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We’re coming up on the biggest weekend for StarCraft II eSports in 2013 so far, with both the Korean and American WCS Season 1 finals concluding the first round of Blizzard’s new, worldwide tournament format. The Korean finals between INnoVation and Soulkey will have already started by the time you read this, but you should be able to check out the WCS archives shortly after the broadcast. The American finals, beginning with the Round of 8, will run throughout the weekend.
Remaining players in the American premier league are South Koreans HerO, Alicia, Ryung, CranK, aLive, and Revival, as well as Australia’s mOOnGLaDe, and Norway’s Snute. You’ll be able to tune in on theWCS Twitch channel for the live stream from MLG’s studio in New York starting tomorrow, June 1, at 10:00 a.m. PDT. The finals broadcast is the same time Sunday. The champions of both the American and Korean Premier Leagues will take home $20,000, and 1500 WCS points—the most that can be earned in any one tournament.
Blizzard has provided an official bracket for you to fill out, and score yourself against your friends. You can read more about the event on the StarCraft II eSports hub
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. Today, a shooter that wore its heart on its sleeve. Somebody’s heart, anyway. And their liver, lungs, and three different flavours of goo.
Occasionally, old games resurface for a new era. At the moment, it’s Shadow Warrior’s turn. The original game is now free on Steam, with a reimagined version coming in a few months time. I’ve already done itthough, so this week I thought we’d take a look at its undead sister game – one that will probably never see a similar treatment no matter how much fans demand it, simply because it’s one of those games whose rights issues have firmly turned out to be wrongs. It’s an interesting game though; like Shadow Warrior, a shooter that managed to do a lot with very little, minus the painful comedy racism.
Wonder if horror cultists ever have a secret fist-pump at knowing – with proof – their god is real and kicks arse.
Blood is the story of Caleb, a former gunslinger turned elite “Chosen” in a cult devoted to Tchernobog, god of flushing toilets. Everything is just cherry, until Tcherny suddenly turns on the Chosen faster than you can say ’3D rendered intros were really hard in 1997′, declares that the four have failed him, and has his new elite forces dispatch them. One is carried off by a giant spider, another by Cerberus, and Caleb’s possibly-it’s-a-little-confused undead lover by a gargoyle. Caleb himself though is merely teleported into a surprisingly spacious empty grave, presumably because Tchernobog suddenly realised he didn’t have enough elite soldiers for everyone but didn’t want to get his hands messy. Besides, it’s not like one man armed with a pitchfork for some reason is likely to cause a god much trouble, right?
Now, to be fair, what’s actually happening is that Tchernobog has made a couple of rookie evil overlord mistakes. First, his idea of elite soldiers are people made of packing peanuts. More importantly, his actual intention is that Caleb rampage through the cult to become incredibly powerful, at which point he can take his power and punch through into the world to bring his special flavour of pitch-lowered evil to the masses. Suffice it to say, this is a better idea for evil gods who aren’t vulnerable to conventional weapons, or whose plans are better served by not having had all of their minions massacred.
This being a 90s shooter though, plot isn’t too important, and was still the kind of thing shoved into readme files and the like rather than properly implemented. That’s little excuse though for a story like this– the text-version of Caleb’s plight in all its whatever the heck this is supposed to be.
Caleb awakens in cold and damp in a body he no longer knows. It has long lain as a corpse that refused to rot, protected from putrefaction by some unearthly link to its master. The pain of protesting muscle and flesh invigorates and awakens him. He welcomes it. It distills his hate into the maelstrom raging in the center of his mind. An agonizing cry breaks out of him, shattering the stone lid of the tomb in which he lies, knocking loose sediment, cobwebs, and the small, unnoticed creatures that have shared his grave with him. A single word rings out through the darkness, echoing Tchernobog’s lingering howl: “Why?”
“It distills his hate into the maelstrom raging in the center of his mind” indeed. By Tchernobog’s giant sweaty balls, that’s not just regular old purple prose, it’s purpureus.
Wow, he’s a big one, chief! How about we call his bluff and just leave?
Anyway. Much of Blood is what you’d expect. In keeping with the shareware style at the time, it’s four episodes split into individual levels, where Caleb has to get from the start point to a sigil at the end. In his way are locked doors that all use the same key, which he never bothers keeping, and an army of undead monsters – zombies, cultists, fire-spitting dogs, spiders and so on, plus a few bosses.
