Blizzard's Diablo: On Cutting to the Chase

Diablo is a Blizzard franchise since 1996, around the same time that Star Craft came out and a few years after Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. What makes it a memorable game is not so much the novelty, but the execution(no pun intended). Like any other Blizzard game, it's a re-discovery of the game-play mechanics of an already popular genre, in typical Blizzard  style less of the role-playing, more of the fun of slashing up enemies. 

The first thing you'll notice when starting up Diablo is the minimalistic interface, no convoluted D&D rules involved in the character creation, no customizable character backgrounds. In fact it's as simple as choosing a character class and a name. Later on you'll be able to assign some points to your character's statistics and skills, but for now don't worry about that. If you've ever played anything like Baldur's Gate or Fallout of the same era, you might be a little disappointed at first, but everything that it lacks in the area, Diablo makes up for in atmosphere and style. The art is heavy and dark, the music is classic medieval lute, whenever you're in the small town that makes up the starting area, and a suspenseful ambiance, when you finally venture into the  catacombs beneath the nearby church.

The story of Diablo revolves around the town of Tristram, which has recently been visited by what appears to be a demonic power, infesting the cathedral and the endless layers of catacombs beneath it with scores of demons. Pieces of  both the overall lore of the world and some personal stories will be revealed to you as you interact with the dozen or so non player characters around the town. There's a blacksmith, an elder who is also a healer, an annoying kid who'll sell you some interesting gear, gathered from who knows where for a reasonable price and a witch, settled in a hut on the outskirts of town. The game itself is based on completing quests for the locals, and most of all hacking and slashing your way through hordes of the various demons and minions of Hell. There are treasure chests to hunt down, ancient scrolls that give you new abilities, and scores of items and artifacts varying from honest to God junk to items that only drop from a specific boss, or as a reward from a quest.

Finally you'll face Diablo himself, after you've trudged through more than a hundred different levels of Catacombs. As you progress deeper and deeper, at first you'll be adventuring in the catacombs of the church itself, then in a mixture of ancient tombs with dirt walls and finally into Hell itself, with alkes of lava and fire demons. Every level, except for Tristram is randomly generated and enemies don't respawn, but in case you feel that you've not quite gathered enough experience for the final battle you can always restart the game from the character screen which will randomise the levels you've already covered and reset the enemies. Additionally to the main chapel entrance every now and again as you go deeper you'll find a shortcut that conveniently leads you back to the surface, only at a different location, one may be hidden in the graveyard next to the chapel, another may be in a bunch of rocks nearby, and they serve as a sort of check-points that make it a little bit easier to go back to town whenever you need to re-stock on potions, identify a magic item, repair your gear, etc. There's also portal scrolls that will bring you back to the town from any point in the game, and then back to where you left off in the dungeon, before they close up behind you.

All in all the game feels epic from end to end. Weather you choose the warrior, rogue or sorcerer class, you won't have to worry about micro-managing your character, and that only leaves the satisfaction of plowing through hordes of skeletons, zombies and demons. Still, both the first and second Diablo games have a fascinating and rich lore, further expanded by the book series, written by various authors throughout the years. Weather you actually enjoy that sort of writing is another thing entirely. Personally I've never been a fan of video game novels, but I've met plenty of people who've read the series start to finish and can tell you exactly what happens to each King, Prince and Demon in the tale.

Diablo has been appraised universally as one of the most popular RPG's of all times. The third edition of the game is currently in invitation-only Beta and is expected to be released sometime in early 2012. The original game is available for download on the Blizzard Store for a token price. 

Melancholia 2011: Trier and the Controversy of Disgust

Lars Von Trier is not Nazi. He's not much of anything as worldly and trivial as that. At that Cannes press-conference he was not quite joking, not entirely serious. In his own words he was trying to 'entertain' people. Isn't that what movies are all about. Through the past several years Trier's been going through a deepening state of depression and Melancholia is his way of expressing that.  

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Melancholia(IMDB) is a movie about a planet, that's been hiding behind the sun, which is now on a collision course for the Earth, and from the opening scene, what Trier calls a prelude, there's no doubt that life on Earth will be over very soon. The movie follows the life of four characters - the bride, her sister and the sister's husband and son, from her wedding day to the point of the collision. In a way the movie's about their coming to terms with their fate, but it's even more so about the psychology behind coming to terms with death. Each of the main characters goes through stages of denial, fear, anger and finally acceptance. What's noteworthy about Trier's work is not so much the plot itself, but the nuances of the interpretation. Like a dream, it's not about the content itself, but the feeling of it, the same images and sounds could feel entirely different under the circumstances. Under Trier's dictation Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde', John Millais's painting of Ophelia are given an entirely different harsher meaning.

