Author: Jeremy Voss

Musician, wanna-be writer, suburban husband and father. I'll occasionally tweet from @couchshouts. You can find me on XBL, PSN and Steam as JervoNYC.

On Baby Driver and Crash Bandicoot

I’ve got nothing bad to say about 4-day weekends.  We had a wonderful time – plenty of quality poolside time, plenty of quality family time, and on Monday, with the kid at day care, the wife and I went to see Baby Driver in the theater.

I’d have to think about it for a little while to come up with a definitive list, but I think I can say that Baby Driver is the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in the theater in many, many years.  Now, it’s true that since the kid was born we haven’t been able to go to the movies as much as we used to – especially when we were living in Astoria and could take a nice leisurely stroll to the local cineplex – but that being said, I’d still be hard-pressed to think of another film that was that much fun.

I admit that I’m biased; I’ve been a huge fan of Edgar Wright ever since Spaced and I’ll see anything and everything he’s involved with.  But even with these impossibly high expectations, I wasn’t prepared to lose myself so thoroughly inside it.  It’s the best movie he’s made, and I sincerely hope that it makes enough money to let him keep making the films he wants to make.

The plot of Baby Driver is paper-thin, and if you think about it for more than 30 seconds you’ll find a whole bunch of nonsense.  But that’s not the point.  The point of this movie isn’t its story, or even its characters – the point of this movie is the experience that the movie creates for you.  It is exciting and moving and spectacular and quiet and every single frame of film serves a purpose – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie with this much self-contained momentum before.  (Possibly Mad Max: Fury Road, though that’s a different sort of experience.)  This film exists to entertain all the corners of your mind.

Not all nostalgia is created equally.  This is especially true when it comes to old video games.  Very often the memories we have of something – a game, a book, a film, a friend – obscure the true nature of what those things actually were.

I’ve said here before that I went through two big video game phases in my life; the first was from age 5 to 17, when I was still living at home and had access to my Atari 2600 and my younger brother’s Sega Genesis, and the second was after I’d graduated college and was hanging out at my co-worker’s apartment almost every night after work, getting smashed and playing Oddworld and Crash Bandicoot on his PS1.

The Oddworld remake that came out last year is a wonderful thing.  It keeps what made the original game so entertaining – the puzzles, the sound design, the characters – and the graphical improvements simply make the game better.  The game still fundamentally works, though, is the key – for a 2.5D platformer/side scroller, it did what it did remarkably well and it still holds up because it’s still a unique experience.

The Crash Bandicoot games?  That’s a different story altogether.  I loved the experience of playing these games back in 1998-2000, but that could very well have been to the company, the music, and the relative levels of sobriety.  I am very grateful to have these remakes back in my life, and I can say that they are… hmm… faithful to the originals, and certainly the graphics are much improved, but… um… I’m not so sure these games are as great as I thought they were.  They’re certainly a lot harder than I remember them being; I can barely get through the very first level without wiping out a dozen times.  A number of people asked a variation of the same question on Twitter:  Were these games always this hard, or do we just suck at playing them now?  (As it turns out, it’s a little bit of both.)

Truth be told, the appeal of these games doesn’t really translate as well as I’d hoped.  My 4-year-old was excited to try these games out, and I gleefully handed him the controller and watched him die, and die, and die again, and as he got frustrated I’d take over for him and I’d die, and die, and die again, and we both got frustrated and decided to do something else.  It’s a bit of a bummer, I’m afraid.

Revisiting Watch Dogs 2

The wife and I have been talking about buying a record player for a while now, and I’m pretty close to pulling the trigger – especially since my mother-in-law just gave us a whole bunch of her old albums.  But I haven’t yet bought one, and there’s a couple reasons for that.

One:  we don’t listen to music very often in the house.  Now, part of me feels like I’ve failed as a parent because I, as a musician, haven’t exposed my son to enough music.  But the truth is that my wife and I like somewhat different things, and while the Venn diagram of our respective tastes does have some overlap, my son’s interests lie completely off the map.  Yes, he’ll listen to the Beatles in the car, but he’ll also want to listen to the “Sing!” cover version of “Shake It Off” a thousand times in a row.  And when we’re home and hanging out, he’s very insistent that we listen to no music at all, because it affects his ability to stack dominos.

img_5288

The other reason is that… well… it’s a very slippery slope for me as far as record-buying goes.  Because if I buy one, I’ll buy a hundred without even blinking.  I’ve even been going through my existing collection wondering what might sound better on vinyl.  I mean, yes of course I want to get the new Sgt. Pepper remaster on vinyl, and the OK Computer remaster, and then I’m sure the new Fleet Foxes album sounds amazing, and then the next thing you know I’m $10,000 in debt and my floors are sinking because my vinyl collection is too physically heavy.

