It’s been a rough few days here at SFTC HQ, and I apologize in advance for being quiet. I’m not going to get into the details here, but suffice it to say that I needed a bit of a break from the internet / the world / people in general.
I’m still kinda in hibernation / cocooning mode, and so I expect it’ll be quiet here for a little while longer. I thank you in advance for your patience.
1. My buddy Sara returns serve with more Uncharted 4 correspondence over at Videodame. I hope to volley back later next week.
2. I’m busting outta the ‘burbs and will be at the NYVCC summer shindig at Barcade this coming Monday, July 25. If you’re in town, come on by!
3. I’ve been wanting to write about Stranger Things all week, but knew I should wait until I finished the season; my wife and I started on Sunday after the kid went to bed and pushed through 2 episodes per night, and so we finished it on Wednesday evening. I woke up later that night at 3am and had one of those middle-of-the-night timeless intervals trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. Now it’s Friday and I’m still floating out to sea, somewhat. (There’s a reason for that, though.*)
If you don’t know what Stranger Things is, here’s my very abbreviated elevator pitch: imagine Steven Spielberg directing a Stephen King novel, with a John Carpenter soundtrack, in 1983.
This essay from Paste goes into a bit more detail, especially in terms of what exactly it’s stealing from; here’s a TL:DR excerpt:
If you were a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, chances are you’ve seen Stranger Things before. An eight-part sci-fi spectacle and shiny new Netflix original from filmmaking brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, Stranger Things is spooky supernatural entertainment unashamedly in the 1980s popcorn mould. It won’t be a problem for today’s kids less familiar with that period in film, but for those that recognize the influences—anyone who’s been paying attention to pop culture over the last 30 years, probably—there’s nothing surprising about Stranger Things. In fact, there’s barely an original idea across its six-and-a-half hours. Instead, it constantly recalls old stories.
There’s an argument to be made that this is in fact Stranger Things’ ‘original’ concept: arranging shopworn ideas in a new and interesting way. Collaging is considered an art, and it no doubt takes talent to make a worthwhile season of television almost entirely out of borrowed parts. Which isn’t to say Stranger Things is like some scrappy mish-mash; like Quentin Tarantino, the Duffers only cadge ideas from the best, but are more importantly talented enough as storytellers to use those ideas in effective ways.
I don’t know if I would count it among the greatest seasons of capital-T Television I’ve ever seen, but it was incredibly fun, and I guess the thing I appreciated the most is how, while it’s obviously borrowing heavily from a lot of 1980s tropes, it’s also incorporating a lot of today’s story-telling methods. Let’s be honest – if you go back and revisit a classic 80s movie that you haven’t seen in a number of years, a lot of them haven’t aged particularly well; they are better in your memory of them than how they actually are.
A few key examples of this: the first Tim Burton Batman movie, from 1989. I saw this movie in the theater as a kid and LOVED it, but hadn’t watched it again until a few years ago. And for all its stylistic Tim Burton-ness, there’s just a whole bunch of nonsense that 14-year-old me just didn’t notice at the time. There’s a scene in the back half of the movie where Jack Nicholson’s Joker pays Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale a menacing visit. But there’s literally no reason for him to show up there. The scene doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s a fabricated excuse to give Jack and Kim a scene together, and when you watch this with the benefit of watching 20+ years of movies in the interim, suddenly it sticks out.
Or, alternately, Big Trouble in Little China, which I loved to death back in the day. It’s still fun, and it’s visually interesting, but the movie itself barely hangs together.
Anyway, back to Stranger Things. Here is a bullet-pointed collection of thoughts, which I am currently too distracted to properly formulate into an actual essay. (See the above-referenced footnote below.) It’s hard to be specific without getting into what are technically spoilers, but I should also note that this isn’t the sort of show where you’re being knocked over by plot twists; there’s a tremendous amount of forward momentum here and so anything spoiler-y is less about a BIG REVEAL and more about a moment of character development. Still, be warned.
I loved the show; you should watch it.