As any Trier movie, it starts with an opening scene, in slow motion punctuated by a memorable classical melody, as seen by the bride (starring Kirsten Dunst) in her own half-dream, half-premonition. We see her as she's trying to enjoy herself at her own wedding party, and the longer it goes the more apparent it is she simply can't. Something is stopping her and at one point it becomes painfully obviously that that's how she's been her whole life. When her sister asks her what's wrong there's no surprise in the question, only a frustrated underpinning of a problem that has existed for years and years. And the answer is one of almost childishly stubborn pretense. When Trier talks about his depression, there's the same realisation  the self-awareness that you have to get up in the morning and follow a schedule in order to escape the melancholy. Similarly Kirsten Dunst's character is equally involved in her work to a point of complete denial of the self.
She's in a way an image of Trier, only placed within a situation which requires her to come to terms with it, with herself, her inability to attain enjoyment or satisfaction of life.

Trier himself complained that the movie felt too beautiful, that he had let himself down. If you're familiar with his work, Trier started a group in 1995(Dogma 95) dedicated to preserving cinema as an art-medium, rather than a simple platform for voyeurism. Among the ground points of that movement were that the movie should be shot from a shoulder camera and any static images, be there any at all can be static as much as immobility can be achieved by hand. Another point was that artificial lighting was forbidden, as long as there's enough light to achieve exposure, otherwise a single light source was allowed to be attached to the camera itself. Sets were allowed for inside scenes, but if a prop is required the director should do the best to find that prop in real life. Otherwise it can be constructed in its natural environment. Lastly the movie happens where the camera is and not the reverse. Those was his ideals as an author in 95, and last year in Cannes he apologised, believing with Melancholia he might have broken his own credo.

Trier's press conference in Cannes immediately after the movie screening in early 2011 was a huge scandal that ultimately had him banned from the film festival, although his movies are still eligible to receive rewards. Which they invariably still do. Trier still continues to apologise for it. 

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Lastly don't forget to check out today's post about: Stalker 1979 - Andrey Tarkovsky and the Eastern Cinema Movement

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Stalker 1979 - Andrey Tarkovsky and the Eastern Cinema Movement

I was watching Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Before that I was re-watching Antichrist and something caught my attention. A dedication. At the end of the movie, Trier made a dedication that infuriated a lot of film critics. Even before that I was playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for a while. I'm not a dedicated gamer when it comes to games past some imaginary point in time in the early 2000s. I remember, though, a night in let's call it the imaginary city of Erithrea, capital of an imaginary Eastern-European country. Before that I was born, but sometime in between, a few years after I started playing games I was in one of those flashy PC clubs in a newly established mall. The walls covered in posters, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was new back then. Back then, vodka was a new experience for me having just graduated from drinking beer at night at the parks and playgrounds around my school. 

In Erithrea time passes slower, we were out that night, on a whim like always. With my best friend, we went to a bus station to buy some beer and vodka, and then we headed off through the small back-streets of the city towards the mall, passing the vodka from hand to hand. We were supposed to meet a friend at the local mall, top floor, the games room. By the time we were at the parking lot with the tall blue and silver facade of the building, Nebesnii Gorod, written in large glowing letters across, the alcohol had set in nicely, we were careless. From the parking lot, take the service entrance to the right, where all the trucks come in to load and unload, walk past the metal wire fence that separates the mall grounds from a warehouse, take a moment to take in the backdrop of post-Soviet panel flat blocks, twelve to fifteen stories tall, grey and black in the night with only a few windows gleaming with light. It must have been ten or eleven. As you enter take the elevator to the right. Top floor. Gaming room. As we reach our floor our friend is waiting there to tell us a story about how he hit the punching bag so bad he broke his arm. He's younger than us, but that doesn't matter, since he's got enough stories in his lifetime for two or three of us together, so we drink with him regularly. Such is the value of time in Erithrea.

Image courtsey of Wikimedia Commons. 

When we sit down to play the games were both already drunk. Our friend wanders around the rows of computers to set up some sort of make-shift LAN for everyone, the game is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. My nickname is something meant to piss off the kind of losers who rage every time they get killed by a mortar shell, and I can barely walk to and from my PC chair, to get some popcorn from the front desk, but I can play CoD pretty damn decent, nonetheless. On the chat someones raging hard at me, I don't care, I'm too drunk, from across the room and the rows of hundreds of computers, someones raging about someone elses mortar, probably mine. I don't care.

