If you’ve missed them, check out parts one and two of my big movie sell-off diary, which catalogs the handful(s) of DVDs I’m keeping from my collection of hundreds. The first two parts covered movie titles through the letter “P.” This is the third and final part.

One of these things is not like the others.

• Pitch Black: For as limp and disjointed as its sequel is, “Pitch Black” remains a master class in action-horror pacing; the disposable characters are fun to hate, and Vin Diesel shows exactly the sort of charisma and menace that directors have tried to coax from him since.
• Pretty Woman: A smart, frequently hilarious movie punctuated by Jason Alexander’s exquisite sliminess; it’s the first R-rated feature I remember seeing and has a brutal turn-of-the-decade soundtrack.
• Pride & Prejudice: I talked earlier about my adoration of director Joe Wright, and this is why; the movie condenses a classic text with a shrewd eye for what matters, and it manages to breathe some contemporary life into the thing while remaining faithful to the period; Keira Knightley is wonderfully prickly as Elizabeth, and Matthew Macfadyen makes for a delightfully mopey, suitably proud Mr. Darcy.
• The Prestige: Not my favorite of Nolan’s extracurricular in-betweenies — the projects he took on when he needed a break from “Batman” sequels — but I couldn’t throw away David Bowie as Nikola Tesla.
• Punch Drunk Love: Haven’t seen this in a while, but I insist on keeping it because of Adam Sandler’s completely sincere crowbar freakout.
• Pulp Fiction: This blew me away when I was 10 years old, and unlike its slew of wordy, hyper-violent, late-90s imitators, it holds up; kicked off my lifelong Uma Thurman fixation.
• Raising Arizona: I keep this more out of fealty to the Coens than out of true love, but it’s as enjoyable a Saturday afternoon baby caper as exists.
• Raging Bull: Obviously.
• Reservoir Dogs: Worth keeping for the warehouse Mexican standoff alone, and for charting how much better Tarantino became at them by the time he made “Inglourious Basterds.”
• The Royal Tenenbaums: Great soundtrack, great performances and my favorite on-screen portrait of an American city; as a treatise on family and fatherhood, I don’t really get it, but as a piece about achievement anxiety, I’m with the movie 100 percent.
• Rushmore: See above, but with a better soundtrack, better performances, funnier bits and a genuinely affecting story about infatuation and mentorship.
• School of Rock: I was primed to hate this, or at most to embrace it ironically, but with Linklater and Mike White involved, I ought to have dialed back the wariness a bit; this is a sweet, ridiculous movie about a manchild who loves to rock.
• Serenity: A whip-smart, butt-kicking, largely undiscovered action epic that concerns itself more with the worth of a man’s resolve than the fate of the universe; hopefully on the verge of rediscovery, given Joss Whedon’s extraordinary success with “The Avengers.”
• Seven Samurai: Another pile of shame entry, and a special edition at that!
• Shaun of the Dead: A seemingly effortless blend of pathos, slapstick, zombies, gore, aggressive editing and wordplay; bonus points for incredible third-act deployment of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
• Sideways: I can only hope that my middle-age friendships are more rewarding than the one between Thomas Haden Church and Paul Giamatti here, but if I have to settle for the same sort of uneasy, codependent detente (and things are trending that way), I suppose I could do worse.
• Sin City: A black-and-white, style-saturated comic book adaptation; thrilled to learn that a sequel’s in the works.
• Singin’ in the Rain: Among my favorite talkies, for sure, and features some of the manliest, most athletic dance sequences in the history of such things, I guess?
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: The actors-on-purely-computer-generated-sets thing had some punk-rock cachet in the early aughts — only a few people tried it, and when it worked, the effect was hypnotic — but as we’ve become better at spotting digital artifice, our patience with it has waned; all of which is to say, despite fun turns from Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law and a handsome palette of leathers and pastels, “Sky Captain” looks fuzzier, cheaper and stodgier than I remember.
• Sleepy Hollow: As The A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps pointed out in a recent inventory of terrible lead characters, Johnny Depp’s stab at Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is so terrific because Crane is such an unorthodox leading man; that he squirms like a gassy kitten and faints no fewer than six times makes his timely, unlikely bouts of heroism all the more satisfying.
• Slither: Like “Shaun of the Dead,” but with parasitic slugs in place of zombies, and gleeful, deliberate B-level schlock in place of feelings; populated by extraordinarily likeable people; between this and “Serenity,” the finer Nathan Fillion vehicle.
• Spider-Man 2: I tossed “Spider-Man” and never bought “Spider-Man 3,” but that doesn’t diminish my appreciation for what remains history’s best live-action superhero movie; the perfect blend of high-octane acrobatics and hero-versus-sympathetic-villain structure.
• Speed: Features a screenplay touched up by a young Joss Whedon; is fantastic; coincidence?
• (This Is) Spinal Tap: I had and lost “Best in Show”; else, I’d keep it, too; as things stand, this is the only Christopher Guest mockumentary I need.
• Spirited Away: Miyazaki’s magical realism alienates me more often than it doesn’t — it makes sense in “Princess Mononoke,” where the metaphysical hokum is attached to identifiable stakes, and it’s barely tolerable in something like “Howl’s Moving Castle” or “Ponyo,” where the stakes are much more abstract — but it somehow makes sense in “Spirited Away,” which is so airy and fantastical that it’s hardly worth griping about.
• The Squid and the Whale: A child of divorce snuck from one country to another knows a legitimate domestic drama when he sees one, and “The Squid and the Whale” is as authentic as they get; funny, real, complicated and occasionally ruinous, with children who feel compelled to take sides and parents who get the whole thing completely wrong.
• Stand By Me: Gosh, my favorite movie of all time; I can’t argue that the film (based on a superb novella by Steven King) wins on its creative merits — I haven’t seen the thing in years, mostly on principle — but it, more than anything else, taught me to take good care of my friends and to work hard to earn the same consideration from them; still looking for the Chris Chambers to my Gordie LaChance, and not quite sure I deserve one, but it’s something I think about constantly.
• Starship Troopers: Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi suckerpunch, based in spirit and in concept on the great Robert Heinlein book of the same name, greeted viewers in 1997 with tongue planted so firmly in cheek, it was likely to puncture the thing; the movie still works as a visual effects epic, complete with exploding faces and fire-breathing arachnids, but it’s also a fairly sophisticated satirical takedown of war propaganda and the comfortable cocoon the first world has woven for itself.
• All this Star Wars stuff: Look, there are three-and-a-half good movies among the dozen discs that compose my set, and that includes the outstanding Genndy Tartakovsky shorts. I really want only “Empire Strikes Back,” but that would be … ugh, dumb. Anyway, they all stay.
• Tigerland: A sweet story about an Army private (played by the typically outstanding Colin Farrell) who finds ways to help unfit draftees avoid being sent to Vietnam; that it comes from the hands of Joel Schumacher, who has demonstrated both admirable sensitivity and profound directorial ineptitude, makes it an interesting oddity.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Another pile of shame film, and an especially embarrassing one at that; the book, its author and the circumstances surrounding its publication are some of my very favorite things.
• Toy Story: In stiff competition with “The Incredibles” and “Wall-E” for favorite-Pixar status. Less emotionally potent than its sequels, but more elemental from a storytelling perspective; perfectly assembled.
• Toy Story 2: Expands the universe just enough, though it has a few fifth-reel breakthroughs that verge on cloying; Joan Cusack and Kelsey Grammer round out one of the best voice-acting ensembles in the history of movies.
• Trainspotting: A vile and essential Glaswegian dictionary; should have scared me straight about a host of self-destructive behaviors, but I’m stubborn that way.
• Unleashed: An oversaturated, fable-like yarn about a man of below-average smarts and above-average capacity for running up walls and dispatching bad guys; supremely economical filmmaking from Louis Leterrier, who satisfied in the first “Transporter” but has otherwise disappointed.
• The Virgin Suicides: I saw this as a teenager and didn’t really understand what I was watching, I think, but it’s widely considered Sophia Coppola’s best film, and I’m keeping my other Sophia Coppola movies, so I might as well hang on to this one.
• Waitress: Memo to progressive TV writers: If you want to give your heroine some agency, take a page from Adrienne Shelly’s “Waitress”; a smart girl gets mixed up with losers and musters the clarity and courage to distance herself from them.
• Walk the Line: I meant to give this one away but forgot; it isn’t bad at all, but Johnny Cash’s life was so frustrating, what with his frankly repetitive descents into drug-induced lethargy, that I’m tempted to reach through the TV and throttle Joaquin Phoenix myself.
• The Wizard of Oz: Just feels like one of those movies a person ought to have, right?
• Wonder Boys: Grady Tripp is the writer I aspire to be — misanthropic, insecure and contemptuous of other writers, with just a hint of empathy beneath it all; true to Michael Chabon’s work on the page, the movie is full to bursting with wit and characters a thinking person can root for.
• X2: X-Men United: Mildly disappointing for the same reasons the first film suffered — too much Wolverine, too much emotional Wolverine, and a retread of the same old let’s-make-all-humans-mutants-or-let’s-make-all-mutants-human chestnut— but still a fine, exciting superhero movie.
• War of the Worlds: A largely faithful and criminally underrated update to H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion story; the aliens are unrepentantly sinister, and the humans we get to know (including — nay, especially Tom Cruise) prove that they deserve to survive this nightmare.
• What About Bob?: Another nostalgia pick, though I can’t say specifically what it harkens back to; it could well be that I like watching a fussy Richard Dreyfuss.
• Y Tú Mama También: If I had seen this before “Stand By Me,” it might well have supplanted that movie as my favorite friends-on-voyage-of-self-discovery flick; though the kids here are older, worldlier, Mexican and products of the 1990s (rather than the ‘50s), they stumble on many of the same lessons; really wonderful.
• Zodiac: My favorite Fincher, thanks to dizzying detective work and pitch-perfect performances from Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

