Everyday future tech

In the dome of Titan that the rebels from the Wheel have set up there's a disturbing machine. It's a waste recycler that changes human waste - human body waste - into food. Or, as Jamie puts it the machine turns human waste into "things like biscuits that weren't biscuits, bowls of stuff like mushroom soup that wasn't mushroom soup" (164).

The strangest part of this though, and the whole book, really, is that Baxter doesn't dwell on explaining the technology that he presents. He gives a quick run down of how it works in scientific terms, and then moves right along. This isn't a detriment. Instead, such a quick treatment makes the technology that he describes seem all the more real. As if it's so everyday and common that readers will already know the ins and outs of it.

What I do wonder, though, is whether or not such a recycler's output would suffer from diminishing returns. If the source of your nutrients is always your own waste, stuff that passes after your body's taken what it can, then wouldn't you eventually be making food that was nutrient neutral?

No more escape

What is it about the parts in between No More Heroes' title bouts that make the game feel like so much work?

The new minigame has Travis picking trash, and Lovikov Balls are now on the minimap. There's nothing but grind here. A grind that greatly contrasts with the rush of running through a few enemy-filled rooms before taking on a boss. Putting these two things side by side, weirdly, makes No More Heroes one of the few games that mimics life.

Not because it's an everyday occurrence to run down a hall lopping people in half before fighting a strong opponent to the death - definitely not. But because in the game that experience offers such a thrill, such an adrenaline rush. The sort of thing you might feel on weekends when you do whatever it is you do for fun.

Then, almost immediately afterwards (it's cushioned only by a few status screens), you're back out in the world, in the week, and you've got to work toward your next weekend. The grind always takes a lot longer than the title bout and its lead-up, too, just as weekends are only two out of every seven days, while the rest remain for work.

This blog post argues that No More Heroes has no big lesson or moral that it's trying to teach, no theme that permeates its every pixel. In short, no artistic statement. But I disagree.

No More Heroes is a translation of the binary of work/fun that most people experience in their workaday lives from real world situations to over the top video game situations. But does that mean that this game is a joke Suda51 plays on everyone who plays it? Or is it supposed to be somehow ironic?

Rollen(ts)'

Outside of the Incandenza family, Marathe is the most interesting character in Infinite Jest. He's a member of the militant group of Quebecois wheelchair assassins Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents  (the AFR) and Wallace nails Marathe's Quebecois with the eye-dialect that he uses.

But, there's another reason for my enjoyment of Marathe. He is the foil to everything that ONAN and the book's depiction of the USA stands for. As Steeply so rightly says, he's an anomaly (along with the other wheelchair assassins) because he isn't motivated by anything bigger than himself. This makes Marathe interesting almost by default since there isn't any political or cultural motivation behind his actions and the string of questions with which he binds Steeply's wits.

It's this combative quality of Marathe's that makes him so intriguing as a character. Not to mention, he's the only real window we have into the mentality of the AFR - something purely of Wallace's invention and reflective of his creative depth.

A radiant ramble

It is done. Vainqueur has been beaten, and the sword called the "Historica" has been powered up "Masamune" style to the "True Historica." What's more, 217 of the total 236 nodes have been finished. I'll be treated to the best ending because of that. Once I actually get through the boss gauntlet that is the game's end.

On the cusp of Radiant Historia's end, I just have a quick bit about the game's time travel mechanic. As a refresher for anyone who hasn't played Radiant Historia, you can time travel from any save point to any critical moment in time. So you're not able to zip around with quite as much freedom as you can in Chrono Trigger's Epoch, but such structured time travelling adds a great deal of depth to the game.

Replaying events over and over again does get tedious, but pressing "Start" or "X" skips you through cutscenes and dialogue. However, it does allow you to see everything in the game without any fear of missing out on sidequests or hidden dialogue. Plus, if you ever do want to go back to get something every event in the game is ordered in a complete dual timeline. And sidequests are set just below or above the regular story event where they're activated.

Thus, as boggling as time travel might be, Radiant Historia's set up makes it easy to find where you need to go and to go there. On this count, Chrono Trigger could be downright opaque in its hinting at sidequests. So Radiant Historia, though frequently compared to Chrono Trigger, bests it in terms of time travel mechanics, particularly because its timelines' organization is perfectly suited to a handheld like the DS.

Lay away book special: An icy wheel of body and soul

It's only given a bit of dialogue, but Stephen Baxter's mention of how artificial intelligences are treated in The Wheel of Ice makes sense. This bit of dialogue is spoken by Luis Reyes, the ambassador from the Planetary Ethics Commission, on page 116 when he's inspecting the destroyed mining machine. Despite the brevity of its expression, the idea that an artificial intelligence could become distressed or feel guilt is something I'd never considered before.

It's a concept that's new to me, and yet something that would be needed to make any artificial intelligence human - particularly if it's an AI designed to carry out the objectives of a company but that finds itself physically unable to do so.

This idea may seem to underscore the notion of a mind/body split, but it does just the opposite. It's the body's failing that throws the mind into distress, suggesting a direct connection. The two parts of the whole (even the machine whole) are out of harmony and so it's not so much a moment that emphasizes the separation of body and mind, but that highlights the importance of one to the other and vice versa.

Interestingly, earlier in the book (on page 107) the Doctor passes a comment about the damage imprisonment will do to the colony's children's souls. This sentiment doesn't get developed any further, but once more prods the issue of how the mind and the body are connected.

Since this concern runs parallel with that of Reyes' concern for the AI in the destroyed mining machine, it's fair to guess that the entity from the book's prologue must be an intelligence of sorts, one who was possibly the bigger body from which the moon called Mnemosyne came. Perhaps it was even the intelligent system of a ship, and the Blue Dolls that the TARDIS crew and heads of the Wheel have now encountered en masse are that ship's security system, or its own crew.

No more high school rumbles

Fighting your way to the eighth ranking's fight is pretty cool. Not because it's such a Tarantino-esque experience, but because the formulaic fight-through-the-hallway-'til-you-reach-the-boss process has already been toyed with. It's altered simply enough, too.

The fight for eighth takes place in Santa Destroy High School, and for whatever reason the boss' minions are all flannel-wearing, axe- and sledgehammer-wielding gents. There are also a few with torches. None of these weapons can stand against a beam sword, of course, but halfway through the halls, things change up. One of the minions with a torch raises it to the school's sprinkler, causing the whole system to go off. Travis' beam sword runs on electricity and so he winds up getting electrocuted.

Instead of being an instant death however (and in keeping with Suda51/Grasshopper Manufacture's sense of humour), your controls lock up except for the analog stick, with which you have to guide Travis past the myriad minions scattered throughout the hall. Since the sprinkler's main control box is at this particular hall's end, you have to turn around and make your way back after having disabled it. It might not sound like much of a play on the formula, but it's simple stuff like that that can really change how a game like this plays.

The rumble with the boss herself, Shinobu, is decent, but I must've chosen the "Sweet" difficulty setting in the file I'm finishing off. Though at first I was sure that I'd need a second shot at it, pulling off the newest wrestling move left her vulnerable for the coup de grâce, and the battle was won.

Now that it's back to the game's duller cash collecting mode, I do have one thing to say aside from gushing about how interesting the title fights can be. The game should allow you to replay missions.

Not necessarily to re-fight previous assassins, but because trading cards can be missed, and missions can be somewhat lucrative depending on how effective you are in a fight. Mowing lawns, collecting coconuts, and various assassination gigs get boring fast, especially when you're forced to repeat them a few times over to get from title bout to title bout.

Grinding for the secret boss

The fight against Vainqueur is frustratingly difficult. The real kicker is that it's a two part battle.

The first part is handled easily enough. A flurry of G-Fire and G-Frost brings the spider-back house and Vainqueur himself tumbling down. What comes next is quite a bit trickier, though.

Vainqueur splits himself into four and the battle begins - with the four of them. More often than not you'll be fighting against six turns with your own three, and truly, as the guide I'm following says, the fight would be practically impossible without one of Eruca's techniques: Divine Light. This nulls two attacks for a single ally, and is what helped me to keep alive until the collective Vainqueur had about 300 HP left.

At that point Marco and Eruca were knocked out, and Stocke was left with 10 HP. Resurrecting the other members, even to draw fire away from Stocke, proved useless, and in a few more turns Stocke and co. were immolated. Considering the fact that Stocke and Marco were at level 61 and Eruca was at level 45 when the recommended level for the fight is 68, I have to say I managed the battle well.

