Dungeon Siege 3 Review: Game... Blouses
by Keith Daniels
Dungeon Siege 3 diverges from its forebears to such a degree that it should almost have had a different title. Players expecting the traditional PC RPG trappings of the first two games: character creation, large parties, pause-and-go strategy, mouse and keyboard oriented gameplay, will almost certainly be disappointed. That’s what this game isn’t. What it is, however, is a polished and addictive button-mashing action-RPG that succeeds in creating a story-oriented co-op fantasy dungeon crawler for modern console audiences in the tradition of Secret of Mana or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. In fact, the game's lead designer, Nathaniel Chapman, mentioned both of those games by way of comparison in our recent interview with him.
Dungeon Siege 3 returns the series to the first game’s Kingdom of Ehb, a fairly generic fantasy setting once protected by a group of honor-bound warriors called the 10th Legion. At the opening of DS3, the Legion has been all but obliterated by the armies of a religious zealot called Jeyne Kassynder, who holds the Legion responsible for the murder of the former King of Ehb and has dedicated her life to vengeance against them. You and the other playable characters are part of a mere handful of surviving Legionnaires, and your quest involves reuniting the various splintered factions of Ehb with the remnants of the Legion. All this game’s talk of Legions actually led to a few humorous moments for me when NPCs would celebrate how, “The Legion has returned,” and I’d think, “Well, yes, but it’s basically me and this other guy.” The abstract arc of the story is superficially similar to that of Dragon Age: Origins: as a new member of an elite but dwindling order you recruit allies amongst the kingdom’s squabbling factions by doing quests for them until you have enough force to march against the Bad Thing. But what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Though the Dungeon Siegefranchise was originally developed by Gas Powered Games for Microsoft (and later 2K Games), Obsidian is known for taking on sequel projects from other developers, most notably the sequels to BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Bethesda’s Fallout 3. Their sole wholly original property to date, Alpha Protocol, underperformed, though arguably for reasons tangential to the game itself. Every Obsidian game preceding DS3 has suffered from technical issues of varying degrees: from the literally unfinished KOTOR 2 to the crashes and corrupted saves of Fallout: New Vegas.
Yet these glitches and rough edges have largely been balanced by the excellence of each of these game’s stories and characters. Fortunately, from my experience so far, having played through this game twice as different characters while doing every side quest and vacuuming up every bit of coin and loot I could lay my hands on, it appears Obsidian have maintained their winning tradition in the writing department, while also delivering a solid and highly polished technical experience. Playing the PC version, I experienced absolutely zero significant issues: no crashes, no unfinishable quests, no pathing weirdness, and no corrupted saves -- even though I never passed a save point without using it. It also ran smoothly and looked gorgeous on maxed settings even on my fairly mid-range PC.
But yes, I said “save point.” Even on the PC, you can’t just save wherever you wish. Luckily, the save points are logically and generously placed, so it wasn’t too much of an issue. The fact that one was located immediately before (and after) every major encounter was nice, but also took some of the element of surprise and danger out of it. Seeing a save point in a dungeon became like seeing a chest-high wall ahead in Mass Effect 2, “Gee, I wonder if this means I’m about to be attacked?” On “Normal” difficulty, experienced players will hardly need any saves anyway. Normal was just hard enough to force me to use most of my abilities to my best advantage, but not so hard that I was ever likely to throw my controller. Like Dungeon Siege 2, you only “die” if everyone in your party is dead simultaneously. Throughout the game on Normal, there were a few moments where my character was knocked out, but luckily my AI party member was useful enough to hold their own until they could resurrect me. Only a few times in Normal did we completely “wipe” and have to reload. Hardcore was a different story entirely. I wiped hard and repeatedly, particularly in the early game before I picked up any party members or learned many abilities. Even ordinary packs of mobs had to be kited and hit-and-run tactics applied.
Personally, I found the friendly AI impressive. My counterpart used all his or her abilities well and was genuinely useful, doing a significant part of the damage and saving my ass several times. A good thing, too, because unlike previous Dungeon Siege games, apart from picking gear and talents you have absolutely zero control over your party member in combat. The only real issue I saw with the party AI was that it sometimes didn’t know not to stand in what RPG gamers call “the poop,” whatever it was: environmental hazards that caused damage just by standing in them or walking through them. This actually caused my one wipe on Normal during what I considered the most interesting and challenging boss fight of the game, which occurs at the end of the second act. Pet AI was also less impressive, often behaving like a World of Warcraft Hunter’s pet set to aggressive, going after far off-screen packs of enemies on their own volition.
The boss fights, while well integrated into the story, were perhaps a bit uniform in terms of strategy. Almost every boss encounter, bar a few exceptions, consisted of the Big Bad teleporting around the room while summoning waves of mooks to harry me. Given the struggle my party member had with one truly interesting boss fight, I suspect that this lack of variety might have had something to do with the limitations of the otherwise competent friendly AI.
The idea of different forms of vulnerability which played such a large role in Dungeon Siege 2 is out as well. Instead, your tactical decisions consist of target prioritization and ability synergy. You have to maneuver well, dodging frequently, while trying to stun, slow, or knock back enemies who get too close. You will almost never be faced with only one form of attack. A group of mobs will almost always consist of melee fighters as well as ranged, and you’ll have to decide which poses the greatest threat. Early on ranged enemies are often the bigger threat, but in the end-game fast, hard-hitting melee enemies can take you down in seconds if you oblige them by standing still.
Your character’s abilities are toggled by switching stances, which generally break down into a long range, single target stance, a short range, crowd control stance, and a defensive dodging and healing stance. A given fight will have you switching between all three of these stances repeatedly. Instead of mana, which drains as you use spells and then refills itself automatically, you use Focus, which is built up by attacking enemies. You also slowly build a secondary form of power, which gives you the ability to occasionally supercharge one of your abilities. This gives the game a relentlessly offensive feel. No one is ever standing around waiting to be able to do something. The key is that all feels so smooth. Your abilities are so well designed, and juggling them requires just enough skill that combat, far from being a chore to get loot, becomes a joy in and of itself. Your choice of companion and preference of stance determine which abilities you’ll want to unlock first, though by the end of the game you’ll have all of them if you do every side-quest.
Though the four characters available conform roughly to standard RPG archetypes: warrior, mage, ranger, etc, there are no support characters. In fact, every single character can unlock some form of self-healing early on, and there’s isn’t even a single potion in sight. Customization comes in the form of unlocking the aforementioned abilities, and in Proficiencies and Talents. Proficiencies allow you to improve a given Ability in one of two ways. For example, if your character can summon a pet, you can either buff it or make its attacks heal you, or mix a little of both. I’m not the sort who would analyze loot in a spreadsheet, but itemization appeared well balanced, providing you with a steady stream of upgrades and side-grades at a reasonable pace. The inventory system was also easy to navigate and always notified you of which items were new. You can convert items to cash (at a steep loss) directly from your inventory, though I only learned this halfway through the game when I finally filled up my storage. My main complaint with the loot had to do with poorly defined statistics. Without tooltips or descriptions it was hard to decide between vaguely similar sounding stats like Armor, Block, and Warding, or why a piece with one stat was considered more valuable than another. The only way to find out what these stats did was to look them up in the glossary of the in-game Help menu.
