In memory: Peter Falk (1927-2011)

I really never know what to say when I write one of these celebrity obituaries: I'm terrified of coming across as false. And of... talking about myself.

I heard yesterday that Peter Falk, the actor famous for playing Columbo in the long-running and consistantly-impressive TV detective series, and who did an outstanding job with the character, has died, aged 83. I'm not very familiar with the rest of Falk's work, but he really was very good in Columbo and a great acting performance ought to be honoured.

The actor had been suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease in the years before his death. This was news to me too, and I'm very sad to hear it.

He was fantastic in The Great Race, too.

Here's a clip of Falk, being very good on television.

Indie Games 3: positive edition

First off - a warning to Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds. After spending about half an hour writing about his performance in the Green Lantern movie, I got my PC infected with malware while looking for pictures of the smug, character-ruining bastard. And I had to reset the PC to factory settings, and re-install everything and lose a lot of files. All because of Ryan Reynolds's performance in Green Lantern.

Look here now, Reynolds: I know you read my blog. I'm going to get you back for this. I'm going to get to the gym and work out, and gel my hair, and appear in some rubbish teen movie, and then bit by bit I'm going to destroy you like you've been destroying me for all these years. And one day, when you hear that I've landed the role of Hal Jordan in a film and simultaneously married your dream-girl... I will break your damn computer, right before you go to work at 2AM. And then we'll be even.

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Now. I wanted to write about Xbox Live Arcade Indie Games again. I really love these. If you're not aware of them, they're in this odd little hard-to-reach corner of the 'Xbox Live Arcade', where you can download small (usually either retro or interestingly pioneering) games for about a pound each -- and absolutely every one has a free demo, so you know what you're getting. They're made by amateur game designers and members of the public, and there are LOTS of them now, all just thrown in there like some strange lucky dip of amateur games. A lot of them are appalling, some of them are very close to being good but are simply broken.... and a handful are absolutely superb.

Going into the Indie Game page and downloading games based on their titles and descriptions feels wonderfully like exploring. Or better, it's like going into the game shop when you were a kid, before the internet and free reviews were available - the days when you looked at the title and the few screen-shots on the back of the box, and thought, 'Okay I'll try that!' Sometimes you discovered The Legend of Zelda and sometimes you wasted your money on Hydlide. It's just like that. Except they have free demos.

In my previous two Indie Game round-ups this time last year I mentioned a lot of bad ones and tried to be funny, like I do. In the ensuing 12 months, I've played lots and lots and lots of very bad Indie games... and a handful of really good ones. For a change I'm going to be positive and just stick to recommending the gems. So I'll start with a recent hit...


THE AVATAR LEGENDS

As a rule, I recommend staying the hell away from Indie Games with 'Avatar' in the title - Avatar Fighter, Avatar Warriors, Avatar Zombie Massager Extreme (no really)... all terrible, mostly broken. But The Avatar Legends by Barker's Crest Studios is something special. It's a silly, tongue-in-cheek single player 3D Zelda-esque RPG... but with your Xbox profile avatar as the hero. It seems like a cheap gimmick, but it's just a wonderful feeling to see a little cartoon version of you, perfectly animated, running up a volcano fighting monsters with a sword and spells, off to save the world in his little Mass Effect t-shirt and glasses.

One of several themed worlds, like snow, beach, swamp, mountain and farm - but all of them are fun to explore and full of charming little old-fashioned NPCs.

The combat is repetitive and extremely simple, and the story is basic but sweet, so don't expect some kind of modern epic here... but.
The game is really special. It's adorable. The level-up and dialogue systems are great, the game world is much bigger than you might expect, the characters are funny, interesting, well-written and occasionally quite moving. Seriously, I was moved several times, by little avatar people with big heads telling me to fight skeletons for them. I spent a week on this. I kept going back to my profile to change my little Buch avatar's clothes, so that he was wearing a jacket in the snow world, for example. Just to make it that bit more fun.
This game is very popular at the moment and is getting high scores with critics and on Xbox Live itself. It's cheap and cheerful, but the designers have put a LOT of effort and love into it, and it shows. There is even a complex tool-set where you can make your own quests and worlds. The Avatar Legends. Excellent work.