I've managed to grind pretty nicely too. Making it clearer who is available for your party at different nodes would be greatly convenient at this point, though.

Replaying the boss fight at the "Etherion" node to level Eruca up brought her to level 51 quickly enough, but there's got to be another node where she's available and there's a ruin or field to clear the monsters out of. Still, I'll be giving the game's hardest boss another go before pushing the party to level 68 all around.

The end of the chains

Finishing off The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford, something happened time and again. I would have a poem read, turn the page and find more poem. For a lot of the poems in which this happened it's a big problem since each was stronger in my eyes before the page was turned.

Poetry is about brevity. There can be long poems, but as I wrote in the previous entry on this collection of poetry, long poems run the risk of overcooking the idea or the feeling that they're getting at. Epic poems are possible, still, I think, but even they vary their ideas, characters, and viewpoints enough to keep the material fresh - even for thousands of lines.

It's possible that each poem that presented this sort of false end was planned. It's not outside the power of the poet to make decisions about how a poem appears on the page. But each time I discovered what I thought to be the poem's end was false, what came later was just an explanation of the emotion or idea that I had already gleaned from what of the poem had come before. In other words, these poems are examples of their poets nattering on a little too long.

A professor in my undergrad once said that when you've written a poem and feel that it's finished you should cut the last two (or three or four) lines so that instead of resolution, the reader's left with loose threads. Not because good poetry is vague or somehow hard to read by nature, but because good poetry shouldn't need to explain things with elaboration; word choice, word placement, sentence structure, and/or enjambment should be used instead.

That said, C.D. Wright's pieces are what I look for in poetry. There's music in her lines, and reading the two poems she has in the penultimate chain offers just enough to grasp what she's saying. Or, at the least, to feel like you grasp it. Nonetheless, I have to say that Linda Tomol Pennisi's "Doll Repair Shop" is still the best piece of the entire collection.

The assassin and the ghost city

Alas, the garbage in Santa Destroy isn't taken out to bins on a regular basis. At least, within the fiction of No More Heroes, that seems to be the case.

I had hoped that the dumpsters you can kick open to find cash or clothing would refill themselves after the game had been turned off and turned back on. Mostly so that the fee gathering process between each title fight could be more efficient.

Right now, the game definitely offers quite a bit to explore, and it's apparently going to open up further at some point in the future. That's what all the dim entryways that say "Preparing..." when I walk over them suggest, anyway. But it still feels like an empty world.

There're people walking the streets, and tons of cars on the road, but none of these can be meaningfully interacted with. You can zoom past pedestrians or push them around, and you can practice good driving or cut cars off like a maniac - but there aren't any consequences for such actions. I've even cut off cop cars and sped past them and nothing's done. It's almost as if the world is populated, but only by blank, non-aggressive zombies and robot cars.

This emptiness is particularly troubling because a good portion of the game forces you to go through the city itself, looking for cash. That means that between title bouts and their lead-ups, parts of the game that are intense and challenging, you're demoted to wandering around a wasteland that has the illusion of being populated.

What I wonder, though, is this: If, say, there were a Legend of Zelda mod for No More Heroes that re-skinned the city, its people and vehicles, to look like Twilight Princess, would the game feel as empty?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. And, subscribe to my feed to be notified of Going Box By Box updates.

A chain of clay before a chain of gold

Disappointingly, the poetry chain from issue 22 of McSweeney's that starts with Michael Ondaatje is quite lackluster. Some of those within it are good poems, but most just lay the poetry on far too thickly.

Instead of kneading an idea and letting it bake up, nearly all the poets in this chain treat poetry like a person with a mouth of sweet teeth treats syrup: it's laid on every idea to the point where that idea's no longer recognizable.

Kay Ryan, on the other hand has exemplary poems in this collection. They're punchy and rhythmical.

Sarah Lindsay also has two good poems in this collection, Though "Cheese Penguin" is particularly brilliant. Its steady pace is the perfect vehicle for its bizarre story. A story that wouldn't be out of place on a They Might Be Giants album.

Radiating spoilers

I was actually kind of right in my previous Radiant Historia entry. As it turns out, Heiss and Stocke don't share a soul, but they do share a function - they're both sacrifices from the ritual used to maintain the world's stability. The thing is, Heiss wants to destroy the world because he sees nothing but the mistakes of the past, while Stocke remains staunchly in favour of saving the world - even at the cost of his life - because he sees the hope of the future.

For the end-game of an RPG, Radiant Historia does a good job of explaining things, too. Like the Chronicles themselves. The two books are given to the sacrifices, and intended to help them build character, to strengthen the soul that is to be sacrificed and immerse it in the power of Flux. Those sacrifices that are particularly Flux-imbued are supposed to be that much more effective. Heiss, were he willing to sacrifice himself, seems like he'd be able to stop the whole desertification thing simply by following through with the ritual himself. He does a lot of jumping around in time, especially as you chase after him.

Oh, and Heiss isn't King Victor of Granorg, but, instead is his brother. Go figure.

On the sidequest front, things are nearly at a close. All that remains now is to fight Vainqueur, and receive the True Historica - the best sword in the game. Apparently this fight is the hardest in all of Stocke's travels, but after the rigmarole surrounding the last item you need to challenge Vainqueur in the first place, it can't be that bad.

At the very least, after fighting those crystal enemies at least four times more than I would've had to had I just beelined to the save point, the skill the "Soul Pact" teaches Stocke had better be good - better than the "Omnipedia" teaching Gafka a move that temporarily raises everyone's crit rate: A move that's good on paper, but antithetical to my magic-heavy tactics.

Prescience within a perfect storm of words

David Foster Wallace seems strangely prescient. Although the specifics are a little off, Hal's essay about how the Teleputer took over the entertainment industry and pushed out the big network TV corporations mirrors what's currently going on in the home entertainment arena. "On demand" services like Netflix and Hulu haven't entirely ousted network television and cable, but that seems to be the way things are going.

Of course, what throws Wallace's parodic envisioning of the future off is that fiction allows authors to play with perfect conditions. Everything lines up perfectly for the outcome that they want to write (or they know it does if it doesn't appear to to readers), and then they go with it. This ideal condition quality of such fiction is supremely evident in Hal's note that the PR guy for the first third party president of the United States (the crooner Johnny Gentle) took up the incumbent's campaign because he had recently been pushed out of an ad agency that had previously been a giant in the then recently deceased network TV world.

Wallace pads this situation out with other conditions as well, such as a high pitch political disillusionment that sees the third party candidate's party attracting people inspired by Rush Limbaugh and Hilary Rodham Clinton alike. His reasons for how North America looks in the world of Infinite Jest are definitely fleshed out, to say the least.

And, perhaps conveniently for a blog like this, are simply too detailed to go through in one entry. Besides, it's much more entertaining to read about Mario Incandenza's filmed puppet show re-enactment of how the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) came about and the pageantry around its annual showing at E.T.A.

No more linearity

Getting off the Schpeltiger and walking around San Destroy has made No More Heroes feel much more complete. Maybe it's because it makes the game feel less linear. After all, once I was out walking I found myself exploring - and taking in quite a haul.

Throughout the city there are tons of spots to dig for treasure. With an upgrade for your beamsword these show up on the map. Each buried find yields £1000.

On top of that, dumpsters can be kicked open to find even more loot.

If there's gold in the bin Travis walks away with £2000, bringing me that much closer to the next title match. But, sometimes you'll find a shirt in the trash, apparently making it perfect for immediate wear. Customizing Travis' outfit doesn't seem to have any benefits, but some of the shirts have really cool designs.

Along with cash and clothing, I've also been finding a lot of Lovikov Balls. Later in the game these are traded for hidden skills, and already I'm well on my way to finding all 49.

Though, knowing that, and that each skill requires seven balls, really makes me want to play Grasshopper Manufacture's Gamecube entry, Killer7.

Lay away book special: Looking for the hand that spins the wheel

The Wheel of Ice was maybe a script before it was a novel. That's the sense that I get from an oddity of the book's organization. Every time there's a flashback, it isn't presented as the stuff of a regular chapter, or even given space as its own. Instead they're delivered in multi-sectioned interludes.

