The art of storytelling is as important to the story as are the actual details of the story itself. Perhaps that is why I loved Advent Rising (which I finally finished over the weekend, I might add) and The Village so much. The story, in both cases, might not have been as complex or as detailed as some of the best-loved classics, but the way in which the story was told, the artistry and skill with which the particular details were revealed, certainly places both stories in a place of great prominence for me. Sure, The Village seemed a lot less mysterious and creepy once the particulars were made known, and Advent Rising raised many more questions than it answered, but the mysteries were laid out one at a time and with careful precision, forcing you, the viewer, to sit on the edge of your seat and wonder just what the heck was going on.
I think people tend to overlook the artistry of storytelling. Part of why I think so many people disliked The Village was because it was finally revealed that the monsters in the woods were not real after all. In a world where gore and murder are so popular, where horror receives such interest and acclaim, where people like to be titillated, complex and interesting plots are often rejected because people don’t always like to have to work by thinking through a story in order to understand it. They don’t like having the story laid out for them only a bit at a time.
It’s interesting to me to note the disappointment and the criticism when a mysterious story promises a hugely climactic ending that resolves without the splash of blood they were hoping for. All that tension builds up in anticipation of that momentous peak, and then the great mystery proves to be less mystery and more mundane. This is not unique to just stories like The Village, either. Many stories I’ve read or seen in a movie are wrapped in great mystery, and then, when the mystery is solved, you look back at the story in hindsight and wonder why you ever got so wound up about it. Anticlimactic. Sometimes. That is the very thing that I think causes people to criticize so harshly stories like The Village where the resolution is closer to ordinary than anyone expected (or even than anyone might have liked). Yet, when you look at the skills used to tell the story and the way in which it was told, it is possible to appreciate the story in a different light and proclaim it good – and maybe even excellent.
Tags: advent-rising, m.-night-shyamalan, movies, orson-scott-card, storytelling, the-village, video-games
I find myself in the ‘predicament’ where I am playing way too many different games right now. On the down side, sometimes it’s hard to decide which game to play. On the up side, I have plenty of variety and if I’m not in the mood for one game, I have several others to choose from. I’m finding that I am increasingly drawn toward games with story, a far cry from the days of Pong and Super Mario Brothers. The reviews below are only partial reviews, since every single one is a game in progress currently.
Advent Rising is the first in a trilogy under development. The game developers signed SF&F author Orson Scott Card onto the project to help develop both the story and the dialogue, and you can certainly see his imprint in various places (e.g. FTL communication, the ansible).
The storyline itself is captivating. Humanity is on the brink of total annihilation. A race of aliens who call themselves the Seekers have travelled the universe under the guise of peace in search of all human colonies. The Seekers see themselves as the most advanced race in the universe, and they want to keep it that way. However, certain religious prophecies have spoken of another race, humans, that will rise to a higher evolutionary plane, taking their place at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder. So, the Seekers are systematically hunting down and destroying all humans they find.
In Advent Rising you play the part of Gideon Wyeth, a human pilot who is fated to become the first human to trascend, acquiring the power to ultimately rid the universe of the Seeker pestilence. You fight with him through many battles and revel in the acquisition of new strength and power. The story drives forward at a breakneck pace, leaving hardly enough time to catch your breath. It is a pleasure to play a game that has a great plot. The dialogue and voiceacting is excellent. Gideon even has the ability to fire at two targets at once, if you switch back and forth between very quickly.
There are, however, a handful of downsides to the game. Some of the forward movement in the story, particularly at the beginning, is a little bit rushed. It is almost as if the writers simply want to get you to ‘the good stuff’ and so hurry past some of the key development points. The mechanics are also a little bit clunky, with the auto-targetting system forcing to look somewhere that may not be in the direction you want to go. Advent Rising also attempts to follow in Halo’s footsteps by rendering the gameplay and cutscene graphics as you go. This sometimes causes the game to slow down and stutter, an annoyance at the least and a fatal hindrace at the worst.
On a scale of 5, I give the story a 4.5 and the gameplay mechanics a 3.5. If you love science fiction and video games, I recommend it.
Ok, so I don’t go exclusively for the story-driven video games. Sometimes it’s just fun to get a fast-paced game to play purely for the fun of it. In Burnout 3 your only mission is to win as many races as possible and take out as many opponents as you can. The more gold medals you win, the more cars you earn. Races span the USA, Europe, and the Far East.
The more opponents you crash, the more cars you earn. The more points you acquire, the more cars you earn. Get the picture? It’s high-speed, high-action, and high-intensity paired with a diverse soundtrack. As the driver you get to race everything from coupes to muscle cars to circuit racers to semi trucks. If you want quick, mindless action that tests your reflexes, then Burnout 3 is the game for you.
On a scale of 5, I rate Burnout 3 as a solid 4.5 for both fun and mechanics.
