The Last Candle

41 days since my Xbox was sent off to fix the video problems, and ten days since I received the email telling me to wait “3-5 days” for the repaired machine. Needless to say, I’m not too happy about that kind of service.

Opening the box revealed a document placed on top of the console, which was just barely exciting. The document’s first line after the salutation says, “So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker, we have replaced your Xbox console with a replacement unit.” So the console they sent back is assumedly a refurbished model. That’s fine, but hopefully this “new” console performs more quickly and efficiently than the Xbox repair turnaround time has proven to be.

As consolation (pun!) for the repair, a 1-month Xbox Live gift card was included with the package. Fortunately for my piece of mind and time, I’ve already used the Live service and the irritating (and inevitable) Live cancelation procedure, which is about as fun as being stabbed in the upper thigh area or playing Zork. Thus, being aware of the ills of Live, I am deterred from future pain — until the next big Live game comes out, of course, but there are none on the horizon for my timeslice.

That whole account cancellation procedure galls me everytime I have to go through it, which has been at least a half-dozen times so far. Stopping an active Live account requires calling Xbox support and sitting on the horn with a representative for about ten minutes. The console’s interface is apparently fine for entering credit card information and cranking up a new or inactive account, so why doesn’t the Dashboard have an option to kill off an account as well?

I can guess at the answer to that one: there’s no easy cancel option because it’s too convenient. If you have to dial in to the mothership, scatterbrained folks (like myself) will forget to cancel a latent account for an extra duration, letting it relapse for another extra month or more, netting the Redmond Mind some easy capital. Kind of a impudent assumption, aye, but fairly so compared to Microsoft’s baffling UI decisions and callousness for customer support.

Well, callousness in this case, at least — they did send me a free keyboard after I accidentally knocked a glass of water into a previous model. Lesson learned: when in doubt, whine to customer support.

The only minor blessing out of this debacle is that during the month of estrangement my interest in the Xbox 360 has been low due to a lack of games for the console. That bodes okay for me, who hardly noticed the month of Xbox-lessness pass — I played Far Cry instead, which has been pretty goddamn fun, and Zork, which is…less than stellar — but not for Microsoft’s console, which has been in a slump for about six months.

Oh well. Only two months until Halo 3 is released, when Microsoft will rake in sultan-swooning piles of cash from the millions of copies fated to be sold.

I’m still tired from walkin’ around the annual Ann Arbor Art Fair a week ago. In fact, I was so tired that it took me the whole week to sift through and organize and upload the photos from the artsy overdrive walk and gawk.

Really. But take a look.

Ann Arbor Art Fair, 2007

Supplementing my DVD collection is low on my list of things to accomplish, hovering right around cleaning the lint from around the side of my clothes dryer and dusting the underside of my exquisite coffee table. However, when I drop the A-bomb — Amazon.com-bomb, that is — the citizenry in my little world parade in the streets. Here’s the latest haul:

To me, this arrival and arrangement is cosmically beautiful on a macro scale, as if Buddha, Allah and Jesus were all sharing a stout homebrew conjured up by Thor. Satoshi Kon (Millenium Actress and Paprika), Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and Akira Kurosawa (holycrapit’sfrickin RAN) are probably my three favorite directors of all time; getting them into the same room is a religious experience, even if they’re usually cooped up in the little DVD keepcases.

The Paprika soundtrack is my new heroin: it feels so good and so happy, but the enjoyment is quickly fleeting after the music ends, a siren song that beckons me back for another hit. Actually, I bought this disc solely for the variations on the main Paprika musical motif; three of the songs on the album (Mediational Field, A Drop Filled with Memories, and The Girl in Byakkoya – White Tiger Field) contain the motif and make me giggly throughout each of their five minute rushes. We’ll see how long they last before I move onto my next pop-infused love, though.

The Paprika OST was a fine bit o’ bounty not only because of the music, but also because of this prominent and brazen sticker affixed to the album’s plastic wrapper.

An ultra-modern attack on the senses. Film music on a new level, huh. Maybe it’s too subtle (or too ultra-modern), but the soundtrack just sounds like super-catchy electronica to me. But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt — perhaps it’ll grow as new albums tend to do.

Seeing this emphatic sticker got me wondering: how many other albums can attest to this high esteem? Are other albums deserved of the same incredibly positive critique bestowed by an anonymous admirer that the Paprika soundtrack received? I decided to find out by doing a little…testing.

Here’s a look at the Irish Invasion, which is no doubt massing on our east coast as I write this. (Think underwater bagpipes, and you’ll get the idea of how that’s going.)