* This week’s been a shitshow – work has been busy, and the RNC is a waking nightmare, but on the lighter side of things I’ve also been pleasantly obsessing over music, which carries its own set of distractions. I know I’ve talked numerous times about how impressed I am at whatever algorithmic alchemy Spotify manages to achieve for the weekly Discovery playlist; the hit-to-miss ratio is more than acceptable, especially considering that the songs that qualify as “hits” more often than not end up becoming profoundly affecting. Part of the reason why I couldn’t write anything yesterday is because I spent, like, 5 hours just listening to the bridge in Moses Sumney’s “Everlasting Sigh”.
I am not playing Pokemon GO. But neither am I one of those cranky old fuddy-duddys who’s making fun of people who are.
I am, instead, one of those people who were simply born in that very specific date range where Pokemon means absolutely nothing to me whatsoever. I was too old when they first came out, and I was again too old when the videogames started coming out, and I remain too old and too limited in my free time to pay attention to it now. This is not me complaining; this is me simply being realistic.
Normally I get that “Fear Of Missing Out” anxiety when 90% of my Twitter feed is about something that I’m not actively participating in, but not in this case. Even if I were to download it – and I may still do it, just out of pure curiosity – I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do with any of the various Pokethings I might come across, nor would I bother looking for any of the various Pokemon Go explainers that have popped up.
I’m also not sure how long this mania is going to last. Remember just a short while ago, when Miitomo was all the rage? Has anyone even looked at that thing in, say, the last 3 weeks?
I must stress, again, that I don’t hate Pokemon GO; I just don’t care about it. I’m not reflexively angry about it, like all those idiots who hate the new Ghostbusters film without having seen it. To those of you who are currently obsessed with it – please, by all means, tell me about it. Is it approachable for the Pokemon neophyte, or do you have to already know how Pokemon works before bothering with it? And does it kill your phone battery as quickly as I hear it does? My iPhone 6’s battery is already starting to wither and die if I use it too much – like today, for instance, where I caught a 7:45am train with my battery at 95% and got into the office a little before 9:00am with the battery all the way down to 53%, and that was just because I was listening to Spotify and reading Twitter. I worry that if, by some chance, I did end up downloading it and starting playing it during my various walks, that my phone would simply catch on fire.
I know it seems silly to write up a blog post to announce that I’m NOT playing the thing that everyone else in the world is playing, but I felt it important to differentiate myself from the other various thinkpieces out there.
1. My latest Uncharted 4 correspondence for Videodame’s Co-Op Campaign is up! Check it out here.
2. Earlier this year I wrote that I was done with Lego games, having struggled to finish Lego Marvel Avengers.. To be more specific:
The voice acting is mostly taken from the movies, except each line reading feels strangely sleepy and deadened in its delivery; the action is relentlessly tedious, endless waves of enemies descending out of nowhere, for no particular reason except to pad everything out. Plenty of bugs. A whole bunch of puzzles that do not explain themselves at all, which is all the more frustrating because the game doesgo out of its way to explain the dumbest shit in agonizing unskippable camera swoops. I know, I know – I’m 40 years old, I’m at least 25 years past the target demographic, etc. This doesn’t stop a shitty game from being a shitty game. Remind me that I said all of this when Lego: Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes out in a few months.
Well, for some stupid reason I decided to rent Lego Star Wars TFA, and, lo and behold, everything I said in the above paragraph applies to this new game as well. I am no longer interested in having to repeat the same platforming exercise dozens of time because the game is too stupid to recognize where I’m jumping. And while it’s great that they added some new stuff to break up the formula – 3rd-person cover shooting, space combat – the new stuff is so poorly executed that I’d rather they kept it out. I barely got through 2 chapters before deciding I’d had enough. I’d rather watch the movie anyway.
