Getting off on Inglorious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds was a movie I liked quite a lot, and I think it's a lot more complex than most critics--even ones who liked it--care to admit. My biggest contention with popular views of the film is that Tarantino's portrayal of the Nazis is somehow intended just for sadistic laughs. Although this is certainly how the film was advertised (at least in the U.S.) I don't think the film upon viewing bares out anything so simple.

The way I read Basterds (and its critical reception) is that it intentionally sends mixed signals to the audience about how you're supposed to respond to its violence, and people find this so confusing they tend to respond by filtering out any complex feelings it generates, falling back instead on simplistic assumptions about Tarantino's intentions that the film itself doesn't support. Tarantino's Nazis are not remotely cartoonish. They are all complex characters with subtle psychology, and they remind me more of the Nazis in Paul Verhoeven's WWII films (Soldier of Orange, Black Book) than what we normally get in Hollywood movies.

Tarantino likes violence, clearly. He gets off on it and expects his audience to as well. But he's also proven over and over again in the course of his career that he is a genuine artist trapped in the body of a genre nerd. He has always seemed a lot more interested to me in complex human characters than in getting off on violence. When he has a choice between the two he opts for interesting characterization every time.

Honestly, who would think the scene where Eli Roth kills the Nazi with the baseball bat was just about getting off on his death? Why was he such a human character? I love the moment when Roth says (pointing to his medal) "What did you get this for, killing Jews?" and he responds stoically "No... for courage." The Nazi is arguably right, and he's already much more human than Roth's character is. So what am I supposed to feel about that? Is this scene really just about nothing more than the guilty thrill of justifiable violence? I don't see how you could come to such a conclusion without ignoring most of what's happening on screen. There are obviously some moments (I wouldn't call any of them full-fledged scenes) where the cold brutality of the Basterds is presented comically, sure, but even those moments to me say more about the Basterds than they say about the Nazis.

Considering that the Basterds are basically minor characters in the film, and considering that most of the movie is intelligent people--half of whom are Nazis--trying to out smart each other in tension-filled conversation, I find the accusations of anti-Nazi violence porn especially weird. They seem based far more on the ads for the movie and Tarantino's reputation as a violence hound than on the movie itself.

Inglorious Basterds is defensible ultimately because it draws some pretty obvious connections between violence, entertainment, and propaganda. These connections are so explicit the fact that the majority of critics seemed to have missed them feels like a kind of mass hypnosis to me, some bizarre inability on the broader population to review the film, not the filmmaker. The whole last section of Basterds concerns the showing of a Nazi propaganda film, Nation's Pride, in which we are treated to endless shots of Nazis in a movie theater laughing and cheering as they watch Americans getting killed. It doesn't take a brilliant mind to relate this back to earlier in the film when we were encouraged to laugh at the exact same sort of shit.

All this is compounded by the fact that Nation's Pride is shot and edited more like a modern American action movie than a Nazi-era German propaganda film. When we get off watching Nazis die, is it that different than when they got off watching their enemies die in their own films? When I found myself laughing at one of the shots and then Tarantino cut to a giant close-up of Hitler laughing at the same shot, I'd found my answer: when you laugh at this kind of violence, you laugh with Hitler.

Tarantino remains an intriguing filmmaker because this sort of ironic commentary seems entirely intentional, yet that doesn't seem to negate him (or us) getting off on violence in certain circumstances.  While I wouldn't go so far as to say Inglorious Basterds is anti-violence, it clearly isn't afraid to embrace the complexities and contradictions generated by its own voyeuristic thrills. It's a much more complicated film than people seem to want to give it credit for, just like Tarantino is a much more complicated filmmaker than people seem to want to believe.

Tracing the Design Heritage of Demon's Souls

My fascination with Demon's Souls has spurned a quest to discover where the hell its brilliance came from. Most people say it's a descendant of King's Field, the cult first-person RPG series Demon's Souls's developer, From Software, did some years ago. I have only really played one King's Field game, King's Field: The Ancient City for PS2, and not for very long. Although there is some resemblance, I think another series, one that isn't as well-known outside Japan, may be the real ancestor. 

Shadow Tower was another first-person RPG series by From Software, one I'd never heard of until I began poking around the Internet. Some descriptions I read made them seem a lot more like Demon's Souls than King's Field, so I tracked them down to see for myself.

