Joss Whedon is one of those guys who just makes everything so easy. I got back earlier this evening from seeing The Avengers, and man is it good. It has all the classic Whedonesque elements of action and humor, characters and story that make me such a fan of Buffy and Angel and Firefly.
It’s making me think I should brush up on more of Whedon’s shows and maybe some comics too; I try to keep an eye on my own weaknesses, and one area I’m especially worried about in my work right now is pacing. Whedon is great at pacing.
I kind of want to write a review of this film, but to analyze the story properly would require a whole ton of spoilers. Instead I’ll just leave it at this, a brief discussion of the inspiration it has given me for my writing. Maybe I’ll review the story in a few weeks, when spoilers aren’t such an issue.
It’s no secret that I love zombies. One look at my story The Fast and the Dead is enough to convince anyone of that. It should come as no surprise then that I love The Walking Dead in every form it’s available in; as a comic/graphic novel, as a TV series, and now as an adventure game from Telltale Games.
I’ll have a full review of The Walking Dead Game up on GeekBeat.TV soon, but I wanted to go into how episode 1 handles the storytelling, as that’s really the part of the game that impressed me the most.
It’s common these days to call any good, impressive game ‘epic,’ but The Walking Dead Game Episode 1 - A New Day is the opposite of epic. It’s small, it’s personal, it’s isolating, stressful, fearful and very satisfying.
The game puts huge emphasis on the importance of the choices you, playing as Lee Everett, make throughout the story. Conversation and investigation make up the bulk of the game play; make no mistake, while this is a zombie game, it is NOT a shooter, nor is it a survival horror game. It is pure adventure.
Lee EverettAt key points throughout the game, you’ll say things in conversations, and you’ll be given a brief flash of information about the impact that your choice had on things. If you stick up for a friend in an argument, they’ll remember it. If you mouth off and call someone a nasty name, they’ll remember that too. In a twist that’s very Bioware in nature, these decisions can have consequences far beyond episode 1, impacting your journey into the next four episodes as well.
The examples I gave above were relatively trivial (at least they seem that way at first glance.) But there are much weightier choices to be made as well; there are a number of points at which you’ll literally be choosing who lives and who dies, and make no mistake, people WILL die.
The story’s far from over; we’ve been given a single episode of 8 chapters, with four more episodes to come. I’m really looking forward to seeing how deep the connections run between episodes. I’m loving Telltale’s Back to the Future series, but haven’t finished yet in part because each episode is so very self-contained; there’s not as much driving me to finish all five quickly. If The Walking Dead Game lives up to the early promise it shows, I won’t have that problem with it.
I love living in the future. I really do. One of my favorite things about this future we’re in is how huge geek culture has become and how it continues to explode with great content, like Felicia Day’s brand new Geek and Sundry channel over on YouTube.
The Sword and Laser
Geek and Sundry first came to my attention by way of The Sword and Laser, a fantastic fantasy & sci-fi book club/audio podcast/GoodReads forum hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. Some weeks ago, they announced that they were bringing S&L to video as part of Geek and Sundry, so of course I had to check it out.
Sadly, The Sword and Laser won’t be airing on the G&S channel for another couple of weeks, but G&S itself launched today and they’ve got a bunch of other shows that are well worth checking out.
I’m the One That’s Cool
Firstly, Geek and Sundry is Felicia Day’s channel, so you’d better bet The Guild is represented. They’ve gotten together and made another music video, this one about the injustices many geeks had to endure in their formative years at the hands of “cooler” peers, and the cultural reversal that has left geeks increasingly popular lately. It’s a fun song and video, though by far the most serious of the releases they’ve done to date, dealing as it does with issues of bullying and abuse.
The Flog
Felicia has another show, this one a weekly solo effort. The Flog debuted today, where she talks about stuff she’s into, highlights cool things she’s found around the internet lately, and goes out and tries things she’s always been interested in, sometimes for the first time. In her debut episode she goes out to learn the basics of blacksmithing. Now I’m no stranger to blacksmithing and crafting in general—I wield a mean pick in Minecraft—but she was doing this in the real world for once, not in a video game. She forged a real iron fire poker, and has it up for auction to benefit the FDNY Foundation. Pretty awesome stuff.
