Mountains Made Low

The following is from Lindsay, with permission. It’s her take on Penny Arcade’s holiday charity program, Child’s Play. There are links to the Child’s Play site (and their “About” page) in the post below, and I’ll give a shout out to the charity’s nuts’n'bolts/making-it-work partners, Amazon and PayPal, here.

Lindsay writes:
…it’s that time of year, again. Yes, the time of year where there’s a holiday approaching called Christmas, where kids wake their parents up early and are obnoxious until they get to open their presents. The day kids await for weeks with baited breath.

Unfortunately, there are kids that aren’t as lucky. Kids that don’t get to jump on their parents’ bed until they begrudgingly get up; kids that are lucky if they have the strength to get out of their hospital bed.

Now, all you nerds with soft hearts can help, if you didn’t spend your last dollar and change on a 2-liter of Mountain Dew. I don’t like charities — unfortunately, donations to a great many charities often never reach the people you intended to help. However, there is one that is much, much different.

The nerds over at Penny Arcade run a drive every year called Child’s Play to get presents into the hands of kids in children’s hospitals across America and Canada, and even a few hospitals in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. You can donate locally, or internationally — your choice. You can donate cash, or you can click the hospital you’d like to donate to, and it will redirect you to that hospital’s Amazon Wish List. You buy the stuff, Mike and Jerry from Penny Arcade help pay for the shipping, and sick kids smile on Christmas day. It’s not rocket science.

If you’re still feeling a bit leery of the idea of donating to a charity, here’s the “About” section of their site – go read about them for yourself. If you’re feeling charitable, send a book or a toy or a video game to a hospital. I’m not going to tag anyone specific in this note; I don’t care if you donate or not. But, if you want to donate, I’m telling you that this is the place.

Aha! If you’re looking at my blog in the moment this is published, I’ve got a question for you: “Why aren’t you partying?” And you’ve caught me cheating, of course, this post was drafted far in advance (I’m taking the first pass at it on December 7), edited a number of times (4, I think), and set to publish itself automatically at 12:01 am on January 1.

Gotta love that.

I’ll report in a “live” post later today how I actually spent my New Year’s Eve, but at this point it’s looking like I’ll be spending it as I spent it last year: alcohol and PlayStation (which isn’t really as sad as it sounds—it was kind of a fun way to ring in 2008…at least the parts of it I’ve managed to remember). May have to get a new PlayStation game for the occasion, though.

My New Year’s Resolutions for 2009:

1. Continue with the working out. This one should be relatively easy—I’m addicted.
2. Take the working out to the next level. This might be more more difficult because there are questions: what is the next level? do I have the time?
3. No more bad kissers! This one’s sort of a carry-over from 2008, I didn’t publicly resolve this last year (though I think I did shout it on Facebook for about five minutes one time). But 2008 proved to me that this particular sort of resolution presents a problem: It’s difficult to know ahead of time, and by the time you learn you’ve broken the resolution, you’ve broken the resolution. And I hate to say “deal-breaker,” because I hate to think that anything might be a deal-breaker as early on as a kiss (okay, yes, I have been known to kiss on the first date), but it’s close—it’s just too important. So I’m resolving this again for 2009 because I batted .500 (1-for-2, if you’re keeping score) on this one in 2008, and because anything worth doing is worth doing right.
4. Passive-Aggressive Behavior will be answered with silence, not with additional passive-aggressive behavior; life’s just too damn short.
5. Read and review 30 books. Obviously, you’ll see me reviewing books here, so you’ll know how I’m doing with this one. And, yes, audiobooks do and will continue to count. (This was initially a 50-book goal, but I realized that might be just a touch insane, even though my plan for the summer involves a good bit of camping, hiking, and reading.)
6. Watch and review 50 Movies. You’ve read, recently, about my Netflix subscription, and there are already better than 50 movies in my queue. This might be harder than it sounds, though, so we’ll see. (Less insanity to 50 movies; two hours a week will fulfill the viewing part of this one.)