George Lucas thinks his art is progressive, as in that he can just add some CG to a couple of scenes and validate another re-re-release of his variable-quality hexalogy. Me, I can bring his film’s soundtrack into the ultra-modern age by using just one little sticker.

Andrew W.K., whose musical composition is all over the map these days, would probably appreciate these accolades. It kind o’ works, too.

I would pay massive sums of cold cash to see the film for this soundtrack.

And finally: Hakuna matata, bitches.

My Nokia 770 is marketed as an “Internet tablet,” but it plays like a “mobile adventure game console” to me. Sure, being able to sit in the Michigan Theater and poach off of the coffee stop’s next-door WiFi is exhilarating and thrilling, even using the terrible signal attenuated to miserable levels by the organ pipes stowed within the ornate walls. But where this little baby really shines is playing adventure games.

Or so I thought was going to be the case. My aspirations weren’t that of a fool’s (in this case, at least) — ScummVM, the free virtual machine for the LucasArts classics, is reported to work beautifully, opening up the wonderous possibility of playing Sam & Max: Hit the Road in the Theater just prior to John Wayne scowling down from the silver screen, a lovely dichotomy. And if Sam & Max are invited, they’ll bring along Full Throttle, Monkey Island, Loom, and, er, Zak McKracken. (Welcome, Zak.)

But I haven’t been playing the classics due to a common issue with these little porta-devices: storage. The 770 comes with 64 MB of available internal memory and a 64 MB RS-MMC card, which I’ve already partially filled with podcasts and Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes ebooks. Even if I removed those small appeals to leisure, the need for space far exceeds the availability — the device just plain doesn’t have enough space to contain Mr. McKracken. And forget about keeping Ben of the Polecats under control.

My mind’s eye imagines the adventure gaming nerd in the back of audience, raising his hand and sputtering. He spouts that the original games only take up several megabytes each, a small enough size that I could fit the entire old library of LucasArts adventures onto the RS-MMC memory.

Well, that’s true enough, but also irrelevant. I don’t want the original originals — I want the talkies. I’ve played the speechless and speechified versions of Sam & Max, and let me tell you: Max’s chatter is worth the seven hundred megabytes of space it takes to store him.

But I don’t have seven hundred megabytes for the hyperkinetic rabbity thing, let alone Sam, their car, or the Human Dumpling (“He looks delicious!”).

So instead I’m playing Zork, which clocks in at about 64 KB.

Zork is to adventure games what Space Invaders was to the modern 2D shooter, or what Pong is to Wii Tennis. All of the aforementioned are games and concepts that the classic-ticians or golden boys of gaming like to reminisce about when they walk into a room and see Guitar Hero. Zork is hallowed in the annals of adventure gaming. Before Monkey Island, Ben, and Max, there was Zork.

Here’s the classic opening setting of the game:

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

> get knotted

Ha, ha. A little game humor there on my part.

But that’s how Zork begins. It’s a nice, confusing little beginning, but it lends a bit of promise and the patina of a swell adventure. My quest to play as many adventure games as humanly possible before I croak continues, and seeing how the genre is gasping for life these days, I would have to tap into the older library at some point. If Zork’s time wasn’t now, it’ll be a few destinations down the dusty path.

I’ve put several hours into the game since early last week. What do I think?

Well, let’s see.

So I’m wandering around the nearby environs of the white house, arriving in the forest. “You hear the chirping of a song bird somewhere near,” the game tells me. And I think, Cool. I like atmosphere, and I like chirpy birds. My character is directed into a clearing, and then takes a few steps away from the clearing direction, west, north, west…

And ends up back in the same clearing.

Um, okay. Let’s try going east this time.

Same clearing.

Okay, so the compass points in the land of Zork tilt a little bit. I need to make a map. Hey, I’m even feeling a little nostalgia for maps. It’s been a while since I had to make one for that maddening, disorienting tram puzzle in Myst, so I might as well scratch an itch and flex my map-muscles. (Actually, I think one of my sisters’ was the one to make the Myst tram map. I must have been the support. From another room.)

Further wandering in the forest gives way to boredom, which gives way to climbing trees, which gives way to my character finding a crystal egg with a broken clockwork canary inside. That’s pretty great. I’d rather have that fat flying chirpy bird, though, who is nowhere to be found. Even when I “look for songbird” the narrator tells me that’s it’s “somewhere nearby.” That’s fine. I’ll get that little featherhead, and then I’ll use him to solve the slider puzzle, because all adventure games have slider puzzles in one form or another that need solvin’.