3. I realize that I never updated my progress with respect to INSIDE. Well, I finished it, and… um… yeah. I stand by my initial assertion that it packs one hell of a first impression, and that the animation and sound design are particularly excellent. That being said, I have literally no idea what the hell happened there at the end, and I was left with a lingering sense of “what the hell did I just play, and why?” Hard to explain unless I get into spoilers, though even with spoilers it’s not like it gets any easier. Would be curious to discuss it with someone who got it. Otherwise, I’m starting to wonder just what it is about PlayDead and their fascination with child murdering.
4. I’m kinda drifting along through my gaming library at the moment. I should be focused on finishing Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, but that requires a time commitment that I simply don’t have right now; that’s not the sort of game that I can play for just 30 minutes and then log off. For some reason I bought the PS4 editions of Saints Row 4 and Gat Out of Hell, probably because they were stupidly cheap. I do kinda love how ridiculously dumb SR4 is; it’s the Crackdown sequel I always wanted. The PS4 edition barely qualifies as a “remaster”, but that’s not necessarily enough to ignore it completely; it’s a fun, dumb game, and I’m happy to mess around with it unless it completely crashes (which it actually did the other night). I’d never played Gat out of Hell, and after 30-45 minutes with it I’m not sure I need to. I am obviously going to start playing Red Dead Redemption again on Friday, once its transition to the XB1 is complete; I don’t know if I’m going to start over from scratch or just pick up where my cloud save left off, but all I really want is just to hang out with it again.
1. I’ve been continuing on my reading tear of late, and I’m sure it’s because I’m feeling pressured to make sure I hit my Goodreads Reading Challenge number for some stupid reason. And most of the books I’ve read lately are on the short side of things.
Since my last post, I’ve finished Emma Straub’s “Modern Lovers”, which I found somewhat disappointing, though I’ll admit that it may only be disappointing in that what I expected is not at all what I got. I should note that a lot of what I’m reading these days is stuff that I’ve picked in order to help me formulate some lyric ideas. And a book about middle-aged people who used to be in a band in college and reexamining their lives in light of their shared connection – well, that’s a topic that’s very much on my mind, both in terms of lyrics and just in general. “Modern Lovers” does not really focus on the stuff I’d hoped it would. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s without merit; it just means I was looking for something that simply wasn’t there.
Then I read Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”, which Amazon had recently featured in a Kindle sale for $1.99 or something ridiculous, so I picked it up. It is known as a sci-fi classic, and apparently you can’t describe it without mentioning its commonalities to Vietnam, of which Haldeman was a veteran. To that end, it presents a unique perspective of the soldier’s point of view, which is certainly worth absorbing. I was a little put off by his more far-out ideas of sexuality and eugenics, though.
Last night I began Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending”, and I finished it this morning, and WOW, WOW, fucking WOW. I’ve read quite a few good books lately, but there’s a difference between reading a good book and reading a good book by a great writer, and Barnes is absolutely magnificent. I am also perhaps a little ashamed to admit that I related to the narrator far more than I was prepared to be? In any case, this was the rumination on nostalgia and loss and remembrance that I’d hoped “Modern Lovers” would be, and now I want to read everything else he’s written. I think I’d been aware of this specific book for a while, but it wasn’t until the reviews came out of his latest book, “The Noise of Time” – a (fictional?) book about Shostakovitch – that I started looking over the rest of his work.
2. I stared playing INSIDE last night, the latest 2.5D game from Playdead, makers of Limbo. You can’t talk about INSIDE without referencing Limbo, and I suppose that might be part of the point – they’re both very moody and atmospheric, and both feature a child running away from something horrible towards something unknown but also probably horrible, and all the while platforming and puzzling around dangerous obstacles. And both games are not afraid of showing the gruesome fate of an ill-timed or wrong-footed step. I’m about 2/3 of the way through and am hopeful I can finish it tonight. I don’t want to say anything else about it except that it is, so far, absolutely stunning. Remarkably articulate animation (helped out by finely-tuned controls), astounding sound design, and a very pleasing use of physics manipulation where necessary.