Four an a half silly Star Trek jokes out of five.

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Okay I'll try to make the rest of the reviews a bit shorter... getting the length right on a blog is hard, man. Next up is...


ABAN HAWKINS AND THE 1000 SPIKES

And this is one of the easy levels.

Here is an NES-style 2D platformer that is very hard and uses a (deliberately) obvious Indiana Jones rip-off as its player character. It is, however, a truly excellent example of the genre, and has a cute sense of humour about itself. I firmly believe that if this had been actually been released on the NES, it would have been one of the console's biggest hits. It's a damn shame that nowadays Xbox live Arcade is the best exposure a game like this can get.
Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes by 8Bits Fanatics is aptly-named, as almost every block puts you at risk of spikes, arrows, bottomless pits, fireballs or scorpions, all of which will kill you in one hit. It's one of those games where the extreme difficulty is the whole point, and the designers have luckily balanced the frustration and fun of that challenge very well. Every level (and there are just enough) is excruciating, but the first time you die - probably via some hidden spike that appears if you stay on the first block for more than a second, is always very funny. The sheer cheekiness and inventiveness with which the game whittles away your 1000+ lives (so you have no excuse not to keep going) is just so charming that it's hard to hate even the nastiest traps. The end boss has a particularly sadistic move he pulls, after it's dead, which just... I nearly cried.
From the mis-spelled gibberish instructions to the music, every bit of this is designed to perfectly replicate and simultaneously send-up the hardest NES games you remember, like Ghouls and Ghosts or Contra. Very funny, very addictive, and also - the control system is innovative and brilliantly balanced.

Five 'YOU ARE DEAD!' screens out of five.


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TECHNO KITTEN ADVENTURE!

You know that simple game with the helicopter where you just have one button and the screen scrolls left to right while you go up or down to avoid obstaces? This game is that, but your character is a flying cat ('kitteh') of some description and while you're trying to dodge the walls, the game tries to throw you off-balance by hurling harmless but distracting images of pterodactyls, angels, UFOs, pirate ships, hearts, eyes, hands, strobe lighting, butterflies and even the giant flashing high score reminder right in your face, from all angles, all choreographed to bubblegum danceclub music. I know that sounds like the worst game you can imagine, but I rather suspect that's the idea. I hate lolcats and I hate dance music. But...

Only the white stars can hurt you - the dragons, music, 'meows' and endless light effects are just there to piss you off.

The details are just fantastically cute. They have three levels and three records, and they're synched together very carefully. The singer will sing 'I will reach up high like a rainbooow...' and the game will have a hand reach up from the bottom of the screen and vanish, then use obstacles to force you to go high, as a rainbow shoots across the screen in an effort to blind you. Then the song will speed up and flashing lights will blast all over the screen in tune with the bass. (It is genuinely not playable if you have epilepsy - they don't give you this warning but seriously, take heed.)
A lot of Indie games try and grab you with silly titles, but this is one of the few that actually delivers what it rashly promises - intense, carefully-plotted stupidity to make you chuckle guiltily. Well done, 21st Street Games. I downloaded this one because I thought it would be something to sarcastially mock. I've played it every day since.

Three and a half little hands pointing at the top of the background for 'Have you ever touched the blue, blue skaaayyy?' out of five.

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This is getting far too long. I'll wrap it up.

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JOHNNY PLATFORM SAVES XMAS!

Another one where the amusing title won my interest (this has evolved into maybe Indie Games' primary marketing technique), this second Johnny Platform game is far, far better than the first thanks to some clever, fluid controls and gimmicks, and a long series of impressive puzzles, ranging from easy to damned hard. The time trials and improved wall-jump mode give it serious longevity too. Well worth a go. Five hot Xmas puddings out of five.

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NINJA BROS.

