Over the Christmas Break I finally downloaded Mass Effect: Andromeda, the less-than-loved fourth story in the Mass Effect series. Andromeda is a pretty good game in its own right, but compared to the story of the originals, plays like Mass Effect fanfiction. The problem is that fanfiction stories are often worthwhile in their own right while clearly deriving so much context from outside itself.

The plot of Andromeda is thus: shortly after the events of Mass Effect 1, a project similar to Operation Cerberus decided that the Reaper Threat was real and the correct solution was to get the hell out of the galaxy; to sneak massive ships loaded with cryogenically preserved colonists into hyperspace and spend 600 years traveling to the Andromeda galaxy and start over. Astronomical analyses of Andromeda indicated no advanced technologies anywhere, none of the signals of spacefaring species.

The problem is that Mass Effect establishes an architecture to galaxies: clusters of one to six star systems no more than four or five light-years wide, separated by gulfs a hundred light years or more wide. The only way to get between those gulfs is to use The Relays, built by an ancient species; starship engines have duration limitations and can’t cross those gulfs. There are no relays in Andromeda, so the story re-writes the rules to say that a “cluster” can have dozens of star systems effectively as large as the whole Milky Way, and that “big enough” ships can cross the gulfs by entering hyperspace and “coasting,” preserving their engine’s reserve until they need it to exit hyperspace again. That’s how they made it to Andromeda.

Another problem is that Sara Ryder isn’t Shepherd. When we meet Shepherd, she’s already a well-respected, well-liked military officer with several years of experience. When we meet Ryder, she’s a junior member of a science team. Her father is a veteran military scout with hostile world experience, and that’s what makes him “Pathfinder,” a specialized role with a powerful AI symbiote. An accident happens, he dies and transfers the symbiote to his daughter, who takes up the role. The only thing she has going for her is the symbiote, but she quickly earns both the skillset and the respect Shepherd had.

… which, while it wouldn’t fly in an original work, is normal for fanfic.

The set-up for the series is that Andromeda doesn’t have advanced spacefaring because of The Scourge, a vast interstellar cloud with slow-moving tendrils that emerge from hyperspace near star systems and disrupts the ecology of those star systems quickly. The Remnant were an ancient race who fought back against The Scourge, but their project is unfinished. Our heroes learn that there’s enough of the project that they could at least clear sufficent space to make several worlds habitable. There’s also a war between the last two spacefaring species, which have been at it for about eight hundred years, fighting over the last few surviving inhabitable worlds. A robot construction system was sent first so when those “arks” arrive they have a central hub from which to operate; it’s basically an excuse to have a mini-Citadel.

The Angaran are a lovely species with a wide range of reactions much like humans; the Kett are xenophobic genocides and no-quarter anthrophages whose mode of reproduction is basically the plot of Quake II; the Remnant are low-rent copies of Halo’s Forerunners, only they favor green lights instead of blue.

… which is fanfic, borrowing from other media to fill in the story.

Many of the side-missions feel forced, like the authors didn’t know how to glue them into the main plotline with any real meaning. Diligent players familiar with the mechanics of games like this will end with too much money and too many skill and research points unspent; after you find a weapons mix that suits you and your crew fine, you’ll run out of reasons to spend anymore, and the game isn’t stingy with providing you with weapon upgrades taken off fallen enemies or loot boxes.

… which is also a common sensation in fanfic. Things come too easily.

And, to round out the fanfic sensation, Mass Effect famously introduced a “romance plot” with awkwardly animated sex scenes that fans agreed were both delightful and cringe all at the same time. But more delightful. So Andromeda has Ryder flirting with everyone, all the time, shamelessly. You could probably bang the whole crew if you put your mind to it. And the sex scenes are longer and more explicit because that’s really what the fans want: more blue tentacled titty.

“Hornier than the original” is probably the most common of all fanfic tropes.

For all that, the story was fun. Maybe because I wanted something a little hornier, and Sara Ryder (default name) is a little less serious than Jane Shepherd. And maybe because the conflicts are a little less dire. Oh, they’re very dire; four colony vessels full of cryo-suspended colonists and zero inhabitable worlds at the beginning of the game is a dire situation, but the idea that those sleeping colonists might be all that’s left of the Milky Way’s species and cultures isn’t delivered until almost two-thirds of the way through the game, diluting the impact of “losing” a lot. To make the Andromeda setting interesting, Sara’s becoming Pathfinder and integrating the symbiote is accompanied by a two-year period of her being in a coma to find there was a revolt among the colonists, and now several of the marginal worlds on which the Angaran and Kett fight out their battles have a third problem: rogue human factions with names like “The Outcasts” and “The Collective.” This feels more than a little forced, an attempt to create more interspecies conflicts because just having two species rather than the many, many in the original series limited the possibilities.

And yes, I have to agree with the fans that the change of rendering engine brought a lot of undesirable changes, the worst of which is that we basically got only one subtype of Asari, and they’re all wide-eyed and puffy-faced compared to the sort back in the Milky Way. Choosing not to have a Salarian as part of the central crew was also a mistake but I guess it’s a lot harder to replace Mordin Solus than it is Liara T’Soni.

I do wish the game had been popular enough to justify the planned sequels; the game ends with two major plotlines incomplete: The Kett are temporarily pushed out of your cluster but they still exist and they’re still a threat, and The Scourge is still there slowly strangling whole star systems. Your Remnant specialist (who, like the Prothean specialist in the first game, is an Asari) has no idea how long the Remnant terraforming system you rebooted will be able to hold the Scourge back from the worlds you have reclaimed. Also unresolved is the plotline of exactly who paid for the Andromeda project, who authorized the use of very advanced AI in violation of all Citadel Alliance law and policy, and why those people may have had one of the Human colonists’ civilian leaders murdered, and I kinda want resolution on those questions.