1. First thing’s fuckin’ last: my first piece in Videodame’s Co-op Campaign is up, in which me and my buddy Sara start our discussion about Uncharted 4. I’d deliberately avoided talking about U4 in these pages because I knew this thing was going to start up, so go on and give it a spin, why don’t you?
2. I’m in a weird place, gaming-wise. I’m not playing anything with any enthusiasm. Work has been killing me and my three-year-old is a vortex of I’m exhausted, for one thing, and so if I do end up playing anything it’s not for very long; I’m inching along in Witcher 3: Blood and Wine for this very reason. (Also, I appear to be wildly under-levelled for some of the sidequests, and so I’m kinda just treading water.) I gave up on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, because it was hopelessly dumb; one particular side quest has a broken Runner’s Vision thing which kept sending me off a ledge too high for me to survive, and it’s not like I particularly cared about what I was doing. I’ve more or less given up on Trials of the Blood Dragon, because the off-bike stuff is soooooo bad. My rental copy of Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens should be arriving next week, but if the demo is any indication, it’s still the same old broken platforming bullshit that’s been plaguing this series for years.
I honestly can’t remember what else is on my plate at the moment. I beat the new Gauntlet mode in Swapperoo, my current iOS GOTY candidate; woo-hoo.
3. I’ve read a hell of a lot of books lately, though. Of note:
4. This eulogy for Other Music is hitting me in the feels. I might as well have written it myself.
…My scramble for self-identity was tied up in records, and Other Music was where I went to get myself sorted out. What did I like? What did I want? Which section did I want to start flipping through first, and what did that say about me? The classification of a person via her cultural preferences and proclivities—maybe that’s something we should be glad to wave goodbye to. One is no longer either a punk or a goth, In or Out; one merely is.
But it’s also why I think of Other Music as an integral player in my making, and why witnessing its end feels especially personal. We all experience some version of this dissociation a million times in a life: a drawbridge being raised behind you. The sense that you couldn’t re-create yourself now if you tried. When I needed it to, Other Music turned the whole notion of “Other” into something prideful—it forced me to make a choice about who I thought I was, or could be—and for that I’ll always be grateful, beholden.
And just like that, the day job is busy again. Until next time! [Exits, pursued by a bear]
I’d hoped to have posted my impressions of Sony’s press conference much sooner, but events have conspired against me. I suppose it’s for the best, since I have the benefit of hindsight now and I feel that I can be a bit more objective about what Sony had to offer.
Did Sony “win” E3? Was this “the greatest press conference ever”? I’ve seen several tweeted headlines that answer in the affirmative to both of these questions, but I’m not convinced. Again – I’m writing this a few days after the presser, so I’m not nearly as breathless with anticipation as I might’ve been during the actual event.
Sony’s actual press conference was certainly not the epic, no-doubt-about-it mic drop of a few years ago. (And when I look at that recap, I am simply stunned by what I managed to be stunned by.) I did find it much more substantive and tasteful than Microsoft’s, though that could’ve been the live orchestra.
More to the point, the games – or, rather, the portions of new games that were presented to us – seemed more mature, more sophisticated. This new, Norse-themed God of War reboot feels like a Naughty Dog game, with a nuanced relationship between a father and son. Horizon similarly looks quite astonishing, although it’s hard to know how to extrapolate a full game experience from that 7-8 minute demo. We have a 2016 release date for The Last Guardian, which is nice, even if I haven’t read any preview coverage that managed to get a clear handle on what it is.
Honestly, I’m mostly excited about the Crash Bandicoot remasters. And also the PSVR, which comes in at a price point that I can most probably survive.
This is all well and good, but now that’s it’s been a few days I’m more concerned about what we didn’t see – like No Man’s Sky (which I suspect was withheld simply because they’re in crunch time and didn’t have time to show anything without severely cramping their style). And of course Sony did not talk about the “Neo”, which begs the question – will my PSVR work better with the new hardware? Can I afford a Neo and a Scorpio while still paying my mortgage? Will my wife leave me if I buy them both anyway?