These parts of the book let the flashbacks breathe, greatly benefiting the characters within them. But otherwise, unless there's some sort of editorial business at work here, I don't see why they need to be separate from the rest of the story.

Granted, separating them out like this does make them into more than just an embedded reminiscence. I'm not sure that seeing Phee's maternal ancestry as they passed the amulet down to her would have had quite the same impact if we were constantly reminded that she and Jamie were huddled in a shelter on Encephalaus with the rest of those gone skiing.

Speaking of which, the character of Jo, Phee's mom, reminds me of Lucca's mom from Chrono Trigger. They didn't come to be confined to wheelchairs for the same reasons, but it's perfectly within reason to say that Jo's character is a soldier version of Lara's.

Pushing the Chrono Trigger connection further, the amulet that Phee always has with her is now implicated as an object that has travelled through time. Could Stephen Baxter have played the RPG classic and taken a lead from Marle's pendant?

Alternatively, the amulet's origin in a "fossil" could be a nod to the Fourth Doctor story The Hand of Fear.

In this serial, Sarah Jane Smith becomes hypnotized by a ring on the fossilized hand of the Kastrian criminal Eldrad, and brings about his resurrection. The ring is found in 1970s Earth, and though it's been dormant for millions of years rather than having travelled through time, the same sort of idea is at work: A piece of ancient alien technology is on Earth, is discovered by someone and one way or another its true purpose is fulfilled. That's just what seems to be happening with Phee's amulet and the strange blue ceramic-y beings the miners of the Wheel are starting to encounter.

If this pattern is being followed, then all that's left is the why. Given the book's tagline of "Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration. Whatever the cost." and the prologue about the intelligence responsible for these things, the why looks like it'll be because that intelligence failed. Shifting the question to the how.

Guessing ahead in history

I'm finally caught up on Radiant Historia's sidequests. I've still got to find two more of the pacts required to unlock the game's secret boss that's more difficult than the boss waiting at story's end and finish a couple of other quests along the way, and that's it.

Progressing a little bit into the Final Chapter of the Alternative History, a huge twist has been rounded. Heiss is the one with the Black Chronicle - since he disabled the Flux manipulating powers of the chamber beneath Granorg castle. Plus, it's also become possible that Heiss is the previous ruler of Granorg, King Victor.

All I have to back up this guess is Heiss' mysterious origin, his possession of the Black Chronicle (since King Victor was its last owner), and Aht's realization that there's something similar about Heiss and Stocke. If Stocke is a revived half of Ernst's (Eruca's brother, whom King Victor slew for the Flux ritual) soul, then it makes sense that Heiss possesses the soul's other half as the performer of the Flux ritual. In short, such an arrangement means they share a soul, and that's likely what Aht noticed about them.

It all sounds crazy, but that's what makes these sorts of J-RPGs awesome.

Poetry window shopping

McSweeney's The Poetry Chains of Dominc Luxford: Ten Poets Pick Ten More And So On continues to be a rewarding read.

Not because every poem's a gem, but because for all of the great poems in a chain there is often an amazing link in a series of chains. From chains four to seven this standout poem is Linda Tomil Pennisi's "Doll Repair Shop."

A prose poem, "Doll Repair Shop" draws its strength from the surreal connections made between dolls wounds and various things and actions. Pennisi's placing the things and acts in brackets and prefacing each with "Think:" amplifies the power of these connections. Why? Because it doesn't just present them, but tthe imperative makes you think whatever follows the colon.

Even on repeated readings "Doll Repair Shop"'s effect hasn't lessened.

With another four links to go, "Doll Repair Shop" has a good chance of being my favourite in the collection (A. Van Jordan's comic book-inspired poem "The Atom Discovers String Theory DC Comics, June - July 1964, #13 "Weapon Watches of Chronos" being a close second).

Shaky on the controls

No More Heroes isn't a fighting game by any means. But, were it not for the odd mission that requires you to only use wrestling moves, I would have never remembered that they were in the game to begin with. I'd found a manual that reminded Travis of an old move he used to know, but figured that it probably just unlocked some cutscene or other down the line. After all when combat starts, Travis doesn't prime his chair-handling fists or stretch his rope-jumping muscles - he fires up the beam sword!

Curiously, though, hitting "B" during fights causes Travis to kick high or low. Stunning an enemy with either kick, or indeed the beam katana, allows him to then grab the enemy (another "B" button press) and perform a wrestling move (with the help of moving the wiimote and nunchuck as instructed). These are usually one-hit KOs.

Getting back to the point, when an assassination mission had opened up that required that only wrestling moves be used I was a bit mystified. Surely, before I went on my year or more hiatus from the game, there was a tutorial showing these moves. But I had since completely forgotten them - completely.

In fact, No More Heroes' controls are so different from those in games I often play (RPGs, platformers, adventures), that I don't have them carved into my muscle memory. I hadn't played for a week, and the controls for the Schpeltiger (Travis' motorbike) had pretty much vanished from my memory. "A" for accelerate and "B" brake took me a while to recall.

Because the game's controls aren't necessarily the most intuitive (and my used copy didn't come with an instruction manual) the game would be much more quick to pick up if the menu screen included a control configuration option. Not only would this make it possible to customize the controls to some extent, it would also give players an in-game chance to refresh their memories. Fighting games have such menus, and what's a beat 'em up if not a free-roaming fighting game?

Dipping back into Infinite Jest

Orin J. Incandenza was intrigued by the woman that came to interview him. So intrigued that when he tells Hal all about it, it sounds as if they were almost a couple for a spell. But, that woman is the only hulky woman in the book - agent Steeply's brilliant lady journalist cover.

Yeah, amidst stories of junkies dying from bleach laced heroine and coke-addicted pregnant mothers giving birth to unformed stillbirths, there's a good old fashioned man-in-women's-clothing joke in Infinite Jest. To lighten things up, of course.

And the joke does just that. Though the reveal's being tucked away in an endnote truly brings it into the book's ken. Infinite Jest's Endnotes continue to be informative, but the book itself is just too much like the creator of the "MO" robots in Adventure Time - being sustained by extra bits.

They manage well enough, though, especially when an endnote's about neorealism films that aren't recorded or distributed, merely imagined around a single real life person. "Found Drama" as James Incandenza chooses to call them. Such an idea is perfectly suited to the hyper-realism of Infinite Jest, and though reading the book's endnotes is sometimes a pain, they're all part of the experience. An experience that looks like it'll still be around my reading list for a solid while.

Thinking on its sides, a game requiring no guide

Radiant Historia's sidequests continue to be full of character development. From the simple 'the secret of the Beastkind is that they're a balance of humanity and bestiality,' to the final admission of a romance between Raynie and Stocke that's been evident from chapter one, there's a great variety in the game. The discrepancy is, understandably, based on how long characters have been around. Gafka's been around for far less time than Raynie, after all.

Otherwise, the sidequests seem to be entirely fuelled by character development. Mostly because the items and equipment you get from them just aren't any good. Though, as I've mentioned before, this is mostly because the game allows you to skip around so much. As a result you can't really miss anything, and so it's inevitable that you'll wind up with some second tier items from sidequests. Unless you've used a guide from the get go.

Speaking for myself, a guide's not really necessary to  play through Radiant Historia. Because you're able to jump through time with quite a bit of freedom, that's often what you need to do to progress when stuck. Playing it blind as I have does mean you could wind up experiencing the story out of order. However, I think that's a good way to experience the disorientation such constant time travel would undoubtedly cause.

Lay away book special: A perspective on Baxter's world building

I'm really digging The Wheel of Ice. Not only do you have the second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe, but even the incidental characters have great potential. Characters like Phee, her older brother Sam, younger sister Casey; their mother Jo; and this Luis Reyes person apparently on the wheel as a kind of moral police. Even aside from the whole mining colony on a fragmented moon in Saturn's ring setting, Baxter has created quite a vivid world in characters alone.

In particular, the different classes ranging from "A" to "D" are downright curious. As far as I can figure they're not related to family - since Phee is an "A", Sam is a "C" and their mother is a "B." There's definitely some sort of merit system involved, but what exactly it's based on hasn't come up yet. The intrigue around the "Blue Dolls" that are apparently sabotaging the wheel also goes a long way to breathing life into this imagined colony. Nothing breathes life into something quite like a potentially imagined crisis, after all.

