The Billy Has Landed

And so begins February, the hectic month of non-stop visitors. The first wave is boarding his flight out of LAX as we speak, which is too bad, because it was perfectly lovely having William here. He arrived on Friday around noon, and even though a class commitment had originally conspired to keep me from scooping him up at the airport, my schedule shifted around unexpectedly and the timing ended up pretty much perfect. This was much to the chagrin of one Becca Lear, who had fiendishly devised a scheme to abscond with William for the afternoon while I languished in an editing seminar, but alas, the righteous prevailed. Later that night, as I received stern lectures about “hogging the Billy,” I told Rebecca that there was some saying I couldn’t precisely recall about “snoozing” and “losing.”

Bill and I descended upon my Xbox 360 within a few hour’s time, which is wholly appropriate to our friendship, but certain wives were forced to cross their arms and tap their feet impatiently at this. Corelyn proved herself eternally the good sport this weekend, patiently allowing us to meander about in our own silly way, witholding comment at all times. Still, I can’t help but feel that Billy’s mistake is to give people like Cor and Becca, who prefer some level of human interaction in their recreational activities, far too much hope. He must learn, as I have, to gaze longingly into Ingmar Bergman film on a Friday night, just as everyone’s about to go out, and maintain a real consistency with this policy.

Some of you may know that the next entry in the “Halo” series is, in fact, an RTS (which is basically a video game version of “Risk” on a smaller scale with more micro-managing) called “Halo Wars,” built by the now defunct Ensemble Studios specifically for the 360. There are many reasons to be skeptical here: RTSes have never worked on consoles (you need to have the sensitivity of a mouse, and a control stick just doesn’t cut it), this is the first time anyone but the venerable Bungie has even touched anything “Halo,” Ensemble Studios was disbanded right after the game finished, etc. Nonetheless, curiosity makes ill-fated cats of us all, so Billy and I downloaded the free demo off of Xbox Live.

At first, I frowned gently. Okay, sure, the presentation was pure “Halo,” and the graphics were great, but Ensemble had clearly done nothing to alleviate the rubbery, molasses-slow response time of a control stick on a real-time battlefield. You have to understand: RTSes require leaping around a gigantic map from an isometric viewpoint, selecting a single, tiny unit from a mass of them, and sending him to an exact point, all within three seconds. With a mouse this is easy, but pushing a stick with your thumb is never going to be precise enough. Many developers have tried vainly to climb this mountain, and the only success so far has been “Tom Clancy’s EndWar,” because it uses voice command. When I found that my camera was sliding around with the same mushy clumsiness that had vanquished “Command and Conquer 3,” I began to give up hope.

But alas.

I had forgotten something very important: “Halo Wars” was designed only for the Xbox 360, and that makes it unique. Any other strategy game on any console was originally a PC game, because that damned control stick keeps new IPs from growing in the soil, and that means the core of the experience was built with a very different gameplay rhythm in mind. I also forgot that Ensemble Studios made “Age of Empires,” have been doing nothing but strategy games ever since, and are as good at RTSes as anyone alive. So of course, this gaggle of geniuses quickly identified that the problem was not the control stick, but the pace of a PC game mixed with a control stick. If you construct the entire experience, from how large the units are on the screen and how fast they move right down to map layouts and control schemes, with a specific console in mind, you can set the game to a pace that a control stick can easily manage. The funny thing is, you don’t have to make it slower than a PC strategy game, you just have to make it different.

Within about twenty minutes, Billy and I were hooting and hollering on my couch, so consumed by the sheer mastery of design on display that we forgot all else. “Halo Wars” is, in many ways, much simpler than most games of its ilk: you only need to collect one resource, buildings have predetermined slots where they can be constructed, and units can be commanded with only one or two buttons. But the more you play it, the more you realize that Ensemble really just trimmed the fat; they’ve been doing this long enough to know that it doesn’t really add that much to the experience to force you to collect lumber and gold, or assign individual units to gather resources, or to plant a building in some random spot. What’s left is nothing but main course, and what a meal it is. “Halo Wars” is, on a very basic level, fun. I don’t know how “fun” is accomplished exactly, but I know that it’s quite difficult, much like comedy.

So Mr. Cover and I vanished into this thing for hours, both on Friday and Saturday. It was like a tractor beam. We still managed to find time to venture out to a night club for some person’s birthday who I do not know. Everyone seemed to have a nice time, even though there were a ton of people we didn’t know, but it wasn’t really an earth-shattering time. Clubbing is a thing I only need to do once or twice a month, because many of the times it’s attempted, I think we find ourselves spending a lot of money, wearing a lot of uncomfortable clothes, bumping into a lot of people, nearly losing our hearing because they play the music so damned loud…and not really having that great a time. Sometimes it works, and when it does that’s wonderful, but I don’t really care to beat a dead horse every weekend just so I can be more like the people in “Gossip Girl.”

On Saturday, after more “Halo Wars,” we grabbed some lunch, met up with the sisters Lear, and took a tour of USC, trading off leader duties between myself and Rachel. I had been deliberately not telling Billy that the entrance to Norris Theater contains a gigantic exhibit called the “Sinatra Hall,” filled to the brim with memorobilia, so when he gazed upon it and flipped out like a six-year-old, I was quite delighted. Among other things, there was a picture of ol’ Blue Eyes sitting next to JFK, whom I am quite fond of, and we both geeked out. I later remarked, “It’s weird that I like JFK, but I’m going into entertainment, and you like Sinatra, but you’re going into politics.” Billy was amused.

We take all of our guests to El Cholo, the legendary LA Mexican restaurant, and even though Mr. Cover is not a man who admires tequila, he found himself with a margarita firmly in his pasty, Scott-Irish hands. We also ventured to the Arclight Theater, where we, true to the “Arclight experience,” missed our showing by two minutes and were refused admitance. We resolved to sit at the bar and drown our sorrows until about an hour later, when the next showing ran. Billy introduced me to a lager made by monks in some monastary somewhere called “Chimay,” and I can safely say it’s one of the best beers I’ve ever had. We then shuffled into “Push,” which had one really great telekenetic gunfight, and other than that was total crap. I remarked on the way out of the theater that the script needed three or four more drafts, because there were plenty of interesting threads that just hadn’t baked in the oven long enough. In particular, I wished the movie had focused more on “Pushers,” people who could implant false memories in your mind, and the ramifications of that. I loved the idea of spending a whole movie with a relationship between two characters, then finding out that the entire memory was fake, and how that would affect the audience. “Push” flirted with that idea, but didn’t have the balls to go through with it.

This morning, we had time only for breakfast before I had to deposit Billy at LAX for his flight. We sorely miss him already. Bring on the next round.