But, like Half-Life 3, we may never know.

Mass Effect: Andromeda has had a lot of money thrown at it, and it shows. It’s pretty, the voice acting is top-notch, and even running on Linux it runs smoothly and without problems. It’s a little flatter and less well-thought than the original, but not devastatingly so, and given how high a bar that is, anything “a little less” is still much better than 90% of the dreck out there. If you enjoyed the first three, you’ll either really like it or really hate it, and I suspect “like” will happen more often; if you weren’t a fan of the originals, it doesn’t have much to give you.

Spoiler, this is the best joke in the whole game, but you have to know who Drack and Peebee are to get it, and it’s especially rich because there are no Elcor in Andromeda; that ark, as far as anyone knows, didn’t make it, so the only way this joke makes any sense is if you’ve completely imbibed the original.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: The Villa Sternberg
Current Music: B-Complex, Hospital Mix 1

Fanfic, even authorized fanfic, can be a risky venture. I've often made that point myself as a writer of fanfic, and as a reader. Making a fanfic video game out of a beloved work from a deeply respected genre master is especially treacherous. And yet, The Invincible somehow manages to both be completely faithful to Stanislaw Lem's original novel, The Invincible, yet extend it brilliantly.

I played the video game first, so let's start with this: I knew nothing about this particular book when I played the game. Like most SF readers, my encounter with Lem consisted of being forced to read Solaris in high school, which I found terribly dreary and uninformative. Lem's writing style is very much an older, more telling style, a narrative mostly of descriptions of people doing things; dialogue is reserved for brief color and long expositions. Not a style conducive to video gaming.

The Invincible: the video game

The game focuses on the character of Yasna, a member of a small exploratory vessel from "The Commonwealth," as she wakes up in the desert of Regis III, an unknown world of very dry atmosphere and a weak, cool sun. Her last memory is of her agreeing to stay on the ship with the ship's navigator (and its commander) while the other five people on the crew go down for a look, but she finds her backpack and her notes sticking out of a dune nearby. In her notes she finds that she had been walking for several hours and has a map back to the team's campsite.

She gets in touch with the navigator, finds two of her crew in a state of catatonia, and from there has to find her way back to the ship's one working lander.

The plot and story of this game are what make it worthwhile. There are very few places where you have to decide more than "go left or right," and like most such games the outcome of any such decision is foregone. This is mostly a tale being told in a slow, engaging way by a first-person game engine. The order in which you explore a new place, and whether or not to check out some side-stories, are pretty much the only fundamental decisions you'll make.

That said, it is an engaging bit of work. Yasna comes into conflict with a team from "The Alliance," who came in a starship named Condor. The game doesn't say so in so many words, but you get the sense that the Alliance is "western" in some sense, whereas the Commonwealth is more "soviet." Eventually, the real crisis of Regis III comes to a head and Yasna and members of the Alliance must work together to survive.

The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is excellent, and Yasna is good company with which to hang out.

The Invincible: the book

The 1964 novel has no "Alliance" or "Commonwealth." We're told only that The Invincible has been dispatched by "the authorities back home" to Regis III to find out why Condor, which had been scheduled to explore Regis III eight months earlier, had not returned.

The book focuses on the character of Rohan, the ship's senior exec and second in command, and the experiences he has on the surface of Regis III. The story follows Rohan around as various expeditionary teams are sent out to try to find Condor to discover what could possibly have happened to the ship and its crew. It's dry in that way that 1960s science fiction could be dry, especially when joined with Polish sensibilities of that time and the translator's efforts.

For all that, it's a brilliant book. It was written 22 years before Drexler's Engines of Creation and yet every great idea in that book exists in The Invincible. How the dangers of Regis III emerged from naturalistic processes is so well-described it makes James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker read like fanfic. Lem single-handledly envisioned nanotechnology, and how nanotechnology, automation, and the feedback mechanisms of natural selection could interact decades before those very terms came into existence.

Faith and Deviation

The game is astonishingly faithful to the book. Recall that I read the book after playing the game. In the game, the Alliance has caterpillar construction equipment digging massive boreholes, balloon-wheeled all-terrain jeeps, ground-effect transporters, ducted-turbine "flying saucers," multi-legged crawlers and a few force-field floating war machines. The mix of vehicles felt completely nonsensical... and every one of those is in the book. The "atompunk" feel of the equipment in the game is accurate to the book in every detail. So are the limitations of the space suits, the communications equipment, the surface-to-orbit landers, the sensory gear, and even Yasna's compass is a pretty good representation of the same one Rohan used (although Rohan could wear his on his wrist, and Yasna has to keep taking hers out of her pocket).

The game starts on Regis III three days before The Invincible is scheduled to arrive, which creates tension in that the Commonwealth people, who are just a little exploratory team of eight, know they need to do a quick survey and get the hell out of there before The Invincible arrives.

There are a few deviations from the book. In the book, the crew of The Invincible find Condor and it's dead crew... and one guy who might still be alive in one of Condor's cryochambers. (It's not a spoiler to say he's not alive and can't be recovered; it's just a moment Lem added for pathos.) For game reasons, those cryochambers are empty and still working when Yasna finds the Condor. The book says that Condor and The Invincible are the same class of ship and of the same size. The game says that the Invincible is "the biggest ship in the Alliance, and twice as large as anything else they have." Condor's team didn't have time to set up more than one drilling operation to explore the strange metallic ruins under the sand, but the game, to stretch out Act II a bit, has three different drilling sites for you to visit.