However, I find Baxter's treatment of perspective to be a little bit jarring. We're given different characters' perspectives throughout the novel, but they're quite entrenched in those characters' own viewpoints. It's not entirely a matter of just reporting things from a set character's perspective because they're there to see them happen (as it often felt was the case in Shada).

Instead, there's a lot more fluid internal monologue going on, though perspectives regularly shift mid-chapter. So, for example, we'll begin a chapter in Zoe's perspective, but then the Doctor will come in and Zoe will leave, and we'll jump into the Doctor's head. Maybe reading A Song of Ice and Fire has made me used to a one character/chapter form, but jumping between characters in the same chapter will definitely take some getting used to.

Lay away book special: The wheel begins to turn

There's a marked difference in the style and voice of Gareth Roberts' Shada and Stephen Baxter's The Wheel of Ice. Both are Doctor Who novels, one being a novelization of a serial that never aired, and the other an original second Doctor story. This difference alone could be enough to explain the difference in styles, but I don't think it goes quite far enough.

Baxter's style is much colder, for starters. Not only does this suit the subject of The Wheel of Ice, it's also closer to the tone of many second Doctor stories. The second Doctor himself (as played by Patrick Troughton), is anything but cold, but more often than not the stories he finds himself embroiled in political intrigue, plots that have huge repercussions and futuristic societies that have a tinge of dystopia about them. The Wheel of Ice is already looking like this sort of story, though I've only read four of the book's 47 chapters. Shada on the other hand, is a story simply immersed in all of the zany science fiction (with a helping of comedy) that is Tom Baker's era as the Doctor.

The difference is very refreshing, particularly because Stephen Baxter's writing style is closer to my own. Also, the book's opening promises many more interesting characters than those found in Shada, which ought to make for a more rapturous read.

Away game special: What makes it "Epic"

Maybe I'm not great at holding a Wiimote steady. Maybe my sense of what's flat doesn't jive with the Wii's. Maybe Kirby's Epic Yarn just has levels where the difficulty spikes.

Considering that the rest of the game sets the difficulty bar pretty low, it's probably that last one.

Having just played through the level in Cake Land where you need to be train Kirby/Fluff, this so-called easy game has taken on a new face.

The level in question (Cocoa Station) doesn't have a lot of enemies or pitfalls. If it did it would be all the more infuriating. Why? Because you control train Kirby/Fluff by drawing tracks with the Wiimote.

These tracks technically don't have to be perfectly flat, but make them too rocky and train Kirby/Fluff will fall right off. This is especially enraging when you're trying to reach a platform or get to a speed boost on the way to a yarn wall. Thankfully, the game shows a small mercy in the "B" button. Pressing it flips you around.

Truth be told, at this point in the game (halfway through), every world has one challenging level. This level is always one unlocked after beating a world's boss, as is to be expected. But the challenge never lies in getting to the level's goal. Instead, if lies in getting enough beads to earn a shiny gold medal.

Such a completionist concern might seem a strange reason to deem a level challenging. However, any old school hardcore gamer will be able to appreciate a game that ratchets up the difficulty every now and then; it's a quality that made Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country classics.

Lay away book special: Closing Shada down

Because, in the Doctor Who universe, Rassilon's got a hand in everything, there's even an insult named after him. Well, an insulting gesture, anyway.

This revelation might  be the highest point in the novelized Shada's wrap-up. That's not to say the ending is disappointing,  it's just a little generic.

Clare's role ends up being quite interesting, though. Throughout the novel she's aware of herself taking subservient roles when with the Doctor or the Professor, though she can never really explain why. Ultimately, though, she winds up as a kind of human Romana, a circumstance which undercuts the kind of variety having so many companions about brings. All the more so because Clare gets close to being what Liz Shaw was: as near the Doctor's scientific equal as a human can be.

Jumping to the book's actual ending, once more the afterword would have made a better foreword. In it, Roberts puts his version of Shada into the context of contemporary Doctor Who and Douglas Adams own body of work. This context brings the whole story into perspective, particularly the fact that Adams wasn't pleased with it.

In fact, when asked to do the six episode season seventeen finale, Adams wanted to write a story about the Doctor going into retirement, re-discovering himself, and then going back to planet saving by serial's end. That such a story is almost what we've recently seen play out with the eleventh Doctor shows just how  much of a visionary Adams could be.

As per Gareth Roberts' novelization of Shada, it is a thumping 70s sci-fi read.

Away game special: Galactic extras

Being able to play as Luigi in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is refreshing. It changes up the game's controls, and offers an extra challenge. Such is especially so because Luigi has slippery controls, so skidding off of edges is regularly risked.

Unfortunately, though, Luigi's appearance during the game suggests that Super Mario Galaxy 2 lacks the first game's Luigi mode. True, this mode's just a matter of playing through all of the same levels again. But it still works as an extension of the game's content. Super Mario Galaxy 2 looks like it's going to lack that extension.

Instead, being half-way through World 4 and having only 37 stars (out of a probable 120) suggests that this game's extra content is merely hidden.

After all, only a handful of the previous levels are "complete." Having so much hidden content is fine, but there's so much of it in the game that it can hardly be called "hidden."

Lay away book special: Shada's slang

Being written originally by a Brit and being novelized by a Brit, Gareth Roberts' Shada is full of slang.

For instance there's the Doctor's reference to "bung[ing] in peace across the universe" (on page 261). Translated into North American English, this simply means to casually throw away or give (http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/b.htm). Though that doesn't fully spell out the Doctor's meaning of casually travelling the cosmos.

Much more curious is the labelling of prisoners' rooms on Shada. Instead of being cells and blocks, the prisoners are in "chambers" and "cabinets" (page 286). These two words carry a lot of political weight in any English, but the second is also associated with storage.

Considering that Shada's a prison locked out of the regular flow of time, such an association seems appropriate. All the more so since the prison was designed to be a holding facility while the death penalty's legality was debated on Gallifrey. Nonetheless, referring to cells as cabinets is eerie.

Doing so implies a strong desire to see those imprisoned within as merely objects. It's a subtextual meaning of "cabinet" that dehumanizes what is within; effectively turning whatever is into "contents."

On the one hand, such dehumanization of Shada's inmates suggests that Gallifrey was truly torn on the matter of the death penalty. Those who were headed for it could only be officially recognized as objects.

On the other hand, the rhetorical flourish implies a dehumanization of the politicians embroiled in the debate (at least from a human perspective). Though their dehimanization would be to a more positive end: the coming together of many to rationally decide the best course of action for the group.

The way that the Doctor and Romana speak of the ancient Time Lords, though, suggests that their politicians were anything but coolly rational. All of which points to the strange pointedness of the two contexts of "cabinet" found here.

Away game special: Of patterned bosses

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is strangely quick. Levels take less than 10 minutes, and most that are incredbly challenging are a matter of speed, rather than precision or puzzle solving.

The game's bosses are a different story. Yet, they all have patterns that are unwavering. These bosses' difficulty lies in executing these patterns faster and faster and sometimes with extra obstacles in the way. Because of this, patience and observation are enough to make short work of the challenges that the game's bosses offer.

It has to be mentioned that bosses in the Super Mario universe have never been terribly tricky, though.

Actually the most memorably frustrating Super Mario bosses are from the 8- and 16-bit eras. That's because Mario had only his jump and a few minor power-ups (and the odd axe at bridge's end) to rely on then. More attacks and power-ups mean more things for a game to show, and as a result creative uses of said things are stifled.

But who would want a NES/SNES-style Super Mario game big enough to fill a DVD? And who would develop it?

Away game special: Super Mario Galaxy 2 vs. Kirby's Epic Yarn

The levels in Super Mario Galaxy 2 are weird. They're fairly open, but linear; they're three dimensional, but hemmed in. In some ways, actually, Kirby's Epic Yarn has better hidden secrets and branching paths.

The reason for this unexpected difference (3D games should, after all, trump 2D games when it comes to hiding things) is that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is made up of functional areas.

These are areas that have a specific purpose, like hosting a puzzle or minigame or introducing a new power up. Because much of the game's galaxies are full of such areas, it's fairly easy to see where things are out of place. And, where things are out of place, something is, more than likely, hidden.

In Kirby's Epic Yarn, however, the parts of each level are much more neatly knitted together. No doubt this is the case because the levels here aren't sectioned into particular functions. Each level is just a series of screens to navigate through. The game also benefits by not trying to hybridize a fairly rigid expression of platforming with linear three dimensional environments.