So I’ve gotta be careful, is what I’m trying to say.

*   *   *

I think I’d mentioned not too long ago that I’d been diving into some of my gaming backlog, and I realized that I’d made two notable omissions.  One is a replay of Wolfenstein: The New Order, because killing Nazis is particularly life-affirming in this current political climate, and the other is a revisit of Watch Dogs 2.

I don’t think I wrote about Watch Dogs 2 when I first started playing it last year; and if I did, I can’t seem to find it.  I can’t recall why I stopped playing it, either, beyond probably just being overwhelmed by my backlog in general.  (It’s entirely possible that I bought it in the middle of a gigantic Xbox sale, and so I was playing a dozen different things at once, and one of them ultimately won out.)

In any event, it’s a weird game in all the ways that Ubisoft open-world games are weird, but it’s also strangely compelling in all the ways that the first Watch Dogs wasn’t.  This doesn’t necessarily forgive it for its narrative sins, nor does it absolve it for its bizarre sense of morality, nor does it get a pass for making me feel like a very, very old man.  But I’m continuing to play it, which means there’s something there that’s keeping me invested.

WD2 is ridiculous and wildly incongruous in terms of its tone, but I think it’s at least supposed to feel that way.  It’s silly and goofy and while it still has moments where it’s attempting to be earnest – i.e., that you’re part of a rag-tag group of hackers with a Robin Hood ethos – you at least don’t feel weird when your quiet attempts at hacking go awry and you end up having to shoot everyone in the face with machine guns that you build with a 3D printer in your hacker base.  And even though you’re hacking for the greater good, you’re just supposed to ignore the fact that you not only steal cars all the time, but you steal all the expensive stuff that’s left in the cars, and you’re also constantly stealing people’s money out of their digital accounts – you can’t help yourself, because the game conveniently highlights them in blue and makes it very obvious that they’re ripe for the picking.

The game’s biggest sin, of course, is that it makes me feel like a very old man who wants to yell at kids to get off his lawn.  I don’t know if this is because Ubisoft has accurately portrayed youth/hacker culture, or if a similar group of old men think they accurately portrayed youth/hacker culture, but the point remains the same – Marcus and the rest of the DedSec crew are annoying and ridiculous and I kinda want to punch them all in the face.  The game’s got a pseudo-version of Instagram in it and if you take selfies in certain spots you get rewarded with more selfie gestures (which sounds ridiculous when you type it out like this), and your friends make the DUMBEST FUCKING COMMENTS underneath each photo, and the whole thing is just so absurd.

And yet I must confess that in spite of this game’s desperate desire to be cool and hip and relevant to whatever millennial audience they’re hoping to attract, and thus it has alienated me utterly and completely, I apparently also don’t seem to care all that much because I’ve been playing it for most of the last two weeks; and so while I’ve stopped paying attention to the narrative, I have at least continued to remain interested in the tasks I’m asked to perform.  They are repetitive, as all these things tend to be, but at least they’re different.  As in the first game, it can be immensely satisfying to come across a group of bad guys and find a way to take them all out without even setting foot in their space.

Frankly, it can be just as satisfying to just cruise around and see what’s going on – the digital San Francisco in this game is quite fascinating to explore.  Indeed, one of the things I most appreciate is that unlike other Ubisoft open-world games I could name, the map isn’t that cluttered with ridiculous things, and the hidden things that you do come across are actually quite useful.  Those Instagram selfies I mentioned earlier?  They help you level up and earn followers – followers are basically XP, and the more XP you get the more Research Points you can earn, and those Research Points help you unlock perks and powerups and such.  And so if I need a break from the story (such as it is), I’ll just go hunting for Research Points.

I’m a little surprised that Ubisoft didn’t mention the Watch Dogs IP during their E3 press conference – or maybe they did, but nobody remembered – and perhaps it’s just as well, given that it’s hard to know what this game is meant to accomplish beyond being a more tech-savvy and less blatantly misogynistic Grand Theft Auto clone.  That being said, WD2 is certainly engaging enough to check out – and given that it’s been on a sale a lot lately, you may want to give it a look.

