Now that E3's come and gone for another year, I'm ready to enjoy the rest of my June by checking in with the Summer Games Done Quick charity event that begins tomorrow. I've been a little lax in my usual diligence to ensure the Giant Bomb Wiki is in fine shape for the event: the bare minimum is to make sure everything on the schedule has its own game page, so that the event's Twitch channel operators aren't caught short when it's time to change the stream notes, but I'll often get sidetracked sprucing up the pages or fixing its releases. Since it's starting tomorrow, I can work on it in brief sessions throughout the week, staying one day ahead.

There are many reasons to want to watch speedruns; they're fascinating in how much they've dissected the games they cover, down to all those little unintentional tricks and glitches, and I believe that if you have any interest in how games are built that there's a huge amount you can learn from watching the playthrough of someone who's completed that one game enough times that they can glide through it blindfolded (which happens a lot during GDQ). Another factor is how it introduces you to games you might not know about, which you could be inspired to play - if not in a speedrun context - after seeing them on fast-forward. However, the main reason I tune in every half-year is for the races: these can be wonderfully tense, where a single mistake can put a runner in last place for the rest of the run.

But in addition to all that, there's also the wonderful camaraderie of the event, how everyone is doing this for charity and applauds at every milestone or ooohs at every big donation. There's a lot of heartfelt moments and a sense of inclusiveness at these events that offer a balm in the midst of everything wretched that tends to be blamed on "gamers" throughout the year, a lot of which is earned by the toxic elements in our midst. Without putting too fine a point on it, there's more cause for a big, wholesome, magnanimous gaming event like this now more than ever, and it's always a welcome fixture on the calendar. If nothing else, it means there's at least one thing in summer to look forward to as after all my favorite ongoing shows (Legion, Archer, The Expanse) end their seasons this month.

Talking of things to look forward, y'all can look forward to reading the following (at your convenience, of course):

• The most significant news in terms of content is that part one of Trailer Blazer: E3 2018 is complete. This covers the first hundred trailers that were uploaded to the site during E3, and caps out somewhere towards the end of Sony's conference. I've still another 70 or so left, excepting the cases of multiple trailers for the same game, but I'm holding off on that for a week or so to let my batteries recharge. Turns out that goofing on trailers is hard work, sort of.
• The seventy-fifth Indie Game of the Week was Glass Masquerade, a casual and brief jigsaw puzzle game that was the tonic I needed after a hectic week. Nothing too remarkable in terms of gameplay here, but I really like the game's look and music, which can help a great deal in not only establishing the mood of your game but for this genre specifically can also mitigate the player's frustration and brainache. I can't begin to count the amount of puzzle games I dropped out of because little things about the game were annoying me while I was trying to concentrate. Just like in a restaurant, the service and ambience are often as vital as the food itself.
• The alternating Tuesday slot has flipped to the Sega Mega Drive again with Mega Archive Part II, and with it another fifteen games from early in the system's lifespan that have been analyzed, researched, screenshotted and updated in our wiki. I don't have any intention of covering the full width and breadth of the console this year: at the current pace I'll probably only see about the first third of its library. I'm thinking I might wait until I hit an important milestone - the end of 1990, say, or perhaps the introduction of a certain blue rodent that changed the system's fortunes for a while - and then see if I can supplant that slot with something else. I'm getting used to the idea of having a revolving slot in my blog schedule I can experiment with.

Addenda

Movie: Chinatown (1974)

I've been watching a lot of contemporary movies since I implemented this "one movie per week" rule for this year, but recent circumstances made me realize that it's probably due time I catch up with a lot of classic movies that tend to be included in "you haven't seen [BLANK]?!" type conversations. We all have our blind spots, after all, and the sheer amount of movies, TV, games and whatever media you prefer that get released these days means there are more gaps than ever. As to those circumstances I mentioned, those came from listening to the excellent Talking Simpsons podcast and their regular deep dives into the references and in-jokes the show made during its peak in the early 90s. They talk often about how a number of Simpsons scenes and jokes clicked for them once they'd watched the movies they pertained to later in life, so now I'm looking to fill a few gaps myself for... the sake of enjoying a cartoon more than I currently do? Well, it's an excuse as good as any.