Yes, yes, another attention-grab title. I am the target demographic of insulting sales ploys. But as it happens, Ninja Bros. is a brilliant, tense little timing-based puzzle-platformer. What makes this one special is that you control between two and four ninjas at once - they move down, left and right simultaneously on seperate screens but each have their own jump button. So you're forced to multi-task, essentially playing two, three or four levels at the same time. Very tricky, well worth the effort. Four pseudo-Japanese translations out of five.

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PLATFORMANCE: CASTLE PAIN

I wanted to end this round-up with yet another difficult retro 2D jumping game (I like them). In the same vein as Aban Hawkins, Platformance aims to test your patience to its limits. It has one level, but that level is large, cleverly designed to fill a screen, and will kill you with everything that moves in it, at least once each.

You're in the bottom left, the damsel is in the top right. It's just one level, sadly, but what a level.

Here there are endless lives and very generous checkpoints... but the aim of this one is to survive with as few lives lost as possible. Finish with under 30 deaths (no easy feat at first) and the Princess you save will ask you to try harder next time. Die less than 5 times and she's mildly impressed. But if, by Herculean effort and the training and dedication of a chess master, you finish the level without dying once... then you're the King of the god-damned world, man. The Princess asks you to marry her and you're like, 'whatevs'. There are three difficulty levels, and the hardest is just ridiculous. This game is very small and has slightly wonky controls, but it's very enjoyable, has great music and is beautifully drawn. The difficulty levels even translate to slight differences in the game's appearance, such as bronze, silver and gold picture frames.

Will you manage to finish it in a good time, let alone with less than five lives lost? Well, maybe...

Will you finish the game in Hardcore mode without losing a single life, and in only 4 minutes 46 seconds at that? Unlikely, chum, because it took me about a month of practice! But by GOD, I did it. Today. Just in time for the sequel - 'Temple Death' - to be released.

DO YOU SEE THAT, REYNOLDS? FOUR MINUTES FORTY-SIX SECONDS WITH NO DEATHS! HOW'S THAT FOR AN ACHIEVEMENT? SCARED OF ME NOW?!?

Four out of five.

Aimless ranting and zombies

Hi, it's Buch again. I know I haven't been writing much on the blog here, so thanks for reading this. Honestly I just don't seem to have much to say these days. My world views are pretty much limited to, 'This videogame is cool', 'This movie sucks', 'I need to get a membership at the swmming pool and then maybe I'll swim more' and 'I hate everyone and everything on television, particularly all newsreaders and Phillip Schofield.'

"Is there any ITV show you aren't on, Phillip?"

And while each of these arguments seem valid, fresh and fascinating to me, I realise quickly how dull they must be to other people when I yell at the TV and just get stern, English looks of disapproval in response. But these are my major concerns in life, aside from angst about tuition fees and my ex girlfriend, and these of course form the wealth of fascinating life experiences that make up the entirity of the fiction and poetry I write.

So all I have for the blog is stupid, stupid smug humour and nerd rage. I guess you get both today, because this was supposed to be about...

ZOMBIES.

Yes, zombies. I remember about five years ago reading a blog by the author of A Modest Destiny, when he was dilly-dallying with a comic about a post-zombie future: he pointed out that nowadays when you announce you're working on a creative project about zombies, every single one of your friends says 'yeah, me too'. And in those five years, it just seems to have become ridiculous.

I should point out that I love zombies. George Romero's cheap horror-turned-classic Night of the Living Dead is one of my favourite movies (Dawn of the Dead actually seemed quite dull to me) and I recently finished reading Max Brooks' novel World War Z, which has to be the greatest entry to the genre since Romero invented it.

But I also just saw Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (Stranger tides? The water and weather are just about the only things that never behave unexpectedly or pose a threat in the entire movie! Where are these stranger tides, anyway - isn't this still the Carribean? Cuz they were sailing over a maelstrom in the Orient last time and no-one batted an eyelid.) And I remember seeing the trailer and laughing as Disney desperately read out some of the cool junk they had been loading into the movie to grab interest: "Mermaids! Blackbeard! Zombies!" It worked on me, but I remember my brother and I crying out 'Robots! Ninjas! Phillip Schofield! Pira... oh, wait.'