 

scenes from a mild mid-day panic attack

OK – I started this post last week and never got around to finishing it.  It’s not a particularly difficult post or anything; if nothing else it’s a collection of scattered E3 thoughts that I was trying to write down before my short-term memory said “fuck it, you don’t need this.”

Today, as I attempt to write this, I am feeling very anxious.  It’s the sort of anxiety that I’m recognizing as if it were from a bad dream – I feel like I’ve forgotten something terribly important, and there will be terrible consequences if I can’t remember it.  This feeling could also just be due to me drinking a very large iced coffee and taking a Claritin-D for allergies – so my heart is racing and yet I’m feeling spaced out.  For whatever it’s worth, as far as I can tell, I haven’t actually forgotten anything; today is my wife’s birthday, but that’s already been sorted out – gifts received, dinner reserved, etc.

So I don’t really have any E3 thoughts, as it turns out.  All the big press conferences happened when I was unable to watch them – I mean, I did watch a little bit of the beginning of Microsoft’s presser on Twitter on my iPhone, because I needed to get some Scorpio info – but that was probably about it as far as paying direct attention to the event itself.

Before you ask:  yes of course I’m getting an Xbox One X.  I’ve been saving money in a special savings account ever since it was first announced for that very purpose, and by the time it comes out I might even be able to pick up a 4K TV, too.

I’ve been spending most of my gaming time on the Xbox One lately, as a matter of fact; during their last big sale I ended up buying a bunch of games I already own on the PS4, because I’m an idiot who has started to feel the burn of Achievements again.  Truth be told – and I may have already said this here, but I’m too lazy to go back and check – I really do prefer the user experience of the Xbox far more than the PS4, even if the PS4 is the technically superior machine.  (Will I get a PS4 Pro if I do end up getting a 4K TV?  Probably/eventually, if it gets a price drop, and if I can easily swap in my 2TB hard drive.)

And as it happens, if you were to ask me what it is I’m playing these days, I’d be hard-pressed to give you a quick answer.  I’m kinda playing at least 10 different things all at the same time, some new stuff:

  • Dirt 4: kinda ugly, and has an unusually shitty UI (which is especially odd considering how glorious and pristine previous Dirt UIs have been), but very fun and contains possibly the best rumble technology I’ve ever felt – I mean, you can feel the curved grooves in the road.  It’s extraordinary if only for that specific reason.
  • Lego City Undercover: I bought this hoping my son would play it with me.  He’s sorta interested, sorta not.  As far as the game itself, it’s Lego GTA, and it’s quite charming.  It suffers from the same horrific platforming bullshit that has plagued every Lego game since the dawn of time, and it has a weird tone issue wherein it’s clearly aimed for young kids, but filled with references to movies that no young kid would ever go near.  But whatever.  Sometimes you just want to screw around in a consequence-free environment and break stuff into littler stuff, and this game does a really good job at that.
  • RIME:  Alternates between being a beautiful, serene exploration game and a frustrating, obtuse platformer.  I’d like to see this to the end, but who knows.

as well as a bunch of backlog stuff:

  • Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: because I got a little jazzed seeing the forthcoming Origins and wanted to remember what those games feel like; this is the first time in a long time that I can remember actually looking forward to a new AC game.  I remain hopeful that the 2-year break served the development well.
  • Fallout 4: because I stumbled across a fantastic video analysis of the game by Joseph Anderson, which does such a remarkable job of articulating everything I hated about FO4 that I kinda want to go back and play it again.  No, that does not make any sense, but does anything make sense these days?

 

I have more to post, I think, but I’m not quite in the navel-gazing mood at the moment and I’d prefer to save that stuff for a different time.  In any event, I’m alive and the Ativan has started to kick in.

(exhales)

Moody in Manhattan

Serious, heavy-duty case of the Mondays going on here.  I came this close to taking a mental health day, except my son was also having a serious heavy-duty case of the Mondays, and if I can’t set a good example for him, then what am I even doing being a parent?  So here I am, twitchy and over-caffeinated, just trying to make it through the day, one endless hour at a time.

I have a bunch of random, scattered thoughts littering my head this morning, so, look out:

1. I don’t know what else to say about 45 other than I’m exhausted and feeling like I’m approaching some sort of breaking point, where I’m going to have to forcibly remove myself from the news in order to maintain some sort of equilibrium.  This quote from Josh Marshall says it a bit better:

The terror attack in London is not Donald Trump’s fault of course. But his response to it is hard to fathom even for him… Actually, I wouldn’t say it’s hard to fathom. It’s not even surprising. We’ve known and seen this withering deficit of shame and grace before when he tweeted out “appreciate the congrats” in response to the Orlando club massacre last year. I’m not even sure what the word is or if there is one. But the one I am struggling to find is the experience of not being remotely surprised by the President’s action and yet marveling that the expected action – or transgression in this case – has managed to find a new depth of awfulness to penetrate and explore.

