Aim For The Heart: February 2008

Last week we bought two Mystery Science Theater 3000 boxed sets. Watching bad movies almost every night has made me realize that so many of these shows have some of the same things wrong with them. What is it about bad moviemakers that they just can't see what it is that makes their art so awful?

Here are a few traits that I noticed that are consistent in these bad movies:

1) Stupid actions by the heroes. Oftentimes the characters do something just to drag out the story when a simple solution is staring them in the face. In The Giant Spider Invasion, a hero is supposed to grab a flare gun and head into a field after the giant spider. He forgets the gun, even though a) they're in a life-threatening situation, and b) he'd just mentioned he was going to use the flare gun ten seconds earlier.

2) Scenes that meander. Maybe they're waiting for something to happen and, rather than skip ahead, we get to watch the entire waiting scene.

3) Scenes that do nothing to advance the plot or reveal the characters. This is an especially egregious offense. These bad moviemakers either have scenes with their buddies in them they don't want to cut or they can't get rid of anything they shot because they can't kill their darlings. This often goes along with nbr. 4.

4) If the movie was made in the sixties, there's almost certain to be a band or singer who has to sing an entire song while the plot grinds to a halt.

5) Showing too much transition. I remember in the movie Hobgoblins how we always got to see the heroes pulling into the driveway or parking lot. The entire scene. Every time.

And these examples aren't even accounting for plots that make no sense, terrible acting, bad camera work, bad sets or special effects, or basic mistakes like boom mikes falling into the scene.

I also want to point out the numerous ways these movies insult women, though in fairness, most of those are a sign of the times. But in the spider invasion movie, there was one especially stupid scene where a male scientist goes to meet with another and sees a woman in a lab coat and carrying a clipboard. He tells her he's meeting with Dr. Whatever. Is that her father? No. Husband then? No. Then it must be her brother. No, I'm Dr. Whatever.

The movie was made in 1975! It's not like women were that out of place in science-related fields in the seventies.

We still have three more movies to watch, so if I return next week bleary-eyed and insane, you'll know why. I'm looking forward to Parts: The Clonus Horror, which I believe is the movie The Island (Ewan McGregor/Scarlett Johannsen) ripped off.

(For the record, a few of the movies MST3K makes fun of were probably decent movies for their day. The one we watched last night, The Rebel Set, had a coherent plot and decent camera work, and many of its faults were more a sign of moviemaking of the day.)

Maybe my next blog post will discuss how most of these elements also make for bad books.

Due to a couple of early morning work-related phone calls to my husband, I woke up insanely early Saturday unable to sleep. So I got my grocery shopping out of the way (Wal-Mart is almost pleasant at 6:30 in the morning.) I returned home, grabbed breakfast, and started installing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The game I've put 300 hours into and never finished. The game I spend almost as much time modding as I spend playing. The game that deserves every award it's ever been given and then some.

The game that promptly crashed my computer after four hours of downloading the biggest overhaul mods out there.

Actually, that's not true. It didn't promptly crash my computer. It let me get all the way through the tutorial dungeon first. OK, so I remove all the mods and step back through the sewer gate. No crash! But I still had purple all over the ground, a sign of a missing texture file.

Easy fix, right? I'll uninstall, reinstall, and the world will be a wonderful place once again. Except it didn't play. At all. All I had on was Oblivion and it didn't work. Tried again, and in the meantime, went to Best Buy for a new keyboard. Also found the Shivering Isles expansion at Computer City (for $15!) and decided to buy it. (Except for the new location, I don't even know if I'd realize what was new material and what was modded stuff.)

Long story short (no, really, I left out several install problems here), I finally got Oblivion working with Shivering Isles and a buttload of modded material.

This time around, I'm going for full immersion. I add one or two mods at a time and then check the stability of the game. I'm adding new mods that:

1) Remove fast travel - finally, a reason to own a horse!
2) Give you a bedroll, because I'm adding a required sleep mod
3) Require food and drink
4) Weighted gold and torches - there's also a mod that adds a bank to the Imperial City to store your excess cash
5) Fatigue based on weight limits - no more walking around one point away from my weight limit, picking up a blueberry, and suddenly being unable to move.
6) I'll have to change the length of a day to do this, so I won't have to stop to sleep or eat too often.
7) I have Living Economy running, but I'm getting some sort of bug with the merchants' money and may have to disable it. I don't think that will destroy the immersion factor too much.

So, I'm deliberately making the game harder on myself. Why? I don't really know. It's an incredible way to play the game, though. I like loot whore games like Dungeon Siege and Diablo, where story and plot are at a minimum and your goal is just to get the best gear possible. But there's something so disappointing when you start amassing great wads of gold but you have nothing to spend it on.

Oblivion isn't like that. Not only can you use your gold to buy houses in the various cities, you can also upgrade them. Hell, you could steal the contents of someone's house and outfit your own with it if you wanted. Even vanilla Oblivion (that's Oblivion as it comes out of the box) allows this. Now add in mods that do damn near anything you can think of (including some stuff they didn't even think would be possible when the game was first released), and you have an amazing, open-ended roleplaying game that can be perfectly tailored to your preference.

And just think, in about a year, the same guys who did Oblivion are also working on Fallout 3. If they offer the same open-ended moddability to that game as they offered for Oblivion, we'll have seen the two best RPGs in existence in my lifetime.

I was thinking the other day about how so many celebrities are what I'd term Hollywood Pretty. It seems especially prevalent among the women. I think another word for it is cookie cutter beauties. They work so hard to remove any unique features that every one of them looks the same.

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I was cleaning up the filing cabinets, reorganizing, shredding, etc, when I came upon a short story I wrote in 1999. From the look of it, it's a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood. I don't even think I attempted to get this story published. I'm thinking of revising it, because what I saw didn't look half bad. I only winced twice in the first page.

I also found some old information on Victorian England that I want to read up on. It looks interesting, and I may be able to pull stuff out of it for my post-apoc. novel.

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I've been looking for a good CRPG lately, so I bought the game, Eschalon: Book One, an old school, turned-based RPG from Basilisk Games. I've already played about twenty hours this weekend alone. (I was sick most of the weekend. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking by it.) If you couldn't guess, I highly recommend this game.

I'm even considering giving Neverwinter Nights 2 another chance. Maybe it's finally been patched into playable shape. (We can always hope, right?)

Never did get to play Axis & Allies last weekend.

I have a cold, or maybe the flu; I don't know. Started noticing it yesterday. This might not seem like a big deal to most people, but I come down with illness once every few years at most. I'm supposed to play Axis & Allies tomorrow, and now I don't know if I'm going to feel up to it.

Of course the worst part of it is that I won't feel like exercising, and all I'll want to do all day is sit around eating.

It's been a while since I blogged last. Shame on me. I turned my book in on Friday, and this weekend I started editing a short story I'd written a couple months ago and dug out my last manuscript to see where I'd left off.

I can no longer tell if The Disciples of Ezekiel is any good. I've been looking at it too long. That's a good sign that it was time to finish up and move on to something else.

Next weekend I'm playing Axis & Allies. I've only played once before, and we got stomped. I'm just not a long-term strategic thinker. I tend to make up my mind quickly and act, sometimes to my detriment. Anything else and I get bored. But I did enjoy the game, and I'm looking forward to playing again.