Submerged

There is not a whole lot better than getting two paychecks on the same day, let alone the Friday before a holiday weekend. I decided to celebrate this rare event by purchasing a new video game, which had been taunting me for some weeks.  And I have now played the game, "LA Noire", every day this week, and completed it just last night.  To say I am addicted to the game would be an understatement.


Noire is the latest game from Rockstar, the company famous for the infamous (and slightly misunderstood) Grand Theft Auto series.  I am also a fan of the GTA series, for all its faults, and looked forward to Noire, at first glance a GTA game set in 1940's Los Angeles.  But the open style gameplay of GTA, where you can choose to do missions to advance the story, or you can try to continually steal cars and evade policeman until they bring out military tanks to destroy you, is heavily restricted in Noire, which prods you along from one case to another.  Also, the "find clues and interview people to solve the crime" mission method is fun at first, but by the third disc, gets very repetitive.  All in all, the gameplay is spotty at best, mediocre at worst.

I've never step foot in California.  But, having been born out east, and lived here in the west, I can tell you this:  The sun is different out here.  The light is not the same, out here it makes things more expansive, less oppressive.  I can't prove it, but I know it. And it's in the game.  The sunlight, the way it hits the pixelated buildings....It feels like being out west.  That kind of assuredness is in all the details of the game.  Not only in the setting, as Rockstar used a similar facial motion-capture technique that Avatar created, which means that the characters actually look like the actors who voice them.  The game developers didn't want to create a homage to 40's detective movies, they wanted actually make that movie, and put you in the middle of it.  The storyline, building slowly over the game while interjecting backscenes involving the character's experience in the War, hits all the same notes as the graphics.  All this eventually whitewashes any problems with the gameplay; I finished the game so quickly, not because I wrapped up in the fun of playing, but so I could watch where the narrative went.

Which is more than I can say for "Water for Elephants".  I wasn't sure how I'd feel about WFE, mostly because of it's reputation for being a (gulp) love story.  And although Jacob and Marlena, the two lovebirds, are the most wooden characters in the story, romance was not the reason I disliked the book. My disfavor was due to an overall lack of....circusiness.

You might have guessed this from a few paragraphs ago, I have a thing for stories set in the early decades of last century.  It was a fascinating time, especially in America, where the country really built up and came into it's own, though not without some severe growing pains.  A story set in a traveling circus in the 30's is right in the wheelhouse for me.  Or could be.  But the problem with WFE is that I never bought the setting.  Never was hooked on the Benzini Bros circus: it didn't feel real.  It felt like a book written by someone who had read too many wikipedia articles on circuses.  The facts were there, providing a shell, glossy but empty of feeling. When you establish that the owner of the circus is so proud of his freak-show collection, and always on the lookout for more, and then we never meet said freaks...that's a problem.

Yesterday, at book-club, when I present my opinion on the book, I kind of got labeled (in good nature) as being "too analytical".  And you know what?  I totally get that.  Guilty as charged, with a proviso.  I don't immediately go into a book, or movie, or even a video game thinking, "Let's see what I can pick out.".  I like to give myself a chance to immerse in the setting.  And if it's good, and I'm totally submerged in the world and the characters.....I will put up with a lot of crap.  I'll even defend some of it. (Joe can tell vouch for my undying love for the tv show Lost)  But if the world is flimsy, or I find nothing interesting or redeeming about the story and people, that's when I will just find things to pick apart. ( Joe can also vouch for my venom towards Mad Men) That's when I get tweaked that Jacob, in one day, goes from Vet student at Ivy League School to runaway to Circus worker.  Or that in WFE, we meet only ONE clown, and it's the dwarf who Jacob is forced to stay with. And that's where my feelings on the two stories develop: LA Noire is not a great game, but I was enthralled enough to overlook it's faults.  Water For Elephants isn't a terrible book, but I was never sold enough to care.