Monday, January 26th, 2009

Primarily, I'm talking about the Blood Rayne series, developed by Terminal Reality and published by Majesco. Forget about the horrible movie "adaptation" by German torture artist Uwe Boll. Seriously. Forget about it. If you have to, get a soldering gun and precision burn that memory directly out of your gray matter. Until he got his grubby mits on the franchise, Rayne was the perfect video game heroine; an incredibly hot leather-clad-redhead-half-vampire who hunted Nazis. Awesome.

Besides such a solid gold set up, the storyline was surprisingly good: Rayne was the offspring of an incredibly powerful and evil vampire name Kagan. Kagan raped Rayne's mother, and Rayne was the issue; a Dhampir (half-vampire). She has most of a vampire's strengths, such as supernatural grace, strength, enhanced senses and so on, and can heal all wounds by consuming human blood. She also has some of a vampire's weaknesses, in that she isn't sunlight's biggest fan and running water burns her like acid (which must make taking showers a bitch). She spent most of her young life looking for Kagan in order to kill him, and elimates every vampire she comes across as a matter of course.

A benevolent occult group known as the Brimstone Society becomes aware of her actions, and despite some reservations about her heritage, offers her membership in their secret society. At the outset of the game she has been sent by the Society to investigate some apocolyptic goings-ons in Louisiana, where she comes across the first of a set of relics; the bodyparts of an ancient vampire god named Beliar, who was dismembered and his pieces scattered all over the world to keep him from resurrecting. Unfortunately for Rayne, another group is looking for Beliar's bits; a nazi team called the Gegengheist Group (the G.G.G, or "Counter-Ghost Group"), who are trying to harness the power of the occult to help Hitler rise to power. Their leader, Juergen Wulf, nearly kills Rayne as he claims Beliar's rib.

The game then jumps forward a few years as Rayne is sent to Argentina on a mission to destroy the G.G.G, who are trying to reassemble Beliar in an attempt to use his power to help the nazis conquer the world. Rayne's mission is to hunt down each and every one of the G.G.G. leaders and put a stop to them once and for all, and, of course, to stop Beliar's resurrection.

Rayne is armed to the pointy teeth. Her main weapons are a pair of scyth-like arm blades with which she can dismember and decapitate enemies with ease. Early in the game she is given a chain-harpoon that allows her to spear distant enemies and yank them close like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, so that she can chop 'em up or, even better, jump on them, wrap her lovely legs around them, and drink 'em like a Capri Sun, which has the added benefit of healing her. She is also able to pick up the weapons of her fallen foes, giving her a nearly endless arsenal of anything from dual pisols to double-barrelled shotguns to rocket launchers and everything in between.

The second game in the series, the cleverly named Bloodrayne 2 (where do they come up with these wity titles?) leaps forward 70 years to the modern day, though Rayne is still young and beautiful. The game deals primarily with Rayne's attempts to hunt down the last of Kagan's offspring, her twisted half-brothers and sisters, who are attempting to create a vampire apocolypse through the use of something called The Shroud, a blood-red curtain of eternal night which will block the sun's rays and give them free reign over the earth.

For the sequel, the developers ditched the ability to pick up enemies' fallen weapons; instead Rayne is given a pair of supernatural guns called the Karpathian Dragons, which hook directly into her blood stream; they allow Dhampir blood to mix with certain alchemical agents within the guns, creating projectiles that can harm even supernatural creatures like vampires. They have a built in reservoir which can be refilled from foes, but once they are empty they start draining Rayne's health instead. Blood spewing guns... sounds like the CDC's worst nightmare.

Interestingly enough, though Rayne does defeat her primary adversaries, the game doesn't end with the clear-cut victory for the good guys that one would expect, instead ending with the afforementioned vampire apocalypse decending on earth, pitting Rayne and the tattered remnants of the Brimstone Society as the defenders of a doomed humanity against the Vampire High Council and their hordes of hell. This was an obvious attempt to set up a third game in the series, but when Majesco started to go teats up, that doomed any hopes of a third game and derailed a Bloodrayne Playstation Portable game that had been in the works.