There are two games in the series: Shadow Tower for the PS1 and Shadow Tower Abyss for the PS2. I managed to grab them both off ebay and played each for a few hours. Shadow Tower is available in English. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't. This a shame because Abyss is by far the superior game, and the one that is, I feel, much closer in style, atmosphere, and gameplay to Demon's Souls.

The first game is okay. The controls are the clunky non-freelook ones common to many Japanese first-person games, but otherwise Shadow Tower does feel like a somewhat slower, awkward Demon's Souls. Weapon degradation is a major aspect of the game, and encounters with minor enemies can be pretty epic. And, of course, you upgrade weapons by collecting souls, although in Shadow Tower you actually have to pick them up as items. The importance of blocking is also another big similarity, with you being able to map a weapon to one hand and a shield to the other. It doesn't even remotely approach the sublime combat system of Demon's Souls, but you can definitely see the template being set.

The world is rather non-linear and rewarding of exploration. While I am not one to bash PS1-era graphics for being what they are, I do feel that the ones in Shadow Tower are somewhat repetitive. Like Demon's Souls there is no map, but unlike Demon's Souls a lot of environments look the same. This can make the game pretty tedious unless you are prepared to make a paper map as you play. From what I played the game seems actually less linear than Demon's Souls, with more alternate paths available.

The story for Shadow Tower is extremely minimal. There is a tower that is, er, forbidden. You go in. That's it. The games does contain some of Demon's Souls's brooding sense of silence and loneliness. (Like Demon's Souls there is no music.) The environment does seem to be imbued with some elements of narrative. There is writing you come across from past explorers, which looks a lot like the player messages in Demon's Souls, only here they are just baked in as part of the story.

One of the biggest arguments for Shadow Tower being an ancestor to Demon's Souls is the intro cinematic, which features a knight getting the crap beat out of him by a variety of monsters. The game really seems to suggest a similar sense of mortality and exhaustion on the part of the protagonist that was one of Demon's Souls distinguishing features. People familiar with Demon's Souls's non-U.S. box art will remember the knight riddled with arrows, ambiguously either dead or battle fatigued to the point of collapse. One gets the sense that Shadow Tower was an early attempt to create a player experience shaped around similar ideas.

Shadow Tower Abyss is very similar to its predecessor, except that it has superior art direction, narrative design, and usability design. The real good news is that it has an option for dual-analog Western-style controls, which is something King's Field never had. In this mode the weapon buttons are the trigger buttons, and players can switch back and forth on the fly between weapons in the right or left hand. (I didn't get a shield in Shadow Tower Abyss, but I'd be surprised if there aren't any.) This makes it almost identical to Demon's Souls's control scheme, which makes the gameplay nice and fluid.

Shadow Tower Abyss has firearms, which is probably the biggest thing which makes it feel different from both Demon's Souls and the original Shadow Tower. It takes place in the present day, and you begin the game with a gun. It isn't designed at all like an FPS though. Guns are useful, but they run out of ammo, which is why you need to deck yourself out with the knives, swords, and other melee weapons you find. It feels like you are an FPS-protagonist who somehow wandered into a Demon's Souls-like game, which is interesting. Functionally speaking the game is not that different, since firearms basically take the place of bows, but it's still an intriguing twist.

The story and world in Shadow Tower Abyss really makes me wish my Japanese was better. The thought and detail put into its environmental narrative is much closer to Demon's Souls than the first Shadow Tower. It's use of sound, light, and color is also closer to Demon's Souls in terms of establishing a mood, and suggesting danger around the next corner. There are a fair amount of NPCs, all of whom you can kill for no reason if you wish. I wandered around for a while just trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, where I was, and just what all these creepy tunnels were built for. The game has a fairly Lovecraftian vibe, with you basically thrown into this scary cave which leads you deeper and deeper into a complex netherworld. In this sense Shadow Tower Abyss really reminded me of Hell Night, another (wonderful) game I played recently that also achieved a similar effect, what I'd called the 'Ultima Underworld Effect'. These are games that really make me feel like I'm a normal human being trapped in a cave or some other such subterranian world, which is where a lot of their elemental power comes from. The lack of load screens helps this feeling a lot, as does the non-linear space design. You really feel like an explorer, not some videogame badass who's just in it for the asskickery.

