Splinter Cell Double Agent Delayed

It's official, so I can 'announce' it here as well: Splinter Cell Double Agent is delayed until September 2006.

The team was already feeling that we had a winner on our hands with a scheduled Spring release, so delaying 3 more months to September is a boon to the X360 team: it means we'll be able to do a truly spectacular game.

If you want to watch something really cool, go to the Gamespot article linked above, and click on the trailer. Sweet!

Videogame Piracy in China

As you most certainly know, China is a haven for piracy. Whether it's an XBOX game or a movie DVD, everybody buys it pirated. To say it's tolerated is an understatement: it's a way of life.

One console that had escaped piracy so far was the Nintendo DS. Since I bought my own DS a few months ago, I enthusiastically purchased legal copies of DS games, even though they cost 30 times(!!) the price of a pirated XBOX game. Well, it was only a matter of time: since last week, I now own a pirated cartridge loader, for the grand prize of $30 USD, plus the price of a 1 GB SD card. I feel a bit bad ending my long run of legitimacy with Nintendo, but considering I own 16 legal NDS games, I figure I can get away with playing pirated versions of games I would not purchase at full price anyway.

This may seem weird coming from a game producer; the truth is, China is not much of a market for non-MMO videogames at present. It seems that console makers just can't get around piracy however hard they try; two years ago, Nintendo launched the iQue in China, which required you to contact a central database at the store when you wanted to add games to your storage card. The idea was that you couldn't get around centralized identification to purchase new games... a security stratagem that was cracked within one week of release.

Exotic storage media is not an option. Consider the Nintendo GameCube, with its minidisk format; GameCube minidisks actually spin in the opposite direction to the standard DVD, since they are burnt from the outside in. This would seem to be a major deterrent to piracy, right? Well, I own a pirated GameCube, complete with pirated minidisks. So much for exotic media.

The X360 is next on the hit list, with rumors already flying of a mod chip available soon. Microsoft went to great pains to protect their hardware (including hardware encryption in the core) but as the DeCSS debacle has shown, there's nothing hackers/crackers like more than a challenge.

Personally, I don't care so much about videogame piracy, inasmuch as the videogame industry is very healthy even with rampant piracy in the US and abroad. Companies might whine about 'loss of revenue' all they want, but I'm not convinced that videogame piracy will hurt the industry any more than Napster killed the music industry. My feeling is, with greater access to a multitude of games, gamers become more astute, and will eventually shell out the money for a game they really like.

Videogame piracy driving the industry to a greater focus on quality? Hey, one can dream...

King Kong and the Movie Industry

Saturday night, Helene, a few of my colleagues and myself went to see Peter Jackson's King Kong at the ever-pleasant and weirdly-named Paradise Warner Cinema City. As I described it in a July 2005 post, this theater boasts "VIP tickets" where you get to sit in a room of 30 with reclining leather seats; not only that, but popcorn and a soft drink are included in the admission price. Good thing these leather seats are the epitome of comfort, given that King Kong is over 3 hours long!

(Some minor spoilers follow for King Kong.)

Overall, I found the movie a pleasant experience. It might have been because so many people cautionned me about the movie being too drawn out and emotionally empty, but I thought the pacing was good, and didn't mind the overflowing of action scenes.

But then it got me thinking... You know, it's kinda weird that a movie of King Kong's magnitude, the current title-holder for most expensive movie production in history, pleases me mildly, and will most likely be forgotten when the next blockbuster comes around. How is it that I get more emotional impact out of an episode of Scrubs, or remember more vividly scenes from, say, Arrested Development?

I guess part of it is that television got insanely better in the last years (thank you, HBO!) With solid writing, a television series has a lot more space to build interesting characters than cinema. What ultimately draws me to any story is seeing characters react to situations, or creating them. Conflict is interesting when it arises from different goals or principles in characters. That's why I was so drawn to Sideways, for instance.

Part of it might also be that I'm growing older. I'm pretty sure I would not have taken to The Royal Tenenbaums as a kid, say. That's probably a big part of it. But watching older movies, including Hollywood blockbusters, it feels to me as if character development is slowly taking a backseat.

Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. The movie goes to great pains to establish an interesting anti-hero in Indiana Jones: he's very daring and skillfull, but we also know him to be a shy professor living a double life, and a guy who gets scared for his life whenever he's put in a dangerous situation. He's also not above tricking his way out of a problem, for instance, by shooting down a guy with a sword. When the movie kicks into high gear, we are not only seeing a series of interesting action shots: we're following Indiana Jones, enjoying his skills, and laughing at just how scared shitless he is all the time.

