The Last Candle

One of the new radios in the Portal update. Broadcasts may contain SSTV data or LOLs.

In the summer of 2004, an ARG called I Love Bees (or ILB), a series of promotional stunts for the upcoming release of the game Halo 2, invigorated a time that was otherwise a working summer spent in my college city of Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Heck, I wasn’t even a big Halo fan at the time, but the ILB game, which combined a digital world with our sensory one, captured my attention completely for several days. I wrote an essay about my excitement for the surreal events, events where hidden messages were found buried in distorted JPEG images and pay phones across the nation in both urban and rural locations rang out as the game’s awakening AI stretched “axons” across the continent. Naturally I concluded that fond recognition by saying I very much looked forward to the next ARG that captured my imagination.

That ARG arrived two days ago, and this time the events surround the puzzle-adventure game Portal. My interest began when I was browsing through the feeds in my RSS reader and found that an update was released for Portal. Hardly unusual, even for a two-plus-year-old game, but the patch notes for this update piqued my curiosity.

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

Needless to say, this kind of “compliance” is not your typical bug fix or extra feature, notwithstanding the beautiful freedom allowed to the PC platform (compared to the locked-down purgatory occupied by the popular consoles¹). I went to my usual Internet gaming haunts and found that various fan communities had already accomplished most of the gruntwork with the new update, revealing the update as actually the advent of a new ARG, one to rival 2004’s I Love Bees.

A Steam post on the official Steam forums summarizes the week’s excitement very well, but own my excitement continues below.

Portal players who began a new game booted up the game after the update was applied, they (including me) discovered that a series of radios, exactly 26 in all, had been added to the many “test chambers” — puzzles, divided among many rooms — and that they would broadcast morse code or what was seemingly static. And the radios now make terrible noises when tossed through a “fizzler,” signaling a newfound significance in the setting.

All information for the new ARG thus far has come from those radios. The morse code contained genuine messages, although the quality of the new information ranged from mysterious (”Interior transmission active”) to comedic (”Beep beep beep beep lol”). But the real meat has come from the static, which turned out to not be static at all but data. Intrepid gamer investigators extracted the data, and someone had the knowledge to guess the audio recordings were “broadcast” using slow-scan television, a picture transmission method utilized by ham radio operators. Someone ran the audio through a decoder of sorts, and images like the below came out the other end of the black box.

One of the pictures decoded from Portal's new radio transmissions. Crazy!

Twenty-two of these images were decoded, and further numbers and letters were extracted from the new information. And here’s where the game bled out into the real world: Some of the numbers and letters, after being further decoded, ended up being a regular, single telephone number, location in Seattle, WA.

Voice calls resulted in no success, but eventually someone called using a different, bygone technology: a dial-up modem. A BBS picked up on the other end, which of course requested login credentials. After discovering the credentials (the method how they were discovered escapes me), modern Portal fans, using video cards holding 1000 times the primary memory of a entire desktop computer back when BBS’s were common, logged into the system and retrieved another set of vital clues, presented this time in a very appropriate format: ASCII art.

Like ILB preceded a sequel to Halo, Portal’s ARG is seemingly approaching a sequel to itself. I find it incredibly cool that the developer Valve used Portal, which has basically been unmodified for over two years, as a vector to continue its universe. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen: that’s what press releases, magazine advertisements (okay, maybe not so much these days) and previews are used for. But here we have not only the game influencing real-life events, but a game seemingly modifying itself (within the fiction, of course), which goes hand-in-hand with the main antagonist of the Portal universe, a saucy artificial intelligence who declared itself at the end of the original game (after a fair bit of combat) to be “still alive.” And so it seems.

Of course this gives me an excellent excuse to play through Portal again, collecting radios and enjoying once again, for the fourth or fifth time, what is arguably one of the best games of the past decade and definitely one of my all-time favorites.

Oh, and hey — looks like Portal was updated again today, this time adding a “valuable asset retrieval.” Seems like this fiction is picking up momentum, and I am all too happy about it.

As part of a burgeoning Blu-ray collection, I recently picked up a copy of The Matrix 10th Anniversary Edition. More importantly, I had a chance to watch it again for the first time in close to ten years. The movie still feels contemporary and plays really well, but I came up with a few observations.

I suppose this post had to come sooner or later, so I might as well get it out of the way now.