If I had to recommend one of these games I'd obviously recommend Shadow Tower Abyss. It can probably be played and completed without understanding much Japanese, and the world and feeling it creates is thick and memorable. It's no Demon's Souls, but it's recognizably similar and effective in what it does. If you want to trace the design heritage of From Software's towering masterpiece, Shadow Tower Abyss is a great place to start, possibly a better place than King's Field.

Problems With The Lovely Bones.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for The Lovely Bones.

I saw The Lovely Bones last night. I have a lot to say about it that I can't quite formulate, but I found a reviewer who seems to have a take similar to mine:

Peter Jackson and his usual screenwriting collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have simplified and amplified Sebold’s text, turning it from a meditation on the interiorpolitics of family into a supernatural revenge story. While there are a lot of things Jackson does right - chief among them the perfect casting of the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan in the central role of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in 1973 - the movie seems to miss the point of the novel.

I think this is dead-on. Alice Sebold's novel is about grief, and how it is a long aching process in which absolution only comes with age. In the book the protagonist's narration from the afterlife is more of a device for Sebold to explore the way a family deals with loss. And although Sebold does dabble in some bitter-sweet metaphysics in which the girl's ghost occasionally breaks back into living world, it is done very sparingly. The overwhelming feeling of the novel is not that of a supernatural story, but a serious family drama where the ghost is mostly a narrative device to examine real living human pain. I found the book incredibly moving, precisely because it refused to offer any easy answers or absolutions to a family paralyzed by sadness.

There is a happy ending of sorts in the novel, but it only arrives after years of dull agony, in which we watch the family grow and change. The father's obsession to catch the killer is there, but it's not the center of the story. Neither is the killer, really. The detective bits of the novel existed, I felt, to illustrate the dangers of obsession, to show that absolution has to come from somewhere else.

When I remember the novel, the main narrative and emotional arc to me has nothing to do with the killer. It has to do with the Susie's younger sister gradually growing out of her shadow, of having the adolescence she didn't and the rest of her family finally recognizing and appreciating this. In my memory the climax of the book is when her younger sister and her boyfriend, now in their late teens, spend the night in an old house and decide to get married, which feels like a big cathartic moment. Either that or when Susie--in the novel's only overt moment of supernatural shenanigans--borrows the body of another girl to have sex with the boy she liked. While I thought that was maybe going too far when I read the book, it makes some sense when you consider that the novel was inspired by the author's own experience of being raped as a teenager. The ghost-sex near the end was, I thought, a sort of healing antidote to Susie's rape, like she refused to move on while her only sexual experience remained a horrific one. Given that the book was written by someone who experienced rape but was not murdered, the notion of reclaiming sex as an act of love and not of violence has obvious therapeutic connotations.

None of this is in the movie, which makes me wonder what Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh felt the point was. I read a quote by Jackson where he explained why he wanted to adapt the novel in the first place, saying "like all the best fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world". Why did he think it was fantasy, I wonder? Because it involves ghosts and heaven? 'Fantasy' is the last word I'd use to describe Sebold's novel, because there is nothing fantastic about the feelings and situations it explores.

Reading the book I was reminded of the horrible accounts I've read from time to time about surviving families of real murder victims. I read once about two parents dealing with the loss of their daughter, who was raped and murdered with a tree branch. Years afterward the father, still living with the grief and rage every hour, got a serious tooth infection. He refused to go to the dentist, choosing to spend days on end in agony. When his wife asked him why he refused to get help he said he was trying to absorb their daughter's pain, as if by taking pain upon himself he was retroactively shielding his daughter from the pain she went through. It made no sense at all, and this is perhaps what makes it such a heartbreaking example of how the mind attempts to deal with grief, especially a parent's grief.

There was no easy absolution for that family, no heartwarming moment where the ghost of their daughter appeared and said everything was okay. That's why grief is so hard: because it's not a Hollywood movie where people get to say goodbye one last time. This is a view Sebold seemed to share in her novel, in spite of a few carefully placed instances of the supernatural. The ghost-sex in the novel is more for Susie's piece of mind than for her friends', which I feel is the big (if subtle) difference between the book and the film. The film is all about how she's not really dead, and how that helps heal her family. The novel is about how she is dead, and how her family manages to heal themselves anyway.