Emphasis added.  I spent most of my therapy session this weekend trying to get this stuff off my chest.  A lot of my anxiety issues in my 20s and 30s – back when I was actively avoiding therapy and medication – were because I felt out of control, or that things were happening to me that I was unable to control, or simply that if I couldn’t exert some form of control over what was happening to me, then I was doomed.  I’ve gotten a lot better in the last few years with this; if things are out of my control, then I am (for the most part) able to accept that, and I can instead try to step back and be objective about whatever it is that’s bothering me and take stock of what I can control, and then deal with the rest when it finally happens.  The thing with Trump, though, is that it would appear that nobody can control the nonsense that flies out of his mouth or fingers, and his insanity will have a very real and tangible effect on my life and of my child’s life.  Every day it gets worse and worse and it feels like the worst kind of nightmare.  I do try my best to keep it together, and if nothing else I indulge in every form of self-care I can think of.  But as I said above, it’s exhausting.  I don’t know how this circus can continue.

2. You know what’s good?  Music is good.  I haven’t written about music in a while.  I haven’t written any music in a while, either, but that’s a different story.

I’ve been listening to music a lot lately – or, rather, I’ve been listening to music with great intensity lately.  The new remix of Sgt. Pepper?  Holy shit, it’s incredible.  (And I say this mostly through listening via Spotify on my shitty work headphones.)  If it’s not too much to ask, I’d very much love it if all of the pre-Abbey Road albums could get the same sort of 3-dimensional stereo support that this Sgt. Pepper album got, because it’s amazing.

Sgt. Pepper isn’t my favorite Beatles record – that distinction gets tossed around between Abbey Road, Revolver and The White Album, and I must confess that Magical Mystery Tour is up there, too – but there’s also a mythic quality to Sgt. Pepper that those other albums simply don’t have.  When I think of my favorite Beatles songs, I tend to gloss over the Sgt. Pepper album just because they all feel connected in a way that the rest of their catalog doesn’t.  But goddamn, this remix makes it feel vital in a way that it simply never has before.  “Getting Better”, in particular, is staggering to behold – I don’t think I’d ever appreciated just how magnificent the arrangement of that song is.  One can start to see, now, how mind-blowing Sgt. Pepper must have sounded when it was first released.

Another album that is also blowing my mind, in a completely different way, is Elder’s “Reflections of a Floating World.”  I’d never heard of these guys before last week, and I acknowledge that they’re a bit more on the heavy stoner-metal side of things than what I normally listen to, but whatever – it’s awesome.  Listen to “The Falling Veil”, if nothing else.

3. E3 2017 is next week and I am surprisingly apathetic about it.  This may simply be because I expect that most of what will be announced will be stuff that isn’t coming out until 2018 at the earliest.  Indeed, a lot of the most exciting-sounding stuff from last year’s E3 was for games that still haven’t come out yet.  I may or may not live-tweet the press conferences; I’m not really sure I have the energy to sit through everything.  I don’t even really know what it is that I’d like to hear, beyond a reasonable price for Project Scorpio (and that Scorpio will improve performance to existing Xbox One games the way that the PS4 Pro does for PS4 games).  That’s really all I’m hoping for.  I’d like PSVR to get some new stuff, too, though I’m not necessarily holding my breath.

OK, it’s lunch time.

distracted and dismayed, part 2

I’m in that thing where I want to write, but I don’t feel like I have anything terribly interesting to write about, even as I keep a tab open specifically so that if anything interesting does happen to pop into my brain, I can write it down as quickly as possible before I inevitably delete it.

As with my last entry, I am in a weird emotional state.  I continue to be disgusted by Trump, and I continue to be frustrated with the seeming inability of anyone to do anything about it.  I cannot turn this frustration into anything useful; I come home from work exhausted and after putting my son to bed I find myself going to bed not that much later.