Its weapons are a little different from normal, if not in concept them in terms of raw sadism. A pitchfork to the face may not be all that powerful, but still looks nastier than a fist. The pistol slot was taken up by a flare gun whose shots stick in enemies and continue burning until they flare up. An aerosol can does double duty as a flame thrower and a molotov cocktail. Finally, one of the higher end weapons is a voodoo doll that can be used to spike enemies at a distance, with Caleb accidentally stabbing himself in the hand if there isn’t one around to feel the pricking sensation in their undead soul. All pretty cool stuff for a horror game, even if games like Rise of the Triad (another shooter seeing a return) splashed far more gore from its weapons. Blood preferred pain and torture over mere floods of red.
(Anecdotally, one of my favourite things about Blood involves the US supermarket chain Wal-Mart. During the 90s, it was such a powerful yet conservative retailer that companies would create special versions of games minus the blood or with other changes to be sold in its stores. One of them? Blood, complete with its red-handprint box recoloured a bright slime green. Of all the games…)
Okay, so they’re not the most subtle cult, but they’re still more low-key than most of The Secret World.
What made Blood special though was… well, actually two things. Firstly, while Duke Nukem had already established himself as the FPS hero with attitude, Caleb’s gravel-voice gave him a real run for his money. He’s a pure villain protagonist who happens to be fighting a bigger evil than himself at the moment, and spends most of the time quipping. Where Duke largely pinched lines from The Evil Dead and similar films though, Caleb’s world is made of horror references. His initial “I live… again!” gives way to constant quips or quotes. He’s a fun character, not least because he thoroughly enjoys his role as an avenging angel with jet black wings and arsenal of increasingly cruel weapons.
That mostly works though because of the level design, with most stages riffing on something specific. The first stage for instance is a cemetery, Morningside, as in Phantasm. A later level does the hotel from The Shining. There’s a pub called Cask Of Amontillado Pub & Grille. Check out this comprehensive reference list. To say that this was a world worth exploring would be a bit of an overstatement because it’s standard FPS design in most ways, but there were a ton of things for genre fans to ‘get’.
Rather than purely relying on this though, the level design… in the shareware version at least… was phenomenal. Quake was already out, so the Build engine was far from the technological powerhouse it was when Duke Nukem 3D arrived. It still had its charm though, with its sprite based worlds and enemies allowing far more character and clever trickery for developers who knew how to use it. Shadow Warrior would stretch things to clever tricks like faking portals and really pushing world interaction. Blood was no slouch with it though, with arguably its two best levels coming in the shareware version. It was right on the edge of FPS games shaking off the classic ‘here are a load of corridors and monsters, go to it’ style of design in favour of being able to recreate actual places – something that again Duke had taken the vanguard on, but Blood’s developers were able to take further while crafting their own 1920s era world.
The first is hard to convey now, because so many other games have done something similar. Caleb is on a train running through the countryside, and the train actually is running through the countryside. Being able to run along the sides as well as inside was an incredible technological achievement for an FPS engine the time, even if the scenery offered no detail and it was very obviously working like a treadmill. Like a lot of Blood, it had an attention to detail that simply wasn’t expected, like putting a few zombies in the way of the train even though most players would have turned around by that point to start the level, and animating the wheels that would only be seen if they subsequently fell off.
That level is nothing though compared to the one that follows… and the secret level linked from it – Dark Carnival. The name suggests it’s going to be fun. The design is absolutely superb – Build engine gimmickry at its finest. Along with the regular cultist-apocalypse, this stage adds a number of carnival games to play to win prizes. Most are target-shooting jobs, so not exactly a challenge for Caleb. The most memorable though takes the way that the engine lets you kick around disembodied heads and turns it into a little football challenge – get the heads into the gaping mouth. Another section that I thought was clever at the time sees Caleb able to climb up and do tightrope walking over a snake-pit, making good use of an animated texture and a couple of sticky-out sprites to convey the writhing mass below. The effect fails utterly if you actually fall in, but works great from the intended perspective.
Careful exploration of the level also reveals the first episode’s secret level, House of Horrors. This is an entire level set around a ghost-train full of enemies and torture rooms, and again a wonderfully detailed bit of 90s design. It’s not the greatest stage as an FPS space, but the shrinking corridors and use of a river to push the player forward. Again, it’s a thing of its time. Compared to others of its era though…
Blood was definitely one of those games that more people played and enjoyed the shareware version of than actually picked up the full thing – a side-effect of both the episodic model, and everyone knowing that developers often put their best ideas into the first chapter. Blood… well, it tried, but most of its more ambitious stuff like a city of the dead just isn’t up to the same standard, with the limited textures especially soon becoming pretty painful as the designers try their damnedest to create things like a mall with nothing but concrete and grime and a few similar bits and pieces.
