This game is a goddamned masterpiece.
I’m maybe 1/10th of the way through collecting stuff but less than that as far as actual level progression. I can’t believe games are still getting better and better and that we haven’t peaked, yet.
I can’t believe Nintendo is likely to have two of my top five games, this year. Possibly three.
What a world.
Get a Switch. Get this game. You will be a kid, again.
I’m not a big Mega Man fan, but god damn if I didn’t enjoy Mega Man X on my SNES Classic. I like the concept of Mega Man games – fight through themed levels, tackle sub-bosses and overthrow robot masters to acquire their abilities, using them in future battles with other mechanical baddies. But for some reason – granted, it’s because my younger brother likes them and whatever he likes is poop – I never got into them. But I picked up an SNES Classic and decided to start with a game I’d never played. Using no walkthrough, no save states, and only asking my little bro a question or two about enemy weaknesses, I finished that game. My thoughts?
Old games are brutal as hell.
I’m going to keep my retro reviews short and to the point because, for the most part, digging deep on a game over twenty years old is pointless – countless others have beaten me to the punch. We’ll just tackle this rapid fire, like. To start, the game is difficult. Maybe that’s why I never liked Mega Man games? Too much trial and error? I know we live in a post-Dark Souls world, but “Get Gud” is not something I like as a game mechanic. Having said that, once you get the hang of the controls and the abilities, Mega Man X becomes a simple game of “platform to the right” until you reach those iconic double doors.
I’m a sucker for three things in my “classic” games: interesting boss battles, great music, and tight controls. This game nails all three. The boss fights are fun to figure out and a hoot if you unlock the power to topple them quickly and utilize it in advance. While the final boss trio (a dog, his master, and some kind of giant clawed machine) is a bit unfair, insofar as I lost so much health to that damned dog each time, the rest of the bosses are a treat. I much prefer this games approach to re-fighting the bosses. I know the classic series of games has a room where you teleport to each one in successions, but this game just makes the encounters part of the flow of the final levels of the game. I endorse this.
The music is great, too. The level select is a bit repetitive, but once you pick your level and you hear the standard enemy screen theme, it’s on. Each level features a more-or-less unique sound and if you say Storm Eagle’s stage music is shit I will burn your house down with you and your family inside. After this, it’s all about control. And X moves through the levels like he owns the place. Wall jumping, power dashing, charging your shots, and – if you’re crafty with your searches – finding the armor pieces, heart upgrades, and E Tanks scattered across the levels is a welcome surprise each time you stumble upon one.
I did not acquire all the upgrades, did NOT get the Dragon Punch, and absolutely had to fight the final boss(es) about thirty two thousand times. But when it was over and I avenged Zero and stopped the uprising, I know I’d played a solid – if not shockingly short (seriously, the levels end in about three minutes if you just keep moving) – game. I have also completed its first sequel, Mega Man X2, and will provide a review in due time. Until then, if you’ve never had a crack at this one, give it a go. Well worth the time, frustration, and cursing you’ll absolutely do. And if you hit a brick wall, just remember, keep bashing your head against it until you finally break through. The headache is key to winning.
A concussion, though? See a doctor for that.
The short version? Blade Runner 2049 is better than its predecessor by a wide margin, but will never be remembered due to the one thing it couldn’t do better than the Harrison Ford original: being first.
The long version? Well, that’s going to have massive SPOILERS.
I had a ton of reservations about this film, stemming mostly from the fact that there are rarely ever any good decades-later sequels. In fact, there are even more infrequent sequels that are better than the original film. I held off on this movie until reviews came out, even going so far as to telling my friends that I was actually angry that there were good reviews pouring in. Because it meant that I was wrong. And so, a few weeks later, I went and saw the film last night and it is just as much a wonder as the original.