I don’t think I mentioned this, but I bought a new phone a little while ago; my iPhone 6 had been shitting the bed ever since I installed iOS 10, and so I decided to splurge and upgrade to a 7+.  I like it!  It’s huge but not distressingly so, and more importantly the damned thing works.  I have an alarm clock again!  I have tons of storage!  The new Portrait mode in the camera is fucking amazing!  And all the games I have for it look and sound better than they ever had before, and so I’ve been going back and re-downloading a bunch of cool stuff that I had to kick off my older phones simply because they took up too much room.

I have not yet bought any bluetooth headphones for it, though.  To be honest, I haven’t been listening to a lot of music on my commutes lately, and when I’m at work I have shitty but effective headphones for my PC.  (Even though they’ve turned off Facebook and Gmail, they’ve not yet turned off Spotify.)  I suspect I’ll break down and get some eventually, because I’m still in that sort of Trump-fueled anxiety that can apparently only be soothed by retail therapy.

Similarly, ever since the news broke that Pebble had been bought out by Fitbit and that Pebble’s smartwatches would stop being supported, I knew I’d have to get something new.  I am a smartwatch convert, even if I’m not particularly fitness-inclined.  In any event, you probably can guess where this is going – there’s an Apple store in my office complex, and so now I’m wearing an Apple Watch v2, and it’s quite lovely.  Even if I’m not using it for exercise, I do like that it reminds me to stand up every once in a while, and the ‘breathe’ app has come in handy during moments of stress.

Gaming-wise, let’s see… I’ve kinda given up on Prey, in that my last few save points are all in troublesome areas and I can’t seem to last more than 20 seconds without encountering immediate and certain death.  From everything I hear, the game falls apart towards its conclusion, so I’m kinda inclined to call it a day while I’m still intrigued by it, even as I know I’m still a ways off from where it falls off the rails.

I bought Danger Zone, which is basically Crash Mode from Burnout 3, and it’s… pretty good?  It’s pretty good.  The presentation is somewhat lackluster and the camera isn’t the best, but it’s still pretty great at creating joyous catharsis out of spectacular car collisions.  Load times are kinda shitty, which I hope can get improved with a patch, but it’s not (yet) the end of the world…

…I bought Injustice 2 a little while ago, even though I’m not really a big fighting game fan (nor am I a DC fan, either).  As far as fighting games go, it’s pretty amazing – I can see why it got the review scores it did – but I also know that I’m terrible at it, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond “very easy” difficulty.

I also bought Shadow Warrior 2, which I need to spend more time with.  A friend of mine worked on it, and I’m hoping to put up an interview with him once we’ve both spent a bit more time with the final product.

I also bought Lego City Undercover, even though I told myself I was done with Lego games, because I think my kid will get a kick out of it.  I played a couple missions last night; it’s essentially Lego GTA, but you play as a police officer, and nobody really gets hurt.  I think that’s OK for him to mess around with.

Book-wise… I finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, which was quite good.  Now I’m on book 2 of Ben Winters’ The Last Policeman trilogy, which is also quite good – I mean, they’re relatively on-the-nose detective novels, but surrounding each mystery is the fact that an asteroid is going to collide with Earth and destroy all living creatures in about 4-6 months, and so the priorities of day-to-day life have changed somewhat.  (I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I relate to this context a bit more than I’d like to, being that we’re living under President Donald “Covfefe” Trump who decided to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord for no discernible reason other than that Obama helped make it.)

Yeah, I’m not going to back off of politics here.  I mean, that’s not what this blog is about – you can see my twitter feed for that, if you need to – but given the state of events, it’s hard to not talk about this stuff.

That’s it and that’s all.

 

distracted and dismayed

Yes, it’s been a while.  No, I’m not dead.

It is very hard to write about videogames while Donald Trump is still President.  Indeed, it is very hard to enjoy videogames while Donald Trump is President.  I sit in my basement every night, intending to release pent-up energy by committing digital murder, and instead I pause whatever game I’m attempting to play and continue refreshing Twitter, because HOLY SHIT HOW CAN THIS POSSIBLY GET ANY WORSE [refreshes Twitter] HOLY SHIT IT GOT WORSE.  This has been going on for the last two weeks.

Nor do I have anything exciting to talk about, as I’d hinted at in the opening of my last entry.  The very short and necessarily non-specific version of that little vaguebook thing is that an amazing opportunity fell in my lap, and I went for it, but it didn’t work out.  It was the correct decision by all parties involved, even if I’m still a bit disappointed.  And I also ended up catching a horrific cold because of it.  That’s that, basically.