Sadly when I got to the movie, they were actually zombies in the traditional, Voodoo-or-something sense of the word. It was just, you know, mind control. But I was also kinda relieved, because... do I really need to see flesh-eating undead masses again? I like that now, in the post-post-zombie-craze-craze, people are trying to be a little more unique with their zombies - make them fast, make them sing, make them intelligent, make them Nazis, make it a comedy, give them rat teeth, anything - but... damn. Enough with the zombies. Also superhero origin stories. Enough already.

Oh do fuck off.

So every movie is zombies, every non-ninja videogame is zombies (Dead Rising, the Resident Evil series, Left 4 Dead, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Plants Vs Zombies, Zombie Cow Milking, I Made A Game With Zombies In It - those last two are actually real) and now it's infecting (ho ho!) novels. Like I said, I adored Max Brooks' zombie history book, but... I like novels. I like to pretend they're big and clever. Please be careful with them, young zombie authors.

Last year I read about half of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I remember seeing the cover and laughing out loud - it seemed like a wonderful idea: re-write every young woman's favourite book, deliberately vandalising it by adding every young man's favourite guilty pleasure and watch as Zack lays waste to the English classic. Sadly the novel really, really, really ran out of steam with that one joke, just endlessly repeated and awkwardly shoe-horned into a romance. I ended up putting it down and reading the original instead. Anyway - my point is:

The... WAR... of the Worlds... plus blood. Did you even read the title, Eric?

Yep. I'd like to start my tirade by pointing out that The War of the Worlds contains quite a lot of freaking blood. You remember that bit where it turns out the Martians feed / power their machines by extracting blood from fallen humans? Maybe the author here hadn't quite gotten to that bit when he signed for his royalty fees. Point is: how can you add a silly, violent, geeky element to a (brilliant) story about space aliens lazering everyone to death? For crying out loud...

I do wonder if I'm wrong to complain about the great tide (or horde, HO HO!) of zombie fiction we have seen over the last decade or so. After all - [REC.], 28 Days Later and numerous other recent works were genuine classics, right up there with Romero's early films. Hell, I have now written three short stories about zombies myself. I really like them.

And aren't all great stories still being endlessly repeated? Romero zombies are only 34 years old, so maybe that's why this bothers me. I'm not writing a rambling essay about how every vampire story is just Dracula, or how every mad scientist and monster are clearly Frankenstein and his demon. And I'd argue that the zombie tale is every bit as good as those two gothic classics.

It's a good story:

See, you have this attractive girl, Barbara, who suddenly realises the world is being over-run by the dead, come back to life and desperate to devour human flesh (Why not each other's? Why do they need to eat at all since they never show signs of tiredness or needing any external energy source? We may never know.)
Barbara and a bunch of people get stuck in a shack, and then somehow the zombies find them. And the zombies are now millions-strong, even though one would assume that they would eat their victims' flesh, rather than leave them to... anyway.
Someone betrays the group, gets infected or makes a mistake, and Barbara (or a protector) is the only survivor. At the last moment she escapes miraculously, only to realise too late that she is still not safe! Rather she has accidentally thrown herself into the horrible, poisonous, waiting arms of an even greater threat to her safety and dwindling sanity.

Activate the Cube!

And if your version of the zombie story is good, you'll put in a subtle allegory or subtext about a modern political issue. If you're Max Brooks, then you'll write several of these and mix them together with political speculative fiction. And I will love you.

I don't know what my point was here. I like a great many of these recent zombie films, games, that TV show I haven't seen yet, and books, but... I don't know. I guess they're still new: the early 21st century is for zombies what the Universal and Hammer Horror series were to vampires and mad scientists. Shaun of the Dead would be Abbot and Costello in that analogy. I kinda look forward to the day when zombies are old hat.

Maybe one day some twisted, translated, re-wrtten version of Night of the Living Dead will even be the equivalent of a Grimms' fairy tale. I hope so.