That’s another 56 movies, if you count all the “Star Wars” stuff, which adjusts the grand totals thusly:

I kept 147 movies and unloaded about 270, which works out to 35 percent retention. (These figures don’t include the dozens of TV season boxed sets that I weeded through, nor the dozens of Blu-rays I’ve kept.)

In other words, I kept one DVD for every two I sold. I’m okay with this, but for a moment, I wasn’t.

When it came time to actually sell the suckers — to accept the cash payout, and to pull them out of my car and put them in another person’s truck — I felt a microscopic pang of sorrow. For a long time, I thought of these things as important pieces of myself. They explained a part of me to the universe. People could visit my home and, at a glance, get an encyclopedic understanding of what I like.

This was vitally important to me. “What I like” was, for a while, the same thing as “who I am.”

But as I’ve grown, and as I’ve developed something closer to an actual personality, the asset has become an albatross. Pragmatically speaking, physical media is a pain to move and store. And the “who I am” argument barely holds water today, as I simply don’t buy movies anymore. Like the rest of enlightened society, I stream and rent, and if I feel the need to advertise a fondness for one thing or another, I have Facebook and Twitter and 8,000 thousand other ways to do so.

Now, when people come to my home, they see something new — cleanliness, organization and scarcity (and a 6-week-old kitten, but that’s another topic for another day). I’ve crammed my remaining movies and TV seasons into two Wal-Mart bookshelves, which I’ve lined up in an out-of-the-way spot near my tiny but handsome dinner table.

My erstwhile squatter’s den is looking more and more like an honest-to-God living space.

One of the first things I knew about “Star Wars: The Old Republic” during its development was that I had a friend on the dev team. Her name is Rebecca Harwick, and she wrote the entire story content for one of the game’s eight classes (Sith Inquisitor) and also participated in quest creation for many of the Imperial-side planet-specific quests.

Having gone to college with her, this factoid left me almost honor-bound to experience her first contribution to gaming (the first of many, I hope!). Of course, I played as a Jedi Knight first because I love being the good guy (and I wrote about that experience here). After writing that review, I created my second character and learned what it was like to be on the dark side.

Well, sort of.

The Sith Inquisitor is the empire’s equivalent to the Jedi Consular. Meaning, in game-speak, that the primary stat “Strength” is replaced with “Willpower,” and combat would now have less to do with technical prowess with a light saber and more to do with force manipulation (i.e. Lightning). At level 10, the Inquisitor chooses one of two advanced paths: Sorcerer (ranged DPS or healer) or Assassin (versatile DPS / rogue or evasion tank). I had so much fun spending half a decade of my life as a White Mage in “Final Fantasy XI” that I decided to make a heal-spec’d Sorcerer. In terms of gameplay, the experience has been full of splendor and joy, despite patches that “nerfed” Sage/Sorcerer healing.

In this writeup, I want to focus on the Inquisitor plot arc and character interactions. That was primarily what drove me to play through a second character: to experience a different side of the game and see how my young, aspiring writer-cohort compared to the seasoned Hall Hood.

The Sith Inquisitor starts his/her journey (I’ll be saying “her,” because my character was a female Twi’lek named Shurelia) as an alien enslaved by the Galactic Empire (i.e. “the bad guys,” or if you prefer, “the people with British accents”). She’s discovered to be a Force-sensitive alien, however, and is thus shipped off to the Sith planet Korriban to undertake some trials. Basically, she and a small group of other aliens will compete, directly and indirectly, until only one is left alive. Of course, that remaining person is you. *Why* it’s you is important. Turns out, you have a long-dead ancestor who is a Sith Lord. He’s also able to do the whole ghost-form thing, and he warns you that the lady you’ve recently landed the job of “apprentice” under is probably going to screw you over. Obviously. Master and Apprentice are always at each others’ throats. It is the Sith way.

The prologue nets you your first companion, a Dashade named Khem Val. Dashades are these weird Force-consuming beasts that look mean and ugly and talk a big game. Khem Val is bound to serve you due to the fact that you freed him from stasis, but he continually wishes his old master, Tulak Hord, were still alive.

After the prologue, the Inquisitor plot goes like this (cursory spoilers ahead):

Chapter 1 – You’re sent to round up 5 pieces that together make up the great MacGuffin of Ultimate Mystery. Or, rather, they’re the relics of Tulak Hord (aforementioned awesome Sith lord). As it turns out, Tulak Hord was working on a method of immortality: transferring one’s soul into younger bodies. Hmm, I wonder why your master would send you to fetch these items for her…? Also in this chapter: you pick up the romance-for-ladies boy-toy Andronikos Revel. He’s an ex-pirate with a fear of commitment. I still managed to make him marry me in the end.

Chapter 2 – Darth Thanaton, one of the twelve members of the Dark Council, tries to off you (due to a key event I failed to mention in the chapter 1 summary). Your ghost-ancestor informs you that your best defense, and offense, for dealing with Thanaton involves “Force-walking” and making pacts with other Sith ghosts. This makes you more powerful. Hence, you spend all of chapter 2 picking up said ghosts. You also pick up two companions: sassy Jedi padawan Ashara Zavros (romance-able if you play as a male) and archaeologist Talos Drellik. Big points to Rebecca for allowing *real* choices in how you persuade Ashara to join you (though, inevitably, she joins you regardless of your method).

Chapter 3 – All those ghosts aren’t enough to help you bring down Thanaton. In fact, their very presence is killing you. Looks like your own ancestor was either too ignorant or too apathetic to warn you of that particular danger. In the first half of chapter 3, you pursue a variety of ways to “heal” yourself. What happens on Belsavis was particularly interesting, and it opens up a whole set of lore that could (and should) be expanded upon in the Star Wars universe. In a short break between the two halves of chapter 3, you pick up your final companion, “Xalek.” A member of the Kaleesh race, Xalek becomes your apprentice in the exact same way you became an apprentice at the game’s start: things have come full circle. In the second half of the chapter, you have the ultimate face-off with Thanaton. Your reward, should you succeed? A seat on the Dark Council. You’re even given a new name: “Darth Imperius.” Feels pretty good.