The primary area that the movie succeeds where the first one failed is in the story. Blade Runner is rife with some narrative issues but prime amongst them is that, for a detective story, there is so very little detective work. In fact, its relegated to one long-winded and boring “Enhance” sequence. Past that, nothing. 2049 course corrects by having K (Gosling) do actual legwork. He hunts for clues, follows leads, reports in with his findings, and makes logic leaps that are backed by actual reasoning. It leads him to a brutal opening fight with Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), the revelation that a skeleton belongs to a Replicant, to the revelation that he, himself, might not be what he seems, and – eventually – to discover the location of the long missing Deckard (Ford) in a dusty, gorgeous Vegas. There’s tons of stuff I’m leaving out narratively because its better if you see it, but the twists aren’t horribly convoluted and while there is one major Deus Ex Machina moment (or, should I say… Machina Ex Machina?), there isn’t anything horrible, here.
Everyone brings their A-Game on this one, too. Gosling is an incredibly convincing police detective with strife of his own, Ford brings a level of poise that I didn’t expect to an aging, bitter Deckard, and Robin Wright does a magnificent job with an otherwise empty role. But the standouts in this movie are the relatively unknown women. Sylvia Hoeks does such a great job as Luv that Jared Leto’s unapologetically uninteresting approach to her boss, Niander Wallace, is almost completely forgotten, and Ana de Armas as Joi, K’s girlfriend, both give standout performances that are intense, real, and curious to watch unfold. Past that there’s a short cameo from Edward James Olmos as Gaff, reprising his role from the original film, and it’s cute but mostly worthless.
The biggest shame in the acting? Leto’s turn as the primary antagonist is such a weak and bland role. Comparing it to Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty from the first film is meaningless, since the script never gives us a well-developed villain to be interested in. K’s journey is engaging but the stakes never feel real, both because we spend so little time with the “bad guys” but also because what time we do get is confusing, over-written, and over-acted. But, as I said, Roy Batty is one of the bigger issues with the first Blade Runner – the best character is the bad guy and the main character is bland as hell. This also means that when Ford DOES show back up, he basically gets/has to make the character up from scratch because there wasn’t much to go by, in the first place.
Past this? The visuals and the sound. And man, what a difference 30 years can make. While there are only shades of Vangelis’ original score here and there, the new stuff rom Zimmer and Wallfisch is astoundingly accuracte and – more to the point – more atmospheric that I’d expected. And the sights you get to behold while on this adventure are breathtaking. The city of LA is as dirty and dystopian as it was in the original, but the new locations are amazing. As I’d mentioned, the Vegas scenes are astounding and a wonderful contrast to the darkness of the city. The original film never had much in the way of daylight, but 2049 eschews this while maintaining it. It opens in daylight, but outside of the city’s limits. Any other sun is outside the confines of the grime and the dirt. You could make a claim that it is in these scenes that “Life” is the theme, but to get into that would spoil too much of the film.
The callbacks are few, the tongue-in-cheek references are sparse, and the pace (despite being approximately 45 minutes longer than the first film) never lets you disconnect from the film. There’s always something interesting happening on screen, even in its quieter moments.
While the original film will always be remembered for changing the game and the landscape for science fiction – and, honestly, all of cinema – with its effects, its style, its mood and atmosphere, this film earns a place beside it as not only a better story with more engaging characters, but by building off the very things that make the original such a classic and landmark piece of film history. It won’t be the favorite, in the end, and that’s a shame. Because while Blade Runner 2049 is very clearly not as important a film in the history of movie making, it is so much better as a whole. And, truth be told, its important currently because it’s a high concept, effects driven, smart science fiction film in a franchise that isn’t a retread or soft reboot. It builds off what came before in the proper way. More movies should follow this one’s lead.
But instead I saw a trailer for a new Pacific Rim film before this movie and so I know better.
If you don’t know who Poppy is, well. You might never, really. Or, maybe, we all will. At this point it is too early to tell. Well, YOU will know about her, since you’re reading this currently, but… ah, well, I’ve gone and wasted a paragraph.
My relationship with Poppy is fairly recent, a little over a month ago when I stumbled on a lore video and followed where the source came from. What I found was about 200 videos ranging from just weird to oddly comical, from strangely prophetic to downright off-putting. Eventually it is revealed that Poppy is a singer and she has been recording pop songs (get her name, yet?).