The last we saw of Rayne was as an unlockable character in Majesco's other fun action horror romp for the PSP called Infected. In short the game was an over-the-top third person zombie romp in which the main character, Officer Stephens, was a police officer in the midst of a zombie holocaust. Not only was he more or less immune to the zombie virus, but zombies touched by his blood would explode into a gory mess, spraying other nearby zombies with their now-Stephens-tainted blood, which would cause them to explode too, spraying other zombies and creating a gory chain reaction. So of course Stephens created a gun, very much like the Karpathian Dragons, which allowed him to shoot his blood as projectiles at the zombie hordes. By collecting certain icons scattered throughout the level or by beating the levels under certain conditions, you could pick up cash bonuses, which allowed you to unlock new weapons, as well as new "skins" for your character, including one of Rayne.

So hopefully the company's new solvency will allow them to consider bringing back the BloodRayne series, as well as a follow-up to Infected, though with the current economy, I doubt it. The news does, however, make me nostalgic for the old games, and I think it is about time to break out both BloodRaynes and Infected again, and give them a proper review for old time's sake. Keep your eyes open for those in the coming weeks.

-Collin Out.

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

The game's developer, Naughty Dog, has promised that "Among Thieves" will give us a lot more insight into Nathan's character and what motivates him. In fact, the game's subtitle refers to Nathan's connections to the criminal underworld; after all, unlike Indiana Jones, Nathan never claims to be an archaeologist, and never corrects Elena in the first game when she calls him a tomb robber. It is obvious that he is in it for the "fortune and glory", but his mysterious background is interesting to say the least. Despite his mercenary appearance, Nathan is a consumate researcher, and demonstrated his ability in the last game to translate 16th century Spanish and convert the esoteric Spanish weight measurement of "arrobas" into pounds on the fly, so he is obviously very educated. On the other hand, his familiarity with shady characters like Eddy from the first game point to a much seedier mercenary past. Among Thieves promises to explain some of this disparities in his character.

The incomparable Nolan North is reprising his role as Nathan, which is a relief. So far there is no sign of Elena or Sully, Nathan's allies from the first game. However, there is a new woman complicating Nathan's life: a mysterious dark-haired vixen named Chloe Frazer, who will be voiced by Claudia Black, of Stargate SG-1 and Farscape fame. Though little is known about Chloe at the moment, I'm more than a little disappointed that Elena appears to have been shuffled out of the story, as the relationship between her and Nathan was interesting to say the least. I really hope they don't turn Nathan into a James Bond type, with a new "femme fatale" every installment. He just doesn't seem the type. Nathan's ladies aside, I would be really surprised (and disappointed) if Victor "Sully" Sullivan doesn't make a return appearance in this game. Besides being a great character (and a great pain in the ass for Nathan), he would fit in perfectly with the whole "Among Thieves" motif of shady characters and the fine line they walk, considering all the moral ambiguity around the character in the first game. On the musical side, Greg Edmunson, who did the music for the first game (and who also scored Joss Whedon's Firefly) will be returning for this game as well, which is just about the most awesome thing every. The soundtrack for the last game was one of the finest scores of all time, whether you're talking for movies or video games. Seriously.

Anyhoo, on to the treasure that Nathan is searching for, the Cintamani Stone. Naughty Dog isn't saying too much about it, but a little research digs up more information. Also called the Chintamani, the ancient relic was supposedly able to grant the holder anything their heart desired. It was one of four relics that supposedly fell to earth in Tibet around the 5th century, during the rain of legendary Tibetan king Thothori Nyantsen. At first they didn't knw what these treasures were, but after many years two wise men came to the kingdom and explained that they were relics of the Buddha; this was the coming of the Dharma, the Budhist teachings, to Tibet.

Though the overall plot is still strictly under wraps, we do know that Nathan stumbles across the quest for the Cintamani Stone while searching for Marco Polo's legendary lost fleet. Marco Polo spent almost two decades in China as a guest of Kublai Khan (Ghengis Khan's son). When it was time for him to return to Italy, the Khan granted him a fleet of 14 ships and 600 men. But when they finally got home, they were down to 2 ships and 18 men. Polo had implied some tragedy had happened along the way, but never explained what had happened to his missing fleet. Nathan aparently must have some idea, because that is what he is looking for at the beginning of the game. Other than that, very little is known about the plot of the game.