Some further thoughts/details on the Inquisitor’s five companions:

Khem Val – Rebecca had a really good idea with this character (major spoilers ahead). After your master, Lord Zash, accidently has her soul imprisoned inside Khem Val, most of the companion dialogues have you talking with Khem, Zash, or both of them simultaneously. The “affection” you earn is done only when you say things that the real Khem Val, and not Zash, would like. Frankly, I think this was a missed opportunity. For this companion specifically, there should have been two separate affection gauges, perhaps competing with one another (like the Light Side / Dark Side points). At the end of the companion quests, you’d actually have an option on who wins in the final battle for Khem Val’s body. As it happens, even if you make choices that favor Zash in the end scene, it ends with Zash getting stuck in a Rakata mind trap for eternity and Khem Val regaining full control of his body. I would’ve liked the option to force Zash to serve me while stuck inside that body.

Andronikos Revel – Compared to my Jedi Knight’s romance with “Doc,” the relationship with Revel felt forced. There was no real chemistry, and frankly I don’t think Revel had much personality. Yeah, I get it, he’s a rogue pirate who doesn’t want to commit. I just feel like more could have been done with this character.

Ashara Zavros – I get the feeling that, if I had played as a male character, I would’ve really enjoyed the companion dialogues with Ashara. Mainly because you’re constantly toying with her perception of the Sith and forcing her to question her Jedi ideals, all the while wooing her into makin’ sweet love to you. As a female character (with no same-sex romance option), the conversations I had with Ashara felt a little dry. Yeah, I still got to have fun teasing her about being a Jedi following a Sith. But there was a lot of untapped potential. Maybe in future expansions (more on that below…)

Talos Drellik – This is my favorite of the five companions. A member of the Imperial Reclamation Service, Drellik is a glorified archaeologist with a penchant for the secrets of the Sith. He ends up picking up on the trail of another Reclamation Service member who’d gone missing years ago: Auselio Gann (I’m telling myself that the surname is a veiled shout-out to yours truly, but I can’t be sure… the are actual Ganns who live in Austin TX). What makes Drellik so great is that he’s this gentle, benign middle-aged man who just likes to dig in the dirt. True to form, the canon experience of “empire = bad” plays out in all sorts of nasty and twisted ways in “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” It was refreshing to have a member of the empire who didn’t have a penchant for torture, cruelty, bigotry, or some other vice. This guy just likes to preserve history. He’s also got a decent voice actor, and that goes a long way.

Xalek – Like many of the Chapter 3 companions (or so I’m told), Xalek is a throw-away character. The best part about him is all the stuff up to the point where he joins your party. After that, it’s just some 101 teaching on Kaleesh culture (which you can pick up on just as easily by doing, say, the Belsavis Bonus Series). Xalek’s final companion chat sequence involves him going to Ilum to perform funeral rites for his dying father. You don’t meet his father; instead, Xalek just leaves the ship and comes back after a fade-to-black-and-back to tell you things went smoothly. Okay…?

So, is the Sith Inquisitor path a good story? Let me put it this way. When I completed the Jedi Knight storyline, and I was ranting about it to my friend Stephen Meyerink (from RPGFan, he asked me bluntly: “is the story really good? Or just ‘MMO good’?” I asked him to define what he meant by MMO good. What he came back with was very insightful. He pointed out that MMOs generally aren’t known for having good linear narratives, so the bar is low. “MMO good” means the story’s decent for an MMORPG, but it wouldn’t be thought of as fondly in a single-player setting. I told him the game’s story was “really good,” and not just “MMO good.”

Well, the Sith Inquisitor story is “MMO good.” But I don’t fault Rebecca for this. Let’s face it: the main narrative of SWTOR was given to the Jedi Knight. It made sense to do so, as it would be almost definitely the most popular class (at least among Star Wars plot fans, the kind of people who played KOTOR and its sequel). And that story, the attempt to assassinate the Sith Emperor Malek, and the relationship with Kira Carsen as one of the “children of the Emperor” — that was genuinely interesting. The Sith Inquisitor isn’t given center stage, and as a result, the set pieces and characters with which Rebecca and the other writers could work with were … well, limited in scope. This couldn’t be a “save the universe” story. This is, instead, a “make yourself something out of nothing” story, which is basically *the* narrative of all MMORPGs, and apparently serves as the impetus for virtually every class other than the Jedi Knight (or, again, this is what I’ve been told by other players).

Like the whole Khem Val thing, though, I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the Sith Inquisitor. At the time of character creation, the option to be a pureblood Sith isn’t offered. Instead, you’re one of the alien races (to fit the “starting as a slave” narrative, as all aliens save the Sith are second-class in the evil racist Empire). As such, the Inquisitor is constantly butting heads with imperial authorities who have a narrow-minded vision for the empire: humans in charge, pureblood Sith allowed to join the club because they’re the polar opposite to Jedi and are super-awesome, and everyone else becomes the building blocks of the lower strata of society.

The missed opportunity comes chiefly with the endgame two-part Flashpoint series involving Darth Malgus. I first experienced these quests as a Republic character, and they made sense. After the Emperor went “dormant” (presumably dead), Darth Malgus makes a power-grab on Ilum and declares a new empire, one that is a meritocracy based entirely on strength. All aliens welcome. The Republic oppose them because this new empire appears as a third faction who still hate the Republic for being weak and democratic and blah-blah-blah. But my Sith Inquisitor? She is 100% in-line with the philosophical vision of Malgus and the others who follow him (including Darth Serevin, another of my favorite NPCs).

So here’s the part that really gets under my skin: when I take my Sith Inquisitor to Ilum, I get the *exact same* flashpoints as my Republic character. Only at one point am I given a dialogue option that even hints that I am sympathetic to Malgus. Nonetheless, I’m sent to stop him, and the quest is 100% a carbon-copy of the Republic version of the quest. I could swallow this for the six normal-mode-only Flashpoints, and for the endgame ops content. I loved that the Republic and the Empire had different flashpoints relating to Revan (though, the order in which they take place on a linear timeline, I’m confused about that still…). The point is, while I could see the Sith Warrior and Imperial Agent, and heck, even the Bounty Hunter, joining with old empire to take down fledgling “new empire,” the Inquisitor as a character is written as the antithesis to what the old empire stands for. Robbing me of the choice to side with Malgus is just dumb.

It’s worth noting that Rebecca chose to leave BioWare Austin to pursue a master’s degree. I’ll miss her ideas being put into SWTOR expansion content. I think the Sith Inquisitor is an interesting character, but one that, perhaps, doesn’t fit into the neat lines drawn by the rest of the developers, specifically those who work the imperial side of the plot. For players who play Inquisitor only, I think the Austin TX dev team has a unique challenge ahead of them if they want to bring good story to that character. As I said earlier regarding Khem Val, there were missed opportunities; I hope the folks at BioWare Austin are able to make up for lost ground with the next big expansion (1.5? 2.0?).

I could go on about how frustrated I am that having both sides to play leaves things at a perpetual stand-still, so you feel like nothing is accomplished (unless you’re a Jedi Knight… then you at least make some semblance of progress…). But I’m going to let that go so that I can use the rest of my energy to dispelling a myth about The Old Republic.

The myth goes like this: “It’s fun, but there’s no endgame content. It won’t last.”

I call bullshit. Anyone spouting this hasn’t even tried. While working Shurelia to level 50, I continued to log on as Tonelico (my Jedi Knight) and participate in endgame PvE and PvP content. It’s engrossing, it’s challenging, and frankly, it’s a little overwhelming. The 1.2 update added the “Explosive Conflict” 8-man (or 16-man) operation, the “Nightmare Pilgrim” world boss, the “Lost Island” flashpoint (neatly tying up the Rakghoul outbreak subplot), a new PvP map, the Legacy system, and a whole host of gameplay adjustments.