The general structure of Dungeon Siege 3 is fairly linear. There’s no question which areas you’ll visit in which order, but in between you’ll have some room to explore. You’ll generally have three or four active quests at a time, and you can choose which order to do them in as it suits you. The game also rewards poking around in nooks and crannies to an almost comical degree. Go in the opposite direction of the Fable-like breadcrumb trail (oh yeah, there’s that, too, but it’s optional) leading you toward your next objective and you will always be rewarded materially.
The environments, I thought, were gorgeous and detailed, from the forests in which you begin the game to the haunted mansions, snow-capped mountain passes, steampunk forges, and German-style Renaissance cities. They’re familiar fantasy environments, but lovingly created and packed with tiny details. I never got the feeling that I was being led through lazily copy-pasted filler. The standard enemies too, I felt were nicely varied, even though the early chapters might lead you to believe you’ll face nothing but human goons. I also enjoyed how changes to your character’s armor were reflected visually, right down to tiny details like the hairpins of gun-wielding Katarina, and by the end of the game each character looks quite distinct and markedly different from how they looked at the beginning.
Given that this game was obviously designed with co-op multiplayer in mind, it's a shame that I've had so little first-hand experience with it thus far aside from a few hours of local co-op (SuicideGirls only got one review copy!). I did enjoy that it was drop-in, drop-out, so that my buddy could join me mid-game, quit where they wanted, and I could continue without them. The addition of a dialogue-choice voting system was a nice too. The second player's preference for which dialogue option you should take in a conversation is always shown, and there are supposedly bonuses if the two of you consistently agree or disagree. Less welcome was a probable side effect of drop-in, drop-out: a player drops into your game with your characters, not their own, and any progress they make with a character in your game will not carry over to their copy of the game. The extreme top-down camera angle that had not bothered me before when I played alone also left me feeling nauseous for some reason at a few points in our multiplayer game when it rotated around. I'm not sure if it works this way in internet multiplayer, but in local co-op the camera's insistence on always keeping my friend's body in view also caused us a few wipes when they went down and my ability to move around the room suddenly became limited to the space within sight of their corpse.
Within seconds of booting this game for the first time, I knew that hardcore PC gamers and especially fans of the old Dungeon Siegegames would instinctively hate it. It cannot be said clearly enough that this is a console game. The PC version might have higher resolution textures and other graphical whizzbangs, but otherwise it appears to be exactly the same as the Xbox 360 version, right down to the menus and UI. Some gamers hate the trend toward so-called “consolization” on principal. Personally, while I’d love to see a true PC RPG successor to the likes of Baldur’s Gate 2, I’m not holding my breath. Rather than rage about what I can’t change, I try to enjoy what I have. I don’t remember either of the first Dungeon Siege games ever being lauded as flawless untouchable classics, anyway.
And I enjoyed both times I’ve played through Dungeon Siege 3. If there were one word I could use to describe this game, it would be “solid.” It brought to mind classic arcade beat-’em-ups like Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara or console games like X-men: Legends. The joy of this game is in the gameplay, which I found rewarding in and of itself, and not especially in the roleplaying. The story did become more interesting as the game progressed though, and I eventually found myself transitioning from, “Yeah, yeah shut up and tell me where to go,” to looking for every extra line of dialogue. Obsidian’s strength has always been in their writing department. While this game may not have the open-ended freedom of their previous titles, it does possess some interesting characters and meaningful choices to be made throughout that affect the later course of the game in surprising ways, and this time Obsidian has wedded it to a game that’s as technically well crafted as its story.
Star Trek Has Been Reborn, and It Is SPECTACULAR
Since I saw Star Trek a little over a week ago, Ive struggled to write an adequate review of the movie, and what it meant to me, as someone who was part of the first effort to make Star Trek relevant to the, uh, next generation of fans. Ive started and abandoned a few thousand words, mostly because I can say everything I need to say in just six:
It was awesome. I loved it.
I realize that a column about the movie, and what it meant to me, is going to need to elaborate on that just a little bit, and thats where the trouble begins. See, I keep feeling like Im just rewriting what I wrote about Watchmen, which could also be reduced to six words:
It was awesome. I loved it.
I've tried to stay away from Watchmen, but I keep coming back to that comparison because they both played significant roles in my life as I came of age during my teens. I feel a deeply personal connection to them, and I was I think understandably worried that these movies would leave me feeling the way I felt when I walked out of Phantom Menace.
In fact, to explain why, I'm going to quote myself, from my review of Watchmen:
...we live in a world where we've endured Ang Lee's The Hulk, Spiderman 3, both Fantastic Four movies, and Indiana Jones Gets Raped Repeatedly While We Are Forced To Watch In Horror, so I think it would be really strange if we weren't worried and apprehensive about something that already means so much to us...
And that's the thing, isn't it? Star Trek has meant too much to too many people for too long for those of us who love it to blindly accept that whoever makes it will treat it with the same love and respect that we believe it deserves. I think it was normal and natural for all of us to have reservations, especially about Star Trek.
It turns out, I think, that a lot of our fears, while well-founded, were unnecessary. JJ Abrams may not be one of us in the convention-going sense, but I think he has something in common with us, and I think it's a big reason why Star Trek made so many of us so very, very happy.
A lot of Trekkies got worked up when JJ Abrams seemed to say that he didn't even like Star Trek, and was more of a Star Wars fan:
Well, I'm just a fan of Star Wars. As a kid, Star Wars was much more my thing than Star Trek was.
The usual blogs and geek punditry picked up on that, and freaked out that he clearly didn't care about Trek, and was going to make something that had more in common with Star Wars and possibly its disastrous prequels and special editions than the Star Trek we've loved for so many years. I think, living in our post-Phantom Menace, post-ET-with-Walkie-Talkies, post are-you-fucking-kidding-me-with-X-Men 3 world, that's an understandable response. The funny thing is, I never heard anyone bother to add the very next thing he said:
"The challenge of doing Star Trek -- despite the fact that it existed before Star Wars -- is that we are clearly in the shadow of what George Lucas has done.
Let's think about that for a moment, because it could mean a couple of different things. It could mean that Lucas made Star Wars movies that were bigger spectacles than the Star Trek movies, and we need to somehow top that ... except JJ immediately says it isn't:
The key to me is to not ever try to outdo them because it's a no-win situation. Those movies are so extraordinarily rendered that it felt to me that the key to Star Trek was to go from the inside-out: Be as true to the characters as possible, be as real and as emotional and as exciting as possible and not be distracted by the specter of all that the Star Wars film accomplished.
I think this means that JJ Abrams, self-professed Star Wars fan, left the Special Editions and prequels feeling the same way a lot of us did. That is the shadow George Lucas cast over science fiction movies, especially remakes and reboots and re-imaginings. That could be why he made sure that, even though he doesn't love Star Trek as much as we do, he surrounded himself with people who did, and listened to them when he made his movie.