One other follow-up note: in a short trailer shown at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, we find out a little bit more about how Nathan receives the serious wound on his side that was shown in the first "fortune favors the bold" trailer. In the second released trailer, Nathan awakens in a train car to find that he is covered in his own blood with a nasty wound in his side. Before he can even process any of this, objects begin hurtling towards him, careening off the seats around him, and his seat begins to rip loose of it's moorings. Our perspective shifts, and soon we find that the train car that Nathan was is is on fire and dangling over a deadly precipice from a broken track; Nathan falls out of his seat and out the back of the train, barely catching a rail at the last minute. The trailer ends with him dangling, injured and alone from the back of the train over a desolate snow-covered Tibetan chasm. The graphics are incredibly detailed and realistic, and according to the game's designers, everything was rendered in-engine, meaning this is what the gameplay graphics will look like, and not just some highly rendered CGI movie. They are aiming to use 100% of the PS3's power, which is saying a lot; as amazing as the first game was, it only utilized about 30% of the PS3's Cell processor's potential.

That's about all I have on the game so far. While this isn't going to become a blog about Uncharted, if I find out any more about the fate of Elena or Sully, I'll pass it along. Otherwise, I'll do my best to shut up about it until the game is out.

-Collin Out.

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

So far, only a teaser trailer has been released, over at Gametrailers, with the promise of a full-length trailer to be released on December 14th during the Spike TV Video Game Awards, and a cover-story article to be released in the January 2009 issue of Game Informer Magazine (which, due to the magic of release dates, actually comes out in mid-December). As such, there isn't too much that is known about the new game, but that won't stop me from speculating about what we DO know.

First of all, the press release from Naughty Dog, the company that designed the game for Sony, states that just as the first game focused on secret treasures tied to Sir Francis Drake, who was series protagonist Nathan Drake's ancestor, the Among Thieves will be tied to another famous explorer, in this case the legendary Marco Polo. In the teaser trailer we see Nathan, stumbling and bleeding, in an arctic wasteland. Besides not being dressed for the climate, he seems to be on his last legs, leaving a trail of blood behind him in the snow. He falls to his knees in front of a Tibetan tri-bladed dagger called a Phurba, which is buried point down in the snow and snatches it up weakly. Nathan's voice can be heard saying in voice over: "I suppose I should have quit while I was ahead. But what is it they say? Fortune favors the bold? Right. Lucky me." The trailer concludes with the announcement that the game's world premier would be at the Spike VGA awards on December 14th.

While this wouldn't seem to tell us much, there are some facts that can be gleaned from this. First of all, the fact that we know that it is tied to Marco Polo and that he is picking up the phurba tells us that the artic tundra we seem him in is most likely either Nepal or Tibet, the seats of Tibetan Budhism. This makes sense with the Marco Polo connection, since Polo is most famous for being one of the first Europeans to write about his travels in China, and met Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. Apparently Among Thieves would extend his journeys further into China, to the mountainous monasteries of Tibet. Secondly, we can guess that the phurba may be the treasure that he is looking for, and that just as the treasure that he was looking for in the first game turned out to be so much more than he bargained for, so is the phurba. Besides being a ritual dagger meant to symbolically kill one's negative feeling and emotions (one focuses all one's negativity into the point and drives it ritually into the earth, where it remains), it is also emblematic of the Axis Mundi, the symbolic "center of the world" where the heavens, the earth, and the four cardinal directions come together. As such it is considered by Nepalese Shaman to be a symbol for the World Tree, where the heavens, earth, and underworld come together. The World Tree is a nearly universal symbol, called Yggdrasill by the Norse, the Bhodi Tree by the Hindus, the sacred Ceiba to the Mayans, and so on. Due to it's unique triangular blade, I imagine at some point in Among Thieves it will be utilized as a key, much like the sacred dagger in the most recent Silent Hill game. Another possibility is that since it is ritually used as stake to anchor negative thoughts and emotions to the earth, that the removing of it could have dire consequences. Maybe it is being used to seal away an ancient god?

Of course all of this is pure speculation. We'll find out a bit more after the full trailer is released on December 14th, and after the January Game Informer issue comes out. I'll keep you posted, and we'll see if anything comes of my speculation.

-Collin Out.

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

The Mexican Were-Turkey

In Mesoamerican cosmology, beginning with the Maya, there is the belief in spiritual tonallity, meaning that each person has a companion in the spirit realm that takes the form of an animal. In Mayan this is called one's "Way" or "Waay" (the plural being Wayob), which is roughly translated as "supernatural other". One's Waay is linked to them supernaturally, as an extension of one's own soul, to the extent that if the Waay is killed than the individual dies, and vice versa. The Waay has a number of supernatural uses, including the ability to send it out into the spirit world during bloodletting trances in order to seek guidance for oneself. Alternately, the Waay can be trapped as a way for a "witch" to do harm to a person; injure or torture the Waay, and the person to whom that Waay is linked will feel the same pain, receive the same injuries, and, if the Waay is killed, they too will die.