• The phone used by Mr. Anderson/Neo, Morpheus and other characters throughout the film, a modified Nokia 8110 with a snap-out keypad cover, was cool in ‘98 but looks old and clunky compared to today’s standards. Films featuring frequent use of then-modern technology are always at the mercy of time and the always-advancing electronics industry — 2001 and Blade Runner are exceptions, probably because those settings are so all-encompassing, well-realized and persuasive — but the frequent usage of phones in The Matrix is prominent enough to make the Nokia 8110’s presence the most jarring. And like any other film with computers of any sort, the fake rendered on-screen interfaces are clunky and ridiculous.

• Apparently I’ve become of fan of wider shots, because the constant close shooting of head-body eventually began to annoy me. Still, I like how the sharp lighting frames and highlights the geometry and curvature of characters’ faces during the frequent close shots.

• Not surprisingly, the dialogue is weak to passable in this film (although the delivery itself is good), but compared to the trademark dojo and corridor action set pieces, few dramatic scenes are memorable. I still like Fishburne’s first scene very much.

• Larry Fishburne and Marcus Chong as Morpheus and Tank, respectively, give my favorite performances. Fishburne because he has a gravitas that successfully delivers the many vague explicative scenes without rendering the plot as obvious nonsense or complete confusion, and Chong because, besides playing a very friendly character, gives a little heat and humanity to a film that is otherwise strict and very solemn. Also good is dinner scene between Agent Smith and Cypher/Mr. Reagan — warm and a rare bit of humor.

• Morpheus and Neo’s short scene in the “Desert of the Real” takes place on what is too-obviously a set. A high school production could possibly mock it up completely, save the lush lion-head leather chairs.

• This movie is edited very briskly and has an almost linear narrative. For example, within about fifteen minutes, Neo is bugged by Agent Smith in the interrogation room, has the bug removed by Trinity, meets Morpheus, is released from the Matrix and is brought on board the Nebuchadnezzar, all in series. There are very few “pillow shots” and only one cross-cutting sequence towards the end. Not that this is a bad thing: In this film, the “how” and “what” is much better captured and depicted than the “why” and “where.”

• The famed corridor shootout scene still looks great, but I wish it had more of a conscious sense of space and progress, both how Neo and Trinity traverse the corridor and how many military combatants remain throughout the attack. I’m not suggesting that the film explicitly call out how many enemies were defeated, like Kambei marking off defeated bandits on a piece of parchment in Seven Samurai, a classic example of Kurosawa’s love for explication and progress. But the action in the corridor begins and ends too quickly, with each brief encounter either a medium shot of moving in slow motion or a close shot of a military grunt being killed with little continuity between each encounter.

• As for the Blu-ray package itself, the 10th Anniversary Edition comes in not a keep case but a nice cardboard, book-like case. The liner notes are annoyingly attached to the inside cover, but I prefer this release’s package to the typical ugly baby blue plastic Blu-ray cases. After picking up so many multi-disc high-quality Criterion release, high-quality packages are a big draw for me.

• This 10th Anniv. version features a terrific commentary and scene-by-scene analysis by a group of film critics. Also included is a cast commentary, but I recall the original DVD release’s cast commentary being surprisingly dull, so I’m not in any hurry to check it out.

I don’t plan on buying copies of the series’ second and third films, but The Matrix is still welcome to my Blu-ray library as a great action-fantasy film, though oddly balanced next my copies of Kagemusha, Chungking Express and Pierrot le Fou.

Edits: Modified the paragraph about framing and the conclusion.

Busy season is tough enough without my daily tools going pear-shaped on me:

Really now? My grievance that elicited this opaque error: copying a smallish bitmap into a document. And what am I supposed to do after saving? Close the document and never edit it again?

In contrast, my other big Microsoft tool, Visual Studio, is amazingly robust and usable for hours and hours, and I really enjoy working with it. But, man, Word is not a pretty thing most of the time.

In the later half of the 90’s I took part in this burgeoning so-called World Wide Web by creating and managing a fan site for the vehicular combat video game series Twisted Metal. The site was stored at Geocities, the inarguable hosting giant of the time, and stayed put on a stretch of land in the TimesSquare/Arcade district for over ten years.

But last Monday, parent company Yahoo! swept an arm across the ‘Cities property and cleared a thousand crude communities from the face of the Internet, including my site, that first easily-forgotten foray of mine into web development. But for reasons of nostalgia and a touch of masochism, I grabbed a copy of my ol’ site from Yahoo!’s clutches before the couple rusty Geocities servers were isolated from the niche market of web surfers who still pined for the days of when the web was simple, static, and almost completely ugly.

For my part during dawn on the Web, visitors to my simple, static and ugly Twisted Metal-focused portal were greeted by the following splash page entrance:

Welcome to Twisted Metal. You will enjoy this.