Somewhere along the line, Hollywood seems to have forgotten that contradictions and weaknesses is what makes a hero interesting. Surprisingly, it's not lost on television series, who go to great pains to depict flawed characters.

Here's an example taken from King Kong:

In the 1976 version, the female character (Dwan) was also affected by the greed that ultimately brings down King Kong. She is soon torn between her desire for money and the empathy she feels for King Kong. At the end, she decides what is being done to Kong is wrong, but it is too late. The tragedy of the movie comes from the fact she made the right choice at the wrong time.

In Peter Jackson's version, there is none of that conflict. Naomi Watts' Ann is, quite simply, a goody-two-shoe: despite being terribly poor, she will not do a nudie show. She steals to live, but hey, it's an apple, people. And when King Kong is captured, she doesn't even feel rage at being manipulated by greedy people: she cries like a baby at seeing this innocent creature captured, even though it killed half of the boat's crew for no reason earlier.

Again, it might just be me. But King Kong feels to me like the continuation of a trend, where script and character development are left behind in favor for action-packed set pieces. If it's what the market demands, that's fine; I'm just glad I've got The Sopranos, Scrubs and Arrested Development to satiate my character-driven story needs.

P.S.: Yes, I'm aware that Peter Jackson is from New Zealand, but he is still part, if not the epitome, of Hollywood's flavor of big-budget cinema.

I Probably Ate Cat

I tell ya, it seems like every month brings its new food-related scare to Shanghai. It seems like nothing can escape a foreboding warning or two that makes you rethink ever eating that kind of food again.

First, there was the formaldehyde beer scandal, to which the Chinese government issued such an all-encompassing all-clear that Helene and I immediately switched from Suntory to Heineken. This winter, we also learned that eating dog hot pot could be hazardous to our health. No biggie there, since dog meat is not a staple of our diet.

But the latest food warning actually hits me where it hurts... I'm a big fan of the 羊肉串 (yang rou chuan, or lamb kebab), cheap meat skewers cooked on charcoal and sold for 25 cents on the streets... So imagine my horror when I discovered that my favorite street food might actually contain... cat meat!!!

You see, though dog meat is legal in Shanghai, cat meat isn't. It means you can eat dogs that come from sources certified to be healthy, but whenever you eat kitty, it most certainly comes from a source such as 'creepy guy clubbing kittens in a dark alley'. I'm never letting 西施 out of the house!!

I never intended to eat cat meat, being that I'm such a cat lover, but now, if somebody asks me if I ever ate cat, the only thing I can answer is 'I genuinely don't know.'

(Please, in the name of good taste... No Buffet chinois Le Mandarin jokes!)

The Perils of Tourism

Here's my favorite quote from my trip to Vietnam... Helene and I were having a beer with a Canadian, Alan, and his guide, An, while in a guesthouse in Ben Tre. Alan is touring Vietnam for one month on the back of a motorcycle; from what he has to say, it's as cool as it sounds.

The conversation went longer than this, so this is paraphrased, but the tone is the same.

Alan: "One place I'll probably never visit is Cambodia. I hear they still have unexploded ordinance there."

An: "Hey, don't worry. If we ever run across an unexploded mine or booby trap, you can trust me... I was part of an elite recon unit in the American War; I can disable these with my eyes closed."

Alan: "I... Damn, I thought there were no unexploded ordinance in Vietnam..."

Happy New Year!

Helene and I are spending our last day in Ho Chi Minh City, as our plane back to Shanghai leaves tonight at 1 AM. Helene is doing some last-minute shopping, and I take the time to make one last post to my blog from Vietnam.

We spent a quiet New Year's Eve last time, being that Vietnam celebrates Tet (Lunar New Year, coincides with Chinese New Year) much more than the Western New Year. Today at noon, I was very happy to talk to my parents and brother over the phone, before calling over Sofiane. It was great talking to many of my good friends, albeit way too briefly. Alain, if you read this: I wish we could have talked on the phone! Alas, my mobile phone time ran out.

Strangely, my most persistent memory of Ho Chi Minh City for New Year's Eve is the song Happy New Year by ABBA, which a taxi driver thought it would be kind to play for us full blast as we zipped along the crazy downtown traffic next to Notre-Dame. So here's my attempt at getting rid of this song by having it get stuck in your head instead of mine! Happy New Year!

Seems to me now
That the dreams we had before
Are all dead, nothing more
Than confetti on the floor
It’s the end of a decade
In another ten years time
Who can say what we’ll find
What lies waiting down the line
In the end of eighty-nine...

Happy New Year
Happy New Year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don’t we might as well lay down and die
You and I