Holiday in Zenobia
This April Susi, I and a bunch of our pals left for an eagerly awaited and well deserved diving holiday in Cyprus. Our destination was the city of Larnaca, or more exactly the wreck of a 172 meter long ro-ro ferry Zenobia, which is one of the world’s top ten wreck diving locations. Mv Zenobia was built in 1979 in Sweden and it sank on its’ maiden voyage in 1980 after the shipboard computers malfunctioned and filled the ballast tanks with water. The ship sank at a place where the sea bottom is 42 meters deep. It’s lying on the seabed on its side, with the starboard side reaching up to 16-18 meters. The visibility is about 20-50 meters and there is very little current, so it’s like made for both beginning and more experienced divers.
The orientation and briefing map of Zenobia.
Our guide Joey and Susi, during a briefing for the day's dives.
We had a pretty diverse group with us. First of all there was our instructor Jukka with hundreds of dives, Susi, Hakkis and I with our 100-120 dives and Jori and Ville with an AOWD and a couple of specialties under their belt. We had to do the PADI Wreck Diver specialty and I can hardly think of a better place for it. Jukka did the theory for us and we ended the first evening with cocooning half of Jukka’s and Hakkis’ hotel room in a nylon line while practicing how to use the reels. Our actual guide on the wreck and the course dives was Joey from a local dive center Easy Divers (or Ezdivers, they seem to write the center name in two different ways).
(See the full Flickr photoset)
Navigating from the bedroom to the kitchen.
IN AND OUT OF THE SHIP
Zenobia is undoubtedly the most interesting wreck I’ve dived in so far when it comes to its diversity. You get really massive and great views outside and inside the ship there’s plenty to discover and explore, even some really hard places nobody has yet gone into. We started it off easy, of course. The first dives were down the buoy line and across and around the ship, with a peek inside the easier indoor spaces. The deck of the ship was full of articulated trucks when it sank and now they are lying in a massive jumble on top of each other, some still fastened to the deck that is almost vertical.
Yes, that truck is hanging on a wall.
The visibility was rather good, which made the scenery look really massive. Imagine floating in the air 20 meters high and looking down at huge shipboard structures and large lorries thrown around like kids’ toys – and being able to “fly” around them almost as you please.
Floating over the wreckage.
The indoor spaces we explored were the bridge and the cafeteria of the ship. On the bridge most of the instruments had been taken over by marine life, but you could still see wires, computers, cables and electronics that were recognizable. The cafeteria, or rather the restaurant, was a study in mindblowingly cool perspectives. It was actually the ship’s main restaurant that took the whole front part of the ship, from port to starboard. Imagine a ship’s restaurant like that, then flip it 90 degrees and imagine yourself floating in the highest point, looking down. On the light coming in through the scenic windows we could see the poles that used to hold the ropes for queues, still bolted to the deck; the counter was still intact, the large coffee machines were there and even the carpeting was still like new, apart from a slight case of algae and other growth.
Swimming through the bridge.
DEEPER INTO THE WRECK
On the later dives we went far deeper into the wreck. There were two covered car decks and we visited the upper one a couple of times, going through some other structures of the ship on the way. There’s an area the divers call “the accommodation”, which is like made for practicing buoyancy control. It’s right under the ship’s hull, so you can peek through windows on your “ceiling” and see up to the surface. It used to be a passageway with some cabins, but most of the cabin walls have broken away into a massive jumble on the bottom of the area. What is left is a vertical zigzag, where you have to go up and down all the time in a controlled way.
The accommodation area is perfect for buoyancy training control.
Parts of the cabins were still recognizable, like this washroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower.
We did some of the penetrations with reel and a line, some without. There were some minor “interesting situations”, such as primary lights going out, weight belts coming loose and people getting slightly lost or disoriented, but nothing serious happened and it was great to see that everybody handled even these minor emergencies calmly and efficiently. All in all our guide Joey did a great job arranging dives so that they were enjoyable and just challenging enough for all of us, from the guys with 20 dives to the ones with several hundred.