Still, there was a fair amount of interest when the sequel was announced, Blood 2: The Chosen. It turned out to be mostly pants though, shifting the timeframe to the future, with primitive full-3D characters and worlds, very little charm, and some odd decisions like gender-swapping Chosen member Gabriel into Gabriella as part of Satan’s new equality policy, and turning the evil Cabal into one of those silly futuristic supercorporations called… CabalCo. Say it with me, people: Urrrrrrrrgh. Shogo, it was not. And that’s when Shogo was awesome, rather than now, where it’s better fondly remembered than replayed.
The whole of Blood is available over on GOG.COM, with the shareware version still okay to download for free. Unfortunately, with the source code never having been made available and Atari unwilling to let anyone do anything with it, it’s not seen the kind of updates that games like Doom have over the years to bring them up to spec. At some point, we may see Blood Reloaded or similar hit Steam – with System Shock 2 on there, anything can happen. For now though, don’t hold your breath for it to claw its way out of the ground in a shiny new form and brand new growl of “I live… again.”
Millions tuned in last night to watch the 11 finalists duke it out for the 86th annual Scripps Spelling Bee title. The winner, two-time third-place finisher Arvind Mahankali, walked away with $30,000–not an insignificant amount of lunch money to get beaten up for–after correctly spelling the word knaidel, from the Yiddish for a dumpling.
Perhaps, it was fitting that the word Mahankali needed to spell prior to knaidel was tokonoma–a Japanese word for a niche–because today Yiddishists and etymologists are kvelling over the public discovery of the winning word. We sought out Allan Metcalf, whobrilliantly profiled master etymologist Gerald Cohen for Tablet earlier this month, for his thoughts on the knaidel.
The most interesting points Metcalf raised–after consulting the Jewish English Lexicon–was that there are six acceptable spellings for the word and the spelling of knaidel that Mahankali gave was not the lead one. He explained:
“Knaidel” is not the headword, “knaidle” is. The winning spelling is an alternate.
The intrigue doesn’t end there.
So that raises the question, would there be six possible correct answers at the spelling bee?
The answer is probably “no” because (I think) the bee uses Merriam-Webster dictionaries as its authority, and “knaidel” is the spelling in the M-W Unabridged. But that doesn’t mean the others are wrong, except possibly at a spelling bee.
The director M. Night Shyamalan and Gary Whitta wrote the screenplay for “After Earth,” but Will Smith wrote the story. He also stars in the movie, along with his son, Jaden, and the parental connection is not incidental. Though set millennia in the future, “After Earth” is very much about life today—an allegory of the transition from being a helicopter parent to a free-range one—and it introduces an impressive array of futuristic paraphernalia to make the point.
The action is set a thousand years after humanity had to evacuate a despoiled Earth for a distant solar system, to which the species has adapted. Mankind’s main obstacle is a monster race, called Ursa, which is blind and detects its human prey by smell—literally, by the scent of fear, as it emerges in the form of pheromones. Only those who have no fear have a chance of slaying an Ursa; that phenomenon of undetectable fearlessness is called “ghosting.” Will Smith, as the military commander Cypher Raige, has it. His son, Kitai, a cadet seeking promotion to ranger, only aspires to it. Father and son are passengers on a flight to another planet when their spacecraft gets caught in an asteroid storm and is forced to crash-land on Earth. Cypher and Kitai, apparently the only survivors, need to send a rescue signal with a special transmitter that’s in the tail of the shattered craft, a hundred kilometres away. Cypher broke both of his legs, and so Kitai must make the journey alone.
It’s not giving away too much to explain that the futuristic technology (which is imagined thinly but with verve) involves a “Naviband,” a device strapped to Kitai’s forearm that allows Cypher to see everything taking place around the young man and to communicate with him—in effect, a super cell phone—and that the drama kicks into high gear when it’s disabled and Kitai has to make his way through Earth’s dangers on his own. The future features advanced versions of other contemporary child-safety paraphernalia, such as the EpiPen and the asthma inhaler.
Kitai’s journey of initiation, subject to a set of rules (each inhaler lasts twenty to twenty-four hours; he has six inhalers; each leg of the journey takes a certain amount of time…), plays out like a live-action video game, and, as the movie progresses, new rules present new challenges, their changing demands even posted on-screen in the protagonists’ video arrays. Whether or not the similarity is intended, it’s worth noting—as I discovered just now by clicking around on IMDb—that the co-scenarist Whitta “was editor of PC Gamer for several years,” as well as a writer for the games “Prey” and “The Walking Dead.” It’s an aesthetically neutral matter regarding the film (though these elements do seem foregrounded in a way that is occasionally unintentionally comical), but I wonder if there’s an actual “After Earth” game on its way. I suspect it would be a lot more fun than the movie itself.