I could be completely wrong, of course, but I think the story in Star Trek supports this: Spock Prime says, "Listen, I know that I've messed with the timeline in your universe, and things are never going to be the same. But the universe that existed before I traveled through time is still there, and now it's up to you to explore this universe."
It's like JJ is simultaneously telling us, "I respect you. I respect the people and starships and adventures and universe that you've loved for 40 years. I'm not going to tell you that it doesn't matter. I'm not going to tell you that you were wrong to love it, and now it's all gone because I have shiny new effects and actors. It's all there, and it's yours to continue exploring as long as you want to.
"But I do have this new starship and a new crew, and we're going to go explore some different places where no one has gone before. If you want to come along with us, you're welcome to aboard. If not, bon voyage. If you treat her like a lady, she'll always bring you home."
This is the fundamental difference between what JJ Abrams did with Star Trek, and what George Lucas did with Star Wars. Lucas told us, "Hey, you know all that stuff you love so much? That stuff that's been a huge part of your life? Well, you're stupid for liking it because I didn't mean it. These are my toys, always have been, and now I'm taking them back. Ha. Ha. Ha. Fuck you, now give me more of your money."
I hope that Star Trek's legacy is two-fold. I hope that it leads to more movies with these actors and this creative team, and I hope that it encourages more studios and film makers to follow the example laid out by people like JJ Abrams, Zack Snyder, and Peter Jackson.
I mean, can you imagine Michael Bay's Star Trek?
Sorry. Sorry. That was cruel, and I shouldn't have put that image into your head. According to some quantum physicists, though, just thinking about that created a universe where it happened, and I'd like to apologize to everyone in it.
I want to talk about something else from Star Trek, but it contains spoilers, so...
I loved a lot of different things in Star Trek. I thought the casting was perfect. I thought the story was brilliantly paced and executed. I thought the photography, editing, sound design, and visual design was superb. But I especially loved...
...because it let us know that JJ Abrams got us. I, um, was also really happy to see a teenager on the bridge again, but I doubt there is another person in the known universe who shares my precise reasons.
In other words: I loved it. It was awesome.
When Wil Wheaton buys a camel, it will wear a Fez.
Where Have All The Prom Queens Gone?
Hi, Im Mur. Im a geek. While I have embraced this geekdom for the past fifteen or so years, it was terrible to go through high school when my girlfriends didnt share my passion for They Might Be Giants or Star Wars, and none of the boys wanted anything to do with me.
Well, romantically, that is. I had several friends who thought I was - say it with me - one of the guys. I ran for student government; I lost to a girl named Valerie. My Bloom Countyinspired campaign signs were defaced and torn down. Forget running for homecoming queen; thats just ridiculous. No one would even consider geeky little me for such a lofty position.
I was ignored; the smart one who kept her head down and worked backstage in the theater department. The one who wanted to be a writer.
Of course, in college I made friends who understood me, cared about me, and didnt seem to think that I needed heels and pretty hair to fit in. And now that Im an adult, more or less, Im geeky, confident, and dont give a damn about those who made high school a depressing place.
So. How many of you have the same story? Many, I bet. There were several of us geeks in high school, several who saw those four years as long, arduous tests intended to cause so much trauma to us in order to prepare us for the rest of our lives. But as I make friends, many of whom tell me of their geeky status in high school, one question stands out to me.
What happened to all the popular kids?
Seriously. Where did they all go? There are several explanations, I suppose. They could all be right in front of me, just not wanting to say so, uncomfortably hiding under the radar in the same way that kids whose parents paid for their college educations did when friends swapped student loan or work study stories. If you have no high school was hell stories, then youre not terribly interesting in many social circles. Especially if your stories revolve around, I made high school hell for others.
Another option would be that they went into careers that exist outside of my world. I hang out with a lot of artists, writers, and computer engineers. I suppose most of those jobs are done by classically geeky people. I always assumed that the popular kids went off to get jobs as investment bankers or spouses of investment bankers. I dont know any investment bankers. This does not bother me.
But my favorite option is the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. I was chatting with my arch-nemesis Matt Wallace the other day, and I said that I wondered if the popular people just stopped once they left high school; that they had reached the pinnacle of their lives. He said they were all shipped, in their prom dresses and rented tuxes, to the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. This of course upsets the boys, as the island is named for their dates, not them. And broken tiaras lie in dusty corners like discarded bones.
(Incidentally, Matt was also a geek in high school, a journalism geek who had a menacing frame and left at age sixteen to become a pro wrestler. Now he writes horror. Think Im kidding?)
I do remember a book from the 90s where the main protagonist was a woman who had been the prom queen in high school, the most popular girl ever, whose life did stop at eighteen. She led a life of aimless depression because her court had been disbanded and she didnt know what to do with herself. That made the most sense to me; for most of us, life began when we escaped high school. For the popular kids, everything changed. They likely went somewhere that forced them to start from scratch. Maybe they pledged the Greek lifestyle (I know very little about that, as I didnt pledge) you do meet people who were in frats and sororities but no one ever talks about their prom queen heyday.
Id love to end this column with a report on my ten year high school reunion, on how I went back, confident and happy, and saw for my own eyes what happened to Jessica, Beth, Joleta, Teddy, Craig, and David. The beautiful ones, the popular ones. Those for whom high school served as their own personal golden eating trough, what are they doing? Id love to tell that story, but, well
I wasnt invited to the ten year reunion.
Remember what I said about being ignored?
I still havent gotten past high school angst. Im thirty-five, confident, happily married, and actually doing what I wanted to do since I was twelve. And yet I still get shaken and return to the same horrific awkwardness and shyness that I felt back in the day (like the time I desperately tried to get David to notice me). I sometimes wonder if I would be better off if I found out where they were now, what they were doing. Then I realize Im a lot happier thinking of them on the Lost Island of the Prom Queens.
Yup. Thirty-five, confident, and petty. Thats me.
Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: A Mind Forever Voyaging
Geeks find many way to set aside the mundanity of the real world these days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies compete for our time and our money, and we can find ourselves with more escape pods than ever before, an embarrassment of riches that can be overwhelming, with dire consequences if we choose . . . poorly.
My limited time is the most valuable commodity I have. I can always earn more money; I can always eat more food; I can stay up late if I didnt finish that load of laundry in the afternoon. (Curse you, Guitar Hero III: Thief of Daylight!) But I cant get back time thats already spent in some cases, wasted (the time, not me) on hollow pursuits, so I think very carefully about how I invest my limited free time, and my even more limited me time. Here's a look at a typical afternoon spent in a twisty maze of options, all enticing . . .
LOOK
>A twisty maze of passages, all alike, is behind you. You face a wall with four doors.
EXAMINE DOORS
>There are four old doors: Movies, Television, Books, and Games.
Oh . . . this should be interesting.
GO TO MOVIES
>You are subjected to a barrage of commercials and military propaganda, and the trailers havent even started yet.
>You lose $15 and 20 minutes.
RECOVER 20 MINUTES
>Sorry, you cant do that.
RECOVER $15.
>Not in this theater, buddy.
