Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy thoughts (spoilery)

I got this game for Christmas this year, and I have to say I can't understand why most of the reviews I've seen of it are so good; pretty much every writeup I've seen has given the game a glowing recommendation, whereas I'd only describe it as "above average" rather than "classic". I can only assume that the reviews are based entirely on the demo, which covers the first scene of the game (or "movie", as Quantic Dream would like us to refer to it). I'll admit that it's a fantastic opening scene, with the player having to choose how to escape from a murder scene in the most detailed and interactive toilet ever to appear in a computer game whilst, thanks to the wonders of the split screen, you can see a policeman get up from the bar and slowly stroll towards the murder scene. The problem is that the game proceeds to undermine every positive feature of this sequence.

This rant is going to be spoilery, so I will use the magic of font tabs to disguise it. Select the text if you want to see it.

- I didn't get what I felt I was promised. The box blurb, the opening sequence of the game, and in fact the first half or so of the game established the thing as a deeply personal supernatural thriller, an exploration of guilt with supernatural elements which may or may not be figments of the main characters' mind (although from the start we're led to expect that they're more than just delusions), operating mainly on a low-key personal level. By the time I reached the end of the game I had been subjected to a fantasy extravangza complete with apocalyptic prophecies, martial arts sequences ripped from the Matrix, overblown plot elements sucked from Deus Ex (the two main factions competing for control of the Earth are, get this, an Illuminati-esque secret society and a collective of AIs), and an end sequence plagarised directly from Highlander. ("Hey, I have godlike power and I got the girl as well! Life is good.") I felt cheated.

- As well as the plot, the characterisation disintegrates mid-game. All the good work the designers had put into it is scrapped, and the people you've been cajoled into caring about start behaving like cardboard cutout action heroes. (The most egregious part is where the protagonist doesn't show much in the way of regret or remorse when his longterm squeeze dies, and when the female detective falls in love with him mere days after regarding him as a psychopathic serial killer.)

- The much-hyped multiple viewpoints thingummy is a dud. Initially the idea of playing both the murderer and the detectives investigating him is interesting, and the designers do have several interesting tricks they use to help this work, like not showing how you decide to hide the knife (if you choose to do so) as Lucas (the killer) so you won't know where it is when you're playing Carla and Tyler (the detectives). The problem is that the Lucas segments are the only truly pro-active parts of the game: as the detectives, you are being entirely reactive, struggling to solve a riddle which you-the-player already know the answer to. The Lucas segments are the only part where you have a real choice: as the detectives, you have to interact with everything you can interact with before moving on to the next scene.

- The control system used for most of the game was fairly decent, and is a nice way of implementing a 3D graphical adventure. Unfortunately, they scrap it for the action sequences. During these, you either have to hammer the left and right arrow keys repeatedly (yes, just like in Ye Olde Sportes Games of times past), or push two sets of direction keys when you are told to by glowy lights in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution. The upshot is that you don't actually get to concentrate on the exciting action bits, because you're distracted by all the meters and lights you have to pay attention to; I'd have much rather watched them as cut scenes, to be honest, since they're really not very interactive in the first place. (You also have to do the DDR thing at random points during conversations - it was only after a while that I realised that this was to determine whether or not Lucas's telepathy would help him at that juncture. I'd have rather foregone the telepathy and been allowed to pay attention to the conversation, personally.)

- There's the occasional scene which is inserted for no apparent purpose whatsoever, unless it was the designer's intention to ruin the pacing of the game and wreck the atmosphere. There's a segment where you're playing Carla, sitting in her office, staring at a big pile of evidence saying "LUCAS IS THE KILLER", and you're expected to prove that Lucas is the killer by matching pieces of information together. The result is a trivially easy puzzle that takes all of the drama of the detectives realising that they have their man. There is a superfluous boxing sequence and a pointless basketball game, both of which use the execrable DDR system. Just when things are getting tense and claustrophobic and terrifying, they throw in a banal minigame. What's most frustrating about this is that when they aren't subjecting you to minigames, Quantic Dream frequently prove that they can establish a suitably dark and brooding atmosphere for the game; if they'd only concentrated on this tone instead of consistently breaking it, the game would have been much more engaging.