Squeezing down into small holes.
For me the most interesting part mentally was a dive where we went through a very narrow corridor inside the superstructure of the ship. The corridor used to be a stairwell, now obviously on its side. It was approximately one meter high and wide and getting there required some maneuvering. Our guide and the less experienced divers went first, so the water was already quite silty when I got down there. I had just thought that “ok, this is going smoothly” when I managed to snag my flipper heel fastener on something and get a big bubble of air to my dry suit trouser leg (which means I started turning feet up in a narrow corridor). It took some maneuvering to correct, which of course caused a whole lot of rust flakes and other silt to rise up. When I was back in control, I realized I had lost the line, but a bit of looking around revealed that it was next to my feet a meter lower than I had though. After that it was the matter of going through a tunnel with a visibility of 30 cm, following a white nylon line which was the only indication of how to get out, 30 meters deep and surrounded by tons and tons of rusting iron. One of these “what the hell am I doing – and how can this be this cool and exhilarating” moments in life.
Careless and even careful movement, and even the air bubbles you breathe out causes silt to mix with the water. In case of a wreck it's often rust flakes, algae and mud. At the worst you can't really see your hand right in front of your face.
In the car decks the trucks were in a far better shape, but unfortunately my light and camera weren’t good enough to get any proper large scale photos of them. Imagine, again, being on a car deck filled with trucks and someone tilting it 90 degress. The trucks are in big heaps and stacks, some of them surprisingly intact. You can still make out the colors of the seats and find all kinds of small items. I peeked into the sleeping cabin of one truck. It still had a mattress and a cover, a small white pillow with Arabic writing against the wall – all in all it looked like the driver had just stepped out for a smoke or something. Beautiful in an eerie way.
A view into a cockpit. That thing in the middle is a seat, with the dashboard in front of it.
Most of the cargo of the trucks is still identifiable. For example there there’s apparently a truck down in the seabed loaded with eggs, some of which are still intact. We didn’t see that one, but right outside the covered decks there is a truck with the back covered with bones. Some people say that the truck was transporting meat, but others say it was live animals. For me it looked like an open truck used to transport livestock, though. I could see no refridgeration equipment or other signs that this would have been a meat truck. Well, saving panicking animals in the middle of a night from a listing ship is not easy…
Animal bones.
Our most demanding dive was in the last day when we went to the engine room of the ship. Jori and Ville came with us to the doorway that was at around 39 meters, but didn’t follow us in. That was the deepest dive I’ve done so far and the engine room was well worth seeing. We went there by swimming through a tunnel between truck wrecks and the deck and ducked in through a small inspection hatch. On the top of the engine room there was something that looked like an air pocket, but which was apparently mostly oil. The main oil supplies and the fuel was pumped out of the ship, but you can’t completely clean all the trucks and every nook and cranny of a ship that size. Rising into an oil pocket is generally not a good idea – not the least because oil is a total bitch to try and clean off your equipment.
There's still some oil escaping from the wreck. The black globules seeping out through the metal and rising to the surface look really weird.
Then came the day I got mugged by fish. Some people feed these fellows and as I plonked down on the ship's side, they thought I had food. The fish were the size of one or two hands and there was so many of them I had real difficulties to see where the guide and the rest of our group was.
Some of the lifeboats were still attached and one of them was more or less intact.
FUN IN THE CITY
We had two dives per day, so we had a big part of the afternoon and the whole evening to do whatever we wanted. Usually this boiled down to going to the hotel room, washing up the equipment, going out of an ice cream and gin tonic, and in the evening going somewhere to eat ourselves silly. Diving trips and either cultural travel or partying don’t really mix: you tend to be far to tired after a day out in the sea to travel too far, and you can’t really get hammered in a night before a dive – or necessarily stay awake to do so if you are two days into the trip already.
