A Link To The Past

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

Cultural nostalgia is a curious emotion, particularly for antiquated forms of technology. Washed out and overexposed digital camera filters. The artificial crackle on a FLAC file to simulate the experience of listening to a vinyl record. Blu-rays with faux distortion to emulate a VCR losing its tracking. This strange yearning for the imperfections from earlier days.

As I imagine it is with all gamers of my generation, I feel these nostalgia pangs most acutely from all things 8/16-bit [for example, Google's April Fools Day prank Google Quest]. I even harbor a certain amount of affection for the jagged polygons and low resolution textures of the Nintendo 64. Curiously though, I never feel compelled to replay games from the fifth generation of consoles.

The Gameboy Advanced and Nintendo DS will always be fondly remembered because they provided a platform for entire genres endangered by the transition to 3D. In a way, SNES games will never feel outdated because they represent an antediluvian art -- an evolutionary line run dry. Quite simply, they just don't make them like they used to. In contrast, the Nintendo 3DS has a harder sell as emulated Nintendo 64 games are just inchoate versions of contemporary blockbusters hamstrung by technical limitations (fog, anyone?).

The 2D side-scrolling platformer arguably reached its apex in 1997 with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The best 3D shooter is always waiting to be published. Why play Turok: Dinosaur Hunter when you can just wait for Halo 4?

With this in mind, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time 3D plays a subtle game of revisionist history. As I started playing it, I was shocked by how good it looked and how well it played. It wasn't until I was cruising through the notorious Water Temple that I realized that Nintendo had not only upped the texture cache but had also altered the art direction to make the dungeon more easily navigable. It is a bizarre hyper-nostalgia: an uncanny feeling that maybe the past was actually better than you had remember it.

Yet what strikes me most 15 years later is how empty Hyrule Field feels now. In 1996, it was exhilarating to have the freedom to explore such a vast space. In 2012, it just seems like a waste of time.

Grade: B+

Kickstart my heart

Kickstarter is interesting. It's kind of a toothless microloan economy where you exchange a return for a preorder for a consumer good. I first heard about it through my new Twitter hero, Bryan Lee O'Malley. (You may know him from such classic Graphic Novels as Lost at Sea. Oh, and something or someone called Scott Pilgram.)

Politics and philosophy aside, I actually think that is one of its strengths now. Kickstarter gives talented designers an opportunity to fund and create a well-designed or unique product that may not otherwise have enough mainstream appeal for the average investor.

Basically, you decide to "fund" the project if you like. Depending on how much money you give, you'll get different reward tiers. Usually, the first tier is a preorder for the product. The lower, super expensive tiers... Well. You'll just have to find some highlights on your own.

Here are two products I'm thinking about right "funding" right now.

Pebble is an E-paper watch. Besides being a cool-looking watch, the Pebble ties in to your iPhone via Bluetooth and allows you to control music, view certain alerts and, potentially, do a lot of other cool things through apps. It could be mine in black for as little as $115, or in one of four colors for $125.

An odder project, that better exemplifies what makes Kickstarter cool, is the Berlin Boombox. It's a cardboard "Boombox" that you put together using a do-it-yourself kit. It's not a dock, really, because it uses a coaxial stereo cable. And it's like $60 to get an actual cardboard boombox, which is a lot for something that probably has $10–15 worth of components. ($5, strangely, gets you a "mixtape" by one of the creator's DJ friends.) But it looks pretty cool.

Trojan.KillAV.E

I would consider myself a fairly savvy denizen of the internet but having been on a Mac OSX platform for the better part of the last decade, I have become a bit lazy when it comes to computer security. I trawl the deep web with nary a concern for viruses or malware. Even my phishing spidey sense has started to atrophy.

A few weeks ago, I received a text informing me that I had won a $50 dollar gift card to [REDACTED]. I haven't shopped at [REDACTED] in over a year but a recent New York Times article discussed how [REDACTED] was using predicative technology to lure shoppers so my brain made the leap that maybe this was one of their new promotions. Or, my brain continued to rationalize, maybe my parents had entered my number in some contest and simply never bothered to tell me. As I was getting ready to send a response, it finally dawned on me that our last sacred bastion, the cell phone, had finally been conquered by spammer barbarians.

I was further humbled by the latest news about the Mac specific trojan Flashback. For the past few weeks as I surfed the web, a pop up would appear pestering me to update Adobe Flash. The first few times, I didn't even bother reading it; I saw the Adobe logo and just swatted it down like some pesky fly. But after the umpteenth time, my patience reservoir was exhausted and I blindly hit update. Thus as I read an article detailing how Flashback baited users by masquerading as a Flash installer, my heart dropped. I had secretly laughed at all those suckers who fell for MacDefender, yet here I was scraping humble pie off of the floor like some common n00b. My mind raced as thought of all of the websites I was going to have to change my password on. Yet by some mysterious grace, I had been spared: when I ran the defaults read command in Terminal, my computer came up clean. It turns out it actually had been Adobe all along.

I guess it's better to be lucky than smart.

A Hole in the Wallet

In a surprising karmic upset, EA won the dubious honor of "Worst Company In America" from a former Mark's favorite links site The Consumerist. Americans must be suffering from outrage fatigue in other sectors of the economy: I guess we are already inured to Ticketmaster's "Convenience Fees" and AT&T charging $20 a month for the luxury of sending 37 byte texts across their immaculate SMM network.

Digital Rights Management has always been a way of life for PC gaming but the rise of $10 "online passes" and on-disc "downloadable content" in the name of combating piracy and used game sales is a new phenomenon for console gaming. The disillusionment of the gamerati must have reached a fever pitch right before the Consumerist vote when a "press leak" revealed that next generation consoles will lock out used game sales by locking content to a single account. I can only assume this was a strategic release of information to gauge customer dissatisfaction. EA, the corporate juggernaut whose own terrible DRM network Origin was recently heckled at a games expo, bore the brunt of this when it looked like its anti-consumer nickel-and-diming was going to be institutionalized by Sony and Microsoft. [Don't even get me started on what EA is doing in the iOS ecosystem.]