Lay away book special: Going swimmingly

The adventures of The Doctor and co. as they struggle with Skagra remain unchanged. Not that I expected them to change, but Shada's written just like any other novelization. If Douglas Adams ever did any novelizations.

That said, Roberts manages the book's pace well, leaving me with one quibble.

Every chapter takes the perspective of a different character (or group of characters). Roberts keeps these perspectives in rotation, but, one has been under-used so far. This is the perspective of Clare Keightley, Chris' colleague.

My sense of this matter is that Claire will play a major role in the story's conclusion. Hopefully though, she doesn't just confess her feelings for Chris or vice versa at the end of her arc.

Away game special: Kirby the surrealist

Kirby's Dream Collection is a very rich video game vein. All of its titles are quality, and those that offer multiplayer present a formidable challenge.

Kirby's Dream Land 3 for example, is proving tricky to get through with 100% completion. That is, much of what you need to do to fully clear levels involves patience. Rushing through the game leads to missing much.

This is especially true when finding the levels' hidden star requires you to not trample any of the level's flowers, or to water them all. Other challenges are simply obtuse, such as figuring out that an anthropomorphic spring wants a jellyfish-like thing to lick it. Needless to say, the lack of in game dialogue makes the game's secrets all the harder to divine.

Lay away book special: Further notes on the reconstruction

The most interesting thing about Gareth Roberts' Shada is its frequently short chapters.

Such two to three page chapters, sometimes referred to as attention span-sized, give a sense of a plot in motion. It's a style choice that makes the novel's TV script origins clear. It also makes the book feel like it has Douglas Adams' own sense of wackiness, the sense that he got across with his breaks for entries from the Hitchhiker's Guide itself.

So far, none of this takes away from the story, or the way it's told. In fact, heading into the book's second third, the novelization continues to be a strong imitation of Adams' style, and a compelling reconstruction of a Doctor Who serial that almost wasn't.

Lay away book special: "Sha! da!"

Gareth Roberts' reconstruction of Douglas Adams' Shada is a mixed bag.

Up to the fifth chapter, Roberts  does a fine impression of Adams' narrative voice. Much of the narrative has the flavour of The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I have no trouble imagining Tom Baker as the story's Doctor. That may be simply because that's who played the Doctor at the time the original script was written, but nonetheless.

Now, I can't say the first chapter is particularly strong. Showing the major villain and his/her plot straight away is fine for television, but presents a challenge in print.

After all, seeing the inner workings of a madman is kind of meaningless if we've no other characters by which to measure him. A book could very easily be populated by sociopaths.

Roberts really only grasped my attention when Chris Parsons (the hapless protagonist) and Prof. Chronotis (an eccentric old man) were introduced. Both of these characters are better reader proxies and, by extension, are easier to care about. After chapter two I wanted to read more.

Away game special: Shantae 2: Risky's Revenge

Now that I know about it, I can't help but wonder. About how high the resolution is in the picture of Shantae in a bikini that you get for beating Shantae 2: Risky's Revenge in two hours or less, that is.

This reward for a speedy finish is definitely a reference to the same in Metroid. But in that game, the revelation of Samus stood as more of a shock, since female heroes in video games were unheard of at the time. Unfortunately, such is still the case now.

But, this curious award for gaming skill (and/or memorization) aside, Shantae 2 is a fun game, the three transformations (monkey, elephant,and mermaid) making for some neat exploration.

Taken as a whole though, I wonder who the game was really made for: boys or girls.

A history of games amidst science

The history of video games is short, but varied. The exhibit for the subject at Ontario Science Centre is just the same. But somehow less impressive.

There were 130+ games, about 95% of which were playable, but there wasn't much information about them.

Beside each game was a small placard with a standard profile (name, publisher, release date, description) and that was it. Except for retro games, most of which had brief histories attached to them.

The lack of deeper information and trivia for the lion's share of games aside, it's a fun exhibit. PierSolar stands tallest in my memory, though - along with A Slow Year. The latter wasn't playable but a game that comes with 1000 haiku is memorable enough in and of itself.

The Virtusphere, a virtual reality device that's at the exhibit also offered a memorable experience. However, as a simulation, it didn't emulate walking so much as it did a kind of drunken whirling. No doubt its sensing of motion just isn't finely tuned enough, or it just doesn't bother to factor in a sober person's sense of equilibrium.

Nintendo's travelling Wii U pavillion was there as well. But it was much less exciting than expected.

Neither Pikmin 3 nor The Wonderful 101 at Nintendo's display. Instead, the games present showcased the Wii U's Gamepad and asymmetric multiplayer capabilities. So, of course, NintendoLand and WarioWare were in full force.

It's good that Nintendo's trying to show people what makes the Wii U special, but it's taking its time doing so. A snappy multi-ad campaign would be much quicker.

The need for organization

Radiant Historia has an extensive timeline. This is great for the game's story and makes for a lengthy experience. But, for all of it's depth, the game's timeline has no quick sort option. The closest thing to such an organizational system is the quick scroll that you can do with "L" or "R" button.

But, come the end of the game, there are so many nodes for you to scroll through (especially if you're working at finishing all the sidequests) an alphabetical sort option would be excellent. After all, Stocke does travel through time via a book, so being able to sort the timelines out alphabetically would make sense. 

Playing through the game in alphabetical order, though, now that would be downright nonsensical.

Is character development a good sidequest prize side?

For whatever reason my inner-completionist broke free during my run to finish Radiant Historia. So now, along with the help of this handy FAQ, I'm running through all of the game's sidequests. It definitely didn't help when I caught mention of a "true ending" within that FAQ - there's no way that I'll accept a false ending from such a game! Just so long as I can help it, anyway.

Surprisingly the first batch of sidequests was pretty quickly dispatched. There was a little bit of running around for Red-Letter Day, in which Stocke acts as a go between for Sonja and Rosch (even more in the quest to get the Satyros Liese together with a Granorg gateman), but the node and the reward were worth it. Actually, the quest involving Liese and the gateman can be downright heartbreaking, though we don't really see much of the Satyros troupe after the story's finished with it. Vanoss comes back in the Alternate history a few times, but mostly for political plot points.

Though, that does raise a bit of an issue with the game. An issue that weirdly becomes a non issue in retrospect. This is, as mentioned before, the way in which some characters seem to vanish from the story, are gone for a lengthy portion of it, and then brought back in when necessary. Specifically, let's look at the example of Sonja.

Early in the game you see a lot of this Alistellian MD. But, once you hit the sand fortress, or are on the way to Granorg for the first time, she may as well have never existed. At the time when you realize this it's irksome because you know that she has to be a major secondary character. It's obvious that she and Rosch have a history, and that there's more to her than what you see in the story-specific cutscenes.

Then, far later in the game (at least for me, just now completing the Red-Letter Day sidequest from chapter one), it's revealed that she and Rosch reveal their feelings for each other and officially become  a couple. So your sense that she's a major figure in the game's story winds up being true - but only after an extended absence which before had been ended by more story-related events.

It's difficult to say how this problem could be fixed, though. A sidequest, after all, is something that is extra and that some (maybe most) players won't fully experience. In that way, as much of a time sink most RPGs can be (especially J-RPGs), I wonder if the mark of a great one is having meaningful sidequests that add to the game's story and character development or if a truly great RPG is one where such things are just window dressing and the game's main events tell the story and develop the characters well enough.

If you've got some thoughts on this be sure to leave them in the comments.

Shiny chain links

The idea of a poetry chain is a really slick hook. You choose a poet, take two of his or her poems, and then get him or her to choose the next poet in the chain who does the same and so on and so forth. It's a great way to build a collection of poems practically automatically, from an editorial standpoint.

The poetry chains found in McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets are, so far, mostly made of iron links. Good, firm poems that are neat expressions of states of being or qualities, but that are just there. They hold the chain together and that's that. Some are shinier than others though, like those of James Tate, Brenda Shaughnessy, Lynn Emanuel, Brandon Som, and francine j. harris.

The poems of these poets that appear in this collection do a bit of mind bending, which is just what a poem should do. Describe and express away, oh poetry, but Poetry will be over here bending minds with nothing more than the power of its printed words!

