Something that’s always aggravated me to no end is when people claim that a book, film, painting, album, or other creative endeavor is free from criticism because it’s “art.” Critical immunity is something I’ve spoken about in the past, but I want to focus on the art world today.

I need to make something incredibly clear: art appreciation is subjective, but art itself is not. What most people fail to realize is that any piece of art, no matter the medium, still requires certain techniques in order to produce it. Those techniques are not opinions; they are merely processes subject to criticism just like anything else.

Take a film, for example. Your personal opinions on the overall product nonwithstanding…how was the acting? The editing? Sound design? Special effects? All of those are tried-and-true techniques that are taught, learned, and mastered. If a film is poorly edited, your comments on it must take that into account, otherwise you’re simply wrong. The same applies if a film has fantastic special effects, but you pan them because you didn’t like how they were used to advance the story. You’re incorrectly dumping your opinion on quantifiable techniques, rather than feelings toward the final product.

Criticism should be specific rather than generic. When it’s the latter, you’re often criticizing someone’s appreciation of the medium rather than actual details of a certain work within that medium. That has nothing to do with the work itself, and thus has no place in proper criticism of art.

“My constellation is THAC0. Get it?”

Much ado has been made about the impending fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. (“5th Edition” is not its official name as of yet; the project’s codename is “D&D Next.”) Aside from the expected rules changes, what’s really notable about this is that publisher Wizards of the Coast is crowdsourcing this edition of D&D. They’re attempting to take into account the various ups and downs players have experienced over the past few decades, especially the outrage over rule changes in the 3rd and 4th Editions. Using all of this fan-supplied information and a series of special playtests, their aim is to create a new, definitive form of D&D that’ll unite the warring camps and also bring in a lot more new players.

I can certainly understand longtime fans’ anger at major rules changes, especially the rapid ones during the 2000s. Aside from often throwing rules and strategies you were long familiar and comfortable with out the window, these changes meant your sourcebooks and stuff were now out of date and needed to be replaced. Sure, you didn’t have to go out and buy all of the new material, but you could usually forget about new products supporting the previous system. That’s a big problem, especially for gamers who’ve invested a lot of time and money into D&D. There’s a lot of players who simply quit playing, or moved on to more popular RPGs like Pathfinder.

As to how the D&D rule changes affected me personally, I had it a bit easier than most. I played a lot of D&D as a kid, but then fell out of the game for about twenty years. The reissued red box rekindled my interest in Dungeons & Dragons about a year ago. The game I’m currently playing in (as a tiefling wizard) is using 4th Edition rules and characters derived from the Essentials books. There’s a few players in our group who are new the game, and in my case, someone who hadn’t played in nearly two decades. As such, I wanted to start on the ground floor along with everyone else. I barely remembered the rules from Advanced D&D 2nd Edition (when I last played), so I didn’t mind the heavy revisions in 4th Edition.

Not only that, 4th Edition and its Essentials companion line made it easier for newbies and more advanced players to cooperate in the same game. That seems to be the modus operandi in Next, albeit to a much larger degree. Wizards of the Coast have implied that fans of rulesets as far back as 1st Edition will be able to comfortably play side-by-side with adherents of later versions, like 3rd Edition. That’s a pretty big gap in terms of playing styles.

All of this is a ways off, of course. If Next comes out in late 2013, for example, that’s certainly better than the ridiculous three-year span between 3rd Edition and its update, 3.5. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this new version hit shelves in 2014. All of the playtests and feedback required for a project of this magnitude will result in a long period of quality control, but if the end result is a superior product, then I have no problem waiting.

My current game will not be “upgrading” to Next when it comes out, to the best of my knowledge; our DM has a tremendous wealth of 4th Edition material which should keep us incredibly busy for years to come. I haven’t invested as heavily in 4th Edition as most players, but I’ve still purchased a considerable number of books and accessories in order to play and enhance the game. If moving to Next requires a complete overhaul of my D&D library just to play, I will not be pleased. Comments from Wizards of the Coast seem to indicate that this will not be the case, but we won’t know for sure until Next is released.

In the meantime, hopefully I can gain access to some of the playtests. My local hobby shop will almost certainly host a few Next Encounters games, too. Time will tell, but I think that Next could be just the shot in the arm that D&D needs.

(Now if only they’d bring back Dragonlance…)

As you may well know, my favorite television show of all time is Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I love all of the other Star Trek series as well. One of the franchise’s many hallmarks is its use of scientific terminology and jargon, often lumped into what’s informally known as “technobabble.”

This is commonly used by detractors as a way to shit on the show; opponents claim that instead of telling a solid story, Star Trek writers would always throw in some long, made-up words instead. (I’ve actually heard Doctor Who fans denigrating Star Trek for its technobabble. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!)

Star Trek enthusiasts are well aware that technobabble includes plenty of fictional stuff, to be sure; the warp engines in particular are the crown jewel. But without them, the show wouldn’t go anywhere, now would it? (No pun intended.) More importantly is the fact that Star Trek‘s technobabble includes just as much (if not more) real world science. Sometimes it’s technology already in use here in the modern age (e.g., fiber optic communication, touchscreens, solid state data storage). In other instances, it’s stuff that’s theoretical or in the very early stages now, but ends up being commonplace in the future era in which the various Star Trek series are set (e.g., soliton waves, wormholes, faster-than-light travel, directed energy weapons).

