Some Recommended Podcasts

Over the past year or so, I've taken to listening to podcasts quite a bit. There's some fun, informative, funny stuff out there, but there's also a lot of crap. So with that said, these are my favourite few podcasts, though I'm sure there are many out there I have yet to discover.

Major Spoilers/Critical Hit/Top Five
These three are lumped together because they're all run by the same site, and feature the same hosts (with a couple of extra in Critical Hit). Major Spoilers is a podcast about comic book news and reviews, and has led to me reading a lot of stuff I might not otherwise have found, as well as helped me with last year's christmas shopping. Critical Hit is an actual play D&D podcast, and is not only an interesting story with a great DM, but inspired me to start a regular game up with some friends. Top Five is exactly what it sounds like; a show in which the hosts give their top five in the episode's chosen topic. What makes these three shows great is the hosts, they're knowledgable about the subjects, have a good presence and personality behind the mic, and are usually pretty funny to boot. I recommend giving any of these three shows a look over at Major Spoilers.

Filmsack
Join Scott Johnson (of Extra Life fame), and his fellow hosts Brian Ibbott, Brian Dunaway, and Randy Jordan as they mine the very depths of film entertainment. Each week, they pick a film (usually from Netflix, though as the UK lineup to Netflix is different from the US one, it doesn't make a difference to me) and watch it, they then discuss it at depth, often going off on random tangents. The podcast is great for film fans, and it's obvious that the hosts are all film buffs, but it's also a funny show with lively and enjoyable hosts. Check it out here.

The Nerdist
This podcast, hosted by Chris Hardwick, is generally based on interviews with various celebrities, nerd icons, and interesting people. Interview might be the wrong word though, as they feel more like a conversation, and often wander off in odd directions. Worth a listen due to a great lineup of guests, and some really interesting stories (such as the time Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame, once wrestled a naked little person in a pool of corn starch). Find it here!

Talking Toons
Talking Toons is hosted by Rob Paulsen, voice of Pinky, Yakko, two of the Ninja Turtles, and a whole host of other characters. It focuses on interviews with his friends in the voice acting industry, and has had some really interesting and funny guests. The behind the scenes stuff is fascinating, the guests are interesting, and since they're all his friends, the tone of the show is very relaxed. Check it out over at Rob's site.

Hypothetical Help
Another Scott Johnson podcast, this time with co-host Turpster. The two of them answer three listeners requests for advice on almost any situation each show. The advice is often funny, sometimes tongue in cheek, and surprisingly also manages to be sound advice, most of the time. I like that this podcast does something different, and the hosts have great chemistry. Check it out here!

Those are my picks, and I urge you to go give them a listen. If you have any podcasts you enjoy, please give them a shout-out in the comments, I'm always looking for new podcasts to feast my ear-tongues on.

Saturday Morning Cartoons (Part 1)

When I was a kid, I watched cartoons. I think most of us did, right? Talking to people these days, it seems a lot of people agree with me; kid's tv these days is worse. The focus has moved from cartoons to formulaic live action stuff. What cartoons there are are generally not great. But this post (or soon to be series of posts) aren't to complain about the state of kid's television today. It's to remember what it used to be like, when I was growing up in the nineties and early part of the two thousands. This first post is going to concentrate on the cartoons from Cartoon Network, specifically the ones under the 'Cartoon Cartoon' brand. This was Cartoon Network's own brand of original cartoons.

It consisted of fifteen different cartoons, however some of these I'm not at all familiar with. It may be because they were after my time, or perhaps they weren't aired here in the UK. Or maybe I just missed them. So the following Cartoon Cartoons will NOT be included in my list: Sheep in the Big City, Time Squad, Whatever Happened to...Robot Jones?, and Codename: Kids Next Door. further, I'm only familiar with The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which was originally part of a show called Grim & Evil, I'm not familiar with the Evil Con Carne part of the show. So of the fifteen, that leaves me with nine which I'm actually familiar with from when I was a youngling. So I will be ranking these nine in order of my favourite, from least to most!

Nine - Ed, Edd n Eddy

I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this one. I know this show has a lot of fans, but it's one that I was not only never able to get into, but which I really disliked. The ugly character designs, the weird constantly moving lines of the animation style, the grating character voices, the incredibly dumb main characters (I get that one of them was supposed to be intelligent, but anybody who goes along with the other two characters and their schemes is a far cry from being accepted into MENSA in my book). This show has its fans, but it's about as far from my tastes as you can get. I'm also one of the few people with a strong dislike for Spongebob based on very similar reasons as my dislike for this show. Either way, this show gets the bottom spot on my list.

Eight - Mike, Lu and Og

This show nearly got put into the "I never watched this" list, before I watched the opening theme, and vaguely remembered it. It follows the character Mike, a girl who as part of an exchange program goes to live on a remote island populated by stereotypical tribe-like natives. I honestly don't remember much about this show at all. The complete lack of impression it made on me puts it this low on the list, simply because I can't think of anything to make it rank higher. If you're a fan of this show, then sorry, but it obviously didn't grab me in any particular way.

