Category: ramblings

Good Things

Instead of being all sad and mopey and navel-gazing – AND BELIEVE ME YOU DON’T WANT ME TO GET INTO ANY OF THAT RIGHT NOW – I want to shine a light on some good things I’ve recently come across.  Ironically, a lot of the good things I want to share are kinda sad.  But, be that as it may, here goes:

1.  If you haven’t already seen it, Patti Smith’s tribute to Sam Shepard in the New Yorker is one of the best things you’ll read all year.  I’m going to be honest here and admit that I don’t know Patti’s music as well as I feel like I should.  But between this essay and her humbling, heartfelt performance of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Nobel ceremony last December, I am now compelled to start reading her memoir, M Train, post-haste.

2.  Speaking of books, I just finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon, and while I wasn’t necessarily bowled over by the somewhat dry quality of the prose, the story of the Osage Murders and how they directly formed the foundation of the FBI as we currently know it is staggering.  I can’t believe I never knew about this.  This is a necessary, heartbreaking story and it’s unfathomable that nobody knows about it.  Indeed, if karma is in fact a real thing, then it’s entirely possible that the Trump Presidency is our karmic retribution for our utter annihilation of the Native American way of life.

I…. I think I’m getting woke.

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3.  Today’s song of the day du jour is “itsallwaves” by Enemies.

 

And while I’m at it, here’s a little playlist of some songs that I’ve been enjoying of late – most of them are from Spotify’s Discovery playlists, and others just kinda showed up.  At some point I’m going to write a huge thing about Louis Cole, who’s been blowing my mind ever since “Bank Account” went somewhat viral earlier this year – I’ve been digging into his catalog and I’m continually amazed at how incredibly versatile and restlessly creative he is.  And yes, that is a Coldplay song in there; believe me, nobody is more surprised that I’m recommending a Coldplay song than me.

 

The Sense of an Ending

Still going through some weird emotional ups and downs.  These things happen; sometimes it’s a chemical thing and sometimes it’s politics and sometimes it’s a bunch of bad personal/family/friend news and sometimes it’s just out of the blue.  At this specific moment, it would appear to be a bit of everything.  So I cope as best I can; I play with my son, I turn off social media (for little bits here and there), I engage in retail therapy and accumulate credit card debt.  I feel like I’m repeating myself.  My wife is out of town tonight and I’m throwing the world’s smallest pity party.

I have to assume, in this day and age, that game developers can keep track of how people are playing their games, even if it’s just from looking at Achievement/Trophy unlocks.  It would follow that devs have a relatively good sense of how many people actually finish a story-driven game.  As I’ve noted here and elsewhere, games are a unique medium in that, unlike books or albums or films, it is common practice to spend 10-20 hours with a game and never get anywhere close to the “end”.

I bring this up because last night I finally finished the Watch Dogs 2 campaign, and the ending was possibly the most half-assed, anti-climactic snore-fest I’ve ever seen.  Indeed, the only reason why I know it was the final mission is because the credits rolled afterwards, and I got an Achievement.  Otherwise, I’m honestly not sure I would’ve known the game was over.  And it’s entirely possible that the devs didn’t think anyone would get that far, considering how dumb that ending is.

I maintain that WD2 is, on the whole, a rather enjoyable collection of compelling gameplay ideas trapped in some sort of focus-tested narrative hellscape.  Unlike the thoroughly unlikable anti-hero of the first game (not that you’d ever have guessed that the devs intended him to be unlikable), WD2 has a diverse group of “good guys” that are still unbearably stereotypical and dumb and desperately “cool”, and as part of the hacker collective they have a Robin Hood-esque ethos – screwing over the rich and powerful to better show the unknowing masses how little control over their own lives they have – but the game also gives no shits about you killing dozens and dozens of people.  You can’t have a game about morality and ethics while also being totally unethical and immoral – it defeats the whole point.  Why would the unwashed public care about a bunch of hacktivists who not only steal private data but are also domestic terrorists, inasmuch as the murdering of “bad guys” actually means anything?  Say what you will about Wikileaks and Anonymous, but I’m pretty sure those guys haven’t murdered hundreds of heavily armed security officers as they infiltrate a private HQ – or murdered police, on the way out of the building.  Anyway, the bad guy gets arrested at the end, but who even gives a shit?

