#3 – Mass Effect 2

Though this game’s already been reviewed at length by many other outlets, I felt, having recently beaten it, that it was time I threw in my two cents.  Disclosure: I think Mass Effect 2 may well be among the best video games I’ve ever played.  Its entire presentation – from Martin Sheen to its stunning graphics to its vast improvements over the first – is just phenomenal.  ME2 is very often entertaining in a way that seems ridiculous.  It is a thirty-plus hour game that I beat in just over two weeks.  It is also tantalizingly flawed.  I say ‘tantalizingly’ because given the vast improvement between ME1 and ME2, one can expect that all kinks will be ironed out by the time ME3 is released.  To wit: ME2 is for the most part very, very engrossing, except when it isn’t.  Furious action scenes are strung together by eyeball-achingly-dull galactic exploration (think leveling up ad infinitum in any Final Fantasy game), which is problematic for two reasons: 1. because boring sections are boring; & 2. because much of ME2’s strength lies in the fact that it’s highly immersive and cinematic.  Flying a tiny, Asteroids-looking ship around the galaxy scanning uncharted planets for minerals isn’t my idea of fun, and doing so breaks the fourth wall of immersion that ME2’s action set-pieces go to such great lengths to set up.  But the game is tantalizingly flawed mainly because of one key scene towards its end.  In it, you abruptly switch away from your heroic main character and assume the role of your ship’s disabled pilot.  There is no shooting.  In the midst of a terrifying attack, you limp slowly around the ship, pressing buttons.  And this is the best scene in the entire game.  Video games need more like it.  Let’s hope that happens, somehow.

-Kevin O’Rourke

#2 – On Peggle

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been inside your dimly lit apartment all day watching TV or idly futzing around on your laptop, that somewhat awful feeling you get that’s kind of a low-grade headache + neck soreness + a general inability to breathe as well as you’d like (sometimes known, somewhat obtusely, as cabin fever): Peggle is that feeling, in computer/video game form.  The point of Peggle is, on its face, very simple: one is presented with a board filled with colored ‘pegs’ (hence the name), some of which are orange.  You, the player, are given ten silver pinball-looking balls and are given the task of eliminating (by shooting them with said pinballs) all of the orange pegs.  There’s a catch: you can’t do anything after you shoot your little silver pinball thing at the orange pegs, anything at all, and so much of one’s time spent ‘playing’ Peggle consists of watching a little silver ball bounce off of variously colored pegs.  But oh, somehow, oh what fun it is.  There are special powers.  There are anthropomorphic animal Peggle Masters who guide you along an ‘adventure’.  And whenever you clear a board, Ode to Joy blasts out triumphantly.  Yet, as discussed above, one tends to feel logey at best after only playing Peggle for even a few minutes.  Because of this – the push & pull between Peggle being a boring game wherein the player does little and Peggle being an exclamatory game filled with cartoon buddies and shiny objects – I like to think of it as America’s game, the game we modern Americans deserve and choose (apparently in droves: 50 million and counting!) to play.  So what if we haven’t worked all that hard to earn an Ode to Joy + rainbow ending? We fucking deserve it.

-Kevin O’Rourke

#1 – REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO by David Shields

Appearance: Book.  192 pages.  582 (numbered/mongrel) paragraphs.

Genre: Strenuously N/A.

Release Date: January 2010.

Contents: Verbal collage.  Musings, aphorisms, epigrams, axioms, quips, theories, readings, jokes, undocumented quotation—Yeats to Nirvana to Walk the Line.  An examination (demonstration?) of the culture’s simultaneous demand for “truth” and art.  A pointillist assemblage of disparate material.  An attempt to square America’s Next Top Model with the history of “sampling” in hip-hop.  With Proust.  Memoir—not, not that.  Okay, essay, maybe.  Literature.  Ideas, in brief.

Perks: Assumes readerly intelligence.  Short.  Adds an intellectual sheen to one’s person in coffee shops/on the train.  Will likely be shelved somewhere amusing in bookstores.

Tics: (Over)use of parenthetical commentary.  A tendency toward glibness.  Addition to/predilection for slash marks.

Notable Claims: Novels are boring.  Memoir is boring.  Narrative is tedious.  Fragmentation is interesting.  Disorientation is interesting.  Writing at the margins of a genre is interesting, “good.”  Reality television is a gauntlet toward which writers of fiction must respond.  Jessica Simpson typifies the new celebrity.

Critiques: Term “novel” poorly defined, conflated with “plot.”  “Fiction” is also conflated with “narrative.”  Pop cultural references unlikely to date well.  Digressions into musical history/theory/”appropriation art” prove incongruent to trends in literature, incompatible as analogues.  (Related) refusal to attribute quotations sets dangerous standard.

Praise: Has pluck. Clever.  Form beautifully suited to thesis/function.  Style is genius, hypnotic, insidious, (evil?).  Astute.  Timely.  Impatient, yet precisely constructed.  Author—the “I”—emerges gradually and delicately, almost in negative relief.

Comparisons: Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood.  Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone. “Lydia Davis, everything.”

Notable Omissions in Text: Sarah Palin.  Oscar Wilde.  Vanilla Ice.

Text’s Views on Sarah Silverman: Disappointingly positive.

Conclusions: Volume interesting inherently, but most especially in the dialogue it is likely to engender.  This writer, at least, skeptical that narrative can be dispensed with wholesale.

-Sara Joy Culver