Games That Made Me - Part 3: The 00s

There's only one game released this past decade that made the sort of impression upon me that earns it a place on this list. I've loved plenty of games in the past 10 years, but only one that really changed my idea of what videogames can be...

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Playstation 2, 2001)

My feelings about Metal Gear Solid 2 are intense to the point of incoherence... much like the game itself. A lot of why I love the game has to do with when it was released, which was right after 9/11. For me the game served a function that must have been similar to the film Dr. Strangelove when it was released at the height of the Cold War. As daring, irreverent political commentaries in games go, there is MGS2 and then there's nothing. Okay, well maybe there's Fallout 2, the game that ends with you wiping out the last remnants of a fascist, genocidal U.S. government. But that's just the end of the game. MGS2 is a balls-out 'fuck you' to America's worst dystopian impulses from the moment you press 'start' to the moment the final credits roll. That it seemed to be about America's post-9/11 nationalist hysteria was, of course, an accident of its release timing. But that doesn't change the fact that it functioned so well as a bombastic parody of Bush's new world order.

Because of MGS2 I still think of the people who run my government as "The Patriots": the faceless, powerful elite that are just out of democracy's reach. Whereas games like Deus Ex gave me the same old international conspiracy theories I'd seen in the X-Files, MGS2 gave me a deliciously national conspiracy theory: a horrifically corrupt U.S. government with a puppet democracy and a global censorhip agenda. The Patriots were responsible for everything in MGS2, including the game's intentionally linear design. You follow their instructions and do everything they ask you to, and thereby prove you are willing to be controlled. It's the same game design-as-mind control metaphor Bioshock would use years later, only MGS2 never contradicts itself by pretending rebellion from within the constraints of a designed system is possible. As the authors of your "game" The Patriots' stranglehold on you is absolute, a fact which they rub in your face by the end. A videogame is not a democracy, because the player does not have the ability to rewite the rules. But you don't really want a democracy anyway, do you? Not if you're being sufficiently entertained...

The way MGS2 positioned videogames, with their coyly disguised limits, as metaphors for similar kinds of deceptive government was, in a word, brilliant. It really did have a lasting effect on how I think about both games and government, which to this day is rather cynical. I suppose I feel as incredulous about Warren Spector's utopian notions of "shared authorship" as I do about Obama's promises of hope and change. They are nice promises, but really what does it mean to say a choice is "meaningful" when it is someone else deciding what "meaningful" means? Is the choice between the Left and Right in America a meaningful one? Is the ability to choose between path A or B in Mass Effect a meaningful one? Both game companies and politicians would like us to believe so, but it is important to recognize that these "choices" have been pre-defined within limits we, in fact, have no ability to influence.

MGS2 darkened my view of games forever, and it still remains an astonishing example of political commentary in a mainstream videogame. My demand that games be controversial on political subjects as well as hijack massive commercial budgets for the sake of naked personal statements is due entirely to MGS2. Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, and even Fallout 3 are inferior versions of MGS2 by this metric. In fact, nearly all games are inferior by this metric.

Final Thoughts

There are many, many games that remain important to me that I have not included on this list. Stuff like Super Punch-Out, Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga, Snatcher, Symphony of the Night and many other of my favorite games are not ones I can really trace back to a "taste genesis", a prototypical game experience that I feel prepared me for loving these games. Looking at the games that influenced your taste is not really an exercise in listing all the games you love, but listing the games that determined the types of games you love. That's why Ikaruga is not on the list in spite of being one of my favorite games ever: because my love of it in no way lead to a love of shmups.

While I like games of all sorts of genres, there are certain types of games I keep coming back to, certain groups of aesthetic choices I tend to look for my enjoyment in. The games I listed--Frantic Freddie, Super Mario Bros., Ultima: Exodus, Bionic Commando, Ultima VII, System Shock, Thief, and Metal Gear Solid 2-- are not necessarily even my favorite examples of the game types they represent. But they are the ones that helped me developed the road map by which I found some of the best games I've ever played, and, more importantly, the tools to understand why I like them.