This makes perfect sense, as our scientific achievements grow every day. I don’t think I need to elaborate on the stuff created for Star Trek that became science fact in the real world as a direct result of the show, like communicators (cellphones), padds (tablet computers), replicators (3D printers) voice-activated computers, et cetera. Science fiction becoming science fact is nothing out of the ordinary, and Star Trek is a much larger contributor to that than most people realize.

Don’t get me wrong, when the technobabble on Star Trek is overdone, the plot often goes off the rails. But claiming that it’s all fictional, and Star Trek‘s sole claim to fame, is just a blatant lie.

My parents were notoriously anti-video games while I was growing up, so I never had an NES or Genesis or other home console. However, they saw fit to placate my desire for video games with something else that was incredibly popular in the 1980s and 1990s: handheld LCD games.

Believe it or not, I never owned any of the famed Nintendo Game & Watch series; my cousin had Balloon Fight, but playing that was about as far as I got. The LCD games I owned were all made by Tiger Electronics. I started with generic fare like Baseball and Bowling before moving into adaptations of popular console games, but I played the hell out of ‘em all the same. A few of my friends in elementary school had LCD games, too, so we’d often play them during lunch or recess, passing the games around so everyone could try them. The games were tough as nails, and more focused on pattern memorization than any real gameplay. While the other kids laughed at me and went home to play Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest on their NES, at least I had the LCD version to amuse me.

I owned a few others: Double Dragon, Gauntlet, and Karate King come to mind. Moving beyond the Tiger sphere, my brother had a few Acclaim and Konami LCD games, like NARC, Gradius, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Basketball (yeah, you read that right). But of course, my favorite LCD game should come as no surprise:

(photo from The Mechanical Maniacs)

And look, it even features the same crappy US boxart from the NES game! Sure, it sucked in comparison to the original Mega Man 2, but it was the only way at the time I could get my Mega Man fix whenever I wanted. Surprisingly enough, I never had the Mega Man 3 LCD game back then, which is a shame since the NES original remains my favorite video game of all time.

By the late 1990s, LCD games had dropped in popularity like a stone, since the Game Boy was cheap and games for it were plentiful. LCD games are still around, but most of them are far worse than you could imagine. They’re little more than shitty cash grabs found in the impulse buy sections of big-box retailers. The big exception to this rule, however, is in the board and puzzle game genres. Games like chess or sudoku are very hard to screw up, as the rules really haven’t changed; program them in, and you’re good to go.

I lost my collection of LCD games long ago, much to my annoyance. I poke around on eBay from time to time trying to find a deal on some of my old favorites, and I’ve managed to score worn copies of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Mega Man 2, and (finally) Mega Man 3. They’re often missing the battery door, but that’s an easy fix: I just bought some non-licensed Tiger games for a few bucks, and Frankensteined ‘em for spare parts.

In the early 2000s, I did manage to find a few of Nelsonic‘s old Nintendo wristwatch LCD games, like Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Surprisingly enough, they were rather cheap, and still in the boxes! (No, they weren’t knockoffs. I checked.) Their appeal didn’t last long, but they were still a cool novelty. I ended up trading them away for some other game, I’m sure. They just didn’t grab me the way the Tiger games did, despite the awesome Nintendo characters. (The tiny controls on a wristwatch didn’t help, either.)

With the underground popularity of “demakes” like Halo 2600 and Super Smash Land, I think the time is ripe for LCD adaptations of more popular games. C’mon, who wouldn’t want to play an LCD Portal or Uncharted?

I’m really getting tired of the “worst thing ever” consciousness that’s pervaded pop culture in recent years, where the thing in question could be a movie, album, book, video game, comic book story, et cetera.

I’m not talking about that dumb Comic Book Guy meme. That would be “Worst. Episode. Ever.”, which is completely separate yet still annoying. I mean the tendency of everday Internet dwellers and professional critics alike to dub something as the worst ever, when it is clearly not. (Sure, it’s possible for something recent to be the worst ever, but I’ve rarely if ever seen this.)

Further inflaming things is that they’ll label something the worst ever…until the following year, when something else becomes the worst ever. Wash, rinse, repeat. That clearly means that the preceding items weren’t nearly so bad, now were they?

For example, take this summer’s superhero film Green Lantern. It wasn’t great, but I’ve heard more than one critic dismissing it as “the worst comic book movie ever.”

Are you kidding me? Have these fools never seen schlock like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace or Batman & Robin? Even non-comic book fans could likely name five to ten superhero flicks off the top of their heads that make Green Lantern look like Citizen Kane.

This whole “worst ever” practice is blatant ignorance of and disregard for history. I understand that more often than not it’s either a) just the usual mindless bullshit from the average Internet troll, or b) a shameless ploy to pull in more page hits by making an inflammatory statement. In that case, I hereby declare this entry to be the worst blog post ever.

…until next year’s worst blog post ever.