A few hours later nearly everyone has left, but it costs something like 3-4 euro to play through the whole night so me and my friend and our other friend we stay behind. We've moved to sit next to each other and we're playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chernobyl. The game has a particular appeal to us, one could say, you have to drink vodka to avoid radiation poisoning and that sort of rings a bell with us. We laugh but it's not really that funny. When we look at the game's environment, the architecture, abandoned warehouses, old train stations, junkyards, fields littered with dieing patches of grass and pieces of glass and steel and concrete shards, we're looking at Erithrea. We might as well have not been playing a game, we might as well have taken a five minute walk from the mall to one of the old abandoned train stations on the edge of town, and we would have felt the same, seen the same things, except for the anomalies, obviously, but with the stray dogs walking around and the alcohol in us, it wouldn't have been difficult to imagine the missing parts.

I remember a different time, when me and my friend, both armed with a 2 liter bottle of beer are sitting on a broken piece of concrete the size of a small car, feet crossed under us, facing the setting sun, on top of a hill at the old park in the north side of town. He's playing something on his Sony Erickson phone that could have been Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. It doesn't matter. And in between the songs it's quiet, like it's quiet in the Zone. It's beautiful, like the Stalker could see the beauty in the poisoned flora around him, slowly but surely working to re-take the last patches of asphalt and train tracks.

Some years after that I left Erithrea and that imaginary Eastern-European country for Sweden. That was five months ago and five hours ago I watched Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, prompted by the same friend's suggestion over Skype and that dedication in the end of Trier's Antrichrist. The dedication read "Dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky" and it's easy to see why. When you watch Trier and you watch Tarkovsky it's easy to fill in the missing parts with the power of your own imagination. The broken up hydro-electric plant of Stalker. Trier's old Swedish castle from Melancholia. A different kind of old, but the same heaviness of time weighing on the pillars and stones, every dusty window, every tinted glass. And in Eastern Europe time doesn't mean much, except for the faintest memories, dulled down by alcohol vapors.

Stalker is a movie about a Professor and a Writer who travel to the Zone, with the help of a guide to reach a mythical room, where people's deepest wishes come true. But it's not a movie about fame and fortune, it's a movie about broken concrete and steel, and the rusted and long abandoned parts of the human soul. It's a movie about the way to the room, the one that grants wishes, as much as it is a movie about the nature of wishes, the nature of time, space, the most sublime nature of human beings. 


The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

A Diversion: 01 - Röyksopp and a Different Sweden

Recently I moved to Sweden's less populate mid-East, somewhere between the gleaming pearl of Stockholm, set on its several little islands and the almost permanently frozen North. Before I was only vaguely aware of Nordic cultures. I've heard some of the music, I've seen some of the art, that digitalized outcry of popular nihilism, that is to say that unwarranted rebellion of the young, grown up in a world, way too caring and nurturing, but at the same time expecting. 

The first thing i did when I came here, was of course join everyone else at the local student's pub. I was given a green plastic bracelet and very little instruction on how to interact. The day of the introduction we were told the Swedes are generally reserved people, who don't pull their curtains ever, so if you stayed long enough after dark you could get a free show. With that in mind I planned on getting too drunk to notice anything not in my immediate vicinity, let alone spy on my new found co-citizens, so I settled for a dark corner of the pub beer in hand and very little expectation of anything else than the trendiest most bland and uninspiring music there is. Somehow in the back of my mind I've always imagined Sweden as that thoughtful almost mythical land where Röyksopp plays nearly all the time, with the shadows of houses floating in the air, constantly at the side of your vision.  Instead what I got was a large amount of immigrants equally as disoriented as me, and a minority of well dressed blond and blue eyed, or artificially colored black haired chicks, well-maintained guys, skinny jeans, flashy necklaces, or depending on the scene droopy dresses over jeans and a spiky fro.

Almost immediately on one of my brakes for a smoke outside of the club I got into a conversation with a bunch of locals, and was offered snuss. So far so good, the alcohol and the nicotine balanced each other out enough for me to half-puke, half buzz. All the while I must have had an hour long conversation about hipsters and Requiem for a Dream, turns out one of the Swedes was a movie nut, and had been waiting for an opportunity to talk about his love for Pi and Trainspotting. So I listened and nodded and added some of my own thoughts, still somewhat expecting for people in night-gowns to come floating to and through and drip milk from their bare feet, I don't know why I equate Sweden with Röyksopp, a Norwegian band, but still, I was not nearly dissuaded enough yet.