I’m kinda playing Prey at the moment, and also Injustice 2 for some reason (I was home sick yesterday and saw it was getting amazing reviews).  Prey is something that needs a bit more focus on my part to properly discuss, and I don’t have it in me today to get there.  I am enjoying it, though I also feel like I’m terrible at it, even on the easiest difficulty setting.  It’s hard to play it and not be reminded of any of the Bioshock games, though I think I’m enjoying this a little bit more than those games if only because the world and the story and the gameplay actually sorta have something to do with each other.   Prey is a hard game to binge on, though; I inevitably get frustrated or stuck and feel compelled to turn it off before I start souring on it.

As far as books go, the last book I mentioned here was “A Gentleman In Moscow”, which was wonderful.  After that I read “Waking Gods“, the sequel to last year’s excellent “Sleeping Giants“; it’s not quite as good as the original, but I’m certainly curious as to where it’s going.  Then I read Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”, which is as amazing as everyone said it would be.  I am currently (and very slowly) reading Jeff VanderMeer’s “Borne”, which is also quite good and I have absolutely no idea where it’s going, even as I’m about a third of the way into it.

All right, I think I have to call it now.  I have medicine-head and work is piling up and I need to refresh Twitter again.

a hole in my life

[Please pardon any typos in this entry; I have a bit too much adrenaline in my system for reasons I can’t yet disclose, but will hopefully reveal in the not-too-distant future.]

So where was I?  In last week’s post, I had rolled credits on Mass Effect Andromeda after sinking in 60+ hours and nearly all of my remaining available attention after worrying about my mom in the hospital and being alone in my house while my family vacationed in Florida.

I am now in that familiar post-game void, where the urge to sit down and play something is at odds with the lack of anything fresh in my library.  I mean, yes, I have dozens of games in my backlog, but a lot of them are either things that I’ve already played or are things that I can’t find my way back into.  (Exhibit A:  Final Fantasy XV, which I’m just not sure I’m ever going to get into.)

That said, I do need to play something, because there’s a giant Mass Effect-sized hole in my life, and so over the weekend I started and finished What Remains of Edith Finch for the PS4.

I don’t know how to describe this game without spoiling it or, arguably worse, comparing it to Gone Home.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Gone Home!  I adore that game.  And in all fairness, I’m not sure that Edith Finch would even exist were it not for Gone Home; after all, Edith Finch is, among other things, a story about a family that is told via the exploration of a strange house.

That said, Edith Finch is a remarkable achievement, and one that will linger in my mind for a very long time.  I’m not sure I’ve been as emotionally affected by a game since, well, probably Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.  To be sure, this is a story about death, of a family that feels cursed, and of the eerie and odd spaces of the mind.

I should also state, very loudly, that Edith Finch is not a “walking simulator.”  That is perhaps the most ingenious thing about it; as you explore the house and experience the final moments of your family members through journal entries, those journal entries become playable set pieces, and part of the puzzle is seeing just what you can and can’t do.  Ironically, my least favorite character narrative (that of the older brother, recovering from drug addiction and working a very repetitive job in a cannery), contained the most compelling gameplay – your right hand goes through this very mechanical and repetitive (but necessarily very precise) movement pattern, while your left hand ends up doing something utterly different and fantastical, and then suddenly the end of that sequence comes out of nowhere.  (Well, not nowhere – and again, it’s impossible to talk about this without spoiling it – but in the most general terms you’re led to expect that the actions of the right hand are where this person’s end will result because you’re too busy paying attention to what’s happening with the left hand, but what ends up happening is something else entirely.)

And, of course, the game’s ending is – look, I can’t talk about it.  It is better to not know.  Perhaps I’ll write up a spoiler-filled post and talk about it, because I HAVE to talk about it.  But GODDAMN the ending hit me like a ton of bricks.

Folks, the game is $20 on Steam and PS4 and you should play it.  It’s about 4-5 hours and it’s unlike anything else you’ll play this year, and it will move you in ways that you might not expect.  As I’ve noted before, I spent $90 and 60 hours on the deluxe edition of ME:A and didn’t care about a goddamned thing I was doing; I finished Edith Finch in two sittings and I’m not sure I’ll ever get it out of my head.  It is executed about as well as it can be, and this will be near the top of my GOTY list without question.

The End Of Andromeda

mea.PNG

Mass Effect Andromeda

Current Status:  credits have rolled.  Approximately 60 hours, approximately 80% game completion.  Level 53.  Still a few side quests to tool around with, as well as a narrative epilogue to wrap up.