And ... and that's about it. That last one could even be just that the crew of The Invincible, wrapped up in its own concerns, didn't find all the explorations the crew of Condor conducted. Otherwise, the game is a wholly faithful and reasonable extrapolation of what happened in the book, and the cold war conflict of the Commonwealth and the Alliance are deftly added, sensitive to the conditions of the cold war as it was playing out in 1964, and believable. It's a visual novel, an entirely new story, the best kind of fanfiction, told in an interactive way that gives well-thought and well-designed visuals to one of Stanislaw Lem's great works.

Technology And Its Disconnect

You get less of a sense of it in the game because the first-person visual narrative forces you to be "in the moment" with Yasna, but both the book and the game really hammer home the weirdness of atompunk sensibility (and the game somehow manages to do this without being "ironic" about it!). Lem's future is "like five years from 1964, only with bigger engines." Lem didn't expect information processing to get much better; he has robots and, like lots of SF writers, over-estimated how easy speech recognition would be and under-estimated speech production.

In the book, The Invincible has both orbital and atmospheric drones, but their lifespans are short and their cameras are both analog and terrible. On two occasions in the game, Yasna gets to operate a "camera balloon" drone (something not in the book, but completely believable given the tech) and the cameras have the classic snow and terrible bandwidth of analog. The teams use Morse code when voice radio becomes unintelligible. Their orbit-to-surface telescopes have a resolution of "miles", whereas the Mars Orbital Surveyor has a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, and unlike the MOS, The Invincible has to de-orbit the satellite so its payload parachutes within about 40 miles of their landing site so someone can retrieve the film!

This is science fiction from the 1960s in all its glory: manly men doing manly things, with bigger engines and more powerful laser guns, but no one and nothing is going to challenge man's position as the most intelligent being. Need to map a planet? You'll need 200 men and four months to go through all the photographs.

Now that I think about it, the introduction of Yasna, a woman crewmember, into the game is actually one of the biggest anachronisms; there are zero women in Lem's book, the only mention of women at all is Rohan's observation that Captain Horpach never married. Or it could be completely in keeping with the games "cold war" sensibilities to introduce a woman on the ~~Soviet~~ Commonwealth's side, since one of Lenin's positions was that, unlike the West, the Soviet union didn't discard the intellectual firepower women could bring to scientific endeavors like space exploration.

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Fun is where you find it. The book isn't fun, and neither, really is the game. What they are is intriguing and, ultimately, satisfying. The game succeeds wildly in what it sets out to do: retell the story of what happened to the starship Condor on Regis III from a unique (for the book) and different point of view, provide a visual vocabulary for all the wonders Lem described, and make the point of the book and its conclusion just as hard. You learn something from the book and the game, and you learn different things. The book is short, less than 200 pages, and can be read in about four hours. The game is about twice that long.

Technical details

The Invincible ran "okay" on my computer. I run Ubuntu Linux and have a GeForce 2060 with 6GB of RAM, and the framerate was sometimes not all that fantastic (I discovered that disabling the "special effects" on the operating system's window manager made it run much better!), but it runs well on modern hardware and it's gorgeous all the same. Given the nature of the game, I didn't need perfect aim. Running it on Linux and Wine (Proton) was otherwise flawless.

Current Mood: satisfied

There’s a new Sushi place in town, Tori’s Sake & Grill, which doesn’t have a website of it’s own so the town’s guide will have to do. I have very mixed feelings about it, but I have no doubt I’m going to go back to it again.

It looks like the restaurateur took over an existing place that didn’t exactly have the atmosphere of a sushi joint. It’s sparse and a bit threadbare, the tables are second-hand and the utensils come in a plastic wineglass with “upscale” paper napkins and the cheap sort of disposable chopsticks. And for that experience, Omaha and I spent $78 (before tip) on two meals: An unagi don (grilled eel rice bowl) ($33) and the chef’s choice nigiri platter ($45).

But here’s the thing: I don’t know where the chef gets his fish, but he must have the most amazing contacts, because I have never had sushi that fresh. It was insane just how creamy and perfect the prepared fish was. I usually use very little soy sauce, and this time it felt like blasphemy to use any at all. Our usual haunt is Miyabi Sushi, and when we’re feeling indulgent we head out to Mashiko’s, which is amazing and has a reputation for using only highly sustainable fisheries, but it’s also adventurous and innovative in a way ordinary sushi diners might find disconcerting.

It has that neighborly, ordinary ambiance (the place is very well ventilated, a plus) and a disconcerting humming coming from the electrical box next to the men’s room, but the sushi was out of this world, and I can’t say I was disappointed by the layout, even at $45.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails, Closer

The Callisto Protocol is a horror-on-a-space-station video game produced by Striking Distance Studios and directed by Glen Schoefield, one of the original creators of Dead Space. It wants so hard to be Dead Space, and yet fails so utterly in that singular goal, that it’s hard to take seriously.

I will warn you that there are plot spoilers, including the twist ending, in this review.

The main character, Jacob Lee, is voiced by Josh Duhamel, who started his career as a soap opera star but is probably most known recently as the Bill Lennox, the lead commander of the pro-robot military unit in the Michael Bay Transformers movie series, and the main character’s design captures Duhamel’s look very well. Jacob is a cargo pilot whose circuit takes his ship past Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where the Black Iron Prison is kept. A crisis on board causes his ship to crash, and Jacob is captured, implanted with an inmate brain monitoring device, and thrown into the prison, where everything then goes to hell in a very familiar Dead Space way. Jacob’s job is, naturally, to escape this hell and return to his original life. The plot has other plans for him.

