I am catching up on my Teen Girl Squad, quite possibly the funniest semi-animated thing not to parade around in an Adult Swim logo. People often say I’m cracked, or crazy or any other word that ends in -azy, but I have nothing on the fictional Strong Bad and his squad of hip teen arrow fodder.

I was overjoyed today to learn that Strong Bad will be getting his own video game in the form of WiiWare (and PC). It’s appropriately titled Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. At last some hope that Wii Ware is more than just a way to sell us cheapo flash games at premium price! It will also sell us pant-poopingly funny cheapo flash games at premium price.

Brought to you by the folks at Telltale who are quickly racking up the funtime tickets towards my first born baby.

As a new owner of a Nintendo Wii (Thanks Mom & Dad! Heart!,) I’m just now discovering the joys of that wonderful controller which is a set of maracas one minute and a presentation pointer the next. I’ll write more in depth about these first giddy days of Wiidom soon but I just had to share with you this troubling line of thought I stumbled across on Game Informer in a Preview of The Force Unleashed.

As you may expect, the game uses the Wii remote to control the movements of the lightsaber but not in a one-to-one manner. If it did, the player would need to be a professional fencer to use it. Instead, it detects direction of swing and translates.

What a fun bunch of obfuscation. Who is buying that the reason the lightsaber isn’t controlled in a “one-to-one manner” is because they were concerned that you would have to be a skilled fencer to pull off battles? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Fuck you, Bueller.
Sit your ass down.

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 Secrets of Creation II: Air 

Last time I talked about the concept of “Breath” which is my catchall term for the details which give life to a storytelling world. Before I get into this entry’s main topic, which I have dangerously titled “Air” (see: you’re full of hot,) I wanted to expand on the idea of “Breath”

In Secrets of Creation I, I spoke of how David Fincher’s Zodiac used “Breath” to give a  sense of time and place to the movie -however imperceptible it may have been to the general viewing public. Now I want to talk about how these same concepts effect the very different world of game design.

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Behold the glory that is CLAY FIGHTER.

Look at all those glorious clay warriors. This was one of those games that never had to be particularly good, it just had to be clay. And boy was it. The backgrounds were clay, the fighters were clay and the weapons were all clay. In the days of Mortal Kombat and bloodlust, I had Claylust.

Now only 15 plus years later I still do. And I’ve been able to finally become clay myself.

You can see these hot new pics in the New Album “Clay Day” in the Pics section of the site.

Also I finally uploaded the behind the scenes shots from the E-SAW music video shoot.

You can see them in the new album E-SAW Behind the scenes.

I was reading an interview with ZODIAC director David Fincher in which he reveals that when he was filming his period police procedural, he made sure there was a directory from the appropriate era in the drawers of the officer’s desks. A directory that he had no intention of ever filming.

Let that sink in.

That’s a lot of effort to go through for something that will never appear on screen.

What Fincher understood is that it doesn’t matter if the audience sees these minute details, as long as they are there and the actors know they are. In the case of a movie, it is absolutely essential that the actors believe in the world they inhabit because the camera is keen to doubt, however imperceptible. By controlling this aspect Fincher, gives his world what I have termed “breath.”

It’s sort of a catchall word that refers to the layers that give a world its past, future and real time present.

All of these layers together create breath which supports intent.

And when intent translates to the screen, when you feel it. It’s fucking euphoric.