This all was piled on top two already-challenging 8-man/16-man ops and seven endgame-specific “hard mode” flashpoints. Anyone who says “there’s no endgame” better back that up with screen shots showing a codex full of the baddies they took down. Because, to date, with all the hours I’ve logged (my wife’s going to kill me), I have yet to complete about 40% of the endgame content on my Jedi Knight. And I’m in an active, well-geared PvE-focused guild. Among the guild members, there may be a handful that have seen everything there is to see at least once. But even then, they don’t have all the best gear, as that would take multiple runs. What I’m trying to say is that there’s plenty to do and still plenty of people around to do it. Yes, the game would benefit from some server-merging, and I hope that happens relatively soon. But the endgame content is there, and it’s good.

Played: 600 hours (400 Jedi Knight, 200 Sith Inquisitor)
Platform(s): PC
Price: $59.99 + monthly $15 subscription fee

Okay, so you may feel worn out by the glut of amazing indie 2D puzzle-platformers over the last few years. I thought I would be too, after having played “Braid,” “Blocks That Matter,” “P.B. Winterbottom,” “And Yet It Moves,” “NyxQuest,” “Gish,” “Super Meat Boy,” and a dozen others I can’t remember offhand, I thought the genre had been done to death. But it really doesn’t take much to revive that desire to play more puzzle-platform levels. Just introduce one new mechanic, and play it up HARDCORE, and we’re in business.

But it wasn’t the addictive gameplay that first sold me on “Offspring Fling.” No, it was actually a very clever piece of advertising that caught my attention:

If the hilarious retro parody doesn’t sell you over as quickly as it did me, then maybe the music, by Alec Holowka (whom we interviewed in Episode 21 of The Jurassic Hour), will do the trick. I have plenty to say about the music (here), but I’ll make life easy on you and just throw in the bandcamp embed so you can listen to the music while reading the rest of this review.

Let’s get some things straight. Yes, this game is cute and charming and plays on the hilarious concept of THROWING YOUR BABIES TO SAVE YOUR LIFE (and theirs). After playing all 100 levels in a single session, Pete asked me, “What did you learn from this?” Of course, my wife and I made plenty of tongue-in-cheek jokes thanks to the subtle prodding of Pete (and, by extension, “Offspring Fling” itself).

And yes, the game has an intentionally retro feel. Kyle Pulver notes in the above advertisement that the game was built using a Flash-friendly game-making tool called FlashPunk, and the game sports intentionally 16-bit-ish graphics. But what really makes this game awesome is the intuitive nature of the gameplay, the perfectly-designed learning curve, and the replay value.

Let’s dissect those three traits.

Intuitive gameplay: some strict and simple limitations are built into the core of the gameplay, and it takes absolutely zero text to teach the new player what to do or how to do it. There’s you (mama Kirby-clone-thing), your babies, and a door. Get babies to door. Don’t die. Don’t let babies die. When tossing babies, note that they will go in a straight horizontal line until hitting a barrier, then falling to the nearest ledge. There’s no angles or curvature involved here, and that helps streamline the game and keep the puzzle aspect working nicely.

Good learning curve: at no point was any puzzle hard enough that I had to just rage-quit. A few of the 100 base levels in the campaign took me over ten tries before I figured out exactly what I needed to do, but each session is so short that this really isn’t a large time commitment. Furthermore, the levels are sectioned off into groups of ten, and each set of ten offers a new barrier, or a new enemy, or some mechanic to spice up the puzzles. In other words, added complexity, but not necessarily a huge jump in difficulty. You learn to manage the various aspects of the game as you go, and the result is simply perfect. Also, the boss at the end? Simple and satisfying. Just the way I like it. It also made me want to go back and play “Super Metroid” so I could fight this guy:

Replay value: For beating each level, you earn a flower. For beating the level under a certain “par” time, you earn a gold flower. For beating the level faster than developer Kyle Pulver’s personal best time, you earn a rainbow flower. Warning: rage-quits WILL ensue if you start working to beat Mr. Pulver’s personal best times. You have to get within a few seconds of his best time to even get his ghost to appear, but that ghost is very obvious (in that it is dressed like a ninja), and watching what he does will give you a hint as to how to most efficiently (or cheaply) finish the level. For hardcore gamers, these time challenges are ridiculously fun. Add to that the as-advertised level editor and community sharing, and there’s plenty reason to keep going back for more.

So, yeah. I think you know how I’m going to score this game. I give it a “Go buy now” out of 5. It’s $8, and it’s worth every penny.

Played: 8 hours
Platform(s): PC/Mac
Price: $7.99 (direct here, via Steam, via Desura)

The game (and soundtrack) "cover art"

I am jealous. I am just straight up jealous of Christine Love’s ability as a writer.

To say that she’s “talented” or “unique” is trite. But that’s the best I can come up with. She could probably one-up even this review with her own concepts.

Her latest title, “Analogue: A Hate Story,” showcases her ability to take research of a past culture and fit it into a sci-fi structure, throw in some classic Japanese visual novel tropes (moe, tsundere), add some romance, and even throw in some puzzles using a command prompt. These ingredients, and plenty more I have not listed, are what make “Analogue” such a great experience.

You may be wondering: “is a short visual novel really worth $10?” This same question was asked of the experiential non-game “Dear Esther.” The answer for that game was yes, and the same answer is to be given in the case of “Analogue.” The clever writing, the insane AMOUNT of writing, the dark and original concepts, and the over 100 character portraits (for two different characters) to express different emotions all work wonders.

There’s also the soundtrack from Isaac Schankler. Wow… talk about sealing the deal with a cohesive bit of music. Head to bandcamp if you want to pick up that fine piece of aural love.

Okay, I think I’ve been vague and lame enough to not sell anyone on the game. Here’s the deal: you boot up the game, and you find out that “you” (the anonymous player) live in the far-future and are sent on an assignment to download a ship log from some long-ago-abandoned space ship floating in orbit around some planet. When you dock, you meet female AI construct *Hyun-ae. Unfortunately, while she can send messages to you, you can’t interface with her in such a way as to actually have a conversation. It’s one-sided, but she can propose either/or options for you to reply to her questions.

Yeah, I know, it’s a self-imposed limitation to make the game work. But trust me, it *does* work! Even better, after talking with *Hyun-ae and reading through some of the ship’s log entries, you’ll eventually find your way to meeting a second AI, *Mute. She has it in for *Hyun-ae, but as for why, I will not spoil that here. But *Mute does reveal a whole boatload of log entries as to what happened to this Korean ship. In doing so, Ms. Love touches on some controversial topics related to this backwards society (patterned after 18th century Joseon Dynasty). Said topics include: incest, gender-based oppression, strict social hierarchy / slavery, lesbian affairs, honorable / dishonorable suicide, mutilation, and what might be described as pure idiocracy.

The big “event” present-day involves the ship’s reactor, now running without any maintenance for centuries, mere minutes away from meltdown. After reading some crucial log files that explain why the abandoned ship no longer has any human life on it, you’ll need to work with *Hyun-ae and/or *Mute to disable the reactor and cool the ship down. This is done on a time limit, and it requires some quick thinking and basic skill in using a command prompt. After averting disaster, depending on whom you worked with, you can then go on to achieve one of a total of five endings. The fifth ending, the happiest of all, is a secret ending that requires “breaking the system” a bit.

Fix the reactor, or face a fuzzy, grainy doom!

Fans of “999,” “Ever17″ and other Japanese visual novels will be sure to cherish this game. Is it perfect? No. And I certainly would have preferred the AIs having (good) voice actors instead of the game being in text-only form. But, for what it is, this short but clever visual novel will have you coming back for more, until you’ve achieved 100% log unlocks and all five endings. It’s a great game, and again, I’m jealous of Christine Love for being able to make such a brilliant game. Cheers!

Played: 7 hours
Platform(s): PC
Price: $9.99 (available on Steam)

You’re worried. Don’t worry! I’m still getting rid of most of my DVDs (the first phase of this process is chronicled here), but because the prospect of dragging hundreds of discs to a single spot for one day and hoping enough of them sell to make it worth everybody’s trouble … well, it became a little too much.