- The depiction of Tyler, the black policeman, is totally racist. He is an ex-gang member. He swaggers around the screen to a funk soundtrack. His apartment looks like a set from a blaxploitation flick. He says "yo" a lot. He plays basketball. There's a sequence where an old man of Chinese origin mentions that he was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, and he's therefore "more American than you [Tyler] are", implying that an Asian man who's lived in America all his life is more American than a black man who's lived in America all his life. Making someone who's *supposed* to be one of the main characters of the game an enormous racial sterotype is just dumb.

- Speaking of "supposed to be one of the main characters", Tyler is entirely superfluous, to the point where he gets written out of the game before the final confrontation no matter what you do. He doesn't appear in any of the endings, he doesn't make any contribution to the plot that Carla couldn't have done instead, he seems to exist solely to provide someone for Carla to talk to, although given that the game designers aren't averse to subjecting us to five-minute chunks of characters' internal monologues one wonders why even that was necessary. There is no reason for him to be there.

- Towards the end of the game, it becomes brutally clear that all the apparent choices you had early on were actually meaningless. It didn't matter whether you did a good job of cleaning up the murder scene or whether you just ran in the beginning; oh, it may have changed some minor aspects of the first few scenes with the detectives, but they would have caught you no sooner and no later. In general, any decision you make at any point in the game will only affect the next two or three scenes, and only in minor ways. In the last third of the game the interactive elements disappear almost entirely, and you're left with a parade of dull action sequences leading to the only real choice in the game. And even then, it's not really a choice: of the three endings of the game, two only happen if you end up failing at the final hurdle; compare to Deus Ex, a similarly linear game which nonetheless gave the impression of genuine freedom with its three distinct endings because you're making an informed choice, not explicitly "winning" or losing".

- The game is short. It took me 6 hours to play through it, and I spent a good deal of time on some of the segments.

- The console-inspired features are obtrusive and mood-shattering. There's a bunch of bonus features, like little movies and wallpapers and soundtrack clips, which you can unlock by playing the game and earning bonus points. You earn these points by uncovering and picking up big shiny spinny playing cards which look totally out of place in the game. This sort of bullshit has no place in a supernatural psycho-thriller.

- David Cage is a pretentious creep. He talks about the game as being a "movie" with a straight face, and he animates himself dancing with an underpants-wearing Carla in one of the unlockable segements of the game.

The bottom line: Fahrenheit/Indigo Dream itself isn't going to spark the promised rebirth of the adventure game genre all the reviewers are raving about, although the demo version might: the best aspects of the game and the best *potential* the game had are all there, but in the full product they are squandered. Hopefully future game designers are going to take their cues from the game I hoped Fahrenheit would be, rather than the one it turned out to be.

Wuthering Heights is a wonderful book.

I don't have much more to say about it than that. Halfway into it, I thought "wait, this isn't a romance novel, it's a grotesque almost-gothic revenge thriller combined with Emily Bronte shrieking about how much she hates living in the country." By the end, I realised that it is a romance novel, but so exceptionally well-done, realistic and believable you don't notice.

Book review: "Survivors", Dave McKay.

Okay, there's a charity shop in Oxford which sells a heck of a lot of second-hand books, most of them hidden in boxes underneath piles of clothing. I was browsing their boxes one day when I noticed a little gem in the SF box - several gems, in fact, since there was at least three or four copies of Survivors, by Dave McKay (writing as Zion Ben-Jonah). They were going for 75p each, so I got one.


Here is the front cover, and here is a close-up of the back cover. You'd think that these tell you all you need to know about the book, right? Fundamentalist objection to the pop-Christianity of the Left Behind series. (Apparently, the heroes of the Left Behind series are in the Christian militia movement, so you can see how some might regard them as being too liberal.)

Oh, but wait. It gets better.

You see, Dave McKay is the leader of the Jesus Christians, who are an outfit in Australia. (You can read Survivors for free on their homepage.) They're a controversial bunch, and a quick Google should get you all sorts of material on them - they've been known to recruit teenagers and take them away without telling their parents where they are, for example.

They advocate renouncing one's vocation, selling all one's personal goods, and handing money over to their leader, McKay. They live a nomadic existence, living out of vans and small apartments. They preach to the world mainly through their website, which they believe contains (or will contain) divinely-inspired articles. They believe themselves to possess the One True Faith, which has been lost to other Christians? How do I know this? It says as much in Survivors.