Strength of characters

So the open world of No More Heroes becomes more open once you reach the ninth rank. I can now get more beam swords and upgrades, train to boost stats and get new duds. It feels like the game is slowly opening up, which is a bit weird, but I'll trust that by the time I get to the fifth or fourth rank everything unlockable by simply progressing will have been unlocked. 

For those who missed this game when it was freshly released for the Wii in 2008 (2007 in Japan), it's safe to say that it's a GTA-style game that puts lawn mowing and coconut collecting beside assassination and beam sword fighting. So it definitely does not take itself seriously. The voice acting is a curious show of this, since there's not much consistency to the game's accents. Santa Destroy must be a center that draws Aussie and Brit and Russian alike. 

Not that the game suffers for that variety in voices. For the most part, games like this tend to bore me since it's usually just the same thing repeated over and over: Find contact, take mission, kill target. Recent GTA games and others in the genre supposedly deviate from this, and do it through the same means as No More Heroes. That is, they include a broad array of characters (or at least a few that you can really get into - some that literati might call "three-dimensional"). 

Dr. Peace, assassin number 9, was more or less a country song stereotype, so he doesn't quite qualify as truly three-dimensional, but if each assassin gets successively more interesting (along with more difficult), then No More Heroes could become a game to remember.

Of rehab and an academy

Don Gately's exhaustive discussion of Boston Mass. AA and their different meetings and going to different groups for "commitments" and all that remind me of something. Hal and the Enfield Tennis Academy's players going around for tournaments. Yeah, on the surface, the latter's competitive while the former's more collaborative and social. But the tournaments, as described in the book, are definitely social and involve a lot of bonding between members of ETA's away team.

Wallace has Gately go into such painstaking detail about the different cliques within the AA group, though, it's hard to not see that bunch and Hal's ETA milieu as mirrors of each other. Getting into "The Show," the full-on pro circuit, seems to be pretty high stress and something that drives a lot of the pro tennis players discussed in the book to drugs or booze. At the very least, both the AA group and the ETA crowd are in the "In Here" to the "Out There" that is everything aside from either. In that sense, both are closed worlds.

As the plot slowly gets dredged up (we're talking hand crank-driven dredging here), it's becoming clearer and clearer that Infinite Jest is about its characters far more than the socio-political intrigues that make up its plot. To that end, it's definitely a book about these characters inner lives, about the contents of skulls that a Danish prince might have, in an earlier time, held aloft and soliloquised to. But can we really know these Yoricks?

After a quick stop for a magic sword

No J-RPG would be complete without the need for a magic sword to defeat the final boss. Radiant Historia makes this step quite quick, almost ridiculously so. Especially since the boss you need the sword for waits patiently while you run off to jump through time to get it.

Getting the sword itself is probably the easiest thing in the game yet. You just need to grab the drained sword from the spot in the lab beside the demigod Hugo, hop through time to Celestia, speak with Elm, and then away you go.

Magic sword aside, though, Hugo's something of a pushover. He has stamina, but not nearly enough offense to pose much of a threat to any party. Taking him on with Stocke, Raynie, and Marco, my standard strategy worked fine. Use some Mana Bursts, get Marco on support while Stocke moves enemies into place and Raynie showers them with her powered up magic.

What's missing, actually, from the battles so far is any sort of serious puzzle. Moving enemies around the battle grid to maximize the damage you do and the number of enemies you do it to is helpful, but all it takes is one turn to break an enemy's special attack formation. So, the hope for the game's final boss is that something along the lines of the fight with Magus or Lavos from Chrono Trigger will show up. A battle where you need to pay attention to where you attack and what you attack with to actually do any real damage would really bring Radiant Historia to a masterful close.

Heading out of Oulipo

McSweeney's The State of Constraint: New Work from Oulipo is a grand introduction to the method. Particularly intriguing are the Calendar form and the Antonymic Translation.

Calendar, here exemplified by Michelle Grangaud, takes events from fact and fiction that are known to have happened on certain dates and puts them side by side in a list that aims to tell a new, chronological story. It definitely strikes me as something very literary and high-browed, what with all of the allusions and such. Yet, I can't help but wonder if the same could be pulled off with science fiction or with fantasy.

The Antonymic Translation - writing out the opposite of a previously written text sentence by sentence - really reads like something revolutionary. Lynn Crawford's antonymic translation of Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" is definitely worth a read. The same thing could be said here, too, antonymic translations of genre fiction would be wild. Though, because of the form's nature, some speculative bits do come into play even in Crawford's piece.

Though the shortened tongues that show up in it restricting speech might be physiologically accurate, shortened tongues restricting people to singing only is pretty fantastical, and gives world builders and writers a whole new way to keep spoken magic in check.

Restrictive controls

The fight with Doctor Peace was as good a place as any to remind myself that you need to hold "1" while jerking the wiimote to charge Travis' beam sword. Oh, No More Heroes. At least blocking his bullets is automatic. Though just being able to hit "A" to attack and only periodically actually having to swing is disappointing.

Playing an array of games from a console's lifespan with no regard to the chronology of their release dates never mattered at all until the Wii came along. With Skyward Sword forever engraved in my memory (muscle and otherwise), it's underwhelming to just run up to a boss and hit "A," shifting from "High" to "Low" hits with motion control. Still, the game's voice acting is good and the cinematics are an excellent touch.

Plus, as an RPG and Legend of Zelda fan, having an actual speaking protagonist is a great plus. Though, it has stood in the way of Travis' being as much of a proxy for me as say Crono or Link.

Staring at the Face in the Floor

From an uproarious and complex game to Don Gately's recollections of A.A. meetings. Infinite Jest continues to be as disjointed as ever.

But, like two pieces of cloth sewn together, there's more than one thread joining the book's different parts together.

As was mentioned in an earlier super intense personal section of the book, we read again of "The Face in the Floor." Along with appearing in this section (on page 347) it was also mentioned in the section outlining the E.T.A. attendee's first nightmare away from home (on page 62). As far as I can tell, it's a reference to the poem "The Face Upon the Barroom Floor" by John Henry Titus.

Though, the poem tells the story of a vagrant who was ruined after the love of his life left him for a handsome friend, who he then draws on the floor and (spoilers!) dies over.

Alternatively, it could just be a reference to the pattern-finding habit of human beings, seeing a face in the carpet or hardwood or tile of the floor, and considering it some sort of terrifying all destroyer that cannot be avoided. Why not something more beneficial? So far, none of the references in Infinite Jest have had positive connotations.

At its worst, this face represents a paralyzing fear that leaving a small comfort zone will lead to your destruction - and that fits too well with the book's ridiculous, self-awarely parodying pessimism.

Ahistorical villainy?

As Radiant Historia comes to a close, one gripe with the story nags at me.

Heiss, Stocke's mentor and the one in charge of Spec Ops at the game's beginning, is framed as a villain. But this doesn't add up. Maybe that's just the risk that a game that can have its linearity broken, and yet relies on that linearity for its story, runs.

Early on, I chased one of the timelines further than I should have, and so some things were a little jumbled around that part of the story. Stocke fought Heiss at this point...for some reason. And now he's a villain. Chances are, he is, in the end, the one with the Black Chronicle, but the game will have to offer up a good reason for it to keep me on board.

Speaking of story conceits that are a bit jumbled, the fight with Viola is entirely unavoidable. Nonetheless, though she's more or less absent for the middle of the game, her death and the reasons why she accepts it fit well with the story and make it feel perfectly pitched to what the game's going for theme-wise. In particular, her accepting her death as necessary to signify a break from the old regime to the remaining Alistellians really hammers home the destructive power of the blind faith that country's citizens had in the false Prophet Noah.

Where the Oulipian binary trees are lovely

I admit it. I sat and stared at Harry Mathew's "Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare" for five, maybe 10 minutes, before I grasped what he was doing with "To be or not to be, that is the question."

The concept of Oulipo's sinking in made the way for actual enjoyment of these otherwise weird pieces. They're also healthily suffused with sex. No doubt that's just because they're generally written by French authors and poets. Anyone whose read Baudillaire knows what I mean.

Though I found it strange that what's just a "choose-your-own-adventure" story is considered an Oulipian work. The biggest difference that I could see between Paul Fournel's "Once Upon a Colony: A Tree Story with some Ramifications," and the books I devoured as a kid, was that the latter's dragons and witches and castles were replaced by social commentary, truths about changing culture, and - again - mention of sex.