The problem with The Callisto Protocol is that Dead Space came out 14 years ago and it’s still a superior game experience. The combat in Callisto wants to be more visceral and up-close, so ammunition for the few guns you scrounge off dead prison guards is scarce and your most frequently used weapon is a military-grade stun baton that, with a few upgrades, delivers deadly blows to the not-very-smart, not-very-robust zombies. The developers apparently wanted the combat to feel up-close so the animation is full of blood and guts, but there are only so many scripted animations a team can cook up independently and while there are several hundred such animations, delivering them makes the game feel more like a platformer where it’s just timing and remembering a button sequence and then it’s over. Over and over, and then it’s over. Dead Space relied much more heavily on the game engine to deliver the experience, so the varieties of deaths and combat sequences was significantly greater.

There’s a sequence where you have to walk across Callisto’s surface to get to a spaceship hanger, and it looks so much like another game that I though, “Ah, we’re in the Dead Space 3 part of the game now.” There are crafting benches (another Dead Space 3 mechanic), you get a “force projecting glove” (Dead Space 1’s “grip”), and you stomp zombies and cargo boxes for supplies.

Basically both Issac and Jacob (and aren’t those telling names!) find themselves in a vacuum-hazard human-made facility in deep space where a shadowy organization has “found something” and released it, causing massive mutation and zombification of everything and everyone, from which they have to escape, hampered constantly by some wide-eyed zealot and his minions, surviving as the facility falls apart from the constant misuse by zombies and the lack of maintenance. But Callisto doesn’t quite seem to understand what made Dead Space so compelling, and Jacob’s demeanor throughout the game doesn’t seem to gel into a whole and meaningful character. The worst internal struggled he has is over his guilt that his flight partner died messily and painfully in the crash at the beginning of the game. He’s in the fight to prevent the Callisto infection from breaking out but it often seems that he’s only in it because his allies, such as they are and what there are of them, will only help him escape if he helps them get the word out. Issac wanted something positive; he wanted to rescue Nicole. Jacob just wants to get the hell out of the game.

The DLC, The Callisto Protocol: Final Transmission, makes it very clear that the producers didn’t understand what made even Dead Space 3 worth playing. [Warning: here be the spoilers!] In both games, in the last chapter, the heroes find themselves alive after what should have been a fatally cataclysmic ending. And in both games, they start to experience very weird hallucinations, with maps that don’t make sense and encounters that are just surreal. In Dead Space 3, however, Isaac escapes from the cause of those hallucinations and makes it back to Sol just in time to see that the invasion of the Necromorph hives has begun. There’s no suggestion that what happens there is “all a dream;” the risks and battles Isaac faces in Dead Space 3: Awakened are never presented as anything but part of his ongoing struggle to deal with the Necromorphic influence over his life. But “… it was all a dream” is the ending of The Callisto Protocol; Jacob was fatally wounded in the previous chapter and is hallucinating everything that happens; every battle is a metaphor for him trying to save his life as the doctor character struggles to extract from his brain implant all the data he has collected along the way to implicate the shadowy organization and give humanity a fighting chance against the Callisto infection. The last chapter of Dead Space 3 left an opening for another game, one in which Isaac tries to survive in deep space, gather allies, and find a way to fight back. The Callisto Protocol implies heavily that that’s where you’re going until the very last scene. It’s a violation of the player’s trust that’s on par with the “twist” ending of Prey (2017), another game with an ending so bad it ruined the whole story for me.

The final boss battle is incredibly frustrating, as it’s a sheer RNG drop; you just have to get lucky and manage to hit the monster about 30 times with a hammer without somehow triggering its insta-kill melee move. You’ll die and reload that battle a dozen times or more until you get it. That’s it. And for the developers, that’s probably fine as they proudly announced that they crafted a dozen different death animations for that battle.

Speaking of death animations, Callisto is a very, uh, pretty game. The graphics are amazing and high-quality, and the dozens of “Jacob dies” animations are so carefully detailed that the development team, given a choice between re-rendering them with less gore or being unsold in some countries, decided they’d rather be banned than edit them.

But incredible graphics and sound design can’t hide the simple fact that The Callisto Protocol is a shallow, if expensive, knock-off of a much better game. It has no heart and offers nothing new. The derivative story, incredibly derivative mechanics when they work and incredibly frustrating mechanics when they don’t, and storyline abuse of the player’s trust makes the game much less than it could have been. I can’t recommend it.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Shriekback, Faded Flowers

Deathloop is a very pretty game with an absolutely fascinating premise that, unfortunately, dies on its own writing. I had only played one Arkane Studios game before, and that was the later Prey, which held together quite well all the way to the end. The “twist” in Prey was annoying but, thankfully, came only after the end credits and could safely be ignored.

Deathloop’s premise is that sometime in the mid 1960s a group of eight uber-wealthy people formed a corporation and took over the island of Blackreef in the North Atlantic that was home to “The Anomaly,” a rift in the fabric of spacetime. They found a way to control the anomaly enough to create The Loop: the entire island resets in time and space in a way that lets people enjoy their entire world, Groundhog-Day style. Only something went wrong and everyone’s mind is reset along with the world.

Everyone except Colt Vahn, former head of security for the corporation and a man determined to destroy The Loop. He remembers everything he learned the day before.

So this is just like a video game: when you die, you remember all the mistakes you made, but the game treats you like the same person you were on the previous iteration. You learn in real-time at the same pace Colt does. It’s a fascinating premise that takes the whole “iterate on the mission until you get it right” and makes it a part of the game mechanic!

The final mission, you learn, is to kill every one of the eight wealthy people. Each is from a different discipline: two scientists, a game designer, an artist, a musician, a theologist, a writer and a CEO; together, they’re known as The Visionaries. Each Visionary has a “Slab,” a component that gives them a super-power (invisibility, short-range teleportation, the ability to link people into a single experience (usually death), and so forth), and that connects them to The Loop. The problem is that if you don’t kill all eight in one day, they all wake up the next day with their Slabs… and you get to keep a copy, presumably stolen from the previous timeline. So you not only have to figure out how to kill each of them, you have to figure out how to kill ALL of them, in 24 hours, in Deathloop’s weird timescale. There’s a puzzle, and it’s actually a very good one.

