The N64 game Turok 2: Seeds of Evilis not a great game. It may not even be a good game; it’s hard to say. The graphics were awesome in 1998, but they are somewhat laughable now. The combat is repetitive. And the levels are long and confusing, with only one or two checkpoint save areas spread throughout them. And then there is the whole question of “why is the hero dressed like an 18th century Native American while battling mutant robo-dinosaurs with a machine gun?” Never could work that out.
But Turok 2 had one very interesting feature: in every level there were these little chambers that would grant Turok special abilities. But there was also an identical chamber which contained extremely creepy, cyclops-like monsters that would utter threats of cosmic annihilation in an otherworldly, screeching voice before attacking Turok.
There was, as far as I know, no way of knowing if the portal was a good one or a bad one before entering. The first time it happened, it freaked me out pretty good. The resultant uncertainty and trepidation about whether or not to enter a portal was a very nice touch.
But the best thing about this was that these monsters were very different from the game’s normal enemies. In Turok 3, it’s explained that they are the servants of a somewhat Azathoth-like entity called “Oblivion” that’s out to destroy the Universe for some reason. But in Turok 2 you don’t know that. Even Turok’s guide Adon–or, as I called her, “Lost Land 4-1-1”– didn’t really know who they were or what they were doing. She knew pretty much everything else a dinosaur hunter would care to know in the game, but not that. That made it even scarier.
In most genres, this wouldn’t work. To put in unexplained characters out of the blue is usually verboten. But in the horror genre it’s alright because, well, the idea of monsters showing up out of nowhere is pretty scary. So it was pretty effective at scaring the player.
People knock video game writing fairly often. It’s a little unfair, because as I have said time and again, there are some excellent writers in the gaming industry. But they are exceptions, and most games are definitely not trying to be literary masterpieces. Certainly, Turok 2 was not looking to win any awards for its script. (Adon and the cyclops-monsters may be the only speaking characters; I can’t remember for sure.)
But I think that for that reason, games in the horror-genre can succeed even without “good” writing, because what would be considered bad writing outside of horror is actually quite effective in the genre. The good characters, Turok and Adon, are less interesting because they don’t really have any in-game backstory to make the player care about them. But by the same token, the fact that the writers don’t give the player the lowdown on the servants of Oblivion just makes them that much scarier.
I know I’m in the minority on this, but me and a friend happened to be talking about our disappointment with the Harry Potter series. I think talking about J.K. Rowling’s new book was what started it. We agree that 6/7 of the series is quite good. But the last 1/7 is a different story.
The series starts out magnificently, the first 60% or so being among some of the finest adventure epics I’ve ever read. In the second half, it gets weaker, but still very, very good. But it culminates in an inexplicable and unforeseeable disaster that tarnishes the whole thing. It is the 2007 New England Patriots of Y.A. fiction.
The first four books combine adventure, humor, horror and mystery into an excellent package. The climactic scene in the fourth book where Voldemort rises again gives me chills every time I read it. The next two books are not as good—they have more pointless teenage angst, and seem less tightly-plotted and well-edited than the previous ones. But they’re still quite good.
And then, alas, we come to book seven. The best thing about it is the cover. (In fact, the quality of Harry Potter books is inversely proportional to the quality of their cover art.)
This book is a mess. There is no gentler way of putting it. Early on we have the inexplicable alteration in Remus Lupin’s personality. Why he would suddenly become so reckless makes really no sense for the character, except, I guess, to set up a tearjerker fate for him and Tonks. It doesn’t work for me; it feels like the character just wildly altered his personality for no reason.
Then there is there is the posthumous destruction of Albus Dumbledore’s character. Now, I like the idea of a seemingly generic, stock character (kind, wise teacher) turning out to be more unique and interesting. Theoretically, it sounds like a good idea. But it doesn’t work with Dumbledore, because it comes too late in the story, and moreover it takes too much time away from developing other characters. Which leads me to my next point…
The marginalization of Severus Snape is another weird error, compounded by the fact that he got all the advance hype, and yet was barely in the book save for one flashback chapter. Snape is by far the most interesting and complicated character in the series, but he gets largely ignored and instead we get “The Dirty Life and Times of Albus Dumbledore”, or whatever it was.
