it's the same scarecrow who continues to pop up in different places through out the game. Either way, The scarecrow(s) always offer(s) to do a dance that will fast-forward time 12 hours, if that's what I want him to do.

The scarecrow dance--the flailing arms! all the swaying!--makes me cringe every time I see it. It seems to go on far longer than it needs to. Yet I can't look away! I try, but I can't! Watch it for yourself. You'll see what I mean.

There are so many moments like this in Majora's Mask; moments that I react to, that I have an emotional response to, whether I want to or not. The weird jugglers in town who make the terrible joke about the kidnapping (the punchline: a "kid" was "napping"). The odd mask-wearing creature who disappears behind the Curiosity Shop door just before I can reach him. The old astronomer up in the tower, talking about Moon Tears. It always feels like the whole game is teetering on the edge of poor taste. It flirts with poor taste, then pulls back at the last second. It has this weird, discomforting menace.

These moments resonate long after I shut the game off. There's poetry and art in these moments. Real poetry. Real art.

These moments are far too rare in videogames. Far too rare.

I'll keep you posted on my Majora's Mask progress, just as soon as I make more. Stay tuned.

Wii = Dead (Literally This Time)

Turned on the Wii last night only to be warmly greeted by a black screen and the following curt, clipped sentences: "THE SYSTEM FILES ARE CORRUPTED. PLEASE REFER TO THE WII OPERATIONS MANUAL FOR HELP TROUBLSHOOTING."

As if simply telling me that my Wii is fucked was not enough, the nice person in charge of creating this screen--yes, someone has to create these types of screens; paging Dr. Kafka--also saw fit to render the two sentences in some of jarbled-up, broken-assed font.

I was oddly calm during this moment. I didn't start sweating, or turning over furniture. I didn't pour myself a drink the way that Tom Hagen pours Vito Corleone a drink before telling him that Sonny got shot on the causeway.

I very calmly, cooly began troubleshooting. Step one: I have no fucking idea where my "operations manual" is. So I moved on to step two: restarting and saying a prayer.

The most curious aspect of the experience was the complete and utter lack of emotion I felt about the whole thing. I have had emotional relationships with my consoles. About a month ago, I visited my New York City at my apartment. I went through my closets and found my Super Nintendos (plural; my brother gave me his when he got married), my PlayStation, my Dreamcast, my Nintendo 64, etc. I held each machine for a moment, wiped the dust from its casing, and as cornball as it sounds, I spent some time recalling all the terrific times the two of us had together.

Let me tell you, those machines got me through some rough periods in my life. Break-ups. Deaths. Firings. Even smaller moments--example: missing the 10:19 bus in Chicago, knowing that I'd be late for my shift at the stupid, dumb, fancy restaurant where I worked in the '90s--were bearable because I knew at the end of the day, after all the bullshit and headaches and arguments with Frank the sous chef, it would be me and M. Bison going at it hammer and tongs in Street Fighter II on the SNES.

Which brings me back to my cold reaction to the Wii's death.

Make no mistake, the Wii and I have had some fun together. The Super Mario Galaxy games? Excite Truck? Mario Kart Wii? Good stuff, all of it.

But the aspect of the Wii that I have always loved the most was the Virtual Console. The white, unassuming little box has always been little more than a cipher to me, an empty vessel that appropriates old dreams and experiences. Of course, I downloaded all of the best shit from the past. Super Metroid? The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past? WaveRace 64? They're all on my Wii's corrupted hard drive.

Which should make me panic.

But it doesn't.

Because I know I can simply download them all again once a new Wii comes into my life.

Or, I can get on a plane, fly to New York. I can always hook up my old consoles and play them there.

Old consoles, which by the way had a failure rate of 0.000000000 percent.

CORRECTION: My friend John Teti who edits the A.V. Club's videogame section sent me this useful bit of information: "The thing is, you can't download all your Virtual Console games again -- at least not without paying for them again. Because Nintendo is shit and they tie downloads to a single machine." Thanks, John.