Seven - I Am Weasel

This show revolved around the character I. R. Baboon's attempts to usurp and upstage the popular, intelligent, all around good guy I. M. Weasel. Weasel is smart, generous, talented. Baboon is not. The shows themself weren't terrible at all, but the concept got old fairly quickly, and they all felt a bit samey. The theme song manages to get stuck in my head with surprising ease though.

Six - Cow and Chicken

Mama had a chicken, mama had a cow, Dad was proud, he didn't care how. That line from the opening song is about as much of a plot as you get in this show. I Am Weasel was in fact a spin-off from this show, and I feel the main show was a bit funnier than I Am Weasel. I wasn't a huge fan, though I do appreciate the surreal nature, as it's something I like in some other cartoons I really enjoy. The show followed the adventures of Cow and Chicken, a brother and sister duo, and most often dealt with them running foul of The Red Guy, a demon like character which may or may not be a Satan analogue. I liked some of the weird humour in this show, and some of the characters were pretty funny, like The Red Guy, or their cousin Boneless Chicken (a chicken with no bones...why? Who knows, the show was just like that). Jokes like the parents literally only existing from the waist down, making fun of the tendency of parents to appear like that in many cartoons, or Cow having a superhero alter-ego, who for some reason was fluent in Spanish made little sense, but they got a laugh out of me. Still, overall, this ranks pretty low on my list, partially because I feel a lot of the humour fell kind of flat, and partially because I felt other shows did the surreal humour thing better, stuff like Ren and Stimpy, or Freakazoid!

Five - The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

In this show, the Grim Reaper loses a bet over the life of a hamster, and as a result is forced to be the best friend of two children 'forever and ever'. The children are the incredibly unintelligent Billy (his IQ is given as -5, he was outperformed in the IQ test by a shovel) and the cynical and domineering Mandy. It's an interesting concept for a show, and allows them to explore odd and supernatural stories. I feel like this show might be higher on the list, but it came about towards the tail end of my days of regularly watching cartoons, and as such, I don't have such a sense of nostalgia for it. Nonetheless, it was still pretty enjoyable.

Four - Dexter's Lab

The story of a diminutive boy genius and his hyperactive sister, who screws up his plans at every juncture. Dexter's Lab is one of the first shows to spring to mind when you think of Cartoon Network (and it was in fact the first of the Cartoon Cartoons). The boy who has a vast laboratory hidden under the house, and the mad science he gets up to there; it's a simple concept, but it left a lot of scope for plots, be they ones revolving around mad science, the brother sister dynamic, or Dexter's rival boy scientist, the evil Mandark. It was a clever show, and generally funny, as well as usually full of interesting visuals. To this day, one thing bugs me though...why DID Dexter have an accent, when the rest of his family did not?

Three - Johnny Bravo

So, given my earlier proclamation of disliking shows where the main characters are dumb, why does this rank so highly? Well, there are always exceptions to a rule, and I think the performance given to Johnny transcends my usual dislike. Jeff Bennett gave a wonderful performance, a sort of Elvis Presley type voice, but with a slight hint of child-like naivety. This great portrayal, combined with some clever writing made this a really funny show. Fun fact, it's also a show that Seth McFarlane mainly worked on, though he did work on Dexter's Lab, Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel too. Seth later went on to create Family Guy. Butch Hartman, who also worked on this, went on to create Fairly Odd-Parents. So there was some decent talent behind this. Whatever the reason, this show was funny enough to get into the top three, and should celebrate; come on, do the monkey!

Two - The Powerpuff Girls

 Number two on this list, and probably one some people were hoping would be number one. The show follows the adventures of the Powerpuff Girls; a trio of superpowered young girls created by Professor Utonium, who kept the Townsville safe from various villains. It had clever writing, a great cast of voice actors, and was entertaining for both kids and adults. This show had genuinely great humour. The show was full of pop culture references and sly humour, and the cast of characters were entertaining and creative. My particular favourites were the villains Mojo Jojo and Him. It's also probably the first show I watched to feature one of my favourite voice actors; the lovely Tara Strong as Bubbles. A fun fact is that the show was developed from a short called Whoopass Stew! and the girls were originally going to be called the Whoopass Girls.The original short can still be viewed on youtube. Now, on to number one! Those who know the Cartoon Cartoons will, by process of elimination, know what it is, if not, I'm gonna tell you!

One - Courage the Cowardly Dog

This is it, the top dog (pun intended). Courage was a strange show. It had a small cast, was creepy as hell, and unlike pretty much everything on this list, it wasn't really a show that was intended to be funny. But it gets the top spot because it was really unique. It centred on the titular Courage, who lived with his owners; the sweet and kind Muriel and her curmudgeonly husband Eustace. The show generally followed a monster of the week format, but the creatures they came across were usually genuinely creepy and weird. The show had an odd pacing, and the strangeness of it all probably put people off too. But I loved the atmosphere, as well as the way it played with B-Movie style plots and tropes. If you can hunt it down, in some form, I definitely recommend watching it, if you haven't already.

Hopefully my list awoke some nostalgic memories in you, or at least interested you somewhat. If not, then congrats for reading this far. Hopefully I'll be covering other cartoons in future posts, so keep your eyes peeled!