Ultima VII --> Arcanum, Fallout 1/2, Majora's Mask, Planescape: Torment

Final Fantasy VI --> Suikoden 1/2, Odin Sphere

System Shock --> Metroid Prime, Demon's Souls, Silent Hill 1/2, Hellnight

Thief --> Metal Gear Solid 3, Hitman 2

Metal Gear Solid 2 --> Killer7, Eversion, Passage, Shadow of the Colossus

Games That Made Me - Part 2: The 90s

Continuing my series where I look at the games which most profoundly shaped my taste, I turn from the 80s to the 90s, and discover that my feelings about games definitely got more complicated as I got older.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC, 1992)

Ultima VII was the reason I got into PC gaming. For a 13-year-old who had been weened almost exclusively on Nintendo, the deep dark world of The Black Gate was transcendental. It was clearly for adults, but not in the pandering way most games are now. Blood and sex were all handled in witty fashion, and I never got the sense the developers were impressed with themselves simply for having such things. They were, like everything else in Ultima VII, just part of an astonishingly rich world. Ultima VII was the first time I'd ever seen a game with no loading screen, with NPCs who weren't just signposts, and with party members who responded dynamically to many of your actions. My love of persistent, seamless game worlds and witty, complex dialogue comes almost entirely from Ultima VII. Any Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto game, and, yes, most Bioware games are inferior versions of Ultima VII to me.

Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994)

Final Fantays VI was the first game I played that really moved me. This probably had something to do with the fact that I was an emotionally sensitive teenager at the time, but I think it also had something to do with the game's delicate (and arguably unique) sense of loss and tragedy. Unlike all other RPGs you don't stop the end of the world in FFVI. It happens, and it has a devastating effect on the group of characters you have gotten to know. The completely non-linear final sections of the game, in which you have to slog through a dying world in an effort to pull their friends (kicking and screaming if necessary) back towards hope, remain some of the most emotionally intense hours I've spent with a controller in my hand.

It may be nostalgia talking, but I feel that FFVI's melodramatic indulgences have aged a bit better than many other Japanese RPGs, largely because of the pixel art graphics and understated nature of the characters. Very few games in my experience earn the right to engage in the sort of emotion Final Fantasy VI does. It's probably the main reason I retain a soft spot for melodrama in games... when it's done well.

System Shock (PC, 1994)

System Shock is probably the most immersive experience I've had with a game. To me System Shock isn't so much a game as it is a place. Though I had a very similar experience with Ultima Underworld (a game which System Shock is basically a cyberpunk re-skinning of), System Shock still looms larger in my imagination as the game which made me consciously realize what a game-based first-person suspense story could be.

The implementation of a rogue A.I. as a metaphor for the game's designers was a masterstroke which made otherwise pedestrian use of game conventions (puzzles, power-ups, etc.) into a secret engine which fueled the narrative. Matching wits with the game became matching wits with SHODAN, which allowed for all kinds of devious reversals and thwarted expectations without the player's suspension of disbelief so much as shuddering. This all built towards a sublime final moment in which you literally lock wits--as in, you lock consciousnesses--with SHODAN via a cyberspace terminal connected directly to your brain. Having failed to destroy each other physically you face her on her home turf: as software. SHODAN attempts to overwrite your mind--which is expressed visually as her face overwriting your computer screen, pixel by pixel, while you desperately try to delete her mind from the inside out. It's stuff like this that not only makes System Shock a phenomenally memorable game, but also one of the best game-based examples of cyberpunk fiction I am aware of.

System Shock also did wonderful things with keeping physical space coherent without resorting to putting the player on rails. There were no load screens that weren't disguised, no cut-scenes that weren't explained as either remote surveillance footage or recorded messages. None of the games which later borrowed these devices (with the possible exception of Portal) used them as holistically or as consistently as System Shock. My demand for complete coherence in fictional 3D spaces as well as my taste for environmental narratives (real ones that require detective work, not ones that are handed to you on rails) comes from System Shock. Games like Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and especially System Shock 2 are all inferior versions of System Shock as far as I'm concerned.

Thief: The Dark Project (PC, 1998)

Since stealth games are the closest thing I have to a favorite game genre, I should include Thief: The Dark Project. Also by the makers of System Shock, Thief was great for a lot of the same reasons, but several new ones as well. The biggest thing I took away from it, I think, was the idea that stealth games are in a sense nerd revenge fantasies. They are about a smart weak person taking down a bunch of strong dumb people. Garrett's internal monologue in Thief is about how I imagined my own internal monologue in high school: full of smug superiority, mute rage, and ample wit. This might be why the dumb A.I. (still smarter than a lot of game A.I.) never registered as a flaw to me: the opportunity to taken down a bunch of  idiotic meatheads was clearly a feature, not a bug.