Or maybe I am just reading a little too deeply into the tea leaves. Maybe nerds are just upset that EA botched the ending to their precious Mass Effect franchise.

Gee, I've been saved by Fox. How swell.

Star Fox 64 3D
In a strange twist of fate, Star Fox 64 is probably better suited for the Nintendo 3DS than it was for the Nintendo 64: clocking in at barely an hour, it is a bite-size of a game, easily digested in the handheld format. I might even label it the "definitive version" despite two minor missteps: Nintendo sacrilegiously re-recorded Falco's vocals ("I guess I should be thankful.") and awkwardly forces you to use the stylus to receive Rob64's bonuses. And if Nintendo went through all the trouble of recalibrating the difficulty for the Nintendo 3DS, would it have been that much of a bother to create a Hard mode as well? Despite being 14 years removed from the peak of my gaming prowess, I ran through each difficulty path without coming close to dying. But perhaps ultimately that is the charm of Star Fox 64: it is a breeze to pick up and play, and lacks any of the unnecessary gameplay clutter that eventually diluted the fun factor of the franchise.

Grade: A-

The House of the Morning

Europe has always been a punching-bag for the right: a straw man to help put the superiority of American values in high-relief (or alto-relievo for my fellow rocket salad eating snobs). As a cultivated man of letters (no seriously, it says that on my degree), I have always taken a certain amount of umbrage with these criticisms. It is hard not to look across the Atlantic at that socialist paradise of moral depravity and not sigh wistfully.

But nothing brings out my dormant American jingoism quite like the issue of pay toilets (with the World Cup coming in at a distant second). After all, what more basic human dignity can you afford a visitor than the right to use the facilities in a dire time of need?

When I studied abroad in Spain in 2002, fast food restaurants were veritable American embassies for their lax requirements to use the lavatory. If we wanted to create a Marshall plan for the 21st century, I think we could singlehanded rescue the Euro (and if we are being modest, Western Civilization as well) by installing Halliburton porta-potties up and down the Seine.

At one point in my latest trip to Europe (there have been so many, it is sometimes hard to keep track), a boulangerie (a bakery for you philistines) owner balked when one of my fellow travelers asked to use the privy. Apparently soliciting her fine establishment and ordering quatre sandwich did not meet the threshold to be worthy enough to use the garderobe (restroom… will you please try to keep up for once).

Most curiously, the only free toilet I discovered in my travels was near the bus station in Angers. To call it a toilet is a bit of stretch as it was quite literally just a freestanding urinal affixed to the side of a building without any enclosures. As I was relieving myself in this most precious of necessariums, pedestrians ambled on right behind me and buses picked up their passengers with a full on view of my backside.

For a continent that prides itself on humans rights and privacy, Europe is rather incontinent in its handling of both in regards to the reredorter (seriously just Google it).

Qwikster Two Cents: 11 Hour Transatlantic Flight Edition

The Rum Diary (2011)

Verdict: I guess I am alone in finding The Rum Diary entirely watchable, if somewhat anticlimactically structured. Maybe the thin atmosphere and free drinks clouded my judgement?






In Time (2011)

Verdict: Fascinatingly bad. Like MST3000 good/bad. Nothing about the premise holds water and every line is smothered in heavy italics. Too afraid to even delve into the disturbing psychosexual consequences of its central conceit.






Tower Heist (2011)

Verdict: Just bad/bad. Like wiping out the assets of a charitable foundation set up by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel through a Ponzi scheme bad.

2011: Exit Words (For A Few Films)

To wrap up Movie Week at hideouslywrinkled (or has it just begun?), I humbly offer to you my annual awards to the 10 films that I may or may not have liked this year.

A Few Honorable Mentions

The King Of Carrot Flowers Part 2 & 3 Award for Hipster Christianity AND The Steven Spielberg Award for Not Knowing How to End A Movie goes to...

The Tree of Life

The Vin Diesel fights The Rock Award for the movie with the best fight scene between Vin Diesel and The Rock goes to…

Fast Five

The "I should have seen this instead of In A Better World at last year's Portland International Film Festival" Award goes to…

Incendies

Top 10 Movies

The (now) annual "The Parts Are Greater Than The Sum" Matthew Vaughn Award goes to...

Attack the Block

The Judd MiLOLtary IndustriLOL Complex Award goes to…

Bridesmaids

The (quite surprisingly) least Freudian movie in the Cronenberg oeuvre Award goes to...

A Dangerous Method

The Aaron Sorkin's Continuing Quest To Find The Least Likely Blockbuster Protagonist Award AND The newly minted Brad trolling Award goes to...

Moneyball

The (now potentially annual) Award for the Best Foreign Film (that you can tell is a foreign film because the protagonist is Muslim) goes to…

A Separation

The Mark is going to hate this movie because it totally rips off The Smashing Pumpkins video "Tonight, Tonight" Award goes to...

Hugo

The Warner Herzog Award for the most profound and deeply moving documentary of the year, which also had two descent selections from the big man himself goes to…

Nostalgia for the Light

The I told you the director of the film with the One-Eyed Clairvoyant Viking was somebody special but you refused to believe me until he made a movie featuring Ryan Gosling Award goes to...

Drive

The Kirsten Dunst haters to the back Award goes to...

Melancholia

The Takashi Miike remakes The Seven Samurai and it is indescribably badass Award AND The I seriously need to watch this movie again with Ian Lindsay because it might be the most awesome movie of the year Award goes to…

13 Assassins