So I’ve approached a potential buyer — okay, it’s still Dispatch business manager Teresa Hoover — about taking the entire lot. Before I quote her a price, though, I need to pick the movies I’ll keep, which means the triage continues.

Here are my deliberations from “Gods and Monsters” to “The Outlaw.” Extremely horizontal, poorly lighted photo composites, ahoy! (Click to embiggen)

• Good Night and Good Luck: (Clooney’s strong sophomore effort as a director, and though at times it feels more assembled than created, it’s another vital journalism text)
• Good Will Hunting: (Confession: I had a recurrent dream after seeing this that Will and Chuckie would pick me up and drive me around South Boston, where the bunch of us would cause trouble)
• Goodfellas: (one of the first DVDs, period, and among the first that I double-dipped for upon re-release)
• Grosse Pointe Blank: (How 10-year high school reunions were meant to go down; best licensed soundtrack in movie history)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: (My favorite of the Potters, though I do like all four Yates films quite a bit)
• Heat: (Hasn’t aged quite as well as I would like over the last 17 years, but it remains a workmanlike model for every contemporary cops-and-robbers movie; “The Dark Knight” without capes)
• Hellboy: (I love Selma Blair, but everything she does in this movie and its sequel is extraordinarily dull; the rest of it is very, very exciting)
• Hero: (One of the best martial arts movies in my collection; that it manages to be both unapologetically Eastern and actually about something just sweetens the deal)
• High Fidelity: (Tightly adapted Hornby, featuring Cusack just before the fall)
• The History Boys: (If not the first movie I saw that tried to divorce sex from scruples, at least the most effective; a really wonderful treatise on the value of mentorship)
• Hot Fuzz: (Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s follow-up to “Shaun of the Dead;” of the two, I think history will treat “Hot Fuzz” more kindly)
• Idiocracy: (Only the first 10 minutes are required viewing — the rest of the movie collapses in spectacular Mike Judge fashion — but the whole thing remains an ideological cornerstone of my library)
• I <3 Huckabees: (A movie so obnoxiously literate that its script allegedly did this to its creators)
• The Incredibles: (Favorite Pixar, favorite Brad Bird, favorite … Craig T. Nelson? Yup!)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: (Look, if I’m not being a total poseur, I’m admitting that I pretend to love “Raiders” more than I actually do, but I might as well shred my dork card if I part with this)
• The Insider: (The finest argument for taking broadcast journalism seriously, and the reason Mike Wallace’s recent passing hit below the belt)
• Insomnia: (Man, that Christopher Nolan sure is obsessed with guilt and memory, isn’t he? Me too. Also, fog)
• The Iron Giant: (SU-PER-MAN)
• Jackie Brown: (The only Tarantino that doesn’t wink at itself, or at least the one that waits until you you aren’t looking)
• GoldenEye: (My favorite Bond, now with more young Eddard Stark)
• Jaws: (We’re gonna need a higher-resolution version of this someday, but not right now)
• The Jerk: (Seriously, look at Steve Martin’s IMDb profile, find 1979, and cry into a beer as you scroll up)
• Jurassic Park: (I watched this on a 1080p projector a few weeks ago, and I can confirm that the Dennis Nedry / dilophosaurus sequence unfolded exactly the way you remember it)
• King Kong (1933): (The movie is treasure enough, but the collector’s set that came out just before Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” seven (!) years ago is basically an entire film course)
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: (The heady days right after Robert Downey Jr. had just invented the fast-talking smartass were the headiest days, weren’t they?)
• L.A. Confidential: (If our universe has a “Fringe”-like double, I’d like to believe they’ve already adapted Ellroy’s L.A. quartet into a premium cable TV series; in our universe, “L.A. Confidential” will have to do)
• The Life Aquatic: (This one skates, but just barely, on its pedigree and excellent soundtrack)
• Lost in Translation: (A smart piece of film-making about the surprising joys of alienation; an instruction manual for one’s first two years of college)
• The Man Who Wasn’t There: (Another pile of shame item! And right after I said all those nice things about the Coens)
• Marie Antoinette: (Period costumes and new wave jams? Yeah, it stays)
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World: (Hard to believe this is almost 10 years old, harder to believe that Peter Weir has directed only one movie since it came out; basically, the best on-screen high-seas adventure ever)
• Matchstick Men: (Ridley Scott at his most human and most versatile; when people doubt Nicolas Cage’s talent [and God knows he's given us plenty of reason to do it], they need look no further)
• Miller’s Crossing: (The stagiest Coens feature I own, and among the two or three best)
• Millions: (Some people hate this Danny Boyle movie, but it might be my favorite; it has a sweet message, takes advantage of but doesn’t lean on a Christmas vibe, and is wrapped in great performances from its kid performers)
• Minority Report: (Blue, white, washed out, grainy, thought crime, future guns, blah blah blah; the scariest part of this dystopia is how adroitly it realizes Philip K. Dick’s relentlessly intrusive advertisements)
• The Mist: (The big-screen equivalent of a rainy Saturday afternoon: gray, familiar, unsettling)
• Monsters Inc.: (Skates, but only on its laurels; visually, this is Pixar’s lamest feature set outside the Cars universe; fortunately, its heart is in the right place)
• Munich: (A meditation on revenge that I’d watch much more often if it weren’t so gruesome; the only knife-versus-forehead movie I own)
• Network: (I already called “Dog Day Afternoon” my favorite Lumet, so “Network” will have to settle for “vital cultural document that ought to be seen by anybody who’s ever looked at a TV”)
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: (I’ve got a thing for musicals, so it makes some sense that this is the only movie I can recite from start to finish)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: (antidote for latter-day Nicholson-induced ridiculousness)
• Out of Sight: (Early-ish Soderbergh and, in hindsight, full of lies; how can Jennifer Lopez be so good here and so inert in everything else?)
• Pan’s Labyrinth: (It’s hard to square the stately terror that animates del Toro’s Spanish-language features with the messy excitement in his American ones; moving, beautiful stuff)

Many, many more stumpers this time around. Of the roughly 140 movies in this set, I plan to keep 46, or about one in three. Noticeably worse than the last set, which worked out to about one in four.

Taken cumulatively, here at the two-thirds mark, I’m hanging on to 91 movies of about 300, or 30 percent.

Running the tables, that puts me at 150 movies of the roughly 500 I own, plus a handful of TV boxed sets. I should just dump them all, really, but I think I can manage 150.

Next week, O to Z and TV!

I’m currently coming down off a high from hearing one of my all-time favorite bands play their first show in nearly a decade (even with the low video quality, that LiveStream from Five Iron Frenzy really did pick me up). Before that, however, I played through a neat little indie graphic adventure built using Ren’Py (the same Python tool that made “Katawa Shoujo” a reality and will likely make my own dreams come true someday). That game is called “Digital: A Love Story” (download here) and it’s more book-ish than any graphic adventure I’ve played before. The entire game takes place in a semi-sleek pre-Windows interface. It’s 1988, and the proto-Internet world of BBS forums are really starting to take off. You play … yourself. And you manage to fall in love with a girl. And then things get really interesting, and history merges with fiction to create a surprisingly epic story in a neat little package.

It’s worth noting that, for all the text available in this “game,” it is remarkably short. The side-game browser-based UI content found in the “.hack//” series or “Front Mission 3″ pack more content than this particular title. And yet, as a stand-alone product, it is exceptional. The attention to detail is wonderful, from the dial-up modem to the background MIDI and the awesome ASCII art. And, again, the nature of the content is fantastic. It starts so mundane and then becomes surprisingly heady. I’d give it a 5-star rating, except that the game’s creator (and/or some third generation AI) doesn’t know how to spell the word “separate.” So, four stars.

Sadly, that password will not gain you access to any BBS in Digital: A Love Story.