Also, the island is crawling with Eternalists, people who are sycophants of the Visionaries, and who are psychopathic in their own right. They spent months preparing to activate the Loop, having brief experiences of the Loop, learning that death in the Loop means you’d be back the next day. When they turned the Loop on permanently, they didn’t expect the memory-erasing. And the writer character, Julianna, has taken it upon herself to tell everyone “Colt wants to break The Loop. Kill him on sight!” So everyone on the island is a hopped-up lunatic out to kill you, when they aren’t partying to enjoy their “aternal” unkillable existence.

The problem is with the writing. There are four factions at play: The current Visionaries, the AEON program they founded to research the loop, a prior research program known as Horizon, and before that a group known as The Army of the Motherland. We learn almost nothing about these factions. We learn that Colt is probably a lot older than he looks, having been stuck in not just this Loop but several beforehand, and before that stuck in a “natural” Loop with the fishing village that used to be on the island shortly after World War 2. And yet all of this is just to build plot bunnies– they never do anything with this. He’s just a cipher for killing ciphers.

And that’s the problem with the game: everyone is a monster. Colt especially; the Loop gives him the excuse to learn how to murder people in dozens of creative ways, from intimate neck-breaking to blowing up an entire warehouse full of Eternalists, from kicking people off cliffs to reprogrammed sentry guns tearing up the audience at a rock concert. You have no idea what kind of man he will be when that’s not what he’s doing. And the “good” ending is basically him and one of the Visionaries making a deal: look, don’t end the Loop, let’s work to cross timelines deliberately (something that happens at “random” to forward the story), find variants that are more interesting than this one, and spend the rest of eternity treating The Loop as our hunting and killing ground.

I play video games to hang out with interesting characters, even though many of them are quantitatively mass murderers: Morgan Yu (Prey), Captain Titus (Warhammer 40K Space Marine), the Doom Marine, Gordan Freeman (Half Life), Issac Clarke (Dead Space), even Blood Rayne. Their worlds are surreal but fleshed out, giving them a moral purpose that excuses, to some extent, the gun-weilding horrors that they commit.

None of that really applies to Colt. There’s no world to save. There’s no one being hurt by The Loop, except Colt. We get some vague sense that he’s outraged to be trapped in the Loop again, trapped with them, but that’s not a reason to go all murderspree on them. The only way to get out of the Loop is to kill all the Visionaries, although we do get the sense that if the Loop breaks they’ll all wake up again, mortal once more, but even Colt isn’t sure.

So it was a great game with a fantastic premise and good mechanics, but it fell apart at the end by just being… unsatisfying.

One thing that is amazing about the game? The soundtrack. If you can find it, it’s amazing; there’s a consistent theme throughout the soundtrack, and it can sound repetitive at times because of the two main lietmotifs, but overall it really holds together.

But even there, it represents a problem. One of the two common lietmotifs created by Tom Salta, the principle composer, is spooky. It consists of a three-note, pause, three-note minor key chord sequence underlain with an expertly played Theremin. Except there’s nothing spooky about Blackreef. The game doesn’t know the difference between “spooky” and “weird,” and it shows. It works in the context of the game but only if you don’t think too hard about it.

But it is a damn good soundtrack.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Deathloop OST, The Complex

Movie review: Free Guy [part 1]

(Some spoilers in here; I’m not able to judge their impact.)

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this film, and I was delightfully blown away by the whole of the film. It’s 100% a Ryan Reynolds vehicle in which he produced and starred, so it specializes in his mugging for the camera, but he’s so charming he gets away with it. And yet, he’s not egotistical about it; he gives a lot of equal time to the actual heroes, as well as giving actual characters and meaning to lots of secondary characters.

Ryan plays Guy, a bank teller in a surreal world. The opening scene of a black-clad wingsuiter jumping into “Free City” is accompanied by Guy’s voiceover explaining how “the people who wear sunglasses” are heroes, even as said hero steals a car, launches grenades at police cars chasing him, even as the kidnapped woman in the car stares at the “hero” with worshipful eyes. Guy wakes up in his apartment, says “I live in paradise!” and goes to work, walking through a surreal landscape of violence, helping other PCs get up after being assaulted, meets his buddy, Buddy, a guard at the same bank, and goes to work.

An incident triggers something weird in Guy; he decides to steal a pair of sunglasses and discovers that he’s got new powers, and becomes a hero himself, but a special kind: one who specializes in saving NPCs from being hurt by the “heroes.” He levels up…

… and comes to the attention of two factions in the “real world” who want to know what is up with this NPC in their game who’s suddenly doing all this weird stuff. From there, the conflict escalates rapidly.

The film cribs a lot, but it does so delightfully. You get Tron, the Matrix, but also The Truman Show and even Groundhog Day, and others I can’t even remember now.

The actual heroes are two twenty-something programmers named Keys and Millie. They built a lovely AI game that they sold to the villain, and now Keys works for the villain (played by an absolutely unleashed Taika Waititi) and Millie is suing them both. As you would expect in this sort of film, Keys eventually allies with Millie.

Since a lot of action is inside a video game, all the stuff with Ryan is shot on a green stage. It’s obvious, but it’s fun. High-quality CGI is everywhere, and it’s remarkably effective here, slipping back and forth between full-on CGI and actual actors on the screen. He gets to play with all kinds of rented intellectual property, and even casual IP happens as he walks past a tank from the Halo franchise. Watch the background; it’s full of gags. And the theme of this movie is just that: the people in the background are important.