Splash pages as an entrance to a web site are frowned upon these days, although artist portfolios and upscale furniture stores usually can get by without anyone complaining. But back in the late 90’s, the splash page was a throw-down introduction and on the cutting edge of site presentation. Match a splash page with a few blink and marquee tags — also on the cutting edge of web development at the time — and your site counter was almost guaranteed to click through at least twenty hits a day. That’s juice.

The site provided screenshots, news, clever commentary, and, of course, cheat codes, as well as insider tips announcing that foreign fascists had infiltrated our domestic game studios:

'Have a drink. Enjoy. Be refreshed.'

When the site was abandoned in early 1999, shortly before before I struck out in the world to make a mint on the stock market or develop a new type of biodegradable shopping bag or something similarly important, the site focused on the recent release of Twisted Metal 3. But ever the careful webmaster, I didn’t let the previous games in the series fall out of the public view and continued to praise their contribution to the now-popular exploding cars and vehicular manslaughter genre. Even when compared to site documents that focused on more recent titles, the Twisted Metal 2-focused pages delivered the same forceful, intense aesthetic design and high quality content expected of the site:

Too Twisted, too Metal Two.

That title graphic is rad: blood-weeping bullet holes, a lens flare blaring out from a skull’s barren eye socket (yes, that is a big stupid skull in the image’s background), and a prominent application of the blue-and-gold “chrome” paint gradient. I actually was pretty proud of the work at the time, but looking at it again, the chrome is a touch gratuitous. Maybe.

I’d like to think my Twisted Metal site accrued a hundred-thousand hits and served the audience of the fine vehicular combat series for many happy years. Of course, I’ll never know about those hits since my free counter died years ago — overflow because of exceptionally high numbers perhaps? — but the site is now part of my archives, to be enjoyed whenever I please. Maybe I’ll even pop one of the old games in my original PlayStation and relive those simpler times.

On second thought, looking back at those screenshots, I’ll keep those memories and the games at arm’s length.

Nonetheless, over ten years later, I am here.

I don’t expect a lot out of power metal, but I love it: fleet-fingered technical proficiency, the requisite guitar-keyboard dueling, soaring high-register vocals, swords-and-sorcery concepts, juvenile lyrics, and enough hooks and melodies for a half-dozen pop songs. Power metal is not interesting, but it is completely awesome.

Once in a while a power metal band grows a brain and changes the time signature for a few bars, dumps the keyboard for a glockenspiel, drops the frenetic double-bass drumming or guitar solos for long atmospheric bridges and 10-minute compositions, or cans the unicorn fantasies to delve into concepts about society, politics or theories of existentialism. This is called going prog, and the change is generally a beautiful thing.

But sometimes the change doesn’t work out so well. Take the following two clips from a band I’ve followed and enjoyed for nearly ten years, Sonata Arctica. Sonata Arctica’s second album, Silence (2001), contained a song called Wolf & Raven that has not only been a personal favorite since then but is an excellent example of the genre as a whole.

So I was excited to find recently that a 2008 re-release of Silence featured a “remake” of Wolf & Raven. Excellent. Going into the song, I expected them to have tightened up the sound, punched up the concept through orchestral and more complex arrangements, and expanded the song while keeping the same frenetic energy of the original track.

See for yourself — here’s a clip of the Wolf & Raven remake. I’m playing the 2008 version first because it’s, well, the underwhelming of the two versions. Both versions use the same lyrics stanzas to make the difference more clear, although the change couldn’t be more obvious as-is.

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Melodic and swooning, which is 50% of the power metal world. But this low-tempo ballad is also unusually pompous and forsakes none of the standard drumming, guitar or keyboard melodies of any kind, as if the remake was just a resume for Tony Kakko, the band’s lead singer, songwriter and part-time keyboardist. It has no lift, no energy.

The “remake” part could have been been “demo” and that would’ve made a lot more sense, especially after exhibiting this next clip of the 2001 original. Turn your speakers up (or down, if you’re not so much into the metal thing).

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Now that’s what I call power metal: fast, fiery, and totally ridiculous. The 2008 remake is has little power and certainly isn’t metal, so I don’t know what it is. Dramatic, definitely. Foppish, maybe. But it isn’t metal, although it’s still not bad. At least the band kept the high-register vocals and orchestral arrangements.

Sonata Arctica released a new album just a couple weeks ago, with Flag in the Ground being the new single. I’ve given it some playtime: solid album, but a new Porcupine Tree album was released a week prior to Arctica’s The Days of Grays. And the Tree cannot be out-progged.