The heroes of Survivors are the Jesans. The Jesans' leaders - one of whom is recruited after the destruction of the US (oh yeah, the USA gets nuked into barbarism in chapter 1), one of whom doesn't appear "on-screen" much and lives in Australia, where Dave McKay lives - turn out to be the Two Witnesses who will preach against the AntiChrist in the Last Days. They breathe fire and speak the Truth and are guided by God in all things. They witness the rise of the AntiChrist, the construction of a Jewish Temple and Christian Church in Jerusalem next to the Dome of the Rock, the institution of the Mark of the Beast... eventually, they are shot dead by the AntiChrist's forces. At this point, the Rapture happens. (Because, you see, the Rapture only happens after the Great Tribulation, not before.)

Heaven itself is more like an alien ship from a New Ager's abduction fantasies than the city of God. The aliens angels explain how the New Jerusalem has been hidden in a secret dimension all this time, and how when the great marriage of God to the Church takes place everyone in New Jerusalem will be able to watch it on big screens. The whole thing reads like Mary Sue fanfic - or to be more accurate foefic - for the Left Behind series. Dave McKay uses the main character to live out all his fantasies - battling the AntiChrist, torching the authorities with his firey breath, convincing lesbians, atheists, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists to work together through his holy ability to SHOUT REALLY LOUDLY...

I imagine if there's a Jesus Christian living near you you'll come across a hard copy of this sooner or later; they seem to put great stock in printing out and passing around tracts. Until then, you can read Survivors over the interweb. Enjoy, and remember:

Nar-narnie-nar-nar.

Or "actually making a post this time".

So, I'm moved to actually use this thing to get my impression of the Narnia film out there. I saw it yesterday evening, and was really quite excited about it; although I'm an atheist by nature, I've always been able to enjoy the Narnia books as fun yarns - with the odd exception (I thought The Last Battle is dreck through and through when I first read it, and nothing's swayed my opinion since then).

M' learned friend's opinion is that the films try to strip out the Christian content and replace it with tasty sugary Hollywood "the family is all!" philosophy, which I kind-of agree with. On the other hand, they kind of fail at this: you can't secularise the story without a complete rewrite, of course. Edmund is not reconciled with his family until he is reconciled with Aslan. The Professor wheels out the "Liar, Lunatic or Lord?" trilemma. Aslan dies in the name of Deep Magic and is saved in the name of Deeper Magic. (And what are we to make of the cricket ball smashing the window depicting an Islamic crescent-and-star?)

No, my major objection is that the film was ineptly made.

Some specifics:

• The CGI was ropey in places; when it came to the beavers, it was atrocious. CGI is the most pervasive evil in cinema these days. It's fine in a wholly-animated feature, but unless it's very well done it can ruin a scene for me if it's mixed with live actors. Little good ever came from mixing hand-drawn animation and live action (with the exception of Roger Rabbit), why do people think that a hundred badly-animated aliens is somehow better than one lovingly-crafted alien model?
  
  
• The little girl who played Lucie had a tendency to let the joy and excitement of making a movie overwhelm her acting abilities. You can hardly blame her, really, and a lot of the time it works - being wide-eyed and amazed at the process of filming and being wide-eyed and excited by the prospect of tea with a faun tend to look the same to outsiders, after all. But when she is rushing towards the corpse of Aslan or the petrified Mr Tumnus, she's not meant to look like she's barely repressing giggles. The director can't have failed to notice: did the actress throw a strop when he wanted to reshoot the scenes? Was he too enamoured of the camera angle to show the scene from a different viewpoint? Could they not afford enough CGI to turn her frown upside down?
  
  
• The cardinal sin: the film felt just like one of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movies. It's like Hollywood can't make an adaptation of a British fantasy novel that doesn't follow the Peter Jackson Manual of Movie-Making. It had the crashing booming orchestral score, it had a stirring battle scene with plenty of CGI butchery, it even had a scene of the characters trudging across the icy wastes which looked an awful lot like the Fellowship trudging across the wastes in the first LOTR film.

The last point's the deal-breaker for me, although it becomes most aggravating towards the end of the film, once the battle scene starts and pacing goes out of the window. Nobody who's read their novels can fail to tell the difference between Lewis, Tolkein, and Rowling. Lewis is the guy who gets me this close to converting to Christianity until I realise that what I'm enamoured with is Lewis's outlook on morality and common decency, not his opinions on the Bible or the divinity of Jesus Christ. Tolkein is the one who describes the countryside in minute detail and gradually moves from children's story to Norse saga. Rowling's the one who flirtatiously baits the fangirls. Why can't Hollywood tell the difference?