Further Adventures

Random thoughts. Mostly—have we met?—SF-related.

• The otôto-ue and I have been playing through Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and, fun though it is, the whole thing becomes quite depressing when you consider that all those dudes you rescue in the early missions are just going to get infected by the Flood, or die when you blow the ring, later on.
  
  Also, though Cortana is quite wrong when she says you're making the Autumn's reactor go critical—the nice thing about fusion is it can't go critical—if you notice, what she actually has you do is something different. Namely, you break the magnetic containment, and then fire up the reactor and/or rockets. Which, considering it seems to be something on the order of H->He fusion (the proton chain, in other words), would indeed be very, very bad. Actually, "snap the ring and send one section of it crashing into another" level bad.


• T' other game what's come out is Skyward Sword, and, dude, read Fi's dialogue in a 343 Guilty Spark voice. It's nice to know Link's sword has an AI uploaded to it.
  
  On the other hand, though, a servitor of a deity—what some of us might term "a proxy of a power"—might have a very odd mindset that would strike us as not unlike a machine.
  
  But seriously, a 5% chance that Machi the Kikwi is Zelda? Better odds than I would've expected, lightbulb.


• It's official, speaking of CE Anniversary, that ODST and Reach are my favorite Halo games. Why? No Flood. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite fond of CE (at least in updated form), and 2 and 3, especially the latter, but the parts of those that I prefer to play don't have the undead bastards in them.
  
  I think a part of it is that, once the Flood show up, Halo goes from a first-rate shooter to a third-rate survival horror game. Think about it, the only strategy where the Flood are concerned is logistics, they aren't really tacticians ("wave attack" doesn't constitute a brilliant tactic, it just happens to work pretty well).


• Apparently (video-game themed, so far), Mark Hamill is stepping down as the Joker after Arkham City.
  
  He shall be missed. Nobody (with the only partial exception of Kevin Michael Richardson, whose Joker is a variant of Hamill's) can do the Joker half that well.


• Apparently there's some kind of concerted effort to spam Bill O'Reilly's book about Lincoln with (unwarrantedly) negative reviews. Know who's running it? Ron Paul supporters. This, understandably, confused my mother; I had to point out that Paulbots, along with most of the other less-bright Libertarians, are rabid anti-federalists. Lincoln, and the Civil War in toto, stood for federalism—it was not by chance that the CSA chose its name.
  
  Speaking of Paul, how come elfin little delusional libertarians always have the initials RP? Paul and Ross Perot should get together sometime. Ideally to reenact the ending of Thelma and Louise.


• It's very funny how often "the Uncanny Valley" is blamed for the failure of movies like Polar Express and Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. I suppose it's much more congenial a concept than the real reason, namely that those films sucked.
  
  Polar Express can give Santa Claus (as in, the one with Pitch) and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians a run for their money in the "shitty Christmas movie" department, and therefore needs no more mention from us. But Spirits Within...man, what a train-wreck. Did anyone else notice it's basically FF7, only without all the things people like about FF7? I admit I'm a stickler but if a work has "Final Fantasy" slapped on its cover I expect pretty people with giant swords and improbable, many-zippered outfits; I expect moogles, chocobos, and someone summoning Bahamut. I don't expect to see a reject from a CGI porn site lucubrating about the Gaia hypothesis to Keith David.
  
  I mean, hell, it's actually worse than Final Fantasy Unlimited.


• Has anyone considered that Fukuyama Jun's character in Code GEASS ought, perhaps, to have his name Romanized as "Larouche"? Which, think about it, casts a great deal of his behavior into sharp relief.


• RE: the Uncanny Valley, didja know the reason the things in the valley are creepy is, probably, that they trip the "that guy's got the brain-worms" instinct? What I mean is, if something's too humanlike, but not enough, it affects our emotions like a messed-up human. For most of our evolutionary history, avoiding people with major diseases or genetic disorders was a key survival characteristic.
  
  The Uncanny Valley, like a great many of the other oddities of human psychology, is a false positive created by a circumstance our brains didn't evolve to cope with. Zinjanthropus, after all, never attempted to render near-photorealistic CGI simulacra of his conspecifics.