A video game that features Disney characters. A kids’ game, you think, right? Not so. Kingdom Hearts has quickly become one of my favorite games.
Someone is unlocking the doors between worlds, causing each world to blink out of existence, one by one. It is up to Sora, as the wielder of the Keyblade, to figure out why as he searches for his friends Riku and Kairi. He teams up with Donald and Goofy as they search through numerous worlds to solve these riddles, meeting dozens of familiar Disney faces along the way. The voiceactors feature many of the same people who were cast in the original films.
The mechanics of the game are very simple to learn and use, and the story so far has been first-rate. Sora has been exiled from his island home and thrust into the heart of the action as the Keyblade has chosen him to be its master. Now, Sora must track down the keyholds on each world and lock them to prevent their total destruction. He makes many friends and enemies along the way to discovering the secrets of these strange circumstances.
Disney and Squaresoft have created a believeable world where Disney and Final Fantasy characters can co-exist. I am looking forward to seeing how this chapter ends and where Kingdom Hearts 2 (scheduled for distribution at the end of this month) picks up.
On a scale of 5, I rate the story a 5 and the mechanics a 4.5.
This is a bit of a blast from the past. The Legend of Dragoon is one of my favorite PSOne games. It was developed by the same people who brought us the Final Fantasy series. The story follows Dart as he strives to save the world from ultimate destruction. Along the way, he discovers his fate to become one of the legendary Dragoon, humans chosen to wield the power of the dragon in the fight against evil. He pairs up with six others, all who become Dragoon along the way, and together they move inexorably toward the final confrontation.
One of the things that I most love about this game is the ability affect the battle during the actual attack sequences. Dragoon is built around the turn-based style of gameplay that the Final Fantasy series is famous for. Your character comes up, you select the action for him (or her) to perform, and then sit back and watch as the character carries out that action. In Dragoon, you take an active part in helping reinforce each of your characters attacks by helping them complete their ‘Additions’. Each successful completion boosts the strength of the attack and unlocks more powerful additions.
The Legend of Dragoon is a strong game with a great story. The dialogue is a little stilted, as is typical of any Japanese game that has been translated into English. However, I think you will find that you can overlook the awkwardness and see a terrific game with an exciting story to drive it.
On a scale of 5, I rate the story at 4.5 and the mechanics at 4.5.
I have two other games currently in progress, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, but I think I’ll call it quits here for now. I’ll likely review these two at a later date, after I have gotten a little further through them.
Tags: advent-rising, burnout-3, kingdom-hearts, orson-scott-card, playstation, ps2, ratchet-and-clank, Reviews, science-fiction, Speculative Fiction, splinter-cell-chaos-theory, the-legend-of-dragoon, video-game-reviews, video-games, xbox
It’s been a while since I’ve written any reviews, so I guess I’d best get my act together:
Has Been
When I first heard that William Shatner had produced another music album, my first thought was, “Another?! What was his first?!” And my second was, “Shatner?! Music?!” All I could picture was Captain Kirk, and so I had a hard time seeing him as a sensational music star. Yet, here was his album, Has Been, and it is truly sensational.
To be fair Shatner didn’t actually compose the music for this album. Instead, he teamed up with Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five fame, who wrote the music to back the poetry of Shatner. I was skeptical when I first started to listen to the album. Few actors are able to make the transition into other mediums, and with the abysmal flop of Shatner’s Tek War series, I didn’t have high hopes for a music album. Yet, I was delighted and thrilled right from the first track all the way to the end. Ben Folds is on top of his game, and Shatner’s lyricism is catchy and engaging. It is a wholly different style from just about anything else in my collection and strikes a resonant chord with this musician and artist. I give the album two thumbs up and hope that Shatner produces another in the near future.
Armageddon & Glorious Appearing
This is probably more a review of the entire Left Behind series than of just these last two books in the series. Written by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, the series follows a massive cast of characters across the global landscape of a planet caught in the Tribulational judgments prophesied in Scripture. Based heavily in both Old and New Testament prophecy, the Left Behind series shows what these judgments might be like from the eyes of those who experience it firsthand.
The series was exceptionally well-written and very enjoyable as dramatic fiction. It is certain, however, that the books cannot do justice to the terror and destruction that will one day lay waste to the world as we know it and decimate its population to a fraction of what it is today. Jenkins and LaHaye did an exceptional job of covering all the relevant prophecies contained within Scripture, though it is certain that a fair amount of artistic license was taken with passages whose interpretation is symbolic and difficult to determine. Ultimately, though, the sequence of events is right on target and encompasses a sobering description of life between Rapture and Millenium.