The whole "Tree Story" thing makes me wonder why some people still refuse to believe that video games are art. What's a good video game if not a kind of interactive text, and what's a great game if not an interactive, sense-immersive binary tree story?

Frantic, puzzle-less fights

So after spending a few minutes getting Travis' bike unstuck, I made my way to Destroy Stadium where the fight for the ninth rank awaits. I'm on the threshold of that fight now, and came across something curious along the way.

As is the case with most mission-based free-roaming world games, the lead up to the mission's target lies behind corridors filled with enemies. No More Heroes is definitely no exception. All of those you face even have the good manners to wait their turn, patiently holding back until they've seen their comrade cut down by Travis' beam sword. But that's not what I observed.

Instead, it's that the game's combat is very frantic. Now, of course that's right in the game's genre: "Action-Adventure." But Zelda games are similarly classified, yet their combat is much more pensive. You have the chance to avoid or visibly and obviously block incoming attacks as most enemies have a fairly wide swing or a definite tell that telegraphs their upcoming strike. Enemies don't necessarily queue up, either.

What I wonder, though, is whether or not this difference in combat goes beyond the two games' having very different developers and audiences, and comes down to graphical style. A cartoonish (or, in the case of Twilight Princess, clearly fantastical) enemy coming at you with a huge sword or a ready bow isn't likely to trigger any fight or flight responses in the brain - however mild. But a more realistically styled gang of baseball fury-types coming at you with bats and beam swords of their own makes for a more convincing virtual threat. It's this extra element of realism that makes No More Heroes' combat more explosive, I think.

That and, to now, the lack of any sort of puzzle element to them. I'm still early in the game, but I doubt that I'll need to blow up or set fire to any fallen corpses to make sure certain baddies don't come back.

A narrative note

Endnote 127 of Infinite Jest says a lot in a little. It's a brief bit about how the extraneous details in the description of Lord's Triggering Situation in the game of Eschaton are Hal's own additions. The note itself reads: "A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis's [sic] TRIGSIT, which is 100% all biz."

You could say that this implies that Hal is Infinite Jest's narrator. But then you'd need to explain why, in an endnote that he must be narrating, Hal refers to himself in the third person. Instead, given what we've got in this note, a better argument is that Hal is the editor of a bunch of retellings and recollections.

In this editorial scenario, the book consists of pieces written by the individuals that they feature. These individual pieces are then submitted to Hal, who in turn adds little "toss-ins and embellishments" and puts them in order. Though I'm not familiar with Byzantine erotica, Hal is apparently deeply interested in it. This interest definitely suggests that Hal has edited Infinite Jest since the book's plot - the actual sex and eventual climax -  is left until its end. The pre-plot part of the book, with its developing characters, side plots and settings, is really just foreplay, after all.

Ultimately though, in this editor Hal scenario, David Foster Wallace himself had the final say, and left notes as he saw fit.

A fraud and a theory

I'm happy the see that some things, once encountered in Radiant Historia, do not become merely forgotten, trapped around their respective events. In particular, the game had me do a little fist pump when Field Marshal Viola reappeared. She had a few brief lines of dialogue with General Hugo in a cutscene, but since she's the last of the Alistellian commanders, it's quite clear that she'll come into conflict with Stocke and co. sooner or later. That meeting is sure to showcase an excellent bit of the game's story and character development.

Unlike the expected, but underwhelming reveal that the Prophet Noah is a fake. There was someone by that name, once, but apparently for the last five years Hugo has managed to trick people with a dummy dressed in robes. I never got the impression that people in this world were that easily fooled, but it's not as if Hugo started the Prophet Noah cult from scratch. He was just perpetuating it, extending it beyond the life of its charismatic founder.

Since this is a J-RPG, and it seems that things are about to get crazy, my completely insane theory as to how it'll all end goes something like this: Stocke and co. will be faced with a fight against Viola, however, either after the fight or before it, it will be revealed that she and Noah attempted to perform the Flux ritual, and she currently has half a soul or one and a half souls. Noah died because his soul couldn't get back to him quickly enough, and this excess or lack in the soul department is what makes Viola so charismatic and politically dangerous.

There's not much in the story as I have it so far to suggest that such will be the case, but what good is a crazy theory if it's fully grounded in reality - even if that reality is a fiction?

The weird for the sake of weird piece

As someone whose absorbed a lot of medieval fiction and poetry, it's heartening to know that metaphor and allegory are still alive in the modern short story. Having finished McSweeney's collection of posthumously realized Fitzgerald ideas, nearly everyone had conflicts and figures that could easily be read metaphorically. Especially the two stories based off of the idea "Girl and giraffe."

The first of these two is easily placed among medieval and renaissance beast fables, and the second seems to have something to say about English colonialism in Africa.

The weirdest in the collection, though - and the shortest - is definitely "For Now, I Was Tall," Diane Williams' entry. This one's based on the idea "Play about a whole lot of old people - terrible things happen to them and they don't really care." With hardly enough text to cover a single face of a single page, and more mentions of "President of the United States" than a presidential address introduction on 24 hour loop, it's dense to the point of incomprehensible. It reads like it's about a woman who's dying which I suppose is terrible, and she doesn't seem to care, but so little is concrete that it's difficult to pin much about it down.

On the whole, this is a solid collection of short stories. Hopefully, it's a good introduction to the madness that is form-constrained Oulipo writing coming up in part two of McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets.

Returning to No More Heroes

With The Wind Waker finished and the Gamecube titles in the "Wrap-Up" portion of my Game List now exhausted, it's back to the Wii. Specifically, since the sprawling Xenoblade Chronicles will make a better finishing piece for the "Wrap Up" part of my Game List, I'm now playing No More Heroes.

For those unfamiliar with the title, it's similar to recent Grand Theft Auto games, but much more focussed. Rather than doing a myriad of missions for various mobs, the protagonist of No More Heroes, Travis Touchdown, is merely pursuing his goal of being the greatest assassin. So you spend the game going around doing various jobs to earn enough money to pay the admission fees for Ranking Fights. In these fights, Travis faces off against one of the 10 assassins that he's trying to top, and assumes their rank once they've been defeated.

I'd just barely started to play it before getting swept up with other things, so all I had to relearn upon picking it up again were the controls. They're pretty straight forward. The nunchuck controls Travis' movements, the "A" button interacts with things, and "B" cancels things. The others do specific menu-and HUD-related tasks.

The game doesn't use precise motion controls for Travis' beam sword, a la Skyward Sword, but once you've engaged with an enemy a direction will flash on the screen, prompting you to finish off the enemy or your current combo. It's an all right system, and the game's free-roaming city-sized world offers welcome exploration potential. Though it's a very empty feeling place since the only conscious person on it is Travis. Everyone else wandering and driving around is just a shell, moving about and yielding to Travis no matter what.

Back to Infinite Jest with a Crash

What. Did I. Just read.

I can deal with junkies getting heroin or whatever laced with detergent and one of them having their eye pop out of their head. Or with people being terrible human beings. But David Foster Wallace's description of an E.T.A. student paraboling head first into the upright monitor of a smashed Yushityu desktop computer is just terrifying. A flash bang rendition of George Orwell's foot in a human face for all eternity.

Or, as Pemulis says when the rules of the game of Eschaton start to break down, "Jaysus!" (338).

Right, Eschaton.

So the last section of Infinite Jest that I've read details this game to a painstaking degree. Essentially, it's a four-tennis court top strategy game defined by the players' primary weapon being nuclear warheads that they have to lob to their targets. Since the game is played on a world map projected onto four adjoining tennis courts, it's a big job to orchestrate it all, and each year (apparently the game gets played about once a year), one person takes on this duty. This time that person is Otis Lord, who winds up in the monitor at section's end.

I've noted it before, but Foster Wallace truly has a knack for writing absolute chaos. And all the dry data that the section gives you before the game's order breaks down just whets your appetite for such chaos.

What's worse, it's not likely that we'll hear about the fate of those who were beaten and bloodied in the brawl that ends the section for a few more yet. Even then, I doubt we'll hear directly. Maybe the mention of the black armbands during the section's set up of Eschaton wasn't just to fill out the list of materials used - maybe.

A ritualistic sidebar

It looks like Radiant Historia's Standard History has been set to rights. Except for whatever the game's final boss battle entails. My guess is that the timelines will either reconverge on that battle, or there will be some sort of simultaneous, dual timeline fight involved.