I don’t know what else is on my gaming plate, beyond the usual combo of backlog/replays/cheap-as-hell indie titles picked up during summer sales.  People seem to be enjoying the Destiny 2 beta; I’m staying out of it for the moment.  To be honest, I’m not sure what system I’d play it on, or if I’d play it at all – I liked the original game well enough but preferred the solo experience, such as it was.  I’m not necessarily feeling the same itch this time around.

 

a sort-of cure for the hopelessness blues

I have been feeling somewhat weird lately, for lack of a better word.  (As I look at the titles of my most recent blog posts, I realize that they’re all a bit down-trodden, to say the least.)

I continue to be politically despondent, and I don’t know how to combat that.  As I’ve noted before, my day job has turned off a great deal of internet access but I still have Twitter and the news, and the TV in the kitchenette is turned to CNN, and every time I look up something horrifying is happening and, just as horrifying, nothing is being done about it.

So I turn to – what else – retail therapy.  I went a wee bit bananas during the Amazon Sale.  I now own a Bluetooth record player, some very nice Bluetooth headphones, and a Kindle Fire (for some reason).

It’s funny – when I’d heard that the iPhone 7 was doing away with the headphone jack, I, like most people I knew, was pissed off.  And now that I actually own an iPhone 7+, I was confronted with the realization that using wired headphones was a pain in the ass.   So now I am free from the tyranny of small wires and dongles.  I got these bad boys and they are delightful.

The record player… well, you knew that was coming.  We got it set up last night and christened it with two of my favorite albums – my mother-in-law’s original copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends”, followed by my sister-in-law’s copy of Yes’s “Fragile”.  [EDIT:  I have just been informed that it’s actually my wife’s copy.  Sorry, dear!]  And as my wife and I sat down on our couch and the music started playing, I realized that it was the first time we’d both sat down and listened to music in years.  And that’s kinda the awesome thing about actual, tangible records.  There’s a ritual to getting an album set up to play that simply isn’t there when you’re firing something up on Spotify.  You browse through your collection to find the album you’re looking for; you remove the disc from its sleeve; you carefully lay it on the platter; you press “Start”, and in this case the needle automatically finds its way onto the record.  You sit down, you get comfortable, you listen.  You also have to pay attention because you’ve gotta flip the record over, which is something I hadn’t had to pay conscious attention to since I switched from cassettes to CDs (say, 1992-93).  And then you consider the album as a whole, rather than as a collection of songs; you pay attention to sequencing, how the end of Side 1 and the beginning of Side 2 are their own definitive statements as well as the songs that bridge the album as a complete thing.  (Yes, I might’ve been a little stoned.)

Anyway, I bought the Sgt. Pepper and the OK Computer reissues today.

I have finished Part One of Five of the massive new Neal Stephenson novel “The Rise And Fall of D.O.D.O.“, and it is exactly what I wanted to read right now.  (Until David Mitchell gets around to releasing his new one, whenever that may be.)  I’m a little surprised that nobody’s talking about it; I did notice that it’s unusually pricey, even on the Kindle side of things, but I had Amazon credit and bit the bullet.  It’s easily one of the best things he’s done in years, and that very well may be because it’s co-written by Nicole Galland.  In any event, the sci-fi stuff is very cool, but the characters are also very cool, and as Part One came to a close I found myself very, very excited to know that I still have another 600 pages to go before I’m done.

Why did I buy a Kindle Fire, besides that it was on sale for like $50?  I don’t know.  I already have a Kindle Voyage, which is the best e-reader I’ll ever own.  I also own an old iPad 3, which I haven’t really been using but which at least has a ton of apps on it.  It was an impulse buy driven by anxiety, and so if nothing else I get to offer the first “Thanks, Trump” of what will probably be many.  I only hope that the world ends before my credit card debt is past due.

 

Anxious and Scatterbrained

I used to have 2 similar anxiety dreams.  In the first one, it’d be opening night for a play and not only did I not know my lines, but I’d never received a script in the first place; in the second one, I’d show up to a school with a completely foreign layout and I’d be taking a final exam for a class I’d never attended.