* * *
With regards to the rest of the show: I am the wrong dude to ask. Work has been crazy, and whatever free time I’ve had this week has been devoted to posting about gun control and how horrible Donald Trump is. But I can run off a few bullet points:
I don’t know what I wanted out of Microsoft’s E3 presser today. I barely touch my Xbox One these days as it is. Nearly everything that looked halfway interesting had a 2017 date attached to it, and there wasn’t necessarily all that much that looked halfway interesting.
In this frightening post-Burnout world we live in, Forza Horizon has become my favorite driving franchise, and Forza Horizon 3 looks pretty spectacular – I’ll definitely be picking that up in September.
I was hoping for some Crackdown 3 news or footage, and we got absolutely nothing on that front, and I’m not sure if that means I should be worried. And I suppose I’d also hoped for some big-name 360 games to become backward-compatible (*cough cough* Red Dead *cough cough*). There were other, obvious things that I figured we’d see – Gears 4 (which looks very Gears-y) and Halo Wars 2 (which isn’t my thing, but whatever).
The Xbox One Slim is a nice deal, but who in their right mind would buy it if the Scorpio – “the most powerful console ever built” with the “highest quality pixels” – is coming next year? And will developers have a collective nervous breakdown if they have to develop across all Xbox SKUs?
As per usual, the most interesting part of the press conference was the “indie showcase”, which is merely a montage of all the legitimately cool-looking games that I’m actually looking forward to checking out. Hard to get a feel for any of them with that quick-fire editing, though.
I can’t tell if I’m disappointed, jaded, or distracted. But I’m definitely not feeling as gung-ho as I’d like to be feeling right now.
As in E3s past, I will most likely miss the Ubisoft presser, just because of my evening commute. But I’m certainly very interested to see what Sony’s got up their sleeve. I’ll most likely be live-tweeting when that starts happening, and a more detailed impressions post will follow shortly thereafter.
So I am a dumb-dumb.
I’ve been complaining for months now that I haven’t been able to get to any of the Witcher 3 DLC, because I started a New Game + and need to be at least level 60 in order to start the last episode, Hearts of Stone. And even though I’d downloaded the newest installment yesterday morning before leaving for work, it didn’t appear to be available when I started my NG+ save.
So I decided to back out, close out, and see about starting a New Game from scratch. And lo and behold, there’s an option to play just the DLC (as well as any non-main-storyline quests) as a level 32 character, with properly leveled equipment.
I could’ve been playing the DLC this whole time, in other words, except I didn’t realize it was an option. Or maybe I did, but ignored it (and then forgot about it), figuring I’d want to get there on my own via NG+ and such.
Unlike other RPGs where I’d find myself attached to my specific character build, Geralt is such a well-defined character in his own right that it seems completely unnecessary to bring my previous hundreds of hours along with him for a stand-alone adventure. I’m certainly not attached to any of my weaponry or armor, and I have to figure that the DLC content would drop new stuff soon enough anyway.
So, as I said before, I’m a dumb-dumb. I’ll be playing the Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine DLCs now, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.
I don’t write about music nearly enough on this blog, and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out my current front-runner for Album of the Year: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s ridiculously awesome “Nonagon Infinity”. One of their songs had shown up in my Spotify Discovery playlist a few weeks back and I’d thought it pretty good, and for whatever reason I decided to give the rest of the album a listen, and NOW I CAN’T STOP. Which is helpful, because the album is designed to be listened to on repeat – the last song leads directly into the opening seconds of the first song. The whole thing kicks a tremendous amount of ass and now I’m finding myself falling down a garage-rock-psychedelic-prog rabbit hole; I’ll be listening to this and Thee Oh Sees for the next month, at least.
I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Justin Cronin’s “The City of Mirrors”, aka the final installment in the Passage trilogy, and it’s… hmm. I’m enjoying it very much, though it’s paced a little too deliberately – there’s lots of short chapters with cliffhanger endings. I appreciate that he’s trying to build momentum and tension, but it feels a little artificial to me.