The video game world is bright and colorful, even when Guy isn’t wearing the glasses (the gamers’ heads-up display). The settings and cinemtography is first-class: Keys’s apartment is black & white and empty; the villain’s world is cold, glassy, cluttered and busy; Millie’s apartment is small, earth-toned, with plants and warm lighting. But more than that, the camera choices in every scene are wonderful. In the game world, the camera POV is mechanically precise and smooth. In the villain’s lair and Keys’s apartment, it’s shoulder-mounted and stabilized.

The best scene in the whole film, though, is in the real world, in Millie’s apartment, with no CGI or special effects at all. It’s at the end of Act II when Keys comes to Millie and reveals an important deep discovery, and Millie reveals the secret she’d discovered, and it’s these two geeks pacing and churning around each other, speaking geek as each wham line hits the other and they’re gesturing and the camera is partially destabilized, allowed to gently but organically zoom around them, following the emotional register as they do the typical geek “humor to defuse” thing and showing their expressiveness as epiphany after epiphany grows and they realize that not only is the villain closing in, but he’s probably going to commit murder. It’s gorgeous work for everyone who worked on that scene and, pssst, Reynolds wasn’t involved.

Anyway, absolutely fabulous film. Loved it. Will be watching it again.

Current Mood: ecstatic
Current Location: Lockdown
Current Music: The Nightly News

Yesterday, Omaha and I went to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Rep 4” in which they do contemporary dance pieces. They’re still requiring vaccination cards at the door, masks at all times except when taking a sip of wine, forbidden wine in the auditorium again, and they’ve taken away the coffee service. I approve of the vaccination and masks, but if they're going to let us have wine, they should let us have coffee as well.

There were two older pieces, one of which I had seen before, and two debuts.

The one piece I had seen before was Crystal Pite’s Plot Point, which is an involved piece that every writer would find familiar. The story is something of a combination of a noir spy thriller and a domestic infidelity melodrama but what’s interesting is that there are two people on the stage for every character: someone dressed to play the role, and their white-costumed doppleganger wearing a mask and headpiece that hides their identity. Pite has the dancers interact in a way that shows how the “plot point” set out in the rough draft has the character do something that is in or out of character, and how the character sometimes defies what the writer set out in the rough draft. It’s an interesting piece.

On the other hand, David Parson’s Caught is absolutely magical. Using an completely darkened theater, powerful strobe lights, and a sensor on the solo dancer it creates a superhuman effect: as she dances the strobes only go off at the height of her jumps, leaps, and other moves, creating the illusion that she never touches the ground. She circles the entire stage with her legs in a split, as if floating on a magical carpet; she seems to walk two feet above the ground across the stage, and other astonishing moments that could only be captured by a strobe light and the human eye’s afterimage processing. After every physically demanding movement she would appear by magic in the middle, lit by the conic beam of an overhead flood, implying that she hadn’t moved at all, but you could see how heavily she was breathing. It is a genuinely new kind of dance, and it was a highly emotional privilege to watch it. The video does not capture how fantastic it was, and PNB Corps du Ballet principal Angelica Generosa was far better, far more physically capable even, than the dancer in the video.

Mineko Williams’ Before I Was says it’s about growing into adulthood, but I took something different away from it. Her last piece, The Trees, The Trees, which I saw in 2019, was quite good, and this one is as well. She has more vocalists on the stage this time, again singing a kind of poem, as the dancers move and gyre in front of what looks like the outline of a suburban house. It seemed to me that the story was much more one about the difficulty of maintaining a connection, both to yourself and to your spouse, as you struggle to raise children.

And finally Justin Peck’s The Times are Racing was physically demanding and fun to watch, but it didn’t communicate much. It was great, and the dancers were all on and fabulous. I wish it had spoken more to me, though. On the other hand, it may have given me a new favorite musician.

Current Mood: verklempt
Current Music: Dan Deacon, USA I-IV

Well, I finished The Ascent. It’s set in an SFNal universe but the speed of light is still the greatest barrier; everyone crosses space on slowships, and wherever they end up, their lives are at the mercy of corporate powers. There is no democracy at all; at one point a character says, “I hear on planet Amion that they tried to give everyone the vote, not just shareholders. Can you imagine what a nightmare that must have been?” It’s the grittiest, worst life you can imagine for everyone not at the corporate top of the ladder and you, young sprout, are at the very bottom.

You work in the DeepStink, the very bowels of the arcology known as The Ascent Group… and then something goes horribly, horribly wrong, and you get hired to be the one to fix things. At first, small things, but eventually, naturally, you end up in The Board Room.

The plot is straight out of Grand Theft Auto; it’s a big open world and as you explore parts of it open up. You get to see more of it, more and weirder and nastier parts of it. From the summit you can see the sun and the clouds; down at the bottom you see the scrap yards where robots end their days.

In between, there are a dozen different species with their own characteristics, and multiple corporations and gangs out to make your life hell. The comparison to Grand Theft Auto isn’t at all out of place; you get bigger and heftier weapons as time goes on, you visit ritzier and more deadly places, and you generally run errands for everyone. The only thing missing is Taxi Missions to grind out cash (and in this game, experience points).

The Ascent sometimes takes itself a bit seriously. There are very few easter eggs or sight gags that break the fourth wall, and every joke makes sense in the conext of their universe, not ours.

The game is pseudo-2.5D; I say “pseudo” because it’s clear the engine is capable of full 3D, and it could go the full Grand Theft Auto that way, but you’d miss out on so much art if it did. And that’s the most remarkable thing about The Ascent: The art. There is so much texture to this game that you almost never see the same texture twice, you never meet the same characters. Even some of the aliens, which could be ciphered into just one or two, have dozens of variants each to make sure you don’t start to see patterns. The cut scenes are rendered with the same Unreal 4 engine as the rest of the game, and they’re just as pretty and well-rendered as anything Pixar was doing five years ago.