“After Earth” is also an allegory of the family business, a public affirmation that Will Smith is yielding the spotlight to Jaden and letting him run free as an actor. Since Jaden spends much of his time on-screen as the only person in the frame, the responsibility of performance does fall squarely on his young shoulders.
Unfortunately, Jaden, though agile and skillful, isn’t a charismatic actor; he doesn’t put a lot of personality into the part, and he doesn’t have a deft way with the dialogue. Meanwhile, Will Smith doesn’t give himself very much to do, and what he does do is close to a parody of set-jawed war-movie determination. As drama, “After Earth” offers no surprises; as action, it’s rarely stimulating (there’s exactly one shot—from Kitai’s point of view as he’s being dragged to safety by a hidden benefactor—that reflects visual imagination); as a parenting manual, it seems that Will has thrown Jaden into water that’s a little too deep. For all the free-range plotting, Will does play a large role in the movie, suggesting all too clearly that Jaden isn’t quite ready to go as far out on his own as the story suggests Kitai must.
Of course, it’s too soon to tell what kind of acting chops, what kind of allure beyond the childhood cuteness of “The Karate Kid,” Jaden Smith has. He may prove to be formidable, but I suspect that to become so, he’ll need to work in a wider range of movies, perhaps a smaller scale—movies that allow him to cultivate on-screen relationships with a variety of actors, including ones his own age, and away from his father’s spotlight and counsel.
As for Shyamalan, his direction is impersonal, efficient, and clean—even too clean, resulting in an action film that doesn’t move. It’s worth comparing his blandly clear images with the kinetic frenzy that the director Gary Ross, working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, created for “The Hunger Games.” I wonder whether the placid stolidity of “After Earth” is intended to showcase the actors as if in a picture gallery—a sort of favor returned or service rendered. (Andrew Stewart reports in Variety that “It was [Will] Smith who hand-picked Shyamalan to direct ‘After Earth.’ ”)
I’ve seen a couple of reports (here and here) speculating that “After Earth” is inspired by Scientology. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Will Smith performs with an unappealing and constrained earnestness. The movie offers no trace of Will Smith, the mercurial and hearty comedian, or Will Smith, the introspective and fierce dramatic actor of “Ali.” I have no idea whether it’s dogma, paternal sentimentality, or mere actorly choice that burdens him in “After Earth,” but the result is the diminution of a superb performer, his self reduced to a celebrity emblem that advertises the movie from within.
Without apparently being provoked, Andersen body-checked Hansbrough to the floor after Heat teammate Norris Cole missed a layup in transition during the second quarter of the Heat's eventual 90-79 victory, which gave them a 3-2 series lead.
Andersen then confronted Hansbrough, bumped him in the chest and struggled with official Marc Davis when Davis came to break up the altercation.
Officials gave technical fouls to both players and called Andersen for a flagrant foul 1 for the initial altercation. NBA vice president Stu Jackson upgraded the foul to a flagrant foul 2 and added the suspension without pay because Andersen "escalated the altercation by shoving Hansbrough, and resisted efforts to bring the altercation to an end," according to a league release.
Additionally, the technical given to Hansbrough was rescinded by the league.
Andersen was not made available to the media after Thursday's game or after the Heat's practice Friday.
Earlier Friday, in an interview with NBC Sports Radio, NBA commissioner David Stern condemned Andersen's actions and said officials should have ejected him. Stern told NBC Sports Radio "a serious review of his activities is called for."
Andersen's suspension is a significant blow to the Heat, who have struggled with the Pacers' size in the series. Andersen is averaging 7.2 points and 4.6 rebounds in the five games and is a perfect 15-for-15 from the field. He had four points and four rebounds in Game 5.
Streeter Lecka/Getty ImagesChris Andersen's altercation with the Pacers' Tyler Hansbrough on Thursday night will force him to the bench for Game 6 on Saturday night.
The NBA has upgraded fouls after four of the five games in the series. The Pacers' Ian Mahinmi and David Westand the Heat's Dwyane Wade also had fouls upgraded to flagrants after review.
This also is the second consecutive year a Heat big man has been suspended for Game 6 of a playoff series against the Pacers, and the second time it involved a hit on Hansbrough.
Last season, Heat forward Udonis Haslem was suspended for Game 6 in Indiana after a blow to Hansbrough during Game 5 in Miami.
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The numbers say the Heat are a better team offensively and defensively this series when Chris Andersen is on the bench, as well as just a tad better on the boards. Here's a look at the Heat with Andersen on/off the floor per 48 minutes this series:
