Friday, April 27, 2012

What I've Been Doin' (Part 1)


This week, I am taking a bit of a vacation, so I am going to do a two part series of the stuff I have been reading, watching, playing, and listening to. Enjoy!

Kooky
I recently bought this in a pack with Windowsill (which I’ll talk about later), and it is a Czechoslovakian movie that I have wanted to see for a while now. It is the story of a sick boy and the adventures that his teddy bear, Kooky, have in the woods. The story is “Valvetine Rabbit meets Pan’s Labrynth,” except it is not nearly as emotional as the former, and has none of the tension of the latter. The movie as a whole isn’t great (though I should note I watched the dubbed version, and stuff could have been lost in translation), but the scenes with Kooky in the forest are phenomenal. The use of puppets mixed in with real world animals is both magical and technically impressive. Most of the puppets are seemingly made out of real world, everyday things you can find outside, and the way they move is both funny and fluid. Then having those puppets interact with real foxes, boars, ants, birds, etc. make some of the cinematography fit for a nature documentary. Perhaps not the best story, but the movie is saved by its visuals. Glad I watched it.

Musicology
Musicology by Oliver Sacks is about how the human brain processes and deals with music. It is a fascinating book, and Sacks’ scholarly, but accessible, writing is top notch. For me, Musicology isn’t just about music, but it is about how people consume art and why they do so. Seeing music as something like linguistics, and how learning how to make music can change the physical shape of the brain, is essential information for anyone curious about both the human brain and mind (did you know there was a difference?)


http://www.itstartshear.com
Equal parts melodic and haunting, http://itstartshear.com is a great album by itself. What really makes it stand out (as the URL album title suggests) is the interactive web site that serves as both the linear notes and the message board for the album. In this age of digital music, it is great to see somebody really trying to make up and add value to music that can be so casually downloaded, listened to once, and then never do anything with ever again. The album itself completely stands out on its own, and the entire thing is a must listen, but it means a lot to me when an artist puts in that little extra effort to give the customer back something that they may appreciate. The album can be downloaded from the site itself, but I found myself wanting to pay just in able to support the album (though the higher quality music files when you pay doesn’t hurt either). My first early candidate for album of the year so far.

Windowsill
Windowsill is a deceptively simple PC game that relies on absurdity and changing rule sets in order to keep things interesting. The game is about getting a small little blue cart from windowsill to windowsill by finding out how each room works and getting the key to the next door. Each windowsill is weirder than the last, and the game is much more about exploring how things even work than necessarily how to solve anything. As I am playing the game, I wonder if a child with a more malleable brain might be better at this than my more hardwired adult brain. What makes it fun to play though is that it is more about the joy of finding out what you can do rather than the frustration of what you can’t do. Each windowsill is so weird looking and confusing at first, that it is a revelation whenever the player can get something to do anything. In some ways, it feels more like a toy than a game, but it is when the absurdity is really turned up and leaves the player up a creek without a paddle that it really gets good. It is a game I would recommend to anyone, even if they don’t typically like video games, it is just that different.


FEZ
FEZ, on the surface, looks like a cute, innocent, 2D XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) game with the gimmick of being able to rotate the world 90 degrees to both change the perspective in order to jump from platform to platform. If you dig a little deeper though, FEZ is actually about breaking codes, learning languages, and playing archeologist in order to both solve puzzles and find out what happened in this world you are lost in. I have played it for a while, and got to the point where I have seen the credits in the game, but I have barely scratched the surface of what the game really is. While I am sure this mystery could bother many people, I found myself happy to explore a world I just don’t really understand yet. It made wandering the landscapes much more interesting when the symbols and marks found throughout each level aren’t just pretty designs, but actually mean something. I realize that I have an entire quest to undergo, and that I may not even be able to figure it out on my own, but I am excited to go down that path and see if I can uncover the mystery. Blocks, blocks everywhere, but not a one that I understand what the heck they could mean.

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