1. I meant to get to bed early last night, but the Fruits Basket post had been hanging over my head for weeks and I reached the point last night where I simply wanted to get it done! So, now it’s up and I can move on. Hence also why this is a Saturday Flotsam again.

2. I can’t say my first week of the New Year was encouraging. But pick it up and start over.

3. This past week I watched a partial play-through of Alan Wake 2, which apparently is getting a lot of praise, but from what I saw struck me as astonishingly bad in terms of writing and gameplay. Granted, I wasn’t familiar with the original except the name, but the sequel (after an opening where the player controls a naked fat guy who can do nothing but run through the woods until he gets killed in a cut-scene) focuses on a female FBI Agent who has a very…particular vibe to her. One of the first thing that happens is her (male) partner anxiously tells her to take the lead because she’s so much better of a detective than he is, and he’ll just get in her way otherwise. Because I’m sure that’s how an experienced FBI agent would think. Then you have people repeatedly exclaiming over how great her deductive skills are, even while she’s making extreme leaps of logic (“This lunchbox can’t be a coincidence!”).

This sort of writing feels to me like someone setting up inflatable targets, knocking them down, and then striking a victory pose.

Meanwhile, I’m remembering how in the Poirot novels, the local police would often regard Poirot with patronizing disdain, which he would cheerfully play along with, knowing full well that he’d have the last laugh. Because Poirot was actually confident of his abilities and had nothing to prove to anyone, whereas characters like diverse detective lady are all about insecure writers and audience members enjoying reassurance porn.

4. There is also her frequent giddy comments on how exciting and interesting the case is after at least two police officers have been horribly killed right in front of her while following her orders.

Said officers are killed when the corpse of the naked fat guy gets up off the autopsy slab in the basement of the police station, resulting in shots fired (and the sheriff vanishing into thin air). It’s followed by the two goofy comic-relief detectives doing a routine literally over the body of one of their coworkers, while returning to the lobby shows that the business of the station is going on as usual with no one the wiser. No one heard the shots or commotion going on right below their feet, FBI lady says nothing about it to anyone, and no one thinks that maybe they should lock-down the station or implement any emergency procedures. Just carry on. Isn’t this an exciting case?

Because the writers forgot the idea that the people in the story should have a different perspective from the people watching the story.

5. Then I pulled up a play through of the original game, which opened with a fast-paced sequence of the titular character running through an intense nightmare that gives the player a chance to learn the mechanics while foreshadowing events to come, then jumps immediately into a scene of him and his wife arriving in town, giving us an insight into their relationship and his backstory (he’s basically Stephen King), then we immediately have dark suggestions of sinister forces at work, inter-character conflict, and the main plot kicks off within a half hour. Really solid thriller story pattern leading into well-paced run-and-gun game play. Oh, and from what I can see, the characters actually act human, with Wake being desperate to rescue his wife, his best friend being skeptical, but supportive, and so on.

In contrast, the second game spends hour after hour on slow, adventure-game style detective work which doesn’t even make sense on its own terms (“There’s nothing more to find here.” *one hour later* “There might be more clues we missed…”) and inappropriately-placed attempts at humor, eventually ending in short bursts of run-and-gun game play, while the titular character doesn’t even appear until about three or four hours into the game.

Just from what I was watching, it seems like these two would be a great compare-contrast example of how mainstream writing has deteriorated over the past decade.

6. New Years Eve also means The Twilight Zone. What a great old series that was! Just one fascinating sci-fi or fantasy concept after another, punctuated by elaborately moralistic writing that somehow works, and performed by the kind of old-school working actors who are just a delight to watch at work (I’d watch Jack Klugman read a shopping list). What You Need in particular is essential New Years watching for me (“Look deep and tell me what’s for tomorrow”).

There’s also the atypically lighthearted and optimistic episode Penny For Your Thoughts, where Dick York, the male lead of Bewitched, gains the power to read minds when a coin lands on its edge. York fills his performance with a ton of fun little details, and at times seems to be channeling Jack Lemon. Like, at one point he’s spying on someone through a pane of glass, then just before he runs off to intercept them, he wipes off the condensation from his breath. It’s a quick moment, but how many actors would even think of that?

7. Happy Feast of the Epiphany!