It’s interesting to me how, even though I’ve been playing games for most of my life, I don’t necessarily have the same associative recall with games that I do with, say, music or books or film.  For instance:  I saw Pulp Fiction in the $1.50 theater about 8 or 10 times one summer with my best friend Steve, and so I will always associate that movie with him.  My girlfriend in high school introduced me to The Smiths and The Cure and, though she didn’t mean to, made me hate Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”.  I will always remember listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” with my friend Aleks, as we gorged on junk food.  The first time I ever got stoned, my soundtrack was Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland” – an album I’d appreciated but clearly didn’t get, on a visceral level, until that one fateful evening.

There are a few game-centered memories, of course; my younger brother had a Sega Genesis when he was growing up, and we’d play NBA Jam and Streets of Rage 1-3 long after my mom had given up trying to get us to show up for dinner.  Jongre, my first real friend at my first real job out of college, had a PS1 and we played Oddworld and Crash Bandicoot all the goddamned time (while listening to Aceyalone’s “Book of Human Language”).  My other friend (and very occasional SFTC contributor) Greg and I would nerd out endlessly over Grim Fandango and Giants: Citizen Kabuto.  (We still nerd out about games pretty much every day, as it turns out.)  I had some friends from the Gamespot forums in the early 00s that I will always associate with Burnout 3, Ghost Recon, and Phantom Dust.

But the truth is, over the last 17 years or so my life has been somewhat static; I don’t have the same associative memories if only because not all that much has changed.  I’m married and have a kid and I moved to the suburbs, but my day job is still the same and I don’t necessarily hang out with people the way I used to.  In other words, there is less of an opportunity for me to associate media with people, because I’m a lot less social now than I used to be.

In any event, I did not play 60 hours of Mass Effect Andromeda because it was a good game (though it became… well… less bad after a while).  I played 60 hours of MEA because I was in a dark place last week, missing out on a Florida vacation with my wife and kid so that I could stay behind and help my mom recover from a nearly-fatal illness.  MEA was the thing that helped pull me through each difficult day.  I’d come home from the hospital exhausted and depleted, and MEA had just enough shit to do to help distract me from missing my family.  Ironically, MEA’s below-average storytelling is probably the reason why I kept with it; which is to say, I didn’t have to pay attention to what I was doing; I just had a ton of stuff to do, and I did it, and because I didn’t particularly care what it was that I was doing, it was easy to turn off when I had to go to bed.

MEA is not a bad game.  It does feel undercooked and scatterbrained, and it’s clearly going for the “let’s fill up the map with waaaaay too much shit to do” ideal of level design pioneered by Ubisoft.  And it’s buggy, even after the most recent patch – while I didn’t encounter any hard crashes after that patch, I did fall through the world a few times, and I had to reload the final boss battle because of a weird bug.  And its UI is a goddamned mess – I know nothing about game design but I could probably crank out at least 1000 words on MEA’s UI issues alone.  I think it’s easy to piss all over it because the original trilogy is held in such high regard (especially by me), and MEA is disappointing in almost every respect when compared to its predecessors.

In and of itself, though, it probably has the best combat in the entire series – and while combat is not why I play Mass Effect games, it’s the primary reason why I didn’t turn this one off immediately.  Sure, some of the random encounters on hostile planets get tedious and annoying, but the actual mission setpieces are quite fun and enjoyable and satisfying to complete.

If MEA is the launching pad for a new trilogy, I think there’s a tremendous amount of potential for this series to regain its footing.  But I also think that it’s perhaps a little too restricted by its forebears; this is a new galaxy, and because it’s not really tied into the events of the first trilogy it shouldn’t necessarily be required to think the same way.  I suppose my real disappointment with MEA’s narrative is simply that, for all intents and purposes, the new species of alien aren’t that much different from the Milky Way’s aliens; I was sort of hoping that we’d get into not just a different physical look, but a whole new way of thought and communication and living.  Instead, it’s just a British accent and some different weaponry, but the same mundane neuroses and petty political squabbles apply.   MEA feels almost too familiar, as if Bioware were afraid to mess with their pre-established formula.

I am aware that I’ve spent nearly this entire post being negative; and if I were giving the game a score, I’d probably aim for the 6-7 out of 10 range.  And yet I played it to completion, and I don’t regret doing so.  It was mindless and big and helped me escape my own loneliness and depression, at least for a little while.  I only hope that I don’t have to play MEA2 under similar circumstances.