The post-dive ice cream and gin tonics.
The tomb of Lazarus
This didn’t really matter. We went totally overboard with meze tables almost every evening, eating so much that we could manly just stumble back to the hotel to sleep it off before the next day’s dives. The only cultural things we did was to stumble on the Church of St. Lazarus and visit it, and to go see the Pierides Foundation Museum, both of which were interesting places to see – and a handy distance from our accommodations.
At the hotel pool. No swimming for Jukka until the water temperature is checked with a dive computer.
ASHCAPE FROM CYPRUS
Of course our trip happened right at the same time with the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupting in Iceland and covering most of the Northern Europe with ash that caused Finland to close its airspace. We weren’t terribly worried about this, though, since most of us were on at least somewhat flexible schedule. As it turned out, our travel agent Finnmatkat handled the situation in a really professional and efficient way, causing us to be home just one day late. We got this call about Sweden having opened Arlanda airport and that we should get ready to leave within a few hours. We were herded into a plane, which almost had to wait on the tarmac for four hours for a slot, but they managed to negotiate us up in the air after only about 45 minutes of waiting. The plane had been on the road for five days without visiting Finland, so they started to be a bit short of drinks, foods and such, but this didn’t really show to at least us as passengers.
In Arlanda we walked through a terminal with a couple of hundred really pissed of people that were sitting on the baggage reclaim conveyor belts. Their guide did this sheepish announcement through the PA about not being able to find a hotel, so everybody had to wait in the airport ’till five in the morning. Meanwhile we walked to our busses, got whisked to a hotel near Silja Line ferry terminal and got a few hours of shut eye in a proper bed before waking up for the ferry to Finland.
All in all, kudos to Finnmatkat’s guys and gals. The guides were upbeat and friendly even with all the stress and almost everything went really smoothly.
FUN FOR ALL AGES
If you like wreck diving or want to try it, I can heartily recommend going to see Zenobia. It provides a very easy, yet impressive environment for many skill levels. You don’t even need to go inside, there’s plenty to see just staying in OWD certification depths and outside of the ship. I’ll certainly be going back, now that I know what to expect and where I want to go next.
Radium Age Apocalyptic Fiction – Getting Rid of Writers’ Block
Part of my new year’s manifesto was to get rid of a long time writers’ block that has been plaguing my fiction writing ambitions. Recently, thanks to my pal Ripa, I ran into a micro fiction contest hosted by Hilobrow.com. The idea was to write 250 word long apocalyptic story set in the radium age, meaning roughly between the years 1900 and 1935. So, I grabbed my laptop, headed off to one of my favourite bars, grabbed a pint and set to work.
And yes, it was worth it – didn’t win the competition, but got into the top three. Mine can be found here, and also below.
****
The windows of the zeppelin’s bridge were opaque with frost and rime. The captain of the airship stood half out of the cabin door on the walkway, shouting instructions to the pilot. Sudden gusts of arctic wind made the slowly descending airship sway and their howl fought with the roar and whine of the ship’s engines.
Professor Väisälä sat on a bench in the back of the bridge, trying to stay out of the way.
The sun winked out, leaving the widows milky white instead of painfully bright panes of golden light. There were shouts, the air anchors were lowered and the ship lurched when they caught.
“Arctic circle plus ten, approximately 20 kilometers out of the former city of Rovaniemi”, the navigator intoned.” Väisälä stepped out to the catwalk outside the bridge to survey the shipwreck, which spanned hundreds of meters of the shadowy arctic landscape.
The wreck of the previous expedition had been spotted by the steam plume of their zeppelin’s Fermi-pile, which was still melting through the ice. Parts of the airship FZ Aino still hung on the kilometer high ice wall that loomed over Väisälä’s ship. The captain scratched his beard covered with hoar. “In the night, with the snowstorm, it must have looked like a cloud bank.”