Chinatown is a noirish private detective story set during 1937 but was inspired by the California Water Wars sometime in the early 10s and 20s. Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a former police detective who went into business as a successful private detective and is keen to keep his image and reputation clean, despite the fact that most of his cases seem to involve taking photos of cheating spouses. That's how the case of the movie starts: the wife of the chief engineer of the LA water department suspects he's having an affair, but of course there's a lot more going on beneath the surface. Still waters run deep, and whatnot.

I'll say going into this movie that I knew two things, the same two things I suspect most people know: that Jake's nose gets cut open at one point, and that the movie ends with the line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown". The former comes courtesy of Jake's snooping around, while the latter is a recurring metaphor that speaks to a certain case when Jake was still a cop that you only ever hear about in vague terms. I like that the film spends very little time in LA's Chinatown - in fact, it only shows up for the last five minutes and doesn't have much bearing on anything - and the characters instead use it as shorthand to refer to an event where everything goes wrong, hence the famous quote.

Another significant factor is just how dated the movie can be in spots, as might be expected of a 44-year-old movie. Most of that's a circumstance of the passage of time and the changing of social norms: there's a lot of jokes at the expense of "Chinamen", everyone smokes (a staple of noir, though slightly unusual to see now), and women are treated as largely disposable. The worst and most intentional bit of dating the movie actually comes from the combination of the movie's twist, which I won't go into too much except it involves the sexual assault of a minor, and the fact that the movie was directed by Roman Polanski. It's a little uncomfortable, the same way Manhattan has Woody Allen's character dating a child, given those directors' heavily alleged (or explicitly convicted) crimes. I'm not so much a proponent of "separate the art from the artist" than I am "this particular art was the work of dozens of people, most of whom aren't creeps", but even so Chinatown's pedigree is spoiled because of that unfortunate history.

All the same, I thought it was a decent enough flick. I have trouble labelling exactly what it is - it's a noir in the sense that it's set in an era where everyone wore fedoras and suits, there's a dame what did them wrong (or perhaps not), and it doesn't end on a happy note, but noir also refers to a very specific brand of cinematography that this movie eschews for the most part. I suppose a thriller in noir clothing, perhaps, though I'm not really enough an expert in shooting film to make the distinction.

But hey, the next time I watch "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" from Season 5 of The Simpsons, when Homer says "forget it Marge, it's Chinatown" I'll know exactly what he's referring to. I mean, if I hadn't already known.

Game: The Last Guardian (2016)

I've not played much of Fumito Ueda's latest adventure, but it has all the hallmarks of his inimitable style, from the regularly booming intonation of his recurring invented language to the subdued use of light and shadow (going back to that noir business again). The mechanics all revolve around Trico this time, the enormous dragon-dog thing that's actually a lot creepier than I was expecting, and mechanically the game feels like it sits directly in the middle of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus: a lot of the game flow involves moving from one area to the next with your buddy in tow after solving an environmental puzzle or two, a la ICO, while the combat tends to involve factoring in the presence of an enormous creature including the ability to hold onto them. Of course, the huge beast in this case is your ally, but some of that grip tech and the way it lumbers around the environment feels very SotC.

It might also be fair, or at least less reductive, to say that the game feels wholly its own thing too. I've played a few games where your companion is a larger entity that does most of the fighting - the most obvious of which would be that Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom game from a little while ago - but few match the level of versatility that Trico offers in its animations and how it factors into solving puzzles. A lot of development time has evidently been put towards making Trico feel like a real living being also, with the way it jostles around for somewhere comfortable to perch or sticks its head through gaps to follow your progress when you're temporarily apart. There's some sort of childrens story allegory at work about a fearsome monster who is nonetheless endearing once you've befriended it, and I hope to see the game continue to find new ways to integrate his presence into the environmental and platforming puzzles.

That's about all I can remark on with how little progress I've made so far, but I hope to have a more comprehensive take on the game once I've completed it later this week. I'll end by saying that the trophies are bad and I won't be pursuing them, but I might see if I can feed Trico all those barrels because that animation of tossing one his way and watching him snatch it out of the air (or stare at its flying form obliviously until it gets hit in the face by it, like a real dog might) never gets old.