You Won't See Me Coming

Today I want to defend something pretty near to my heart: video games. Oh, they rot your mind, people say. Well that may be, but I think I've been helped in life more than hindered in my hobby of video games. For the sake of this entry, I'm going to count pretty much all games played on a computer or gaming console as a 'video game'. I also played a heck of a lot more games than I'll actually mention right now, because not all of them changed my life. (Maybe those were the mind-rotting ones!)

Anyways, let's start at the very beginning. I could use a mouse long before I could hold a pencil, so my first game was Sesame Street Colouring Book. I don't know if this would widely be considered a video game, but I don't regret starting the mouse-usage at a young age. My job right now requires some pretty precise mouse movements at times. And think of all the paper I saved! (Okay, but I used more than my fair share of paper as a kid, I admit.)

The second set is a big one: my dad had my brother and me play tons of games by The Learning Company, and for a while they were more or less the only games we had available to us. We played Reader Rabbit ad nauseum, along with Math Rabbit, hours and hours of Gizmos and Gadgets (my brother credits this game for choice later in life to become an engineer), Treasure Mountain, Outnumbered, and many more. Now, it's kind of impossible to say how much these games helped us in life, but both of us always got pretty darn high marks, and I don't remember either of us having an ounce of trouble with elementary school. For sure, my brother learned how to read by playing Sierra's The Incredible Machine.

The next phase is when the strategy, gore and violence started. Doom 2 was a wonderfully fun game! Our computers were networked so Mike and I could blow up the forces of evil along with dad, or our cousin Dustin when he visited. This is really what made it fun. Dustin had this rule that we had to wait for him before opening doors so that he could protect us from the monsters on the other side (or so he said). If we didn't wait, he always said, "Hey! No partying without the man!" I remember that so clearly for some reason! Still, my finest hour in Doom came a bit later when I was playing with one of my dad's friends one time. He declared "Deathmatch!" when we'd killed all the monsters, surely thinking that a seven-year-old girl in pigtails couldn't possibly beat him at a first person shooter. Oh, how very wrong he was. He couldn't even kill me once. This whetted my appetite for being a girl gamer, beating guys at their own games. Playing Doom gave way to playing Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad (extra gibs mode), Heretic and Hexen. FPSs were so fun on the computer, but I could never get the hang of them on consoles. This is a crying shame, because I think I have the preconditioning to beat every boy at youth group in Halo. It just never happened for me!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Around grade four or five, my very favourite game was Sonic 3 and Knuckles. I played so many hours of this game, it probably doesn't bear thinking about. Sonic didn't help me in life as far as skills go, but it did give me a common interest with my brother at a time in our lives when we weren't exactly best pals. Together we played through the levels and tried to beat the game with all three characters. I remember, trying to beat one level with Knuckles was taking forever because the boss was so hard. We failed at it for days, and then Mike went to science camp. I told him I'd keep trying. When my mom picked him up, before he even said hi, he asked "Did Colette beat Launch Base?!"

I did beat it!

I also considered the music of that game to be pretty great, and when some geniuses on the internet did a remix project of it (Project Chaos), I just about died. Some of those songs are so good!

Well, I eventually beat Sonic enough times that I decided to take a break. That was alright because we'd discovered the next amazing game: Diablo. I love everything about this game. The story is great, the quests are great, and it had (for me) a feel about it that has not been matched by any other. It is so gothic-looking and amazing. I've disclosed this to a few people, but this is the truth: not a day goes by even now that I don't want to play it again.

When I get stressed at work, I play the Tristram music on my iPod. It seriously mellows me out. I think my brain has tied it to the thought, "You're safe now, nothing can hurt you." After all, haven't we all opened a town portal in blind panic as Deathspit and his minions rapid-fired acid boogers at us? Being in town is wonderful!

So, video games... lots of people think they're just a waste of time. But really, they're that plus so much more! As long as they are balanced with real life, they'll probably help a child more than they hinder him. At their purest, they act as a link back to those white-hot childhood days when things were simple. I think it's partly why I so enjoy Video Games Live. A lot of those songs have really, really good memories attached to them.