Professor Väisälä let out a wavering sigh. “But they have proved the theories and confirmed the terrible conclusions. The holocene is over, and the sixth ice age is upon us. God save us all.”
Games Are Growing Up – Case: Heavy Rain
I’ve been a gamer since 1983 when I got my Commodore 64, and since 2000 I’ve been amongst other things a professional gaming journalist. There is one thing about games that has started to irritate me more and more as the time has passed: although the gamers, the game industry and everybody in between is clamoring that the gaming is not just a hobby for kids anymore, story-wise almost every game seems to be written for kids or fratboys, or at the best case for “the average consumer”.
Stop the press - there are tasteful sex scenes in games!
Hold on, you say, there’s plenty of games with an 18+ age limit, so there’s plenty of games for adults, right? Well, yes – if you define “adult content” to mean boobs and blood, and even on that front games are horribly handicapped on the boobs side of the issue. Go on, list all the games that handle sex and relationships in a non-dramatic, non-comical and mature way, I dare you. True, Mass Effect had a tasteful super soft-core sex scene, Dragon Age: Origins handled hetero and gay romances in a very nifty way and several games, such as the first Still Life, Hitman: Blood Money, Gears of War 2 (the scene) and The Darkness have some sequences that makes violence feel downright nasty and horrible. The depiction of violence as a bad thing hasn’t got that much press, but holy hell, mention sex in a video game and both the mainstream and gaming media are on fire. Surprisingly the moral panic of mainstream press over for example Mass Effect was often far less embarrassing to read than gaming press, which was far to often on the level of “OMG GAMEZ HAZ BOOBZ”. Way to go, branding gaming as a hobby for adults.
Now, compare and contrast with, say, movies or books. ”This movie is very progressive, the main character has sex with another character in it!” “Well, this book is even more mature and progressive, since the character has gay sex!”
Yeah.
An important point to note is that I’m not actually ragging on the makers of these games. I’ve enjoyed them a lot and I’ve been very happy that the guys in Bioware have included such controversial (for a game) stuff in their writing. I just finished Mass Effect 2 and I was blown away by the excellent space opera storyline and how well certain characters were written. Nevertheless, it makes me sad to realize that we are still in a point where the epitome of progressiveness in mainstream A-list games is a bisexual elf assassin.
I could rag about the most common game characters being cardboard cutouts of stereotypical and juvenile B-movie characters, the lack of real everyday heros (playing a construction worker who turns into a super soldier after the tutorial doesn’t count), and the fantastic settings and the need for traditional gameplay detracting from the moments of good writing, but maybe I’ll start heading towards the point.
The thing is, most story driven games can be compared to summer blockbuster movies. Lots of effects, superficial insights, lots of explosions and a producer being worried that if there’s more than three minutes of dialogue or an iota of insight or actual fucking sense, the viewer will get bored. Most games that fall outside of this can be compared to run of the mill Hollywood crazy comedies or splatter. It’s extremely easy to find and play games that are equivalents to great scifi action like Aliens, pulp action like Indiana Jones, horror like Evil Dead, shootouts like Die Hard movies, and so forth. This is of course great, since I enjoy both those kinds of movies and those kinds of games.
BUT.
So, where is the Requiem for a Dream of gaming?
Occasionally, I’d like to play Eyes Wide Shut, Requiem for a Dream, Pi, Shawshank Redemption, Gran Torino, Once We Were Warriors, Mulholland Drive, Joyluck Club or the motherfucking Citizen Cane. By this I don’t mean I’d like to play a licensed game from any of those movies. I mean games that do the same thing on their own merits; games that give the same emotional impact, tell a good story, and do the same thing in a game context that those movies did on their own medium. In addition to action, adventure and horror I want to play historical drama, romantic comedy, black and white art games and all those other genres that drive an average Halo 3 fanboy right out of the room.