On the other hand, it’s very interesting to see earlier events from the previous books told through different points of view – my favorite sequence in the entire trilogy, Amy’s visit to the zoo (from the first book), is now seen through Amy’s own POV, which adds an illuminating layer of intrigue to an already spectacular set-piece. And there’s also a very long sequence detailing Subject Zero’s personal history, which contains some of the best pure writing in the whole series.
Obviously, if you’ve read the first two, you’re probably already reading this one. I’ll be looking forward to talking it over with people once I finish.
First thing’s first: regular readers of this blog know that I have a tendency to post somewhat irregularly. Unfortunately, due to events beyond my control (i.e., my day job just moved to a new location and my computer monitor is now far more visible than it ever was at the old location), this is probably only going to get worse before it gets better.
I’ve been stressed out about the Goodreads challenge. I am still 2 books ahead of schedule, but I don’t like only being 2 books ahead of schedule; there’s not a lot of breathing room. But more to the point, I don’t like feeling like I need to read quickly just to hit some arbitrary number that I selected at the end of last year.
In any event, I finished David Means’ excellent and very trippy meta-Vietnam-memoir “Hystopia” this morning, which means I can now jump to “The City of Mirrors”, the just-released and final installment in Justin Cronin’s wonderful Passage trilogy. I recently re-read the first two in order to get better prepared; I’d always adored the first book, but wasn’t quite as hot on the second. After this re-read, though, I thought the 2nd book was much better – possibly because the first book was still fresh in my mind, and also possibly because I wasn’t rushing through the ending and so I found myself better able to follow what was happening. I still think he’s better at writing about people than he is at constructing elaborate action set-pieces, and to that end the 2nd book is still problematic, but it’s still engaging.
As for games: I’m finding myself having conflicting thoughts about Uncharted 4, the longer I stay away from it. It’s tricky. While I was playing it, I was thoroughly enraptured by it; the pacing is so fucking good and I always felt involved and invested in what was happening. But now that it’s over, and I’ve read some more critical appraisals, I’m starting to wonder if it’s “THE BEST GAME EVER MADE.” I certainly wouldn’t go quite as far as, say, David Shimomura’s disemboweling of it in Unwinnable, but there are some interesting points raised therein.
I had planned on replaying it, but as it happens, I’ve found myself more and more entranced by the new Doom. It started off very slow, almost alarmingly slow – though I concede that this might’ve been because my initial hour or so was spent in that post-Uncharted 4 haze. But it’s become quite enjoyable.
I don’t have the same relationship with Doom that most people do; I played the first few levels back in the day but I don’t think I ever beat it. Same thing with Castle Wolfenstein. The only games I had access to in those years, for whatever reason, were Duke Nukem 3D and then Quake 2. I’m sure I bought the Xbox Arcade version of Doom, just to have it, but I don’t know that I did anything with it.
Point being, even in my limited experience, I’m familiar with the old Doom enough to recognize that this new Doom feels like it’s coming from the same place. Certainly the movement feels similar. The momentum through a combat arena feels the same – constant movement, jumping all over the place, nonstop action, and then a very pleasing break after that last kill, when the music calms down, and then you can begin to explore for hidden stuff (most of which I can’t find, even though I do look for it – even with my recon upgrades, I’m still missing things all the time). It has the same confounding first-person platforming bits on preposterous architecture. My first visit to Hell felt… well, not particularly hellish the way a more modern horror game might depict it, but it certainly felt like a Doom version of Hell should, which is appropriate.
I don’t give a shit about the narrative and, refreshingly, the game knows it. It gives you just enough to point you in the right direction, but doesn’t overplay its hand; nobody’s playing this for the story. (Which, again, is an interesting thing to experience after playing Uncharted 4, a game in which there are several different levels specifically dedicated to wandering around a person’s private residence, where every single item is part of a larger character study.)
So, yes: it’s going to be quiet-ish around here for a little bit, until I can better figure out how to write without making it profoundly obvious that I’m not doing actual work-work. Bear with me.
Shouts From The Couch 