Thief also impressed upon me, subconsciously perhaps, the notion that violence in games doesn't have to be a foregone conclusion. The stealth genre is basically predicated on the idea that violence is a choice, which might explain why I find its natural contours so appealing. Violence is, after all, a brutish solution to any given problem. But Thief wasn't boring enough to suggest alternatives based on moral grounds. Rather it suggested that pacifism can be more about narcissism than morality... an intriguing notion that probably speaks more to the real reasons behind the behavior of players (such as myself) who obsessively refuse to kill. It's not about right and wrong. It's about one drop of blood ruining my masterpiece. An artist like Garrett--like me--is clearly above such things.

Thief is one of the reasons I'm not particularly impressed by many stealth games, but why I try every one I can find in hopes they will generate the complex set of feelings and ideas that it did. Certain games in the Hitman and Metal Gear series approach this, but none of them quite achieve Thief's sense of exquisitely smug empowerment.

Games That Made Me - Part 1: The 80s

I thought I'd kick off my blog with the "games that made me" exercise that's become so popular. It's where you take a look back at your life and try to identify the games that had the biggest impact on your current taste in video games. They don't necessarily have to be your favorite games (although they can be), just the most influential. I liken this to what psychologists say about parental modeling, about how we go through life looking for surrogates of our parents, our earliest relationship models. Similarly, one can imagine that many of the games we encounter early in our lives are the standards by which we consciously or unconsciously judge games afterward. We look for the games which shaped our tastes in every new game we play... and are usually disappointed when we don't find what we want.

Looking at the games which shaped us helps us understand why we like certain games and dislike others, or, to be more specific, why we see certain games as inferior versions of other games. I don't think this is anything to be ashamed of, as long as one doesn't pretend there's any objectivity to be hand in this process. We like what we like for complex reasons that were formed reflexively and unconsciously, by our natural gravitation towards certain works of art. Discovering why we gravitate towards some things and not others is a process of self-discovery, and one that is arguably required to intelligent criticism.

Frantic Freddie (C64, 1983) 

The first game I remember playing for any significant amount of time. I have no idea how it shaped by gaming tastes other than being the first time I became genuinely obsessed with a game. I never did finish it.

Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)

The fist game I can remember that pulled me into a fictional world. I remember going to Chucky Cheese with my parents and dropping endless quarters on a Play Choice 10 just to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. I don't know why I found it so captivating, but I distinctly remember reality dropping away and be being only aware of what was happening inside the arcade cabinet. It was like reading a book or being underwater.

Ultima: Exodus (NES, 1987)

My first RPG and, interestingly, a twice-translated port of a port. Ultima: Exodus for the NES was a surprisingly faithful re-creation of Richard Garriott's pioneering original. All the Japanese developer (Pony Canyon) did was make it cuter. I didn't think much about it at the time, but my experience with the NES Ultima: Exodus--which was, ironically, my first exposure to "Western"-style open-world RPGs--may have profoundly altered the course of my taste development as I got older. I probably wouldn't have gotten into PC gaming if I hadn't first experienced a taste of it on the NES. I wouldn't have known what Ultima was, so I wouldn't have gone crazy when I saw the Ultima VII box in a PC store a few years later. (VII?! Holy shit! It was like getting a game from THE FUTURE!) To this day I am one of the few people I know who loves both Japanese and Western game design aesthetics about equally, who gets just as excited about Final Fantasy as Ultima, who doesn't regard one as an inferior version of the other. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that my first "Western" game was filtered through Japanese sensibilities.

Bionic Commando (NES, 1988)

Bionic Commando was the first game with a story and characters I really loved. They weren't complex at all, but for some reasons the game's presentation--with game design logic being totally dictated by dramatic logic (and not, as is usually the case, vice versa)--enthralled my friends and I to no end when we were 11. This game is still the reason I never mind an irregular difficulty curve as long as it makes sense story-wise. If the last boss is flesh and blood and I have a bazooka... well... he shouldn't take more than one hit, should he? Certainly not if he's Hitler.