Are Games Art?

Games as art. It’s been a big, and contentious, topic for a while now. On the one hand you have the recent influx of indie designers, you have the games that are being praised for their message, or their method, being artistic. On the other hand, you have people like Jonathan Blow, praised for his artistic games like Braid, and the upcoming The Witness, saying that games are mostly dumb and juvenile (link) and famed film critic Roger Ebert claiming games are not, nor ever will be, art.

So who is right? Are games a burgeoning art form, coming into their own as an artistic medium, capable of deep and meaningful expressions alongside the mainstream point and shoot games, much like movies such as The Artist and Battleship can exist side by side? Or are games doomed to be mere entertainment, with no chance of being anything that can be considered art?

If you ask me, or even if you don’t, I feel that games are capable of being art. But I feel that a lot of the critics who say otherwise are somewhat missing the point. A game is a much longer experience than a movie. It’s often longer than a book also. And they are primarily entertainment. So a game does not need to be simply artistic expression from start to finish. There needs to be room for entertainment, as well as for artistic expression. I also think that the constant comparisons to movies do nothing to help the matter. Games are not movies, they are games. They’re inherently interactive. I feel that the best examples of artistic expression in games are ones which use the mechanics or limitations of a game to their advantage. When the very act of playing the game is forcing you to experience it in a way that is unique to games. We shouldn’t be looking for the Citizen Kane of games, because Citizen Kane would make a horrible game. We should be looking for gaming’s own examples of art.

I respect Roger Ebert as a film critic, but when it comes to games, it’s very clear that it is not his wheelhouse, and that it is probably too late to teach that old dog new tricks. That’s fine, he’s entitled to his tastes, and to his opinions. I bear him no malice at all for his borderline insulting words to one of my hobbies and passions, because I realise he is approaching it from a completely different outlook to me. Jonathan Blow I have a little less understanding for. Braid was great, and I think it was a great example of the mechanics of a game expressing something in a unique way. But from the interviews I’ve read with him, and profiles I’ve read of him, he comes across as being arrogant, pretentious, and dismissive.

So I said that the art in games should come from the mechanics themselves. What do I mean by this? I mean that although in a book, narrative is the main form of interaction, and the way in which the artistic message is conveyed, and in film it is through the script, the visuals, the filming techniques, in games though, the primary form of interaction is just that; interaction. Games are all about player agency. So what games can I point to for examples of what I mean? There are several, though I warn you that spoilers for various games may lie ahead, though I’ll try to be circumspect.

I mentioned Braid already, and it is a good example, the game’s time bending mechanics are used to great effect in the finale of the story, giving a genuinely enjoyable moment of revelation to the player. There are deeper messages and allegories in the game too, but to me, the real triumph of art was that one section where the mechanics of play were used to deliver that memorable scene.

Another good example is Bioshock. It does indeed deliver on the levels of aesthetics and narrative. Of note is the way that much of the background to the story is delivered through exploration, rather than cutscenes. There are certainly scenes in there that lend themselves to a more conventional definition of art. I found certain scenes particularly striking, like the large fight to the strains of Walt of the Flowers, taking place in a dark room while a spotlight centres on you. It creates a memorable scene, and one which I would argue is artistic in its execution. But the scene I would really point at is the one in which you finally confront Andrew Ryan. Control is taken from the player at a pivotal point, and you’re forced to watch as it happens. It makes the plot twist, and the scene far more powerful than it would have been otherwise, and far more powerful than it would have been in a movie or a book, because it’s happening to the player, using the interface the player has come to take for granted, which is exactly what is happening to the character. And isn’t that what art is? Art is hard to define, but delivering a message or an experience through clever use of the tools, resources and materials available is as good a definition as any other I’ve heard.

Both my examples so far are from games which have been praised for their artistic value already in some way, so for my third I’ll go a bit farther afield. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. This isn’t a game that would generally come up as a discussion of games as art. But its final battle is one of the best examples I can think of. Spoilers ahead! The game is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, and anybody who has played that knows that Zack is going to die at the end of this game. The fatal battle comes up, but it’s executed amazingly. Through the game, the battle system has had the DMW, or Digital Mind Wave, system. This resembles a slot machine, with other characters faces on it. These represent memories of those characters, and are used for special attacks and so on. In the final battle, you’re facing a stream of enemy soldiers, an endless one. As you fight, and are injured, the DMW becomes shaky, as if it’s malfunctioning. As your consciousness fades, the faces of your friends and allies fade from the DMW, until you’re left seeing only the face of Aerith, your love interest in the game, Zack’s final memory as he dies (particularly sad, since in FFVII, you find that Aerith never learns of his death, and has been left always wondering what happened to him). This creates a really poignant scene, the DMW has only been a mechanic through the game, the tie to memories and so forth seems nothing more than window dressing...until this scene.

There are other examples I could use, but hopefully I’ve explained what it is that makes a game art. The melding of the playing and the experience, using the unique qualities of games to enhance and complement the experience, rather than simply as a means to an end. To me, examples like this are why I feel I can say yes, games are capable of being art, and artistic moments can already be seen throughout gaming.