Back on track: why am I writing about this game? It is an early title from indie developer / writer Christine Love, whom we will (hopefully) be interviewing in a future episode of The Jurassic Hour. Her latest title, which just launched on Steam for $10 this weekend, is a spiritual successor to Digital, as made obvious by its antonymic nature. Said game is “Analogue: A Hate Story,” and having just dipped my toes in that game, all I can say is I AM VERY EXCITED. Everything I love about visual novels, including really awesome high-end ones like “999″ and “Ever17,” and even the story section of the recent indie hit “Sequence,” is sure to be found in the following hours. I might not be able to sleep tonight. And if I can’t sleep, that’s fine, because I’ll keep playing Analogue and then you’ll get to read my review even sooner.

But until that time comes, I recommend you go download and play through Digital (here’s that link again), and if you like it, buy Analogue. Note also that between these two games, Ms. Love did make another visual novel (free to download) entitled “don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story.” That’s a mouthful, and it’s one I intend to get my mouth around, but I’m going to play Analogue first. Because I bought it and it’s shiny and new.

The best art engages the parts of your brain that you purposefully stow during your day-to-day. It holds up your choices and circumstances and noiselessly slides them in front of the projector, so that you can’t see anything but the creator’s images juxtaposed against scenes from your own life.

By this standard, video games constitute some of the artsiest art out there. Forcing your participation makes those harmonic moments — the times when a work willfully exposes something about you — substantially more visceral.

The strongest argument yet for gaming’s place beside books, music and the rest of it came about two-thirds of the way through 2007’s “Bioshock.” (If you haven’t played the game, I’m about to spoil its most rewarding moment, so be warned.) Theretofore, you had explored Rapture, a ruined undersea metropolis somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, with help from exactly one person — a man who identifies himself as “Atlas” and speaks to you in a polite Irish lilt via mid-century walkie-talkie. When he asks you to do anything, he appends a considerate “would you kindly.”

Atlas wants you to find and kill Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s Randian architect and resident Tea Party whackjob. Ryan is holding Atlas’ family hostage and hunting for you, the player, or so Atlas says. When you and Ryan finally meet — this is the two-thirds part — Ryan feeds you the real story. Atlas is actually an American mobster named Frank Fontaine, and you’re actually a four-year-old genetic experiment with implanted memories and no free will. “Would you kindly,” Ryan explains, is a code phrase cooked up by Fontaine; you’re genetically conditioned to carry out any command complemented by those words.

Just to prove a point, Ryan hands you a golf club and subsequently orders you to “kill.” You beat him to death.

It’s a provocative moment, and though it works better as a comment on the state of video game storytelling than as a condemnation of the player, the fatal bludgeoning of Andrew Ryan is plenty reflective. Are you a slave, or are you a person? Do you create your own circumstances, or do you allow someone else to engineer them for you?

For me, in 2007, the questions were these: Do you quit your satisfying job and move to San Francisco with no employment or housing prospects, or do you stay in your hometown without ever having tested the waters? (The answer, if you’re curious, is to reject that false premise and spend more time figuring out what you really want. That’s the sort of wishy-washy wisdom that comes half a decade later.)

I’m not saying “Bioshock” prompted me to light out for California, but, well, “Bioshock” prompted me to light out for California. The game is potent!

But Ryan’s death is a meticulously constructed sequence, as carefully scripted as it is exciting. Is there room for that sort of illumination in more emergent, less guided experiences?

There is, I think. Just last week, I suffered four or five back-to-back illuminations during a three-hour battle with RedLynx’s “Trials Evolution.” And all before breakfast!

Moment to moment, “Evolution” asks you to pilot your motorcycle from left to right, navigating a gauntlet of increasingly difficult obstacle courses as quickly as you can manage. As in previous “Trials” games, the first few courses are all sweetness and light, stacked with gentle hills and ramps; the later stages include fire pits, moving parts and nearly vertical cliff faces.

The frustration quotient ticks gradually from nonexistent to all-consuming, but “Evolution” does its best to defuse your fury with a shockingly elaborate sense of humor. Past the finish line of every stage, no matter how challenging, some grisly end awaits you. You could set a worldwide record on the most challenging course in the game, topping the Xbox Live leaderboards and logging a replay that’ll make you Internet-famous, but the game still punishes you with a slapstick execution at the end of it all.

Odds are, you won’t top the leaderboards. You won’t collect every medal, you won’t snag every achievement, and you probably won’t even finish every stage, let alone earn a prize for your performance. What the player in the YouTube clip below does in 46 seconds and zero wrecks, I haven’t been able to do in more than an hour after hundreds of wrecks.

Sure, you’ll collect gold on the first couple-dozen courses, and you’ll feel good about yourself. When the going gets tough, you’ll start to settle for silver. Eventually, you’ll struggle for (and graciously accept) a one-point bronze.

And by the time you unlock the last set of courses at 135 points, you’ll be pleased just to finish, and you’ll be surprised when you do.

When RedLynx started making its outlandish motorcycle games years ago, I doubt they set out to give armchair humanists a reason to get introspective, but that’s what their newest game has done for me. Or to me, rather. Every time I admit to myself that I can’t, that I won’t, that there’s no way, I’m reminded of the times I’ve done as much in real life — the cabin I’ll never build, the countries I’ll never visit, the salary I’ll never earn.

It’s a peculiar, almost hormonal process. Just as the brains of new mothers are flooded with oxytocin during childbirth, the brains of chronic settlers are probably starved of life-affirming serotonin every time they give up on something. And because human memories are literal linkages of neurons, one concession recalls another, which recalls another, which recalls another, until each abandoned racecourse triggers a shame spiral that ends in ice cream and “Cheers” marathons.

Okay, I can’t swear that “Trials”-induced madness manifests this way for everybody, but RedLynx certainly responded to some sort of discontent when they put “Evolution” together. The courses are brighter, more colorful and more varied, with a 100 percent increase in outdoor environments. They feature hilariously overblown set-piece moments, like the fighter jet that screams through an early track.

And those deaths. They’re sublime.

This stuff makes for a better all-around package, but it also works as a salve to some gamers’ fragile psyches. If 2009’s “Trials HD” was a cement cell, “Trials Evolution” is a padded room.

But no amount of virtual back-patting puts me at ease when the clock is ticking as loudly as it has been. My 10-year high school reunion is weeks away, and if I go, I have some explaining to do. No spouse, no kids, no real estate, no achievements to speak of. Not that I owe anybody an explanation, really, but I was hoping to be able to brag about something.

Thanks a lot, “Trials Evolution.”

As we’ll tell you at the beginning of this episode, Pat and I last month recorded a piece of audio that we absolutely won’t release as a proper Jurassic Hour. Because, you know, our quality control is so on point? Only the best for you guys, right? Right.

Fortunately, the two of us sat down last week to record something much more listenable. Listen in muted awe as we blow indie music sensations out of proportion, determine how and whether to exterminate all fatties, say the wrong things at work and talk about FEZ and LONE SURVIVOR. Plus, a lengthy interview with Jasper Byrne, LONE SURVIVOR’s talented and extraordinarily gracious creator.

With music from The English Beat and two jams from Byrne himself.

(right-click to save, use the player below, or get the show on iTunes here)

It’ll be my first yard sale and the first time I’ve offered to part with any of my stuff since 11th grade, when I sold a bunch of crusty Genesis carts to a rich kid on my school bus.

That was a decade ago. This time, I’m trying to unload about 500 DVDs. I was an early adopter, having read about the promising new format in things called “magazines” in the mid-’90s. You didn’t have to rewind them, they didn’t fall apart as quickly as VHS tapes, and they were smaller, too. Much smaller. Plus, extras!

My first DVDs were, tellingly, “Austin Powers” and “Dumb & Dumber,” which my mom bought at my request for Christmas in 1997. The last DVD I can remember buying was “Control,” the Ian Curtis biopic I reviewed for the Dispatch way back in 2008. I moved on to Blu-rays almost as soon as that format was commercially available, though I’ve dialed back my consumption drastically. Because I’m an adult?