FINE. WATCH MOVIE
>You wait another twenty minutes for trailers. Finally, the movie starts. The teenager in front of you lights up the theater with her cellphone while she texts her friend. The couple next to you think its cute to comment on everything that happens on the screen. The lazy parent behind you has a brat who cant sit still and kicks your seat . . .
KILL MYSELF
>An old woman shooshes you.
>You lose 2.5 hours and 1,500 brain cells.
Well, that door wasnt much fun, was it?
Does anyone (who does not live in easy driving distance of an Alamo Drafthouse [My editor, Andrew, who lives in Austin and goes to the Drafthouse all the time, made me include this. Bastard.]) really enjoy going to the movies any more? I dont know anyone who says, Man, I can not wait to go spend a crapload of money so I can watch a crapload of commercials, surrounded by idiots who just wont Shut. The Fuck. Up. What is the consistently compelling reason to go out to the movies? Im trying to escape the frustrations of modern life and the idiots in it who just keep on making more idiots. Why not just stay home and watch something on DVD or cable? Thanks to Netflix and Blockbuster Online (okay, and bittorrent) just about any movie youd ever want to see is rarely more than one days wait away. While there are certainly some films that deserve to be watched on a big screen, like Lord of the Rings, or work better with an audience, like Grindhouse, they are exceptions to the rule. I just don't understand why anyone with ANY sense of dignity at all would . . .
>Your blood pressure just went up.
Right. Moving on to door number two . . .
WATCH TELEVISION
>Your house is cozy and your home theater is top shelf. You dim the lights, hop onto the couch, and turn on the TV. Youre in luck, and find a program that you enjoy.
SET VOLUME AT COMFORTABLE LEVEL
>Okay.
RELAX AND ENJOY PROGRAM
>You put your feet up on the coffee table, settle back into the couch, and begin to watch. The drama grips you, and you relate to the characters. Six minutes pass, and the show breaks for a commercial. It is so loud, your windows rattle.
GET REMOTE
>You manage to steady your shaking vision long enough to pick up the remote.
TURN VOLUME DOWN
>Sorry, the commercial is so loud, all you can do is think about how much you could save with factory to dealer incentives on a new Ford F150 fuckxxotronic planet-chewing model supertruck.
PUT BLANKET OVER HEAD
>Okay.
TURN VOLUME DOWN
>Covered by a blanket, the volume of the commercial is reduced to a barely tolerable level. You find the remote control and thumb the volume down until your teeth stop shaking.
WAIT
>You see a commercial talking about erections.
WAIT
>You see an advertisement for beer. There are busty ladies here.
WAIT
>You see ads for NASCAR. There are skanky ladies here.
WAIT
>Your show has started.
WATCH SHOW
>You cant hear anything.
TURN VOLUME BACK UP
>Okay.
WATCH SHOW
>Sorry, the bottom third of the screen is covered with an animated advertisement for a sitcom you dont care about.
HELP
>You are in the living room, trying to watch television.
HINT
>A DVR could do something about these commercials . . .
That door made me--
>Your blood pressure just went up.
--stabby.
So this problem with commercial loudness will eventually be solved by Dolby Volume, but until that day arrives (and we all upgrade our equipment) does any self-respecting geek watch a show when it airs anymore? Since I got my DVR, I dont watch anything when it starts. Instead, I wait ten or fifteen minutes and then watch it delayed on my DVR so I can skip the commercials. Its not that I hate commercials as a class (although, seriously, American beer guys? Beautiful, sophisticated women do not drink cheap, nasty American beer. Give it up already), its that I hate commercials that are so loud they wake up my neighbors. I find that I prefer watching movies on my home theater or television shows on my DVR because I control the environment and the experience when I watch. That takes care of the commercials, but what about those annoying animated advertisements that litter the screen and get in the way of me enjoying the show thats on? Until someone develops AdBlock for television, our only choices, really, are to wait for the show to come out on DVD or just suck it up. I will admit to sucking it up a few times a week, for shows like Heroes and How I Met Your Mother.
Until things change dramatically though, non-DVR broadcast television isnt earning my time at all. It cant compete with washing the dishes, much less catching up on my blog feeds or what lies beyond the remaining two doors.
Speaking of . . . lets see whats behind Door Number Three . . .
READ A BOOK
>What will you read?
INVENTORY
In your {BOOKS} inventory you have: The latest Fables trade paperback. Absolute Sandman Volume 2. Absolute Dark Knight. A knee-high stack of unread comic books. The SF anthology you got two weeks ago and havent opened yet. A classic book from an award-winning author all your friends would be horrified to know you havent read yet. Monte Cook's World of Darkness. Wil Wheatons awesome new collection of narrative non-fiction stories, The Happiest Days of Our Lives.
IGNORE TRANSPARENT EFFORT TO PROMOTE AUTHORS NEW BOOK
>I see no transparent effort to promote author's new book here.
WHATEVER. READ COMICS
>You take some comics off the giant stack and find a nice, quiet place to read them. You feel like a kid again, completely escaping the boring real world. Youre a classic super hero, then youre a zombie, and then youre Doktor Sleepless.
READ NOVEL
>You begin reading a novel, and are swept away into a different world . . .
If the biggest problem we have with books is that we just dont know what to pluck from our two towers of really want to read and really want to read again, what is there to complain about? Books are great for getting away, whether youre a geek or not. A book is relatively inexpensive (free at your local public library) and portable, and if you break down your investment by the hour, you get a lot more for your money in a book than you do in a movie. There are no commercials, no annoying idiots shoving fistfuls of popcorn into their mouths in the seat next to you (or, if there are, you can move), and best of all you have complete control over when and where you do it. You can read during breaks at work, between classes, when youre avoiding writing your column, or, uh . . .
READ NOVEL
>You hear a column calling you in the distance. You are likely to be eaten by a deadline.
. . . when you should be doing other productive tasks.
It should be no surprise that, as an author, I love books and cant find an awful lot to dislike about them. I freely concede that there are bad books out there (I'm looking at you, Dan Brown), but you can always set a bad book down and pick up five books that are more to your taste. There are more books published each year than anyone could ever read in a lifetime spent doing nothing but reading. We live in a rich, rich time -- reading is available for everyone who cares to make the effort, and you can read about any topic you want.
I imagine that if I were a filmmaker, or television producer, Id feel differently about the first two doors than I do, but I just don't see the same variety, the same creativity in the visual media that I do in print. There is good work out there, but you have to really dig for it. In the bookstore, it's right there for the taking.
>Your blood pressure is returning to normal.
Finally. Lets open door number four . . .
PLAY VIDEO GAMES
>You see an Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii, a Nintendo DS, a MAME emulator, and an Atari 2600.
AN ATARI 2600? REALLY?
>Im sorry, I dont understand that.
PLAY ATARI 2600!
>Sorry, its just there for looks and an easy joke.
I HATE YOU.
>I'm sorry, I dont understand that.
I REALLY HATE YOU.
>I know. You're just such an easy target.
FUCK YOU
>Such a potty mouth.
CHOOSE VIDEO GAME
>You have a lot of options to choose from.
PLAY GUITAR HERO III ON XBOX
>You begin rocking out. After a few songs, several of your friends show up online.
VIEW FRIENDS
>Theyre all playing Halo 3.