According to legend, some sorcerers are able to exploit this link even further, transforming into the form of their Waay in order to do mischief or harm. This is not an unfamiliar concept; in Navajo tradition the Skinwalker (Yenadlooshii, or "with it, he runs on all fours") is a sorcerer who takes on the form of an animal (usually a large predator, especially wolves) in order to harm or kill his foes. In the case of the Skinwalkers, their transformation was the result of donning the skin of the animal that they wished to transform into; hence the name. In Peru, sculptures all over temples built by the Chavin culture (particularly Chavin de Huantar) seem to show shaman transforming into jaguars. All of these indigenous American cultures most likely got them from the mysterious progenitor culture known only as the Olmec ("rubber people", so named because they "discovered" how to make rubber out of the latex sap of rubber trees; we don't know what they called themselves). Olmecs seem to be the culture from which all other Mesoamerican cultures descended, at least culturally, diffusing and changing as they spread out from Olmec "ground zero" in western Mexico but keeping certain cultural traits intact (like the use of rubber, the Mesoamerican ballgame, and stone carving). Though little is known about them, it is obvious from their sculptures that the were-jaguar was central to their religion.

However, this idea is obviously not unique to the Americas. I'm not even going to go into the werewolf, because there is far too much to say about these cultural icons, except to point out that early werewolf myths, particularly in France, had the afflicted werewolf actually donning the skin of the wolf in order to make his or her transformation, not unlike the Navajo Skinwalkers. And in Norse myth there are the Berserkers. This familiar term actually comes from the Norse "baer sarkirs" or "bear shirts", who, like the Skinwalkers, donned the untanned and bloody skins of bears in order to channel their spiritual strength and power. In battle Berserkers were known to ignore what would normally be crippling injuries and rip apart their foes with their bare hands, becoming the monolithic creatures that they emulated. Another group of Norse beast-warriors was the Ulfhednar, who were similar to the baer sarkir except that they wore wolf skins instead of bear skins.

The Navajo (like the Hopi) are distantly linked to the Maya and the Aztec cultures, and the Skinwalker belief is just one example of Maya traditions living on in Navajo culture. For where the Navajo have the Yenadlooshii, the Maya have the Huay Chivo. The word "Huay" is a direct linguistic descendant of the Mayan "Waay", which besides meaning "spirit" also means "sorcerer", "supernatural" and other things linked to this "spiritual" or "supernatural" root. The word "Chivo" is the Mayan word for "Goat". So in the most blunt translation of Huay Chivo, we get the term "Witch-Goat", which is pretty much on the money. The legendary Maya monster is half-man, half-beast and has glowing red eyes, and is indigenous to the Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo regions of Mexico which were once the seat of Maya culture. Despite the name, the Huay Chivo has also been known to turn into dogs or deer as well, with the main purpose of preying on livestock. Because of the livestock slaughter and the connection with goats, the Huay Chivo has often been confused with the Chupacabara, which is ridiculous; Chupacabara means "Goat Sucker", as is in a monster that preys on goats, while the Huay Chivo is a were-goat who preys on livestock. Get it straight, people.

Regardless, in Nahuatl-speaking areas of Mexico, particularly around Mexico city and in areas in which the Aztecs once held sway, the Huay Chivo is called the Nagual or Nahual (both of which are pronounced Na'wal), which comes from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word "Nahualli", which means "one who performs harmful magic". "Nagual" is roughly translated as "transforming trickster". In Aztec beliefs each day in the Tonalpohualli (Aztec calendar) was linked to a particular animal. Thus a person born on any given day would have a spiritual link (not unlike the Maya Waay) to the animal linked to the day on which they were born. This was called the person's "Tonal". Thus a Nahualli shape shifter would be able to transform into it's Tonal creature, becoming a Nagual. In modern Mexican folklore this idea lives on in a peculiar form. The Nagual is considered a "brujo" ("witch" in Spanish) who is able to transform into an animal at night in order to suck the blood from their victims, cause diseases, steal things, and so on. Strangely enough, the most common forms that the Nagual takes are those of nocturnal flying creatures: an owl, a bat... or, believe it or not, a turkey. When there are mysterious deaths or illnesses in rural Mexico, turkeys are often killed in an attempt to kill or flush out the disguised Nagual.

See? I promised you were-turkeys for Thanksgiving.
-Collin Out.

Sunday, November 06th, 2008