"How am I supposed to remember trivial facts like who the Prime Minister of the UK is, when my brain is filled with actually useful knowledge? I know the name, quote and effect of every Shrine in Diablo!" - Mike

Well, Someone Had to Say It

At long last, I'm ready to discuss the utter trainwreck that is Legend of the Seeker. I've remained silent so far because I really, really just wanted to give the series a chance. But now, no. This show is long past due for some abuse. I'll just start by explaining that Legend of the Seeker is a television adaption of the novel Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. If you read this book, you might agree that it was pretty much written with the destiny of someday being made into a movie or TV series.

Apparently, this series received mixed reviews, some good and some bad. Regardless, each one I've read so far has been by a critic who was clearly assigned to the review and had never even heard of the book before, much less read it. Thus, they can not adequately trash Legend of the Seeker as it so rightly deserves. Half the time, they bring up facts that are just plain wrong in both the book and TV series ("Kahlan, a woman special in that no man may lie to her..."), and generally they just comment on the flat script and cookie-cutter plot. That's all well and good, but the rot goes so much deeper than that.

I was prepared to be forgiving of deviations from the book's storyline in the adaptation for television. It is a long book, after all, and to include it all in twenty-two episodes would have been very difficult. However, in this case, the series has deviated so far from the book that, had they changed the names of the characters and titles (Confessor, Sword of Truth, etc.), I would not have recognized that it was based on Wizard's First Rule at all. To hear that Terry Goodkind, the author, was involved in writing the script genuinely surprised me, because some of the things they changed are things I considered fundamental to the story. Having said that, some of the things I've heard about Terry Goodkind make me think he's kind of a moron.

Upon seeing the trailer for this show, I had such high hopes. Yes, you could see the sheen of tackiness that pretty much all fantasy series have, but I thought they'd nailed it. They had a budget, they had the author's blessing. My hope faltered when I saw who was cast as Richard and Zedd. Mostly, they were just not what I'd envisioned when I read the book. At all. But that's the type of thing I can get over, because "what I envisioned" is pretty subjective, and no casting will have unanimous support. As it is, Bridget Regan playing Kahlan is the only thing that has made the series watchable. I definitely wouldn't have stuck around so long for a lame Kahlan.

Even a good Kahlan can only do so much with a lame script, though. I don't have anything to say about the bad script itself, because it is simply the result of the storyline massacre.

I am so disappointed in this storyline massacre that it's difficult to put words to it to describe why. Before it started, I'd pictured this series as telling the story as it built on itself, definitely warranting a "Previously, on Legend of the Seeker..." in the beginning of each episode. Things that happened in past episodes would surely affect the episodes to come. What they've done instead is taken aspects woven into the book (that is, in the rare instances they follow the book at all), isolated them into their own episode, and forced them to occur randomly and without further consequence in the middle of the Midlands forest. This leaves the series with a choppy, shallow and contrived feeling. Each episode starts and ends with Richard, Kahlan and Zedd tromping in a seemingly aimless manner through the forest. This became startlingly obvious when I accidentally missed episode nine, and watched episode ten next instead. I didn't even notice that I missed an episode until I looked at the episode guide.

The shallowness of the series is furthered by the fact that we almost never leave Richard and Kahlan's point of view. In the book, we were given insight into what the villain was up to, what some other characters were doing as Richard and Kahlan quested along. It gave the story a little complexity. What complexity isn't obliterated in the series is just made confusing. The episode will include some cut-scene to characters we've never met before, hatching a plot, only for Richard and Kahlan to stumble across them in the next few minutes.

I can only think of one reason for them to have eliminated complexity and cut up the story into neat little episodes like they did, and that's so that someone coming in mid-season wouldn't be completely lost. That's fair. In the end, the man holding the huge bag of money makes the decisions, and I get that. Each episode had to be a story in itself in order to be easily marketed. However, they've made these mini-plots so trite and predictable that I really think someone coming into this mid-season would simply see just another clichéd and mediocre fantasy series and not feel very compelled to watch it. I don't know who made the decision to do this, but to me it insults the intelligence of the intended viewers. It sends the message, 'They'll never be able to keep track of a complicated story.' And so, we get the resounding theme of Legend of the Seeker: Wizards First Rule, dumbed down.