Intergalactic Medicine Show
A relatively new online magazine for science fiction and fantasy aficionados can be discovered at Intergalactic Medicine Show. Founded by Orson Scott Card IGMS is an outlet for amateur SFF authors to display their wares. IGMS is a quarterly publication and features several short stories in each issue, plus a short story from the Ender’s Game universe penned by Card himself (also available in mp3 format). October’s issue also included Cards first novel Hot Sleep (later republished as The Worthing Chronicles) as a five-part series and the comic Fat Farm, adapted from one of Card’s short stories. Free content features movie and book reviews and columns by various writers. If you’re a sci-fi/fantasy buff, IGMS is well worth the $2.50 per issue fee.
Tags: books, has-been, intergalactic-medicine-show, left-behind-armageddon, left-behind-glorious-appearing, magazines, music, orson-scott-card, science-fiction, theological-fiction, william-shatner
When taking the first steps into your new world as a speculative writer, it’s often a good idea to ignore the first things you ‘see’. It’s all too easy to get caught in the Land of Clichés, where the environment in which your story takes places resembles the generic mold for your stereotypical science fiction or fantasy story. Your first ideas about what this world should look like are not necessarily your best, and so it is important to take a second look in order to create a world that is both interesting and unique.
In his book Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card talks about how to create characters that are unique and rich. Part of this process involves taking an idea that might be common and giving it a good twist. Bring the idea in from an unexpected direction, giving it an element of surprise to the reader and thus making it more interesting to the story as a whole. For instance, in my previous article, I wrote about a landscape of hot cinder cones. That immediately brings to mind volcanic activity, which was surely what I intended there. However, had I developed the scene further, you might have found that the volcanic activity, and hence the cones themselves were the product of the war, whose existence was implied by the debris in the volcanic field. The war could have been so devastating that it shook the earth’s balance and brought forth the its fury. Or the volcanic field could have been created by some advanced technology brought by the invaders themselves. Or twist it further, and it could have been created by the aboriginal inhabitants in order to keep the invaders out or even to cover their headquarters or subterranean cities. The possibilities are endless.
It’s a continual challenge to come up with new and fresh ideas in my writing. I am an infant in writing, comparatively speaking, and so twisting ideas to make them unique and new is still very much a challenge, but I hope that as I write more, the process will become second nature and that my stories will be more interesting and enjoyable.
Tags: characters-and-viewpoint, creativity, orson-scott-card, Speculative Fiction, Writing
I have this theory.
In his book Insomnia, Stephen King describes a man who is able to see auras surrounding people. The color of the auras reflected the individuals’ moods and relative proximity to death. Additionally, the auras of people who were emotionally close would interweave, changing the overall colors of both
auras.
In the famous Enderseries, a scientific phenomenon is described. This phenomenon is something called a philote, a term coined by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card to describe theoretical rays or lines which have the size of a geometric point and possess no mass or inertia. Philotes make up all particles in the observable universe by combining or “twining”. This twining between loved ones binds them together, no matter how far apart they may be.
Nearly every major religion I can think of acknowledges that Man is a spiritual creature, that part of his being and nature is insubstantial. This spirit is the part that is believed to continue to exist eternally, long after the body has died and returned to dust.
I have heard stories of clairvoyance-like insight that a loved has just endured a life-threatening crisis. Or of the individual who knows the approximate state of a close friend or family member, no matter how far away they are.
What if there is some substance to the speculations of people like King and Card?
Have you ever found your mood altered to match someone else’s, simply by being near them? Have you ever passed someone on the street and felt substantially affected by them, however momentarily? Have you ever just looked at someone and somehow knew what they were
thinking, feeling, experiencing at that moment? Or been able to read their personality? Or gotten a general impression of their past? And then been astonished to find out your impressions were correct?
What about feeling bonded to someone, whether it be a loved one, a spouse, or a close friend? Close fellowship with others that goes way beyond just typical interactions, that extends into the spiritual and leaves a lasting impression on your core?
Larry Crabb, in his book Connecting,
talks about pouring oneself into another who is hurting in order to help heal the pain. It is a spiritual endeavor, the formation of a bond to provide strength and support to another during crisis.
My theory is this: I have come to believe that, while our spirit is perpetually linked to our physical selves, that it is not necessarily completely contained within our mortal bodies, that it
exceeds those borders and touches and intermingles with everyone and everything around us. From personal experience, I have been touched and affected by things and people in inexplicable ways, even though many of those encounters have been cursory at best. I also
have to wonder if we don’t leave a part of our spirits with those we love most, or if maybe our spirits are stretched in a way as to be continually linked to them. In no way do I believe that we have the capability of spiritual omnipresence, but I do wonder if our spirits have a greater capability of connection and perception than we give them credit for. I know that God has given me a gift of perception and insight, for being able to quickly and accurately see what is going on inside people. Often, that insight comes more as intuition than by direct observation, and I have to wonder if my spirit is mingling with that person, thereby providing me with information.
It’s a fascinating theory to me, and I see evidence that says it might be at least somewhat legitimate.
Tags: auras, connecting, ender-quartet, enders-game, insomnia, larry-crabb, orson-scott-card, philote, spirit, stephen-king