Crunching the numbers, 500 DVDs over 11 years works out to roughly 45 DVDs a year, or one DVD every eight days. I was absolutely out of control, the net result of which is bookshelves full of movies and TV shows I’ll never watch again. Dozens upon dozens of pounds of discs and packaging that I’ve had to lug from house to apartment to house to apartment to (fingers crossed) house.

So when my newspaper’s business manager began gauging interest in a staff yard sale last month, I practically tripped over myself on the way to our make-believe sign-up sheet. The prospect of burning off this mountain of physical media was alluring enough; that I might make a few bucks for my trouble was, well, nice.

My task over the next few weeks is to decide which movies stay with me and which are obvious goners. There’s some stuff, like my first-print import of “Battle Royale” and my 1933 “King Kong” collector’s set, that I’m going to hang on to, but the rest of it can go. It must go.

My methodology is a bit spotty — certain directors (your Wes Andersons and David Cronenbergs and Alexander Paynes and Terry Zwigoffs) get an automatic must-keep, as do certain genres (chopsocky thrillers still tweak me, for some reason) — but this series will, at the very least, give you guys a thorough look at my collection and the way my sensibilities have changed since 1997.

Without further ado, my keepers from “28 Days Later” to “The Godfather” (click photo to embiggen).

• A.I. (not exactly vintage Spielberg, but an underrated, gorgeous, unsettling and moving sci-fi epic in its own right)
• About Schmidt (the least coddling look at middle- and old-age I’ve seen, and a pragmatic antidote to everyday disappointments)
• Adaptation (the first outside-the-box movie about which I really evangelized to my friends, and an astonishingly inventive film visually)
• Alien (the only essential film in the series, and the best way to warm up for “Prometheus” in June)
• All the President’s Men (I actually hadn’t seen this until after I selected a career in news, but finally watching it sealed the deal)
• Almost Famous (A colorful and mostly cheerful handbook for the criminally uncertain; evokes a time and place I’ll never experience with convincing confidence)
• Anchorman (no movie from the ’00s made me laugh harder or longer)
• American Splendor (Harvey Pekar was a miserable, accomplished talent, and Giamatti’s portrait of the guy still ranks as the famously schleppy performer’s schleppiest performance; I will not give away a Paul Giamatti movie, unless that movie is “Cinderella Man”)
• Apocalypse Now (I can barely watch this anymore, what with my anticipatory dread over the cow thing, but as cultural canon goes, this tops my list)
• Atonement (I didn’t like “Hanna,” but I’m a big fan of Joe Wright’s version of “Pride and Prejudice,” and his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” made a moving, sweeping spectacle out of a book I tried [and failed] to read six different times)
• The Aviator (lesser Scorsese, most people say, but I vehemently disagree; this world needs more eccentrics and more ambition, and DiCaprio’s take on Howard Hughes, accurate or not, anchored my favorite movie of 2004)
• Bad Education (sexy, creepy Almodóvar, full stop)
• Battle Royale (if not the progenitor of the suddenly swollen “kids-battle-each-other-to-the-death” genre, at least the most brutal of them; in “Battle Royale,” you get an uzi or a frying pan or something even less useful, and you make do)
• Bad Santa (as a person who recently drank his own fifth of vodka in the company of [over-21] college kids, I endorse all on-screen maladaptive behavior in front of children)
• Before Sunrise (not my favorite of Linklater’s two “Before” movies, but a keeper if I’m to hang on to …)
• Before Sunset (I saw this with three people who had absolutely no patience for it, but I fell in love — 90 minutes of two adults having an adult conversation about aging while walking through Paris; I’m sure pieces of this movie would feel a little too on-the-nose if I watched it again today, which is precisely why it stays in the archive, never to be watched again)
• Billy Madison (an important piece of ’90s detritus, and a reminder of Sandler’s salad days)
• Black Snake Moan (try watching this movie without sweating; a smart and groovy redemption story)
• Borat (the only movie I’ve seen that incited the audience to cooperatively stomp, such was the slapstick insanity of the wrestling / elevator sequence)
• the Bourne movies (chopsocky thrillers; would you like to know more?)
• Brazil (I paid, well, dozens of dollars for this collector’s set, and I still haven’t watched a second of it; this one sits high in my pile of shame)
• Brokeback Mountain (I don’t intend to hang on to all of the Important movies in my collection, but as a member of the tribe, I feel obligated to keep this one; I don’t buy 2005-era Anne Hathaway as a middle-aged woman, but the work from the rest of the leads is intense, bracing stuff)
• Can’t Hardly Wait (the other of my distinctly ’90s touchstones; though the movie came out five years after “Billy Madison,” it feels even older, pockmarked with proto-millenial butt rock like Smash Mouth and Blink 182; it’s all the more adorable for it)
• Chinatown (another never-seen entry in the pile of shame; brace yourself for more of these stumpers)
• Children of Men (a recently named dystopian favorite of “Filmspotting” hosts Adam Kempanaar and Josh Larson, and for good reason — a gripping, handsomely crafted, thoroughly plausible thriller about what would happen if all women became suddenly and permanently infertile)
• Clueless (when challenged about the merits of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 high school opus, I point out the movie’s literary roots, but even without the “Emma” angle, this is a smart story about a girl who masks her own interpersonal anxiety by matchmaking for her friends; a relic of the now-distant, barely memorable time before Alicia Silverstone bird-fed her infant son)
• Collateral (I believe in Michael Mann, and I think I understand what he tries to do with HD digital, but when you stack it against “Miami Vice” and “Public Enemies,” “Collateral” is still the only movie to work the format without drawing attention to itself; also, taut, brutal, exciting, and the best use of Tom Cruise in the last 10 years)
• Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney’s auspicious directorial debut, and another great look at an American weirdo)
• Control (I used to queue up Joy Division albums when I was in a bad mood, but “Control” scared me straight; I ration my suicidal new-wave music much more carefully these days)
• Death Proof (I’m actually tossing this one, but only because I plan to pick up the Blu-ray eventually; 1080p sort of defies the whole grindhouse ethos, but if I were really committed to that, I’d have to find a bootleg Betamax cassette at some underground curiosity shop, right?)
• Dog Day Afternoon (my favorite Lumet, and a contemporary, honest-to-God bank robbery story that you can show people wary of “old” movies without hesitation)
• Eastern Promises (the most wince-inducing movie in my collection [its eye-stabbing sequence is even worse than that bit in "Drive"], and one of the moodiest; I’m not convinced that it’s very good, but it’s Cronenberg, and it stays)
• Ed Wood (so I’m really preoccupied with this eccentric American entertainer thing, if you haven’t sussed out that nugget by now; after “Edward Scissorhands” and “Sweeney Todd,” the only Tim Burton / Johnny Depp collaboration one really needs)
• The Fly (Cronenberg, icky)
• Glengarry Glen Ross (pile of shame)
• Ghost World (I’m approaching the halfway point between the ages of Thora Birch’s and Steve Buscemi’s characters here, and I’m feeling it; a great, weird meditation on when and how to get your act together, and exhibit A in the basically bulletproof case against twentysomething irony)

Uh, that was difficult. And, frankly, worrisome. Of the roughly 160 movies in this subset, I plan to hang on to about 45 of them — slightly more than 25 percent. This trend is unsustainable.

Jasper Byrne, AKA the one-man studio who is Superflat Games, recently published his first “you can purchase this” kind of game ever. Well, excluding his days as a teenager trying his hand at creating adventure titles for the Euro-chic AMIGA computer/console. We have an interview with him in the next podcast, and I’ve spoken at length about his Flash-based hit SOUL BROTHER in past episodes of the podcast (soundtrack review for that game here).

I’ve really taken my time with playing Mr. Byrne’s latest creation, because it deserves paying attention to detail. This retro-style, side-scrolling pixelated survival horror comes with enough visceral “eww” to make you think of conventional survival horrors (zombie apocalypse and whatnot), but with enough psychological horror to make you think of David Lynch (one of Byrne’s admitted influences).