The game industry has tried, but apparently they just don’t trust their medium. They license movies like Godfather and try to make games of them, which feels like watching a cargo cult take form: there’s this grand phenomenon of movies and books with great storytelling above us, so if we’ll try and emulate it with character names and polygons, we can steal a fragment of their glory. At the best what pops out is a good game that happens to have a same name and some characters from the movie, but mostly playing them is like watching a demented serial killer with no social graces trying to attend a cocktail party wearing a celebrity’s skin as a leotard.
DOING THINGS RIGHT(ISH)
There have been some games that have managed to give me the vibe that I’m playing something that falls outside of the Hollywood cow cud comfort zone. I already mentioned Still Life, which was a positive surprise for me on the level of dialogue, how it made violence feel very nasty and the general vibe of the game. The Darkness managed to have some surprisingly disturbing and adult moments in it, considering the fact that the main character is a Mafia hitman with four heart devouring tentacles. The earliest game that gave me the adult vibe was the ages old adventure game Dreamweb, which skipped several adventure game conventions of the time and even had a graphic sex scene in it.
There’s also plenty of good and smart writing in games, something that will be unfortunately glossed over because it’s wrapped in a lacklustre shooter. A very good example of this is Bioshock 1 & 2, which as games are run-of-the-mill pipeline shooters, but where the concept and the writing are truly great. I simply love the idea of a rabid libertarian founding his idea of an utopia in an art deco 50′s city under the sea, and seeing it fall down because of base human nature – not to mention the counter effect of a psychologist who very much disagrees with the self-centered ideas of libertarianism. Another game I really enjoyed was Bully, which behind all the moral panic is a very atmospheric and even warm dark comedy about a very eventful school year of a problem youth.
Then, there was Fahrenheit, which got me hooked from the minute one. The game started with the main character in a diner bathroom with a body of a man he had apparently killed, with no memory what had happened. The game utilized art movie style split screens, where the player could see a police officer come into the diner and it was clear he had to clean up the body before the police decided to use the loo – and so on. The game managed to create a feel of a weird and arty mystery movie for quite a long time – and then went completely to hell, when the creators obviously lost the belief that they can do a serious game and started dropping in silly fantasy elements. I was lucky: I was halfway through the game when I lost my game saves, and before I could start playing it again, I heard about the ending being horribly stupid and never actually played it all the way through. Nevertheless, the beginning of Fahrenheit was a very impressive experience for me, and when I heard they are making another game called Heavy Rain, it definitely caught my attention.
THE HEAVY RAIN EXPERIENCE
(No spoilers here)
Heavy Rain is a serial killer mystery, which draws heavily on noir and drama. There are four main characters, none of whom are exactly the ordinary videogame stereotype. The first character is a family father and the first half an hour or more of the game is about creating the setting and teaching the player the ropes of the game. This is done by having the character wake up, do his morning chores, wait for his wife and kids come home, playing with the kids and going to a mall. By this point an average gamer is disgusted and bored with the game, and good riddance to him. What this does is it sets a stage for the rest of the story, which manages to be dark, cynical, cruel but also very compassionate.
In gaming terms Heavy Rain is an adventure game driven by quick time events. For the non gamers, the latter is a term for a mechanic where the game flashes you a name of a controller button and you’ll have to press it within a time limit. It’s a bit more complicated than that with Heavy Rain, since you get to use the sticks and tilt the motion sensing controller, but that’s the basic gist of the thing.
Let it be known that I fucking hate QTE:s, because mostly they are on the lines of “press X not to die”, as Yatzhee so well puts it. In Heavy Rain it doesn’t work like that, though. For example in a fight hitting or missing the cues steers the fight into a certain direction and one miss doesn’t mean you’ll lose the whole thing. You can miss quite a many of them and still come out on top, although battered and mangled. Then again, the playable characters CAN die, and if that happens, that’s it for that character for the rest of the story. It doesn’t end the game, it just alters the plotline – as do many of the player’s other choices, successes and failures.
It's nice to see a real everyday hero, who doesn't turn into a super soldier after the tutorial.