Table Top
Felicia got Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Eureka & The Big Bang Theory) to host a show all about table top gaming. Yes, they still make games you don’t play on computers or consoles! This one is the longest of the shows I sampled at half an hour plus individual one to two minute interviews with each guest player afterward. It’s well worth the investment.
For the first episode, Wheaton has guests Grant Imahara (Mythbusters), Jenna Busch (Girl Meets Lightsaber) and Sean Plott (Day[9]TV) on set to play Small World, a German-style fantasy board game that’s something like Civilization meets Settlers of Catan with some Dungeons & Dragons thrown into the mix. You watch them play, get a feel for the game and how much fun it can be, get some instruction on the rules and some tricks for good play. It looks like it’s going to shape up to be a really fun show. It’s supposed to air every two weeks, alternating on Fridays with The Sword and Laser.
Dark Horse Motion Comics
The last show I checked out today was Dark Horse Motion Comics, where they take actual comics and give them just enough animation to kick them off the page and into the video realm, with voice acting, sound effects and ambient background music to present the stories in a whole new light. Whether this one is for you will depend a great deal on whether you’re into the comic being adapted; this first one, The Secret, is maybe not my cup of tea, but I could easily appreciate how the format would (and will) appeal on a series that I’d be more inclined to follow.
Geek and Sundry isn’t the only such channel to pop up. Chris Hardwick, aka the Nerdist, has something similar in the works. I’ll undoubtedly be checking that out shortly too.
Warning: I’m a bit of a butter-fingers today. I’m about to drop a name. Oops! There it goes. Damn, sorry Brian Brushwood! Let me just pick your name up off the floor here and dust it off a bit.
Brian is a friend of mine, so take this review with however many grains of salt you need, but he has just published his third book, Scam School Book 1 (affiliate link), as of this writing. And by just, I mean it released on Amazon.com, iTunes and other booksellers earlier today. As the name suggests, this is the book version of Brian’s popular Scam School web series produced by Revision 3.
I preordered my copy from Amazon for my Kindle. I’ve looked at it on my Kindle 3, on the Kindle Cloud Reader on both the PC and on the iPad, and on the Android Kindle app. Unfortunately Kindle is—for the time being—a little disadvantaged in displaying Scam School Book 1. Brian and his assistant Jon Tilton went to great pains to create something special in formatting the book, including in-line videos and audio commentaries, and Amazon’s Kindle format doesn’t handle all of that extra polish yet.
That’s changing though. Amazon announced some time back that a new version of the Kindle format will be forthcoming, and it will handle all of the new media content just beautifully.
In the meantime, the painstaking effort that went into formatting the book pays off in backwards compatibility; the text displays just fine, and while the audio and video won’t be seamlessly placed where it was intended, external links to the content make it easy to access until Amazon updates us all to the new goodness.
So what about the content?
Brian goes over 70 scams, from the Human Chimney to Tic Tac Toe Prediction. He revisits each of the Scam School show episodes, covering how the trick is done, and providing written reference on how each illusion or trick is accomplished. The audio commentaries give a personal touch to each one. Exactly what each commentary provides is unique to each trick. It may be a remembrance of the first time Brian did the trick, or learned it, or of shooting the episode of the show that covered it, or additional information and notes on it. It’s all well worth listening to.
These are brain teasers that he has demonstrated time and again in real bars with real people, getting real drinks out of the bargain.
Scam School Book 1 is clearly a labor of love. Brian and Jon spent countless hours writing, finding photos, creating videos and recording audio commentaries in order to give the reader a completely mobile reference for scamming free drinks at bars or just generally becoming the life of the party.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves magic, science, or just knowing how stuff is done … to say nothing of those who want to score free drinks at a bar.