I had a new one this morning, and it was interesting to see how it took shape.  I was about to go on stage – but this time as a musician.  Half my equipment was missing, but that was OK; I didn’t know the songs we were about to play, but I wasn’t worried about that either – I figured I’d be able to fake my way through it.  No, the anxiety didn’t manifest itself until I turned my keyboard on and realized that all my preset sounds were gone, replaced by weird and dissonant blurps and bleeps – sounds that are useful in certain contexts, but not in the one I was about to play in.

It wasn’t a nightmare, to be sure; just a sudden sense of alarm, and then I tried to make adjustments on the fly.  (Of course, in the dream, the keyboard’s knobs and sliders weren’t in the right place and weren’t making the changes I wanted them to make, but at least I had some semblance of control over trying to fix them.)  This is, actually, a sort of progress for me.  Normally I’d just panic.  At least this time I did my best to work with what I had.

I’m not sure where the anxiety was coming from, though it is true that I had somewhat of a minor panic attack yesterday afternoon – and even then, rather than letting it devour me, I did what I had to do to manage it.  It’s not good to fight these things, so I left the town festival where we all were and took a 30-minute walk back home and let my brain free associate itself into something approaching stillness.  The weather was nice, and the walk was pleasantly exhausting.

Now, I know I’ve just described an anxiety dream and a panic attack, but I want to stress that I’m in a much better place now than I’ve ever been before in terms of dealing with these things.  I took whatever control I could to improve my situation, and I was never in the sort of skin-peeling discomfort I used to have when these sorts of episodes would crop up in the past.  Hell, in the past I would’ve never left the house in the first place.

These are tough times, you guys.  Do what you can to take care of yourself.

Here’s where I would say that playing games is a form of self-care, and then I’d tell you what I’ve been playing, and that would be the next part of this post.  But honestly, I’m sort playing half-a-dozen things at the moment and I’m not particularly invested in any of them anymore, and I find that as I’m distracted by politics and the health of my dogs and my kid’s domino obsession, I’m having trouble staying focused.

I have a weird little routine now.  First thing I do is check in on my Xbox save of Clicker Heroes, which… look, at some point I’ll write up a long thing about idle clickers and why I’m so addicted to them.  This is not that time.  The point here is simply that checking in on Clicker Heroes – doing a little maintenance here and there, making sure everything’s leveling up appropriately – this is a nice, easy way of centering my attention.  I can also continue to check Twitter and such while the numbers continue multiplying in the background, but in any event it’s an easy way of gradually shutting off the distracted parts of my brain.

And then, once I’m at a point where I can’t make any more adjustments, I’ll switch over to something else.  I’m still primarily playing Watch Dogs 2, though I must admit that I’m starting to lose interest.  I was sorta dipping my toes back into Shadow of Mordor, of all things, and I also started a new Necromancer in Diablo III.  Was also thinking about starting a New Game+ in Horizon Zero Dawn, though I’m not sure I’ll keep on with that.  And there’s all the other little indie stuff I picked up in the various Xbox and PSN summer sales – stuff like Roundabout, I Am Bread, Adrift, and etc.  And then there’s all the other backlog and replay stuff I want to mess with – like replaying Assassin’s Creed Syndicate to prepare myself for Origins, and Wolfenstein: The New Order to prepare for the new sequel (and also to kill Nazis, which, of course, is our patriotic duty), and then sometimes I also have a weird impulse to fire up the newish Doom, and and and… well, you can see how it can be difficult to sit down and stay engaged in something for more than 15 minutes.

I didn’t even know that the Final Fantasy XII remake was coming out this week.  I’ve never played it; I’ve read nothing but glowing reviews of it, but I also know that I’ve barely touched FFXV, and I don’t know how I feel about starting another endless JRPG when I’m already so scatterbrained.  In any event, I presume my rental copy will arrive on Thursday, and we’ll see where we are at that point in the week.

Maybe I’ll take some time off from gaming completely and get back into writing music?  That’s a novel idea.  Who knows.

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.

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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.]

https://youtu.be/Vzkp9TqN9po

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.