 

how to disappear completely, for a little while at least

FYI: I am about to go on a family vacation, which means this blog will be even quieter than usual.

I’ve also been dealing with some rather upsetting family-related issues that I’m not going to discuss here.  It is hard, when one has a blog, to not be able to talk about this stuff.  But on the other hand, that’s what therapy is for.  In any event, I’ve been having a hard time mustering any enthusiasm for writing about what I usually write about here, because under the circumstances it’s difficult for me to imagine that anyone gives a shit.  Leaving my own personal business aside, the world is a pretty fucked-up place right now; we could all die in a nuclear holocaust simply because our President* saw something on Fox News while eating a burned, ketchup-slathered steak at his private country club and decided to fire a bunch of missiles in the direction of an accumulation of brown people.

I don’t know how else to explain why I’m continuing to play Mass Effect Andromeda.  It is true that the game is not as awful at it was in its first few hours – I’m currently at level 20, I think – but it’s still pretty mediocre at best.  It’s a hard game for me to binge; I can only handle an hour or so at a time before needing to switch off.  And yet I am compelled to push on, for reasons that still remain unknown.

I do know, though, that despite the rave reviews, I have no patience for Persona 5.  I can’t spend 100 hours playing a game with a translation this shitty.  (This AV Club review-in-progress talks about the game’s dialogue issues in greater detail; I only played the first 30 minutes or so before accepting that I was never going to have the patience to get much further.)

In terms of things that are good and beautiful and make the world a better place, I would HIGHLY recommend Amor Towles’ A Gentleman In Moscow, which is one of the best books I’ve read in quite some time.  It is beautiful and lyrical and its many observations about life’s little details are insightful and illuminating.  As a quick example:

Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again? So it is with good reason that most of us meet this dangerous interstice with a sense of foreboding.

Anyway, that’s the news.  Tell your loved ones that you love them.  Reach out to long lost friends and tell them you love them, too.  Apologize to those you’ve wronged, and if your apology isn’t accepted, well, that’s OK too.  Make your heart happy.

The Ethereal Sigh

A Twitter friend recently held a poll asking which format of games was preferable – digital or physical.  I used to be a physical devotee; I took great pride in my collections of stuff, be they books, CDs, games, etc.  I felt that the object was just as worthy of obsession as the actual art within.  I painstakingly arranged my DVD shelves by director and genre; my bookshelves were a bit more haphazard but there was a logic in their arrangement that I could see; certain books just belonged together, and so they were.

This started to change in 2004, when I got married.  Instead of hiring a DJ, I bought an iPod and made a gigantic mix, and suddenly I realized the genius in having my entire CD library in my pocket instead of lugging around a discman and 2 20-disc CD wallets in my backpack all day.

And then at some point I got a Kindle, and ever since then I’ve almost exclusively bought e-books.

And so you can see where this is going:  I am a slave to the cloud.  I bought (much) bigger hard drives for both my Xbox One and my PS4, and while I might own 200 games among both systems, I think I only own 3 physical discs (both accompanied my PS4 purchase, before I knew any better).

I bring this up because last night, had I owned a physical copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I would have forcibly ejected it from my Xbox and snapped it in half.  I’d been stuck in this one particular battle on a very dreary, snowy planet for the last few days, and last night I was determined to figure out how to upgrade my equipment and actually beat the damned thing, and so I did all that stuff (and it’s so poorly executed in the menus, you guys, the whole thing could’ve been radically simplified if the developers looked at the most recent version of The Witcher 3 and just stole their UI wholesale) and then went back and… and… the loading screen never finished loading, and no matter how many times I went back and reloaded I’d keep getting stuck.

I did eventually have to backtrack to an earlier save which wasn’t fucked up, and I decided to abandon that particular mission entirely for the time being, and now I’m stuck with some bullshit Sudoku puzzle where I know I’m solving it correctly but the game keeps saying I’m wrong.  But at least the game is working, again, sort of.

I don’t know why I’m continuing to give ME:A the benefit of the doubt.  If this was any other game, or any other developer, I would’ve given up a dozen hours ago.  I keep wanting it to get better, to get closer to the Mass Effect experience that I’ve loved for so long, and it keeps… not doing that, at all.  As it happens, there’s nothing else on my gaming plate besides my backlog, and I’m still not sure if I want to bother with Final Fantasy XV until the infamous Chapter 13 gets patched.  (In fairness, I’m barely into Chapter 1 or 2, so I presumably have a long way to go before that point.)