Let me add, Wizards First Rule (the book) is far from flawless. Some people would say it's far from good, but I loved it. It was easy and mindless fun adventure. The characters are simple and require little analysis. Richard is tough, reliable, and always does the right thing. Kahlan is smart and independent, hardy yet gentle. That's all you really need to know, which is why it was destined to be a movie or TV show: you can get straight to the action because the characters are predictable and come pretty much ready-made.

They say the more you liked the book, the less you'll like the series. That's sad but true. They also say that 'it had to be done this way', but I think that's garbage. The other shows I watch are able to pull off moderately complicated continuing stories (in the case of Lost, very complicated) without much of a problem. Even lesser-known shows like The Tudors have done it very well. But I guess that wasn't in the cards for Legend of the Seeker. I wish the series had never been made, because it makes me feel ashamed to say I liked the book. With things like this, you've got to do it right, or not at all. I'll admit, I'm only watching it now to see how much worse it can possibly get, and in that regard, I haven't been let down recently.

If There's Ever Been a Time, It's Now

You know, they should call January 'health month'. Everyone has these great goals to be healthier and fitter and then by February, lots of them are back on the couch munching on discounted Valentine's day chocolate. Well, I think I'm starting to feel the effects of getting almost no exercise beyond the daily "transit dashes", as I call them. However, gyms repulse me a little so this might be reality until it warms up. I formulated a plan to make me run for probably 20 minutes in the morning... catching the bus at the entrance of Queensland. I have pretty much no desire to do this until the snow is gone, though.

Best exchange of the weekend:

Colette: My back is all tense... I need a massage chair, like what Grandpa has.
Dad: You need to go outside and get some exercise once in a while.
Mike: No, Dad! We need better chairs!!

Last New Years, my resolution was to clear out all the useless stuff in my room and I did it. A few weeks ago, I did it again and I plan on doing it once a year from now on if I can. It makes me feel like moving would be fairly painless, since everything in my room is stuff I know I want to keep, and it's all organized already.

Speaking of moving, I kind of hope this is the year I move out. It's a bit of a scary concept, since it'd be the first time I've ever moved, but it'd be good for me. I'm still debating what would be best, renting or owning, house or condo, etc. The best would be for me to get a place with my brother, but while in school, I think he doubts whether he could swing rent or house payments, which is fair enough. The other main option is moving out with any or all of Kim, Alex and Mark, but things are a bit up in the air as to whether they'll be living in Calgary for the foreseeable future.

Anyways, back to the resolutions. Another one for this year is going to be getting more sleep. Once I get home from work, I always feel like I don't have enough hours to do all the things I want to do. But I think I just need to suck it up and tell myself to wait for the weekend. Going to bed at 10pm would give me four hours of free time every evening, and I guess that's pretty okay. That would also mean 7-8 hours of sleep, which I think would make me feel less irate at hearing the alarm every morning. It's worth a shot, anyway. It may mean less time on the computer but that's probably a good thing.

Exercise, sleep, and the last traditional one: diet. I feel like I eat pretty well overall. One thing I want to do though is try to replace meat with other protein sources more often. The more I read about vegetarianism, the more it seems like a great idea. I just don't know if I could do it long-term. However I did read that if everyone eliminated one meat meal per week, it would drastically help the environment. It doesn't seem like a big thing, but when you think about the number of people in North America alone (500 million, give or take), and then multiply that by at least two (meat meals per day), geez, that's a lot of animals. So to subtract one meal per week per person does make a huge difference. The way it helps the environment is that it would mean less cows (which produce methane, a greenhouse gas. It sounds inconsequential and funny until you remember the amount of cows we need to sustain our beef-loving diets), more land used for crops instead of cows, less pollution from processing and packaging plants, etc. You can read The Food Revolution by John Robbins for more information on that.

Becoming a vegetarian would be, I think, a fairly major and hard decision but I know I can eliminate one (or more) meat meals a week quite painlessly. I went to a cafe across the street from my office today for the first time and they make an awesome veggie sub.

Well, that's enough resolutions. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy so I hope that means people will be handing out amazing telescope lenses on the street. What? It doesn't?

Take Me Over Forests, Take Me to the Stars