Through careful examination of the videos, her songs’ lyrics, and all of her public appearances and social media, it becomes clear very quickly that Poppy – and her manager Titanic Sinclair – are simply living art pieces, meant to showcase how vain and stupid pop music is, how crazy people get about celebrity status (both obtaining it and worshiping it). How far this message goes will vary on a person-to-person basis, but she is hugely popular on YouTube for a reason: she is unnerving, her videos are short and well made, and the music, in the end, is catchy as fuck.
Sorry for the long preamble, but now that her first full album is out, I felt it wise to really give a fast-and-dirty look at the two year history that brought us to last weekend when poppy.computer hit digital store shelves. And, now that its out and I’ve listened to it, what do I think?
It is fucking ear candy.
The opening track, “I’m Poppy” is a great introduction piece to the album and the artist as a whole. It has the upbeat synth sounds and the infectious beats required for a great pop song. It is also a great litmus test: if you can’t stand this song, you won’t make it far in the album.
The music continues to be catchy as hell and is about a wide-range of surface-level concepts such as loving computers, cell phones, and pop music as a whole (sometimes personified). Other songs are literally just about how great Poppy is and how great it is to be Poppy. But the lyrics themselves are mostly throw-away. Examples include these gems from the penultimate track, “Software Upgrade”:
“I turn you off, I turn you on,
and off and off and on and on
and off and off and on and on and on”
and the regretfully lamentable
“You never make me any food,
And you are never in the mood,
So come on baby tell me,
Are you gay?”
But despite this, I challenge you not to get the hooks in “Let’s Make A Video” stuck in your head. And your heart:
“I love you when you’re happy, I love you when you’re down” will be stuck rattling between my ears for quite some time. Equally catchy? All of “Interweb” – despite its minimalist take on a Gaga-style track. But there is something genius about “I forgot what my password is… maybe its Password123” due both to the insanity of that being a lyric and, well, Poppy’s infatuation with numbers throughout both this album and the lore up to this point.
There’s some weak stuff in the middle, namely “Fuzzy” and “Moshi Moshi” but these still have energy and spunk to spare. While they won’t be the album’s most played tracks, they for sure still fit the themes and message of the album as a whole.
By the acoustic closing tracks, “Pop Music”, though the gig is up, or should be to an attentive listener; Poppy (whose real name is Moriah Pereira and she’s 22, but not as young as some people creepily wish she was) can sing. And that’s the real joke on all of us (and all of those buying her music). Many people come to see Poppy’s videos and listen to her songs because she’s weird, creepy, and/or they find her cute. But if you come to this album and get past the (intentionally) shit lyrics, you’ll find there’s something there.
This album is fun, energetic, mysteriously devoid of anything that comes off as “fake” and is a hilarious jab at pop musicians today, from Lady Gaga to Taylor Swift. If you don’t think this chick is on to something, you’re wrong. I wager we’ll be hearing more and more from her, Titanic Sinclair, and Charlotte the mannequin (yeah, that’s right) in the next few years. I just can’t believe they’re getting away with this, because if they are successful then we, as consumers of this product, will have taken part in one of the craziest, most in depth art experiment I’ve ever seen or heard of, especially in my lifetime.
And Poppy will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Added December 19, 2017
Fixed a couple of spelling errors and also want to amend a previous statement by saying “Moshi Moshi” is a great song and anyone that says otherwise is a liar and I will fight them.
I have an odd relationship with “Torment: Tides of Numenera” (henceforth simply called “Torment”).
*Loose Spoilers to Follow*
I never played CRPGs, really. I tried to get into “Planescape: Torment” back when it came out, back when I thought any RPG would basically be FFVII (my first real RPG) but I learned very quickly this was not the case. I’ve tried “Baldur’s Gate” and – even more recently – “Pillars of Eternity” which I even backed on Kickstarter for some reason, despite not really enjoying that type of game. The thing is, I want to enjoy it. I like an RPG that really sets me in the world and explores how one person can change and effect so many things.