PLAY HALO 3
>You join Halo 3, and play Big Team Battle with your friends. Before you realize it, the clock strikes 3 a.m.
>You have lost an entire evening.
LOG OFF.
>You turn off your Xbox.
>GO TO BED
It is very dark. You are likely to wake up your wife, who will feed you to a Grue.
In real life, its a lot harder to settle down and choose just one game, especially when Im faced with such limited free time. I read an article in Wired earlier this week by a guy who said hed become a suicide bomber in Halo 3, because asymmetrical warfare worked to his advantage when playing multiplayer online games. He was time-poor, so he couldnt develop the same skills as the hundreds of thousands of students and unemployed writers who have time to spend practicing non-scoped sniper headshots day after day.
Just like the huge stack of books, the best and worst thing about video games is the time involved. I can spend $40 to take my wife to a movie, and well have a nice three or four hours together. I spent $50 on Halo 3, and without even finishing the campaign, Ive already spent 30 or more hours with my friends in online matches. Its the same way with Guitar Hero, and I assume you WoW players would have a similar experience to report -- if you just stopped killing boars in the forest long enough to talk to us, of course. (I keed. I keed.)
I think of my time as a valuable currency that must be earned by anyone who wants me to exchange it for whatever theyre selling. When we geeks talk about investing our money and our time into entertainment and escape, movies and television just cant compete with video games, comics, novels, or going through a few hundred RSS subscriptions that you save for the times when you have a column due and need a geeky way to kill time under the auspices of--
>You are likely to be eaten by a deadline.
Pushy, pushy. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm leaving out. I keep feeling like there's something missing . . .
SEARCH FOR SECRET DOORS
>You find a secret door.
EXAMINE SECRET DOOR
>This door is different from the others, almost as if it was made by your own hands. Its covered with familiar glyphs: polyhedral shapes with numbers, large books, decks of cards, colored glass beads. A warm, inviting glow seeps out from beneath it.
OPEN DOOR
>The door swings open easily, revealing a room filled with games.
PLAY GAME! PLAY GAME! PLAY GAME!
>What game would you like to play?
LOOK AT GAMES
>How about a nice game of To Be Continued?
>The End.
I hate cliffhangers.
Wil Wheaton still remembers how to get the Babel Fish.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: One Big Focus Group
My train ride to Comic-Con from Los Angeles was filled with Hollywood fucks, talking too loudly on their cell phones, bitching out their assistants, and trying to impress each other with how many scripts they had brought along to read.
Oh man, I thought, is this what Comic-Con is going to be like? A bunch of industry douchebags who think we're just a big focus group of nerds?
My fears appeared to be realized when I opened up McPaper, and read a story on page one of the Life section all about how Hollywood executives come down to Comic-Con to use the largest gathering of Nerds this side of Mos Eisley Spaceport as a giant focus group.
The article mentioned something about a movie called Watchmen, which was about "a slain superhero."
Oh for fuck's sake. Why not just call Star Wars a movie about "a captured princess"?
I read my book (the 2007 Nebula Awards Showcase, for those of you scoring at home), turned on my noise canceling headphones, and did my best to lose myself in Dark Side of the Moon and the planet Mars. Hrm, come to think of it, that's what people have been doing with Dark Side of the Moon since it was released in 1973.
Once I arrived at Comic-Con, my fears were put entirely to rest. My fellow geeks were everywhere: guys with ponytails and trench coats, mostly-naked women and the men who think they have a chance to score with them, and some of the most elaborate and awesome Transformers costumes I've ever seen. After suffering through the highest concentration of Hollywood fuckery I've seen in a decade, it felt good to be back among my people, even if the Hollywood fucks just thought of us all as a giant focus group and invaded our party as a result.
This makes me wonder something: if we actually are a huge focus group, wouldn't they, you know, listen to us? We're not just a huge market with a lot of disposable income for you to exploit; we actually care about this stuff, and if you keep fucking it up, we're going to stop buying it. Think Im bluffing? Go talk to anyone associated with Elektra. Or Captain America. Or Fantastic Four. Or Ghostrider. Or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Or Daredevil.
It doesnt have to be this way. Lord of the Rings proved that its possible to please the geeks and the mainstream audiences by simply serving the story thats endured for decades, not making it fresh or new or dumbed down by an industry fuck because hes too stupid to understand it.
Now, its not entirely Hollywood's fault. Its not that they dont want to understand us, its that theyre incapable of understanding us. A studio fuck who wants to bury his face in a mountain of blow while two whores he picked up at the Rainbow Room spit on each other doesnt live in the same world as a comic book geek who wants to bury his face in the collected works of Neil Gaiman while his girlfriend gets dressed up as slave girl Leia.
For those executives, I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because weve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. Weve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.
These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.
For example, while I walked down the middle aisle of the convention hall on Thursday, I passed a huge Lucasfilm booth. A scene from Star Wars played on a giant LCD screen: Darth Vader tells Grand Moff Tarkin that he senses something he hasnt sensed in a long time. Without even thinking about it, I spoke along with Vader as he said, Obi-Wan is here. The Force is with him! There were about two dozen Star Wars Geeks watching the scene. All of us unselfconsciously spoke the quote aloud, and then immediately grinned at the shared experience.
How many of us do you think were really excited to find out that the Force is a fuckin virus?
Batman Begins, Sin City, and V for Vendetta worked because the actors never overwhelmed the characters, and the screenplays were all true to the source material that made the comics worth optioning in the first place.
Hollywood faces its greatest challenge in the history of adapting comic books to movies with Watchmen. Many executives wont understand what its about. Neither will their young, allegedly hip assistants they hired out of Harvard Business School.
If Hollywood really wants to do this right, and really doesnt want to fuck it up, my advice is to listen to the focus group at Comic-Con. I mean, really listen, because if Hollywood fucks up Watchmen, theres going to be a nerd riot so terrifying, it will be like a thousand studio executives cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Wil Wheaton went to school with 27 Jennifers.
Chris Gore's Footage Fetishes: No More Star Wars
On Wednesday, May 25th, 1977, in only a handful of movie theaters across the country, the original Star Wars was released. Most of you already know that the film reached the top of the box-office and was a cultural phenomenon. The impact that Star Wars had from both a technical and business standpoint cannot be underestimated. This film and the episodes that followed changed Hollywood and the movies forever.
Is there any doubt that a band featuring Chewbacca on drums would not rock it?
Star Wars quickly rewrote the rules of filmmaking and the film business when it came to things like
Special effects. ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) invented new effects techniques and continues to innovate today.
Genre films. Hollywood never really took science fiction seriously; this was considered B-movie territory, until the box-office broke records.
The summer blockbuster. The summer movie season was officially invented and perfected the release of the original.
Movie merchandising. Films prior to 1977 rarely had spin-off merchandise. Lucas actually took a smaller fee as director to hold onto the merchandise rights and built his empire on those sales.
Sequels. Well, how to make a successful one anyway. The Empire Strikes Back proved that dramatically straying from audience expectations of more of the same can be a risk worth taking.
The modern video game. Aside from all the video game incarnations spawned from the films, there are countless games that borrowed ideas or were inspired by sequences from Star Wars.