And what is the story about? It’s about the father’s love for his children, a search for a peace of mind, a story of another character’s love for his sibling and yet another’s fight against his addiction, all wrapped up in tasteful and well written and directed plot about a serial killer – who, for a change, isn’t an overly elaborate Saw-like clown, but a real person. I started playing Heavy Rain on Saturday morning and in the morning hours of Sunday finished it with one of the most unhappy endings you can get in the game. The experience left me stunned, melancholy and needing a hug. In the morning I was still feeling a bit blue, in good way – like when you see a really touching movie the last thing in the evening and stay tuned to the mood even in the morning.
The term “interactive movie” is a swear word with gamers, and for a very good reason, since most products tagged like that are horrid crap. Heavy Rain is the first game I would say is truly an interactive movie, and makes the term look good. What made it a better experience for me than a movie is the fact that instead of a couple of hours the experience stretched to cover a whole day, and moreover I can play it again with a different outcome – and hopefully reach a happier ending where more of the characters stay alive and sane. I practically never play games again after I’ve finished them once, and as a rule I don’t watch movies twice either. This is the first media experience where I really can’t wait to get back to it, to see it again twice or thrice.
Press X not to die.
There’s a whole lot of hype in the previous, but no, the game doesn’t walk on water. Mikki wrote a nice rundown about the game’s technical and gameplay fumbles. There were certainly some immersion breaking problems, such as a horrible difficulty navigating through crowds, the characters sliding around in a stupid way, some of the control symbols being obstructed by the characters, and so on. They were a bit irritating, but in the end they were just technical problems. There was one sequence of the game that felt just silly and… well, GAMEY in a sense that stuck out of the rest of the experience like five minutes of Pac Man in middle of Casablanca – and it didn’t help the controls weren’t very helpful there either. Also, some of the voice talent could have done a better job, and especially the inner monologue of the characters was far to often the inner monotone, and very soulless writing at that.
Nevertheless, by and large Heavy Rain was just the kind of stuff I’ve been looking for in the games. Strong storytelling with no fantastic elements, no dumbed down characters, delightfully few attempts to make the game “interesting for the average gamer” (there are some unnecessary fight scenes and boob shots, but not so many that they become irritating), characters who felt like people and not characters, and adult subject matter, such as everyday people who don’t turn into super soldiers to fit the game, dealing with family life, and small and banal problems and troubles.
Quantic Dream and David Cage: you have the engine, you have the tools and the experience. Now – there’s a big bunch of us who want MOAR.
DISCLAIMER
I have to underline, I really do love playing most of the modern games, as much as I love watching trashy action, horror, scifi and fantasy, and I think gaming is going to a better direction. I also understand that a whole lot of the games being the michaelbay-jerrybruckheimer action fests they are is out of the actual game designers’ hands, because the publisher doesn’t want to take a risk with niche games. I can only imagine the fight Quantic had when they were pitching a game like this to Sony, a game that didn’t have a single point that’s appealing to the average gamer. I’m also delighted to see that more and more game studios are paying more attention to the storylines and the mood for the game.
Now I’m just waiting for the industry to take the next hurdle and learn to be low key. You don’t have to make stories like all the gamers were sixteen year old ADHD patients who get bored if there’s no firefight or boobies in the game every three minutes. Blood and gore is not the only way to be disturbing, and it’s not even very effective anymore. Relationship plot lines don’t have to be high school drama to be interesting, and sex scenes don’t have to pander to the teenagers or be tee-hee funny. Everyday people can be interesting without turning into dual pistol wielding action heros because the bad corporation/military leader killed their wife/brother.
I guess that if I had to boil this rant down to one sentence, it would be this: dear game industry, please skip the action/adventure and horror shelves of the video rental store for a while and go browse the drama section for a change.
Elsewhere
How Heavy Rain Delivers and Fails in the Process – SiliconANGLE