This is all pretty bad so far, but I might have liked the book despite it all. What ruins it for me are the following catastrophic things.
First and foremost: The pointless introduction of the Deathly Hallows, which just confuse everything and add even more MacGuffins on top of the already hard-to-keep-track-of Horcruxes. The first six books were spent setting up the Horcrux plot thread; the Deathly Hallows just show up out of left field. They are a magical device too far.
This is closely related to the problem that the Deathly Hallows, particularly the Elder Wand, are governed by a set of byzantine laws that seem designed arbitrarily for dramatic effect. And even for dramatic effect, they fall short. The entire book hinges on Dumbledore’s “final plan” going awry, Voldemort not studying his Wizarding law, and Potter just happeningto disarm Malfoy at the right moment. Not on Potter learning something, or having courage; it’s just sheer luck. Realistic, I guess, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the series. (Jenny Sawyer wrote a review when the book came out that addresses this in a bit more detail.)
Finally, in the atrocious epilogue, I don’t understand how it is that no one seems to have learned that Slytherin house creates vastly more problems than it solves, and that it really should be abolished. Here they are, with the old rivalries still maintained, despite the fact that Slytherin’s Founder buried a giant monster under the school, his “heir” tried to conquer the world, and all but two of the people who are known to have attended Slytherin have been evil. (Even Snape and Slughorn aren’t exactly model citizens, but they keep it from being uniformly bad.)
But no, nobody cares, and they are still admitting people into Slytherin, effectively sorting all the little maniacs into one isolated group, cut off from the rest of the school. I would have tweaked the Sorting Hat’s algorithm to distribute the evildoers into the other houses, where they might be reformed, or at least restrained.
There are other flaws as well–the extremely dull camping trip (and the attendant return of pointless teenage angst), the comical ineptitude of Voldemort and his minions, the unbelievable ease and speed with which the entire Ministry of Magic converts from being a liberal democracy into an authoritarian regime. (Did all Ministry of Magic employees get a memo “You’re all going to be Nazis now”?) but these could be overlooked, if not for all the major flaws mentioned above.
All this adds up to a disaster. The characters are inconsistent, which makes them hard to care about. The MacGuffins and plot devices pop up everywhere, and are not really connected to each other in a meaningful way. The climactic battle between Potter and Voldemort is resolved by a quirk of wizard law, an ending which would be very well in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, but not so good in an epic high-fantasy novel.
Star Wars fans moan endlessly about how “the prequels ruined Star Wars“. Putting aside that I like the prequels, I never understood how the creation of a new movie could somehow retroactively ruin previous ones. But I can sort of feel that way with Harry Potter thanks to Book Seven. It sort of dulls the appeal of the whole series for me. It probably shouldn’t, because I can still go back and read the brilliant Chamber of Secrets and it is every bit the tightly-plotted magical thriller that it was before Deathly Hallows was even written. But, the fact remains, I have not bothered to revisit any of the other Potter books since Hallows, and I suspect my lack of motivation to do so is because of the awful finale.
When you criticize something popular, people usually respond with: “could you do better?” Fortunately, I don’t have to. The good people at “How It Should Have Ended” have already supplied an answer to that question:
Okay, I wanted to try to avoid blogging about politics this weekend, but analysis of Clint Eastwood’s Absurdist one-man play is everywhere. I guess it’s not even that political except that it happened at the Republican convention. As eurobrat points out, the performance, unlike everything else at the convention, was not carefully stage and crafted. It was spontaneous.
That definitely was why it was more memorable than anything else at the convention, but I am not sure that “memorable” means “good”. “All publicity is good publicity”, they say, but they are wrong. Just ask Richard Nixon. Still, I like Eastwood, and I can sort of see what he was trying to so, but it just fell flat. That’s okay; plays often do need adjustments after opening night.
Talking of which, Michael Moore has his own take on it, in which he erroneously says “a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering so he could literally tell the president to go do something to himself”. But Eastwood had the imaginary President–President Harvey, if you will–telling him, Eastwood, that. The implied swearing didn’t bother me that much, although I suppose it will horrify the religious wing of the Republican party.
But, in the end, it was my favorite part of the convention. I have to give Eastwood credit for that much.