The next day as light broke, I could walk around the small town, and it felt like, nothing. None of the cultural edginess of Stockholm, none of the brilliantly bland and at the same time provoking graffiti of the inevitably attached suburbia. The most poignant image of Sweden, I've had before that was a link-track breaking up a pile of concrete on a post-90s suburban setting with the message "We liked it better that way." written in black blocky stenciled letters on the nearby wall. Apparently an old industrial scheme, being transformed into another uniformly beautiful and calm housing area. The affected inhabitants, sporting Converse and smog-coloured silicone bracelets had rebelled against the mechanical efficiency with which the country was loosing it's feel for the 90s and for the nostalgic value of it they were right to demand for their childhood  to be preserved however bland and unattractive it may be to a government, hellbent on improving the image of Sweden to the most distant and unnoticeable square meter of barely marketable property.

Another image of that same art scene that's been stuck in my mind is a small almost unintelligible for the uninitiated message, just the same written in orange spray paint on concrete in uniform, yet distinctly improvised type: "Är du också likgiltig". Which roughly translates into: "Are you also indifferent?". And with the machines inevitably ploughing through refurbishing projects it's easy to see how that perceived strive for exceptionalism can be translated just as well into a statement of complete indifference towards the very personal and unashamed individuality of near-youth, the same that initially drew me here.

Severance: Blade of Darkness

 Among the twenty-something games that were extremely popular back in the same little garage/ PC club was one that I at least personally have heard very little of since, but it's still one of my all time favourite fantasy games. Blade of Darkness is a hack and slash third person RPG, based around a dark medieval setting. With one of the best set of graphics for its time and its addicting and atmospheric game play, it's easily one  of my favourite games of all times. 

Starting out you have the option to choose between a barbarian, dwarf, amazon and a fighter and each one has a preference for several of the various weapon types, and different statistics for their strength, agility etc. On top of that each character has their own unique starting area, although later on their path merges as the storyline progresses. The game revolves around fighting enemies mostly in close combat and usually one or two at a time. The fights are long for a hack and slash game, at least compared to other titles of the genre. When engaging an enemy you'll have to make sure to first and foremost dodge and parry attacks with your shield and then worry about chopping up whatever undead/demonic/beastly creature you're up against. As far as protection goes in even intervals throughout the game you'll come across specific armour appropriate for your particular character, and shields are plentiful and varied, but like the weapons, they lose their durability and break. What helps is that you can carry a multitude of weapons and shields and easily switch between them during battle. Potions and elixirs, as well as food provides health restoration, but keep in mind you can only eat outside of combat.

When engaging an enemy you have to lock on to them with the Tab button and after that use WASD to circle around them. Additionally based on the attacks you have available at each level you can perform special moves with combinations of WASD and attack. The special attacks are unlocked each level and are based off of the character type, but they're also specific to the weapon types. A stamina bar that depletes with each attack makes sure you don't go on a combo-spree, but instead you'll have to take turns attacking and defending yourself while you regain your ability to fight back. All weapons in-game can be used by all character, but based on the stats an amazon carrying a long-sword will be extremely slow with it barely able to swing it once before she collapses panting and struggling for breath on the ground with no stamina to either attack again or defend herself. The only exception is the bow which is useful to every character, especially for solving puzzles, but there's only one type of bow in the game with 10-15 types of each other weapon class, and the damage that bow deals is completely useless after the first few levels.

The story of the game revolves around finding a mythical Blade and descending to an Underworld to fight the big bad. And although it sounds formulaic the attention with which the world is drawn out makes up for the lack of any significant scripted events or complex cinematics between the levels. Once you start fighting, you'll feel completely immersed, weather you're dealing with a simple skeleton or with a brute four feet higher than you and as wide as a car, and there's nothing more satisfying than watching it collapse to the ground in a pile (or several) of blood and gore. Enemies in the game don't conveniently disappear after being reduced out of their health. With enough practice and some luck you can cut heads, limbs and beyond that chop up your foes even as they're collapsing to the ground, if you think they've given you enough trouble to warrant that kind of retribution.

On top of the fighting the levels are punctuated by short and generally non-intrusive puzzles in the style of Tomb Raider, where you have to look for a lever, or a key/gem etc. to open the door to the next area. In order to make sure you get the Blade which is your best bet against the final boss, you have to collect several tablets that have been scattered around the different levels. As an added bonus the tablets will give you some trivia about the history of the game world, for those of you who like the cannon.

Sadly Blade of Darkness never became as popular as it could have been for various reasons, but it's still an excellent example of the genre, with good enough graphics to be playable today. The game lacks a difficulty setting, which can be seen both as a good thing and a bad thing depending on which side of the casual/hardcore spectrum you're coming from. Despite that one thing can be used to measure your success. You can save at any point but depending on the number of saves you have per level, the game is going to give you a rating, ranging from generous praise for not abusing the save system, to some outright mockery if you save before every other enemy.