Requiem Part Two

Apparently, E3 is dead.

Or it is for game journalists, who miss the free swag, extra advertising dollars on their sites, free booze, feeling like they're closer to actually being in the game biz, and the free booze.

Untold is how much better life is for developers, and how much better games are. Last year was the first year that there was no E3, and it was a *stellar* year for games. Think that's a coincidence? Maybe not as much as you think.

When E3 was still "alive", we, the game developers, had to start thinking about it in January. The day after Christmas vacation was the first day to a long slog to get an E3-quality playable level ready. As May drew closer, the pressure mounted. The publisher wanted a basically finished game in the form of a playable level. All the graphics tweeks needed to be in. It needed to be fully optimized because you were stuffing as much crap in there as possible. All the programmers, all the artists got sucked in to making that one level. The programmers wrote hacky bandages to keep the demo together: hacks that would later have to be taken out or they would cause serious bugs. Artists would create fantastic effects that only the finest machines could run so the look of the demo could be competitive.

In other words, you would lose 4 months development time on almost everything else in the game just so you could make the demo. Further, the E3 crunch was always much worse than the crunch you would have to do for actually shipping the game. At the end of the game, all the assets are in, all the gameplay set. You're just fixing bugs. For E3, there were no testers, just management telling you there needed to be more excitement, better art, and less embarrassing crashes. It was unquantifiable.

Now, there's no E3. No rush to get the demo out. No big, fat speedbump that totally unbalanced your game and caused long-lasting programming bugs that would frequently cause the hair to fall out of the programmers who realized at the end of the product that their Jenga-like pile of code was built on a faulty block of code written by a junior programmer at 1:00am in the morning three days before the convention.

Yeah, the reviewers can complain, but you know what, they certainly don't complain when a Bioshock, a GTA4 and a Portal all land in their laps in a 6 month period.

Requiem

So, this week, I'm going to forgo the usual best comic post and talk specifically about Final Crisis: Requiem.

This issue is basically a eulogy for the Martian Manhunter, who was killed in the latest "Crisis" series.

For a couple of years now, rumor has had it that the Martian Manhunter has barely escaped death several times as DC editorial had put him on the "acceptable to sacrifice for increased drama's sake" list. Overall, these rumors pretty much prepared me for this eventuality. Now that it's here, I find that I'm underwhelmed in the...uh...execution of his execution, as it were.

It seems to me that the past couple years were a real low point for the character. The miniseries they spawned during "52" was abysmal. A retooling of his look and personality during that series alienated (heh) him even further from his fans, as he became less human looking, dressed like an extra in a Hellraiser flick, and lost any of the gentleness fans came to expect from him as he became more "dark" and "edgy". DC also placed him in "Salvation Run" with little or no effect. For me, J'onn J'onzz died when they redid his look.

Final Crisis: Reqiuem has some touching parts to it. Many people find the book amazing. For me, a long time fan who always found him to be the best character in the JLA, it felt like damning with faint praise. It felt like a gimmick and an admittance by DC that they couldn't write this character for squat. It felt like too little, too late.

Toward the end of the book, Tomasi, the writer, does a kind of cliche Star Trekky thing and retells the story of the Manhunter's life in the format of a kind of "life download" to those he felt were his best friends. It is here, in the retelling of his adventures, that we see how DC has managed to mishandle him and do him disservice as a character throughout the age of "Modern Comics".

The Manhunter's triumphs were always more about his depth and his wisdom than in his battles. His value was as a mirror to humanity: an outsider who could see the irrationality of his friends and make them aware of it, and possibly be jealous of the ability of his friends to be unaware of how precious they were. If Superman symbolizes the force of good, and Batman symbolizes the force of Justice, the Manhunter symbolized the force of Friendship.

This is why the Manhunter has never been very successful by himself. Yes, he's a loner. He holds himself separate from the people around him, but his strongest performances were always in how he related to other people, not in how extremely over-powered he was.

So, for me, Final Crisis: Requiem was a waste of money. Yes, it pulled on the heart strings. But, for me, all it does is show how little DC tried to make this character work and how little they valued a character that had much more potential than they ever imagined.