Modern RPGs (“Skyrim” or “Fallout” or even “Final Fantasy XV”) don’t have this feel. As these once-niche titles move into the world of Triple-A development, certain sacrifices need to be made, namely that of “consequence gameplay” – by this I mean, in “Skyrim” your decisions are extremely binary, extremely localized on one spot or character, and have no lasting, major impact. You pick a faction in the war and you change who inhabits some castles and forts. But nothing really changes in the game, no drastic alter universe stuff in one playthrough or the next. At the end, you’re still gonna yell at an ancient, time-stopping dragon in heaven until he disintegrates. This is so that players of the game don’t ever miss out on any content in their 100+ hour game. Most average consumers will only play something that big once and they want to be able to see and do it all. This cuts corners and makes the impossible, possible. How can the highest rated assassin in the land also be the chosen dragon slayer, the most daring thief, a friend to all the governing bodies across multiple cities, explore alternate realities, and be married and own three houses? The answer: so one player can see every last bit of content.
This creates a feeling in me, as a player, that I’m not really living in that space. If “Fallout 4” has me searching for my son in a world that is alien to my character, he should never once stop and go “thanks, Preston. I will go check on that settlement again”. But “Torment” reassures me that all the over-abundance of content and narrative dissonance doesn’t hamper every game, and with that long winded into, let’s get into why “Torment” was exactly the game I wanted while still being mostly mediocre.
For starters, I played this on a PS4 (yes, yes, with a controller. Pitchforks and torches you say…? Hm…). I had a blast. Right off the bat the game presents you with a completely different RPG gaming experience than I’ve been used to for some time. It is text heavy, there is very, very little voiced dialogue, and there is no choice wheel for decisions. Instead you have a list of options and some of them are radical. Case in point, depending on what you do in the opening minutes of the game, you simply and brazenly die before you even get control over the character, or even see what the character looks like. Hell, you even get a trophy/achievement for doing so. All because you can make a choice that is outside of a morality system or a simple “I’m a serious person/I’m an angry person/I’m a sarcastic person” options presented in most games.
This kind of decision making is on point throughout the experience and when I say you can’t save everyone, I mean it. A choice early in the game might mean someone is simply dead later and you’ll never see their quests. Sleeping too many times during a murder investigation means – surprise! – more murders happened in your absence. Buy a slave and free him, help him get a job. Will he show back up later and dramatically alter a sequence of events out of love and loyalty to his savior? I mean, probably, but I’m not going to spoil the details, here.
This bleeds into your interactions with the companion characters, who are all interesting and unique, but sometimes you have to work to find and utilize them. One bloke from early the game left in anger and though I could re-recruit him later, I left him alone. Fuck that guy, he didn’t trust my judgment. And there is supposedly a whole character I never even ran into. And the people you do quest with have backstories and choices to make as well, some of which are minor as hell but others have huge implications, like whether or not they basically become a god. Sometimes your choices will have your party members vanish from the game entirely, far earlier than you’d think. This is because the game world has consequences and is frank about it.
Past the choices, how do I feel about the game? Uh, mixed. Very, very mixed.
Visually the game is stunning. The world of “Torment” is bizarre, grotesque, beautiful, nasty, synthetic, alive, and rapturous. Given the nature of the story, this all makes sense, but when you’re in the bowels of a creature one second and the next you’re in a sleek, silver alien ship overlooking the purple surface of distant planet, and you understand that the only thing separating these two combating visual styles is a load screen? You know you’re in for a wild ride. This also allows for an insanely diverse number of different characters and models, though some of the finer details are left to imagination and text windows. The audio is also great. Most of the voice acting is par for the course and the music and sound effects are fantastic. I’ll never get the sound of causing a shift in Tides out of my head.
But that’s it for praise. Everything else is a negative. The story of the game is so esoteric and dense that – for once – I used a game’s built-in codex to remember names, places, and events that were crucial in the early hours and are coming back now, 40 hours later (total playtime was 46 hours, rounding up). I understood the story (of fallen gods, grieving parents, and outer-dimensional forces of nature) and I enjoy doing work to dig into a narrative, but this was too much with a ton of filler. And while I did say that the companion stories were interesting, it’s unfortunate that they all end up boiling down to “A or B” as far as their endings. Granted, almost all of these choices were neither “black or white” but still, they all end in similar ways: let them go or ask them to stay. It was disappointing.