Beyond that, I’ll say simply say “Happy New Year!” to you all. And if something drastic changes in the time between when I’m first drafting this and when it posts, I’ll let you know if I broke resolution #3 at midnight (or, of course, if I kept it while taking a chance on breaking it—but somehow, I doubt it).

Okay, I’ll admit it: New games are probably cooler on next-gen platforms than on legacy consoles like the PS2. But, and it’s a big but, I enjoy the fact that the game publishers are still creating versions of their new games for PS2 players—we’re the only group of legacy console players who are still getting new games on our system. The PS3 has not wholly replaced the PS2 in the hearts of gamers or in the minds of publishers (unlike the Xbox360 and the Wii). But enough about the console—I want to talk about the game: I finished LucasArts and Krome Studio’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed last night.

It took me forever to find the time to play through this 15-hour shooter (will I ever have the time to play another 40-50 hour RPG?). And I found that I really enjoyed it—since I’m not generally much for shooters, that’s saying something. Of course, part of what I enjoyed was the Star Wars plot (the story introduces us to the formation of the Rebel Alliance between episodes 2 and 3), and the fact that, as a Sith/Jedi character, there is precious little actual shooting to be done.

The main character of the game is Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, the son of a rogue Jedi knight whom Vader confronted and killed just after Episode III. And you progress through the game with the full panoply of Dark Side Force powers at your disposal (and some of the new ones, like Maelstrom, are pretty cool!). The Apprentice starts out hunting and killing Jedi who survived Order 66 (some 15 years later), and Vader later orders him to form the Rebel Alliance (which it turns out is a plan not to topple the Emperor, but to root out his enemies).

The story sometimes surges ahead in places where it should not. There are sudden changes in the characters: Captain Juno Eclipse, the Apprentice’s pilot, for instance, seems to very suddenly fall in love with him. And the questions in the Apprentice’s own mind, about the Light and Dark, seem to arise too suddenly for me to be wholly comfortable with them.

The most interesting part to me, though, is something I’ve always thought about the Star Wars saga, and that has disturbed me. I can’t wrap my mind around a philosophy that says that certain actions—in this case certain uses of the Force, certain Force powers—are good or evil, Light or Dark, in and of themselves. Or, for that matter that certain emotions are inherently evil or lead down a slippery slope to Darkness. That’s what I like about this game, it blurs those lines (as do some the earlier games set post-Episode-VI). The Force Unleashed presents both a Light ending and a Dark ending, which the player chooses just before the game’s final battle. But both endings are achieved through using the Apprentice’s “Dark” powers and training. Which is what I’ve always thought: Using Force Lightning doesn’t make you evil—especially when you’re pointing it at Darth Vader in an attempt to save the leaders of the Rebel Alliance.

The Light ending is, of course, as always, the “canonical” ending, since all the print and electronic media tie-ins to Star Wars are canon. And I played the Light ending first. The nice part about the only real choice coming just before the final battle, is that I’ll only be playing the last level of the game again in order to see the Dark ending, but I’m thinking it would really mess up the storylines of Eps IV, V, an VI.

For the die-hard Star Wars fan, there is a good supporting cast, and a couple of surprise cameos. Figuring in the storyline are: Bail Organa, Garm Bel Iblis, the Emperor, Mon Mothma, and a teenaged Princess Leia. Cameos from: R2-D2 and Obi-Wan Kenobi. (The PS2 version of the game lacks the Darth Maul appearance that other platforms seem to feature.)

Overall, I was entertained by The Force Unleashed: Dark Side powers are always fun (I liked the Dark path in the Knights of the Old Republic games better, too, and the story was pretty good; at least it filled in some gaps.

Update: Played the other ending this evening. It was weak! There was clearly not a lot of thought put into the non-canonical ending. At least in KOTOR they put some effort into it. But in the Dark ending of The Force Unleashed, Vader’s dead, so there’s no way to get the story back on track, so no one gave it much thought. Oh well, I guess. (7:29 pm)