This group of George Lucas' made a stir at the most recent Star Wars Celebration.
An army of fans.
Star Wars creator George Lucas remains one of the most important figures in film history for these innovations, not to mention so many others such as the first non-linear editing software.
The original not only changed the film industry, it touched a nerve in a generation in a way that we will never see again. And this group was inspired to make their own movies. There are plenty of filmmakers who point to Star Wars as their epiphany moviethe film that changed them and made them want to become filmmakers.
Now, if youve been reading or, like me, writing about Star Wars for as long as I have, (which, Im embarrassed to say, is from the very beginning), then you already know all of this. Now that all six episodes from the Star Wars series are complete and all of our questions have been answered, what do fans have to look forward to? Well, if you happen to be in Los Angeles this weekend, you can join fellow fans in a communal geek-gasm. To mark the 30th anniversary of this event, fans are gathering this weekend at the for what will be the fourth Star Wars Celebration.
Star Wars truly knows no bounds.
Fans will be treated to rumored big announcements from the celebration with details about the following
The HD-DVD release of Star Wars. Theres a new DVD boxed set coming out (when is there not?) of all six films and this time on HD-DVD. Details are sketchy, but an announcement is forthcoming.
StarWarsTube. The Star Wars web site is getting an overhaul and will become a place for fans to upload their fan films. In addition, users can take advantage of Lucas-approved movie clips, sounds and music to create mash-ups to share with friends
which then become owned entirely by Lucas. (Im guessing that this content will eventually be used for a Star Wars Channel which can be viewed online or on demand.)
The IMAX 3-D version of Star Wars. Fans may be treated to footage from this as Lucas plans to re-release each movie a few years apart in this new format.
The Clone Wars CG Cartoon. There has been a computer animated cartoon about the Clone Wars for some time and early word is that the look is amazing. Where or when this series will debut is still not clear.
The highly-anticipated title of the fourth Indiana Jones movie. This announcement will take place tonight, though Im not sure what this has to do with Star Wars. Frankly, I dont care.
Plus
Slave Leia belly-dancing. Yes, you read that right. Women (presumably) dressed as Slave Leia
and theyre belly-dancing!
And, dont forget, more and more Star Wars merchandise. You can count on learning about a slew of new Star Wars stuff of to buy. On that, I would quote from the Jedi code as spoken by Anakin from Episode II: Attack of the Clones Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. Heed these words debt-ridden fans.
This action figure will not be for sale at the Star Wars Celebration. However, custom-painted topless Padme action figures can easily be found on eBay.
Of course, like all events of this type, there will be a dealers room and panels and screenings and bad greasy convention center food.
But, back to the question at hand, what are fans celebrating? The movies are done, even though Lucas famously announced that there would be nine films, yes folks, nine, from three trilogies back in a 1980 cover story from Time magazine. Lucas, always the revisionist when it comes to writing his own history, decided the six movies was enough to tell his story.
Fans showing off their Star Wars tattoos at a recent Celebration. After attending so many conventions, one thing is consistent, Star Wars fans are hotter than Star Trek fans.
William Shatner sang at an AFI Tribute to George Lucas which devolved into a Star Wars roast.
To my delight, and shame, Ill admit that Ive attended all three previous Star Wars Celebrations. The first took place in a rainy museum outside of Denver, Colorado and the last two were held at the convention center in Indianapolis, Indiana. I was there for all three and I have to admit, the best part was drinking with fellow geeks and, well, talking to girls
might I remind you, girls who loved Star Wars! Anyway, this may be the first one that I sit out. Because honestly, I dont care much about any of the things that are going on, well, except perhaps for the belly-dancing, but thats just not enough. I already have all of the films on HD archived on my Tivo, and learning the details of more and more things to buy and more ways to give Lucas money does not interest me.
I want to see more Star Wars movies.
Period.
I dont care about anything else.
Nothing else interests me except for that. Show me another Star Wars movie on the horizon, and Im back.
As far as Im concerned, when the credits rolled during Revenge of the Sith, I was done. I felt a huge weight was lifted and a chapter from my own life, my obsession with this series of movies, was complete.
I once had the opportunity to talk to the producer of the original Star Wars and Empire Gary Kurtz who told me the plans for the third trilogy. In an interview I did on FilmThreat.com, the third trilogy would take Luke on a quest to find his long lost sister and the origins of the Jedi. There was none of this Luke-Leia/brother-sister thing going on. Heres an excerpt from that interview:
The one story thread that got totally tossed out the window, which was really pretty important I think, was the one of Vader trying to convince Luke to join him to overthrow the Emperor. That together they had enough power that they could do that, and it wasn't him saying I want to take over the world and be the evil leader, it was that transition. It was Vader saying, I'm looking again at what I've done and where my life has gone and who I've served and, very much in the Samurai tradition, and saying if I can join forces with my son, who is just as strong as I am, that maybe we can make some amends. So there was all of that going on in Jedi as well, that was supposed to go on. So the story was quite a bit more poignant and the ending was the coronation of Leia as the queen of what was left of her people, to take over the royal symbol. That meant she was then isolated from all of the rest and Luke went off then by himself. It was basically a kind of bittersweet ending. She's not his sister that dropped in to wrap up everything neatly. His sister was someone else way over on the other side of the galaxy and she wasn't going to show up until the next episode.
One thing some may not understand is that the enjoyment of Star Wars is not from watching the movies in your living room, but from the communal experience of seeing it in the theater and, yes, waiting in line. Some of the most memorable and bizarre and geeky conversations Ive had waiting in line for these movies. Id like to see new films and learn the fate of an aged Luke Skywalker as he attempts to rebuild the galaxy.
Before George Lucas embarked on making the prequels, 20th Century Fox conducted a survey. This survey asked fans if they would like to see Star Wars sequels with the continuing adventures of Luke, Han and Leia. Or, would they prefer to see Star Wars prequels with the adventures of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader. Overwhelmingly fans answered that they would prefer to see sequels not prequels.
Yes, this is the last shot from Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and the last we'll see of Star Wars at the movies. Unless, of course, it's in IMAX 3-D.
So George, youve done it. You made your prequels. And you made them on your terms, exactly the way you wanted to make them. Isnt it time you gave back to the fans? The fans who have supported you and the films all these years? Fans dont want another exclusive action figure or another boxed set on DVD
we want new movies.
Without new films on the horizon, Star Wars fandom is doomed to fade out like every final shot in all six films.
Gore gone... to a galaxy far, far away... for the last time.
Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker and the creator of Film Threat. One of Chris' unfulfilled goals in life is to have an intimate encounter with a woman dressed in a Slave Leia outfit.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: The Next Generation of Geeks
When my stepkids were younger, their hyper-competitive father coached them on baseball and soccer teams. I was shoved right out of the picture, and I never really got to enjoy that sort of interaction with them. I went to all their games, though, and over the course of a few seasons, I realized that I didn't want to share those things with them. I can think of a lot of ways to spend my weekend mornings, and while it's nice to get outside and get some sunshine and exercise, dealing with ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs parents -- who are screaming at their eight year-olds -- isn't one of them. Rather than engage in a silly pissing contest with their father and make the kids uncomfortable, I backed off, sat quietly in the bleachers, and cheered them on, no matter what the outcome of the game was. I tried my best to instill in them one of my core values: if you only focus on winning, rather than doing your best and enjoying the game, you're setting yourself up to be unhappy a lot of the time. (I developed this philosophy over countless board games when the dice just wouldn't fall my way no matter what I did, and it's served me rather well ever since.)
There was a time when I wondered if I'd ever be able to make strong bonds with my stepkids because I don't have that sports gene that most guys have. "I can't throw a curveball to save my life, but I can throw a d20 to save vs. poison," I once said to a friend of mine . . . and instantly realized that instead of trying to be someone I wasn't, and instead of trying to play into the typical "fathers play sports" thing, I could just share with my kids the things that I love, that made me who I am today. I carefully introduced my boys to the geeky things that shaped my life.
Timing, as they say, is everything, and in this case, I lucked out, because Lord of the rings and Harry Potter opened the door for fantasy games like Talisman, Dungeon, Munchkin, and Heroquest (which, I saw in the store this holiday season, is making a triumphant return, complete with expansion packs!) We have spent hours playing these games together over the years, and I will never forget the day that Nolan (my younger boy) pulled out Talisman, and convinced two of his friends that it was "really cool" and got them all to give it a try.
After I proved to the kids through gaming that I wasn't entirely lame, I showed them how cool backyard astronomy can be. I was helped in this regard, again, because five years or so earlier, when they were really little, comet Hale-Bopp was huge in the Western sky almost every night, and the Leonids had one of their once-per-century peak storms, so they knew there was cool stuff up there, and trusted me when I said I'd show them how to find it with a star chart and the red-cellophaned flashlight. To this day, they point out Orion, Sirius, and find Polaris when the skies are dark and clear enough to see it. They even took it upon themselves to learn some of the mythology (via my bookshelf) surrounding a few of my favorite constellations Cassiopea, Cephus, Perseus and Andromeda.
When League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was in theaters, I pointed out to my boys that the graphic novel that inspired the movie was pretty good, and that I had it if they wanted to read it and decide which was better. They couldn't believe I was encouraging them to read comic books, and that opened another door for me. Ryan turned 17 this year, and I gave him a complete set of Sin City books, while Nolan enjoyed a lot of my old superhero books. This particular area wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, though; neither one of them understood why I like Watchmen so much, and one of them (who will remain nameless for his own protection) even said that it was "boring." Yes, a little bit of me died that day; you can't win them all.
The greatest challenge, which surprised me, was introducing them to geeky movies and TV shows. I thought this would be simple, since they were already into Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings but I made a fundamental mistake. This will actually be a column entirely on its own -- a guide to introducing a non-geek to geeky movies and TV shows -- but I'll just say that The Prisoner and 2001 are not the best place to start, especially with kids. Luckily, the new Battlestar Galactica and Firefly proved to be a much better place to introduce my guys to science fiction that had the perfect balance of story, classic Sci-Fi themes, action, and pretty ladies (hey, I'm dealing with teenage boys, remember. Thank you Number Six and Kaylee, for, uh, various reasons.)
As a parent, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing a little bit of yourself in your kids, and as a geek, it's 3d6+4 times more rewarding to see my geekiness reflected back at me from my boys. Nolan is into Magic: The Gathering, we frequently play Settlers of Catan (with my non-geek wife, no less) and they both embrace all of these things I've shared with them over the years. They're not hardcore (yet) but Ryan was recently accepted into Mensa with an IQ of 159 (!), and with an interest in quantum physics, he's on his way. Nolan never met a gadget he didn't want to take apart, understand, and put back together (occasionally with some spiffy modification) and both of them like to celebrate personal accomplishments by eating Sir Robin's Minstrels, which I'm pretty sure they picked up from me.
They haven't played organized sports in ages, but we play games together a few times a week, and when I was watching movies for last week's column, they watched Logan's Run and Westworld with me. I spared them The Omega Man, though, because one of our jobs as parents is to protect our kids from things like that, right?
Wil Wheaton hopes to attend the Midvale School for the Gifted one day.
Wil Wheaton's Geek In Review: A Holiday Gift Guide for Geeks
There are just seventeen shopping days left until Christmas, and the holidays are now officially up in our shit like a drunken co-worker at the office Christmas party. Shopping at this time of year can be difficult at best, and shopping for geeks can be downright miserable. We speak a language not a lot of people understand, enjoy things that seem weird to most normal people, and the places you'd go to shop for us can be a little . . . scary.
So, as a public service, I present Wil's First Annual Holiday Gift Guide for Geeks, featuring things you can buy from the comfort and saftey of your own home, right off the Internet.
Toys for Boys (or, uh, girls.)
Electronic project kits and Chemistry sets ($50 - $150) are time-tested, always fun, and perfect for younger geeks, but the Antworks Ant Farm ($30) takes the classic Uncle Milton's toy we all grew up with, and moves it into the 21st century. Instead of sand, your ants dig tunnels through a translucent, edible gel, leaving incredibly cool three dimensional tunnels to look at. Think Geek sells theirs with a blue LED array attached to the bottom, so the whole thing lights up with a soft blue glow that makes your room look like a scene from The Abyss.
Remember when Star Wars LEGOs were all the rage, and then the new movies came out and your geek melted them all into a ball of betrayal that he mailed to George Lucas? This year, you could give him Batman LEGOs and let him build his own Arkham Asylum, Batcave, or Batmobile. (Prices vary, average is around $80.) Of course, if your geek is seriously hardcore, you can earn major points with some Mindstorms ($250). Just don't be surprised when a freaky little robot wakes up and wanders around the bathroom while you're trying to put on your make-up.
If you're looking for something that could be practical at work, how about a working trebuchet model ($34.95) or a binary LED clock ($24.95)? They should both keep nosy co-workers away when you have a case of the Mondays, though for different reasons.
Gifts for Gamers
Lots of parents will try to buy their kids' love with the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 this season, but how about digging a little deeper for your geek, and getting them some classic 80s video games? Atari geeks can play with the Flashback 2 ($19.99), or the impractical but oh-so-cool Atari joystick and paddle controller keychains ($9.99-$14.99.) If you're shopping for an arcade nerd, and you have an Xbox or PS2, one of the classic collections from Midway or Namco could be in order ($20-$50), but if you really want to recreate that classic gaming experience, and you have $3000 sitting around, your gaming geek will go apeshit over the X-Arcade MAME Cabinet system, which comes with 190 classic games. With a little help from the googles, you can easily expand it to a slightly larger library (like just about every game ever released.) Get a copy of Arcade Ambience, fire up some Journey, and get ready to share a Big Gulp with the most grateful geek in the world . . . provided you can tear him away from Tempest.
Ohh shiny!
Geek Tags are little dog tag-shaped necklaces and keychains, emblazoned with different geeky phrases, like "The geek shall inherit the Earth" and "I *heart* Elves." They also make a tag with a d20 on it (my personal favorite) and some that simply say "geek" "gamer" or "31337." These are fantastic stocking stuffers, or a way to tell your geek, "I accept you for who you are, so here is some geeky jewelry. Now make with the diamonds already." ($20) If you get one of these, and you're not going to make with the diamonds, your geek girl may like a pair of microchip earrings ($25) to go with her "I *heart* my geek" T-shirt ($17.99).
It's more fun when you do it together.
If you'd like to encourage your geek to get out of the house from time to time, your gift could be an activity for you to do together. My personal favorite is Geocaching, the perfect marriage of technology and exercise. It's a treasure hunt, where you use a GPS receiver to find hidden "caches" all over the world. Handheld GPS receivers can be purchased from Garmin or Magellan for under $100. A guide to purchasing one can be found at the official Geocaching website, which has extensive forums and one of the most welcoming online communities I've ever encountered. Geocaching is also a good way to explore areas around your home that you never knew existed. For example, I've lived within ten miles of the Echo Mountain Hotel ruins for my entire life, and I didn't even know they existed until I went looking for a Geocache nearby two years ago. Now it's a regular hike for me and my family.
If your geek likes to explore, but isn't too keen on that whole "walking around" thing, astronomy may just be perfect for you both. It's one of the only hobbies that naturally appeals to all kinds of geeks, but is also interesting and accessible to most normal people, too. Depending on your budget, you can invest as much as several thousand dollars on various telescopes, and accessories, or you can spend significantly less on a book like the Rough Guide to the Universe, or Peterson's Guide to the Stars and Planets, and take a trip through the heavens with an inexpensive pair of binoculars, or just your eyes. I can say from personal experience that there is nothing quite like looking through even a small telescope and seeing the rings of Saturn, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, or craters on the moon so bright and clear you feel like you can reach out and touch them. And the first time someone sees a distant galaxy or nebula with their own eyes? It's truly magical, and with the right person, it can even be romantic. In fact, if you're with the right person and it isn't romantic, you're probably doing something wrong. And if you're doing it right, you may even find yourselves needing a Level 1 Human crawler as a result of your night under the Milky Way.
Uhh . . . you're not helping me.
If you're still stuck, WIRED has a numbingly comprehensive review of 300 gadgets and tech toys to look at. If you can't find something there (or just don't want to wade through 300 different product reviews) you really can't go wrong with just about anything from Think Geek, the original one-stop shop for things that make 90% of the population scratch their heads, while the remaining 10% of us silently laugh at them on yet another dateless Saturday night. Jinx is also a good place to look for T-shirts that are geared slightly younger, and toward gaming culture, and X-treme Geek, while crossing over with Think Geek quite frequently, also has a few unique toys and gadgets, as well as some things that are just plain silly. Books from Penny Arcade, Userfriendly, Dork Tower, Joy of Tech, or PvP will also make most geeks jump up and shout "LEVEL!" when they open them.
Of course, if you ladies out there want to completely reject the notion of materialism and consumer culture, and instead dress up for your geek in the Princess Leia Slave Girl outfit, that's also about as good a gift as you can ever give him. Trust me.
Wil Wheaton sincerely hopes that, whatever your holiday of choice is, and however you choose to celebrate it, that it's a good one, spent with people you love, or at least don't want to strangle.
Wil Wheaton's Geek In Review: The Real Revenge of the Nerds
In recent years, geeks have become accepted (assimilated?) into the mainstream. It's hard to pin down one specific reason, but as a life-long geek, I can attest to the difference in social attitudes toward those of us who can quote Holy Grail from start to finish, or scrape an entire porn website's open directories, organize the resulting files and burn them to a CD with an eighteen line Perl script.
Shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Freaks and Geeks feature characters that geeks can identify with without making us a punchline, and websites like Think Geek specifically cater to us with T-shirts and gizmos that proudly shout to the world, "I'm a geek, and I'm proud!" When did we gain this acceptance, and how did it happen?
Set the wayback machine to 1978 and watch Animal House. Then, jump ahead and watch Revenge of the Nerds and Real Genius. While you're in the 80s, check out The Dark Crystal, too (not because it's relevant, but because it's a pretty fun movie to watch, and since you're already there, you may as well go for it. Hey, if you were a geekling back then, you may even recall being terrified out of your fucking mind by the Skeksis like I was.)
Anyway, these films all have one common theme: misfits are persecuted by the establishment, misfits fight back using intellect and guile, win the war, and get the girl. Geeks were apparently paying attention back then, because we learned that even though we were physically awkward and less interested in kickball than we were in the Fiend Folio, we could somehow use our intellect to one day turn the tables on our tormentors; an entire generation of geeks, whether they were aware of it or notand whether we'll admit it now or notwere motivated to reach levels of power and success as adults so we could get back at them. When the personal computer came into our homes with programming languages pre-installed and we saw that we could create things using our brains, the first step toward that ultimate revenge was taken.
Over the years, those of us who were laughed at and tormented by the cool kids fooled around with our personal computers and sought escape in worlds like William Gibson's Neuromancer where intellect was celebrated and rewarded, while the cool kids spent their time in a superficial world that rewarded feathered hair, flipped-up collars, perfect teeth and careful navigation of what was capriciously deemed "cool" by the hivemind of the moment.
When technology and information became highly-prized commodities in the 90s as we were all getting out of college, those of us who had spent much of the 80s alone in our darkened bedrooms, bathed in the green or amber glow of a personal computer's CRT while we "jacked in" at 300 baud to FidoNet and the few of us who were lucky enough to have access to the real Matrix (ARPANet) when 56k was but a dream for mortals had a head start on an entirely new world. While the popular kids continued what Lester Bangs called "the long journey to the middle," we were using our passion for computers and knowledge to found companies and change the way people communicated with each other. It wasn't long before we became our own demographic, and not just any demographica demographic that was inherently smart, and had a lot of disposable income. Suddenly, mainstream companies were marketing to us, and in the dot com boom, we finally threw the massive parties we were never invited to when we were younger. The geeks may not have inherited the Earth, but we certainly had arrived, and now we got a say in what was cool.
I knew some of the computer hackers of the late 80s who were described in The Hacker Crackdown; in the 90s, many of them went to work for AT&T, UUNet, or other backbone Internet providers. They joked that, after years of trying to own the phone systems and the Internet with social engineering and brute force cracking, it had finally happened legitimately. Today, many of them own multi-million dollar security consulting firms. While Google is one assimilation away from being the new Borg, Microsoft rightfully earned that description and embodied it for at most of the last two decades. There's a joke about how much it must suck to be the guy who was Bill Gates' bully, but there's a real kernel of truth to it. I know that if I had anything to do with it, there are a few people who would never be able to quite get that credit rating fixed. Yeah, it's petty, but it takes a long time to get the taste of locker out of your mouth, believe me.
Tony Montana was right when he said, "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." We geeks just substituted computers for power, and, sadly, many of us have substituted home theaters for women . . . well, we are geeks, after all, and girls totally have cooties.
At least we're moderately cool, for the time being, and any cool kid who wants to argue with us better have a damn good firewall.
Wil Wheaton is the author of Just A Geek. His blog is pretty geeky, too.