It’s not the most stable of games. I had it crash a few times. One cut scene didn’t render, and one time I walked into a boss battle only for there to be… nothing. No boss. I wandered around the arena wondering “Where is everyone?” until I finally decided to reload, and there was the boss and all her minions. More than once I got stuck in a texture I couldn’t get out of, which is very annoying when you’re being shot.

It’s a very adult game. Aside from the violence there’s lots of profanity. In both the Dream World and Stimtown environments full of holographically rendered nudes, and the woman who did the mo-cap for them gets her own credit: Agnes Cort, Exotic Dancer. If that’s your things… The Ascent won’t pander to you, but the content is there.

Overall, a pretty good game. I was a completionist, doing every side mission and even exploring very odd corners of the city to find more stuff, and overall it took me about three weeks of play, mostly on weekends, to get through it; Steam says I was there for about 40 hours.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Location: Underground Bunker

The video game The Turing Test has been out for a few years, but it was on sale during the pandemic so I bought it and played it. It’s a blatant Portal clone of seven chapters with ten room puzzles in each chapter. You play Ava, a “backup engineer” on a mission to Europa, the largest moon of Jupiter, who is awakened from cryogenic suspension by the mission AI, whose name is TOM, when the ground crew fails to report in. Your job is to leave the orbiting ship, descend to the surface, and find out what happened.

The crew, it turns out, have used robots and automated equipment to redesign the entire ground base into a series of puzzles that, as the AI informs you, “seem to be Turing Tests, in that they can only be solved by a human being.” When Ava asks TOM what he means, he explains, “In the very first room, you threw the battery through a window. I would never have thought of that. I am, after all, programmed to preserve company property.”

But there is something ominous and wrong about what you’re doing, and this feeling of creepiness grows as the mission goes on and you start to discover notes from the crew about what really happened and why they’re so eager to keep TOM out of the base. It does seem a little odd that Ava doesn’t question why TOM is so eager to get in, but there’s really no choice to the mission; either Ava continues, or she’s stuck on Europa for the rest of her life anyway.

The puzzles are pretty good. They’re very much like Portal; you have a single tool for manipulating different power sources, and can sometimes control small utility robots, to throw switches, raise levers, activate or deactivate window shutters, and so forth. I had fun with them, and learned that I’m still a lightweight when it comes to alcohol; a single glass of wine made some of the later puzzles unsolvable until the next day.

The story is short and interesting, and like all stories, has questions to be answered. There are two different questions at the heart of The Turing Test. One is a moral question, and the other is a philosophical question. “Does TOM think, or is it just programming?” is the philosophical question. I probably would have found it much more interesting if I hadn’t been deeply steeped in, and deeply familiar with, the arguments Daniel Dennett and John Searle have been having for the past twenty years or more. TOM falls into the Dennett camp, and the even older the Julian Jaymes camp, that TOM walks like a duck and talks like a duck, so is clearly a duck.

The other is an issue of Kantianism vs Utilitarianism, although the latter question is muddled and poorly argued. TOM is arguing the Utilitarian point of view, but it’s clear that he’s leaning heavily on Objectivist arguments as well since he’s programmed by The Corporation to protect their interests. Ava is arguing the Kantian position, but her argument is muddled by both a phenomenological weakness and deonotological descent: she feels duty bound but she’s not entirely clear as to why.

The ending is disappointing. The ending does settle the Turing Test question, but it doesn’t solve the moral quandary that supposedly is the conflict. This is the big problem with a lot of writing, not just in games but in general: the main character’s biggest problem is not the one the writers want to face in the final conflict of the story.

But it’s a good puzzle game, and a good SFnal setting that’s more serious and straightforward, than Portal. If you enjoyed Portal for the puzzles, then put The Turing Test on your Steam wishlist and wait for it to go on sale.

Current Mood: satisfied

I’ve just played through the very first level of Doom Eternal and I’m not as excited by it as I was about either Doom III or Doom (2016). My take on Doom was that it was much more arcade game than first person shooter, and Doom Eternal takes that video game sensibility to such great extremes that I think it actually hurts the pleasure of playing the game.

Just to keep things straight, I’ll use “Doom” to refer to the 2016 game, and “Original Doom” to refer to the 1993 release.

The other thing is that Doom Eternal pushes the ID-Tech engine out two generations from the one used in Doom and in doing so they’ve re-created many of the problems that plagued ID’s post-apocalyptic game, Rage. In many ways, this game feels as if Doom and Rage had a baby, and since Rage was an ugly game the result is an ugly baby of a game.

The visuals are, like those of Rage, truly groundbreaking in their realism, and yet it is that very realism that makes the game feel off. Doom Eternal, like Rage, suffers from the problem of being able to show you gorgeous views only for you to realize that you can never get there, can never visit that location. There are places in the game that feel as if you should be able to get to them, and yet you can’t, not because of any obvious barriers or capability shortcomings, but because the game engine just won’t let you.

The visuals are so much more “realistic” than Doom that you wind up wanting to look around and do the sightseeing thing, enjoying the truly hellish art that pervades the entire universe. You start off somewhere in America, a ruined city with fires and smokes and the red glow of Hell everywhere. Demons have run out of humans to kill and are turning on each other, which is a good thing as it means you can sometimes sneak past them without having to fight, but often the battle is so heavy and hard to defeat that you miss all the art.

The young male UAC intern has been replaced by a chirpy young female UAC intern who delivers such lines as “Rejoice in what we have accomplished! Report to the nearest harvest center!” and “The UAC. Because fulfilling prophecy takes a lot of hard work!” In the context of Doom, the intern’s cheerleading videos made a lot of sense; in Doom Eternal, not so much.