Currently, though, what's immediately up next is another run into Granorg, under the protection of an Etherion stone. This is a magical item passed down through the Granorgite royal family, and is a creation of the same empire that started the strange world-saving ritual that Stocke and co. are helping Eruca perform.

As a sidebar, this ritual involves sacrificing one member of the royal family and then reviving them temporarily with half of the soul of another member of the family. Things remain this way until the two souls involved have matured and then the two are returned to their respective bodies. The displacement of souls somehow balances mana and keeps the world's desertification in check. Pretty crazy, eh?

Needless to say, the ending of this game is going to be epic, and there can't be much of the Alternate Timeline left to play through.

Breaks in voice

As I make my way through the collection of short stories based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's ideas, I'm struck by how different the writers' voices are.

True, Miriam Toews' contribution is a one act play (and a very Canadian piece of drama at that), but even with the other short stories there's a definite difference between them despite the goal of the collection being writing the stories that FSF could have written.

John Beckman's "Clear Channel" and Tom Lombardi's "The Bear" standout from this latest bunch.

Beckman's story is liable to catch the attention of anyone interested in the perspective of an allegedly crazy person. His is also the least FSF-like that's been read yet. There's no real concern with social class, there's nothing to do about the bohemian/the buttoned down, and no one is heading for any roaring parties. Instead it's just a girl who can tune into radio channels in her brain and her alleged uncle driving to some sort of place where all of the nation's radio waves converge.

Possible influences of Marian Engel's Bear abound in Lombardi's piece. About a bear who is strangely attracted (sexually?) to a woman camping with her boyfriend, this bear is also able to speak to humans. It also, allegedly, knows what it means for two humans to love each other and claims that Gary (the boyfriend) bears no love to Lois (the girlfriend). Its ending is strange and open-ended, much as the ending of "Returned" is.

After the wind's been woken

Ganon's Tower was way longer than I remembered. The maze and finding the Light Arrows and then your final ascent to where Ganondorf and Zelda wait had been entirely forgotten. And that's pretty surprising.

The maze is easy enough, and the final ascent is uneventful. But, the major reason for those final stairs and the enemies along the landings being so quickly dismissed is the Light Arrows. A single one of the shining projectiles instantly destroys any enemy - from Bokoblins to Darknuts. With magic jars on almost every landing, shooting down the final lines of enemies is entirely painless. Though the fight with Puppet Ganon makes up for that.

The first two forms are easily dispatched. Bring the glowing blue orb into view, and hit it with a light arrow. Bang, done. But, this boss' third form, the Moldorm form, is just plain terrible. Fighting the Moldorm in A Link to the Past is bad because it takes patience and timing to land enough hits - but at least in that game you've got the 3/4 view in your favour.

Once you find yourself in the middle of Puppet Ganon's Moldorm form all you can do is slash and hope to hit the head to buy yourself some escape time. Though that gives you hardly enough time to get out and to shoot at the flailing worm's tail. That's definitely what makes this section of the final boss so difficult, though. In its appearances in previous games, you could just slash at Moldorm's tail. But, instead you need to use the Light Arrows on said tail. Needless to say, striking Puppet Ganon's Moldorm tail requires a little more accuracy.

The final fight in this boss sequence is shockingly easy after dealing with the thrashing body and rapidly moving target that is Puppet Ganon's Moldorm form. The fight with Ganondorf just sees you slash away at the villain until you need to let Zelda hit you with a light arrow to stun the Great King of Evil. That last downward blow to the head always looks like it should do more than just turn the man to stone, but so it goes.

Having recently finished Skyward Sword, there are actually a few strange similarities between these boss fights. The formation of the swords that Ganondorf uses to block Link's attacks changes with each strike, similar to Demise's constant blocking of Link's first attack. Both enemies are also downed by a downward strike, something that could allude to the Downward Stab from The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Of course, what I'm left wondering is was there a point in The Wind Waker's development at which players had more control over the angle of Link's attacks, or is Ganondorf's changing his swords' arrangement each time he blocks merely aesthetic?

In the end, The Wind Waker is a worthy entry in the Zelda franchise, despite the hate piled on it when it released in the West. The game's cartoony style brings back the whimsy found in A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening - a quality that helps any good game shine brighter.

Breaking the magnets' hold

Seven years after its release, the 2006 collection of prose and poetry from McSweeney's (McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets) is under my nose and in my sights. The idea for the first part of this collection is almost relevant again, as Baz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Gatsby is just leaving theatres. Yes, it's the collection of short stories based on ideas from one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks.

So far the stories have ranged from a beast fable about god and understanding the world, to a modern take on the dramatic monologue based on the final moments of the man 'who kept the idea of tanks out of England.' The most outstanding entry to this point though, is Salvador Plascencia's Returned, based on the snippet "***** ***** running away from it all and finding that the new ménage is just the same."

Plascencia takes the premise into a surrealist world where a woman, seeking to escape the sea and the tragic memories of a brother lost within it, moves in land only to fatally find that she has brought the sea with her. His writing is direct and simple, but that voice belies a tale as intricate to watch unfold as seeing the Fibonacci sequence matched to various plant patterns.

With a story from Canada's own Miriam Toews up next, expectations are high.

Back again to the Sand Fortress

Once again, Radiant Historia's story has Stocke and the gang go back to the Sand Fortress. Where the road branches off to Granorg, Allistel, and apparently Cygnus. This is definitely the most visited place in the game's story, and it shows, somewhat annoyingly, in the limited exploration of the area.

Having already visited the Sand Fortress on several occasions, it has been entirely looted. The way through the sprawling building has also pretty much been memorized at this point. In a way, the familiarity with the Sand Fortress that you build up to this point really makes you, the player, feel like Stocke and/or Rosch. These two characters were stationed at said fortress for a chunk of the game's story, and no doubt the two veterans know the place like the backs of their hands.

For such a late-in-the-game return, though, there should really be more to do. Maybe a hidden room that couldn't be accessed before, or some sort of chest that can only now be opened. Such a delayed secret is something out of Chrono Trigger's book, but still. Good artists borrow and great artists steal.

Most certainly, it's definitely strange that Field Marshall Viola's nowhere to be found, especially since it's made clear that she's been sequestered in such a remote place as a kind of punishment. Instead, the Sand Fortress is being commanded by a generic soldier who, though decked out in the newest Thaumatech suit, goes down like a failed soufflé. Perhaps Stocke and co. meet her again in Granorg.

Lay Away Book Special: The end of an affair

The Eyre Affair's ending is a mixed bag. It offers a marked improvement from the lull mentioned in the previous entry, and the plot threads are all nicely snipped. It also involves some serious deus ex machina.

This last minute plot device involves the appearance of the lawyer from Jane Eyre objecting to Landen's wedding to Daisy out of nowhere. He has valid grounds to object, since Daisy's already married, but it's far too neat.

What's worse, since Thursday changed the story of Jane Eyre by bringing Jane and Rochester together in the end, it seems that the book has continued to grow and expand. When Thursday asks Mrs. Nakajima (the book tour guide, who is able to melt into books at will) how the couple is she tells her that 10 years have passed and they've had kids. The book would go on, since the main character of the first person Jane Eyre (Jane), is back in it, but it raises a troubling question: When a book is so altered when does it end?

Perhaps the book simply ends with Rochester and Jane being married, and that's that. But to be so quick about dismissing this issue leaves out any clarity as to what happens to characters after the book's story has been read/consumed.

Up until the reveal that Jane and Rochester are happily wedded with children, it's suggested (by Rochester himself on page ) that the characters of the book more or less die after the story's told. Is the newly minted couple so long lived because the main character is present? But what then happened to Jane in the original Jane Eyre? Because Fforde implies that the characters go through the story on an endless loop, there must be an end point and a start point for said loop. Living together for 10 years into the book world future does not seem to be the solid ending that the very rules of the book world require. Where do they fit in their playing out their parts in the book?

It's not something that everyone reads for, but when an author goes to the trouble of creating a unique world, it's fair to hope that the basic mechanics of that world will be clear. It's not necessary that an author explain his world in depth in his novel, but he should be clear enough on the rules himself that he not violate them. Or even appear to violate them without some sort of set up. Fforde provides none.

So, overall, The Eyre Affair is an all right book with a mostly excellent villain. However, Fforde's alternate world and explanation of the worlds that books conjure are just not fleshed out enough.