Short version: There’s a dude named “The Changing God” and he’s been around forever. People love him, people hate him. He’s called this because he changes bodies. But when he leaves one body, it becomes a Castoff, a living, thinking, new entity with wants and needs of its own. The player is the Last Castoff and it’s his job to understand his place in the world at large, amongst the other remaining Castoff population, and why an extreme negative force named (seriously) The Sorrow is hunting them down. It’s fairly standard fantasy/sci-fi stuff, but there is an interesting series of layers underneath that make it a touch better, though none of this is extremely well handled.
Gameplay? What gameplay. I enjoy a game that lets me outthink my enemies, and this game has some wild examples that. But it all rests on virtual rolls of a die, as well as proper stat placement for the build you want. Let me break that down. You have three main stats: Strength, Speed, and Intellect. Depending on how you want to play through the game and its many, many encounters with skill checks, you’ll dedicate most of your energy on one of those three. I spent a near infinite amount of points on Intellect so I could weasel out of fights and it worked. Sometimes convincing someone I’m god, other times bending an entire living city to my will. It was neat. But when the game forces you into combat, you are screwed if you don’t have the right party members to supplement the stats you didn’t increase. Granted, this is a game with few Game Over instances (when you die you are removed from the world and can go back whenever you’d like) but that ends up making for a tedious experience. And don’t get me started on stealth options. Going through a massive bug next to sneak out eggs was a joke. I just slaughtered everyone.
And as much fun as being a boy genius was, by the end of the game I had so many levels and abilities that far-reaching conclusions with dire ramifications for the known universe were simply mine to make if I wanted, there was no chance I would fail when I could just 100% every decision I had to make. This removes some tension and risk that really highlighted some of the crazier bits from the early hours, where a mistake never meant you lost the game, but that maybe that poor outcast you wanted to help will get lynched now, instead.
I got nothing out of equipping Numenera, ancient devices with wild, crazy abilities. I usually just sold them. I didn’t use Oom, the free DLC character, at all. I really didn’t understand how the Tides worked or why my game came with a map of places that aren’t in the game. Maybe they are? I dunno. I hate that you can never go back to a previous location once you leave. I really, really wish more of it had been voiced. And the main plot, while incredibly interesting, is cliché ridden and trite on the surface and half-baked at its core. Some of these complaints are based on my play style and, sure, that’s a plus (“play it your way!”), but certain gameplay mechanics, like the devices mentioned, are poorly explained and feel cumbersome rather than curiosity-inducing.
I don’t think I will play this game again, though I will think about the world and the people in it for a long, long time. The plight of the Last Castoff is one I’ll likely to never forget, and that’s a good thing. I just wish the rest of the game rose to meet its world’s greatness.
As always, sis:
Miss you.
Hey, guys. Just a few quick words.
Coming up soon this blog might simply transform into some kind of review site. I don’t know why so don’t ask. There will likely be some other tidbits about this/that here, but for the most part, the only stuff I want to write is going to be “Reviews” – and by that I mean to say that some of it will be review format, but will also feature some long-form, open discussion about the content in a more loose sense. Less opinion, more thematic discussion. I don’t know.
Look for these in the near future:
-Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (PSP)
-Torment: Tides of Numenera (PS4)
-Super Mario RPG (SNES)
-Blade Runner 2049 (film)
-Congrats by Holy Fuck (album)
-Twin Peaks Season 3 (TV season)
-etc.
I’m working on three of these actively, and two are projects that I’m going to start in the near future. There might be a book review in there, too, but I don’t know about that.
I just don’t have a lot to say about things going on in my life these days but I like to write. And I like to be opinionated. So this works out well, I think.
Anyhow, look for all this shit, soon!
-Skyler
I don’t think there can be much debate.
Saw these guys in Omaha where they opened for Explosions/Future Islands and, well… I know where my interests lie, now. Instant fan.
Going to see them in Des Moines, again, this Thursday where they again open for Explosions in the Sky. I wasn’t overly keen on the Explosions set on Saturday, but I’m so in sync with this band and their sound/style. Much more to explore.
If you live in DSM or the area and have nothing else going on this Thursday night, stop in at Wooly’s for a fantastic show. These guys will make it worth the price of admission before the headlining act even takes the stage.
skylerbartels 