LS's equivalent to X-Files' Smoking Man...?

In Lone Survivor, you control… “You.” The introduction is perfect, giving you everything you need to get started in this deceptively small, self-contained world. Images flash by, you’re introduced to the most generic form of foe in the game (a “thin man” is a creepy, fleshy zombie-thing that will eat you alive), and you quickly learn that you’re likely the only living person for miles around.

Except, of course, that there are hints all over the place that such might not really be the case. Scraps from a diary, hallucinations of parties, writing on walls, even your dreams … it seems you’re not necessarily alone. But there is someone you’re missing. Someone you’re forgetting.

Before I wax philosophic any more about what I think this game is really all about, let’s talk about the game’s technical aspects.

I've got a handgun and a sweet surgical mask. You got nothin'.

Though exploration, inventory management, and other “maintenance” activities are important in this survival sim, the excitement always comes with the combat. There are a few ways to handle combat. The first tool you’re given is the tool of stealth: ducking behind walls, sometimes accompanied by a hunk of meat to distract the fleshy fiend from your presence. After that, you get the handgun. Six bullets bring down a thin man, or three to the head will do the trick. If a foe is too close for your liking, or they’re ganging up on you, a shot to the knees causes them to stumble backward, giving you precious time to escape. As the game progresses, you find different enemies with different tactics and skills — some crawl on the ceiling, others “play” dead and then crawl after you.

All this shooting is simple, but it’s not necessarily clunky. The aiming is designed to give you the benefit of the doubt. Ammo conservation aside, killing them is easy. But it’s also the path to the dark side. … sort of. You see, alongside those hunks of meat and hidden walls, you can eventually start trading in ammo for light flares. A light flare will stun all enemies in range for a period of time, allowing you to run by unharmed. If you can plan your routes in such a way that you don’t have to do any revisiting, flares take less time and require less bloodshed than the conventional “kill ‘em all” route.

Every little decision you make has some effect on the outcome (this was one of 11 pages' worth of my endgame stats).

Everything about this game is fun and engaging, though. Running from and/or killing monsters is satisfying, and LONE SURVIVOR offers just enough variety from room to room, from building to building, so that you aren’t ever stuck in one mode. Yes, you can spend an entire day (or days, if you really want to) just taking care of business near your home base (room 206 of an abandoned apartment). After doing enough exploration that you can reach the first floor and even the basement, you’re likely to have enough tools to really start having fun with the game’s sustenance system. Cooking food, combining food types, brewing coffee, even choosing to ingest disgusting stuff (see “obviously bad milk” above): you can really go to town with this. Later on you can also play a handheld video game to help keep up your mental health. In fact, by the end of the game, you discover that your mental health is just as important as your physical health, and you’ll have to determine what activities help keep you in a good state of mind. There is, furthermore, an endless supply of pills, which come in three colors. They have a lot to do with the game’s branching narrative, but they alone won’t determine your end path, only nudge you in one or the other direction.

The graphic style is retro-perfect. The native resolution for the game is something like 180 pixels wide, but it stretches easily to whatever you have your monitor set to in a forced full-screen mode, and it looks brilliant because of all the filters and effects applied to the pixels. Each pixel is ever-changing, ever-moving, blurring and bending the colors. It really is a testament to Byrne’s inventive style that he can work with these primitive tools and then, right at the end, put all the right polish on top to set the mood of a true horror game.

As for the soundtrack? I have a review in the works for Original Sound Version, but until that’s ready, let’s just say that it’s awesome. Not just the dark creepy stuff, or the haunting “memories from my past” music when the girl in blue appears. Even the little things, like the party music, or that mellow jazz when you meet the cat by the hospital — I just love that stuff. That Mr. Byrne thought up this game, did all the art on his own (with a handful of exceptions), and produced the entire soundtrack, just shows that he’s a renaissance man. That, or he simply doesn’t play well with others.

This game is more surprising, and more savory, than a sweet little fruit drop. Even pink grapefruit.

This game is great. It’s absolutely worth the current asking price ($10), and if you’re feeling really charitable you can spring for the $50 LE, which includes an art print mailed to your home. Below are the usual review stats, and past that are my (SPOILER!) thoughts on what this game is really all about. Comments section is free to be a place for other players to speculate on the game’s intended meaning.

Played: 6 hours
Platform(s): PC/Mac
Price: $10 (available here)

~~~~~~~~WARNING! WARNING!~~~~~~~~
~~~~~THAR BE DRAGONS! SPOILERS!~~~~~

(keep going)

(keep going)

 
~~~~~SPOILERS AHOY!~~~~~

LONE SURVIVOR STORY ANALYSIS

What really happened here? I think all this post-apocalypse “zombies everywhere” stuff is an intentional facade, both playing to current popular trend and fitting well within the narrative of a disturbed mind. “You” are the survivor of an accident: specifically, an automobile accident. You survived. The girl in blue, “Her,” did not (I’m pretty sure she’s your sister, but I didn’t get enough concrete details from observing the chalk in The Director’s room before he died to be sure. Might need another playthrough with more fruit drops consumed?).

This is, first off, my best explanation for the Kenny / Benzido / Chie party scene. After your physical recovery, you are still so totally out of your mind about Her death (that, perhaps, you caused? Were you the driver?), you are freaking out in the middle of a chill party. From the player’s perspective, and running with the assumption that we’re in Zombie-apocalypse mode, it’s clear that something isn’t right, and either Kenny+crew don’t exist, or they’re tremendously stupid. But, with this new frame of reference, we see it’s “you” who’s off. As for Chie, the doll, and the gun, I would take that all metaphorically. In the “real world,” wherever it is, you don’t wield a gun, and no one even gives you a gun. Chie may well be the wise part of your brain that knows there’s a fight ahead, the “wise mind” in New Age terms (note: Chie = Wisdom).

But she also warns you to only use it when necessary. Force, as a solution to all of life’s problems, won’t work. What happens when you take that route? Well, you become someone other than who you once were. This, of course, gives us the answer to who Draco is. In fact, I’m fairly confident that it is Jasper Byrne’s intention to suggest that “Man With Box On Head” and blue-pill-guy (Draco) are both “you,” in the sense that they are one of two people you will become. How you choose to survive in your pitiful, disgusting, lonely, shocking world post-car-accident-that-killed-your-sister determines which person you become.

That the Green Pill, “hide whenever possible, use violence only when necessary” path is the better ending only reinforces the idea that there is a clear, simple moral framework within the game. And I think I’ve already stated exactly what that morality is. You become a violent dick if you solve all your problems with violence (Draco), and on the flipside, people won’t know who you are if you’re always hiding. Is there a middle ground? Maybe, but if there’s not, err on the side of non-violence. Plus, everyone knows that playing stealth is more fun than killing everything in sight.

This is your brain on Lone Survivor.

Through the serendipity of the Twitterverse, I recently stumbled into a little journal note penned by Susan Sontag in 1964:

Death = being completely inside one’s own head
Life = the world

I’m frankly convinced that the entire apartment complex is a fabrication, made completely in “Your” own head. The surrounding city is where the inner world of your mind begins to reach its boundaries and collide with the actual world. I’d argue that “Hank” represents a fellow sufferer of mental anguish. If you give him blue pills (i.e. – advise him to use violence as a defense/coping mechanism), you ruin him. If you find and give him health tonic (i.e. – the rare and wonderful insight that helps us move forward), he slowly but surely gets better. As for the cat? Eh… cats are just awesome. My cat makes me smile, anyway.

I wouldn’t have come up with any of this if it weren’t for the scenery surrounding the bus. The narration “You” provides when looking at the set pieces coming up to the bus really help solidify my theory.

I could be way off, and I’d love to hear alternate theories. As you’ll hear in our upcoming interview on The Jurassic Hour, I doubt Byrne will ever fully disclose what was going on in his head when he put this game together. But it’s fun to speculate. So go at it, people!