Back at the white house. I hop through one of the windows into the kitchen and find the remnants of a lunch and a lantern sitting politely. Skipping augmenting my inventory further in lieu of further investigation of the digs, I venture upstairs into a dark room, where I am warned by the narrator that it is, indeed, pitch black and that I am likely to be eaten by a “grue.”

Let me warn any potential new adventurers who might traverse the lands of Zork: the narrator doesn’t kid around. When he warns you about being eaten by a grue, he means it. It’s not so much advice as a warning, as in “Go get that damn lantern, cowboy, or I’m going to kill your characters and scatter all of your inventory across the entire game map.” But I’m a Zork newbie, and I wasn’t afraid of the narrator. And then my character was eaten by a grue.

When your character dies in Zork, the game drops him back in the forest, his chirpy pal twittering idiotically overhead, and takes all of his items away. Not only does the narrator rob the PC bind, but he sprinkles the inventory seemingly random around the visited map.

Needless to say, after losing your inventory a few times, dying in Zork is old hat, a musty one that is beautifully full-brimmed. But I was quick to don a new chapeau by keeping the lamp lit at all times, heeding the omnipotent foresight of the narrator, keeping frequent saves and breaking the glass to reload at the slightest sight of a grue.

I rolled up the rug in the house’s living room and found a trap door, beneath which was the cellar and a host of other environments, such as:

• The Mirror Room, which has a path that goes east and north and somehow ends up coming back in the Mirror Room by a southerly direction.
• The Round Room, which is round.
• The Art Gallery, which is filled with canvassed caricatures of a demonic Mickey Mouse. No, not really.
• THE ENTRANCE TO HELL. Yes, really.
• An entire dam, including lobby, maintenance room (which includes a button that when pushed floods the room), and a massive lake.
• A twisty maze of passages, all alike. Oh, how I’m looking forward to making the map for this area. Hopefully it isn’t as bad as the mazes in Adventure, another old text adventure game, which is said to be non-Euclidean in its composition. Marvelous.

Note that all of this is underneath the house. Yep.

Occasionally while tromping around the undercarriage of the white house, which has proven to be perched on some truly exorbitant real estate, I meet a fellow who the narrator hints as a thief. The thief is always found leaning against the wall of whatever setting you’ve entered, with his big bag leaning at his side; the narrator warns that the thief is looking to lose the bag only “over his dead body.” My guess of the contents of the bag? Dead puppies, or Hostess snack cakes, because that how I imagine thieves roll in the wacky land of Zork. And I want those cakes.

Whatever the case with this vagabond, everytime I “stab thief” he kills me first, and I lose all of my items. Fair enough. I picked a fight, and he counters by whispering a shiv in between two of my character’s ribs.

But sometimes you just need to merely enter a room to provoke death-by-thief. Seriously: you’re in the mirror room, heading north; you’re in an East-West Passage, going west; you’re in the Round Room; Dam; Art Gallery; and then you are DEAD. BAM. Items are gone. Song bird’s overhead. Not even a chance to parry or jump backwards or anything. The thief knows, and he strikes swiftly. (I have a hunch that this thief may actually be, in fact, a ninja.)

This is not my idea of a good time. Other clever game devices include: a room that’s “too loud,” forbidding the player to pick up any items in the room (and, of course, an item is in the room); a chimney that’s a snap to get up, but attempting to descend garners the reply, “Only Santa Claus descends chimneys”; a lantern that quickly depletes of fuel, after which your character is dead on the next movement in the dark areas of the world; a tube of toothpaste-looking stuff that is helpfully described as “Gunk.”

OK, I get it – I’m not cut out for adventuring in Zork. It’s too wise, too snide, too strange for my Longest Journey-loving self. It’s old school. It’s classic.

For everyone else, Zork is available as a free download.

It’s too bad that this 770 doesn’t take SD cards. Otherwise, I’d be rockin’ to Sam & Max already.

As part of my quest for deliverling more content, but against my better judgement, I’ve started a tumblelog, The Last Candle{walk}. The “{walk}” part comes merely from a SRV song I was listening to at the time I needed to think of a title. A song, and a little punctuation abuse.

For those that haven’t heard of a tumblelog before (and my guess is that very few have — it’s not only a relatively new concept, but it’s yet another one of these dumb Web 2.0 ideas), it’s basically mini-blogging. Each post is a single link, a quote, a picture, a couple lines of text, and so on. Bite-sized blogging.

I’m expecting to load a lot of stuff onto the tumblelog; I frequently find little things to contribute to this blog, but the 20-minute writing and uploading Blosxom blogging procedure needed to share it deters me every time. Tumblr, the tumblelog service I’m using, allows me to post these tidbits in a couple minutes, which makes me very happy.

The usual long-winded flotsam will still appear here, of course.