The storyline, I’m sure, is meant to be a “We’ll reveal the backstory as we go along,” but there’s a discontinuity here that is very poorly addressed. Maybe it’s just me, but I like playing for the story as much as I do the combat. I mean:

Original Doom: You are a marine at the far end of a base on Mars when the Hellwave kills most people, converts the rest into zombies, and drops a whole bunch of demons on you. The game starts moments after the Hellwave. At first, you have only to survive, but ultimately you take on the duty of closing the Hellgate. Good luck!

Doom III: You’re a marine at the far end of a base on Mars. The game starts a half hour before the Hellwave, so you get the basic story that you’re the “Ranking FNG” who gets to do the Sergeant’s lousiest jobs, one of which you’re in the middle of when the Hellwave hits. At first, you have only to survive, but ultimately you take on the duty of closing the Hellgate. Good luck!

Doom: You are an overpowered cybersoldier who was put into cryogenic suspension for unknown reasons. You awaken moments after the Hellwave hits. At first, you’re fighting only to survive, but it becomes clear you were manufactured to fight the forces of Hell, and you take on the responsibility of stopping an internal cabal of UAC cultists from opening the Hellgate. Good luck!

Doom Eternal: Uh, why does the Doomguy cybersoldier have a space-based Fortress of Solitude? Why does he have the teleport gates from Doom III, which isn’t canon? Why is the AI Vega from Doom alive again, and is Doomguy’s best friend? Why doesn’t Doomguy have all the buffs he collected from the last adventure? Where’s Sam? And if he’s such a goddamned great super-soldier, why doesn’t he carry around a decent collection of ammo packs for his trusty shotgun anyway?

It goes like that, and it’s really annoying. Sure, it’s meant to be an arcade game: run up, shoot things, collect buffs and ammo. The plot is a thin tissue for the joy of shooting butt-ugly monsters. But in this 40 hour game (estimated playable time), there’s over an hour and a half of cutscenes! That’s an entire movie right there. You’d think there’d be a sensible plot.

The biggest thing between Original Doom and Doom III was that Doom III actually felt lived in. There were other people, and lots of voice talent, to help you understand that Mars Base was a place full of humans who were tragically affected by the UAC’s desire to exploit Hell. The later games make light of this, which I suppose is the point, but it’s not one that resonates with me.

I’ll probably finish Doom Eternal. It’s a fine game. It’s just not the masterpieces that Doom III or Doom turned out to be.

Aside: Yes, I am running Doom Eternal on Linux. It works pretty good. The configuration details you have to go through to get it to work are pretty demanding, though, and not for the technically inept. I’m running it through Proton, the “Linux Compatibility Tools” on Steam, which means basically the Wine API emulation layer with a lot of extra configuration details. None of the Compatibility Tools that Steam provides work; you have to install a custom version.

Install the very latest Nvidia drivers! You may have to go through some serious headaches to make this happen. My laptop required that I shut down the windows environment but somehow leave the Nvidia card powered on– that was tricky, and it’s different for every computer.

Install the latest “Glorious Eggroll” edition of Proton. Download the file and find your .steam folder. Change into it until you find the folder with sub-folders “steam” “steamapps”, and “steamui”. If it doesn’t exist, make a folder, compatibilitytools.d. Change into that folder and unpack the Proton you just downloaded: tar xvzf /path/to/Proton-5.5-GE-1.tar.gz Stop and restart Steam.

Tell Steam to download Doom Eternal. Once it’s done, right click on the entry in your library and pull up “Properties.” Click “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” and choose the Proton you just installed. (The link goes to Proton-5.5-GE-1, but there may be a later edition.)

Unclick “Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game.” The overlay can seriously impinge on rendering performance.

Edit the file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and set default-sample-rate=48000.

Reboot. You may now, theoretically, play Doom Eternal.

Current Mood: indifferent

Doom (2016)

What more is there to say about Doom? It’s Doom. That’s about it; it set the standard for what a first-person shooter should be, and it’s been doing that ever since. The ID Tech 6 engine is just freaking amazing, and it all runs without any failures at all on my Linux box, which is something of a miracle.

I should say up front that I really loved Doom 3, which is apparently considered “not very Doom.” In Doom 3, there’s a lot more story; you’re walking through a well-realized world with dozens of voices found on every data slate you pick up, furthering the tale of a mad scientist who discovers a portal to Hell and makes a deal with the denizens there. It had lots of different settings and a few nice puzzles to solve, but was mostly jump-scares and boss battles.

The people at ID didn’t think that was very Doom. Doom 3 was an adventure with guns; this latest Doom is basically a first-person twin-stick.

Twin-sticks are among my favorite genre of video game. The original twin-stick game is Robotron: 2084, which first came out in 1982. You had two controls: one for direction of motion, the other for direction of fire. There’ve been a lot of twin-sticks since then: from Atari’s shameless and rushed-to-market rip-off, Black Widow, to modern retellings like Geometry Wars, Tesla vs. Lovecraft, and Nex Machina, the last of which was written with help by the guy who wrote the original Robotron. (All of those, by the way, also run great on Linux.)

And Doom is a twin stick. Every level is basically six or seven “arenas,” large spaces, often marked with a “gore nest,” where you fight off one or two massive waves of murderous hellbeasts, collect whatever loot was dropped, and move on to the next arena. There are few jump scares and fewer puzzles.

It’s much more arcade than it is story. The story is thin tissue, just enough to justify the landscapes of Mars, the cramped and dangerous interiors of the Mars base, and the painful bleakness of Hell, and is accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek collection of set pieces where you discover the UAC knew all along that it was engaged with “real magic,” but it was a kind they could technologize, as long as it didn’t get out of control.

And the graphics simply are gorgeous. Doom really does push the envelope for so many frames per second of incredible artwork, all in the service of this very silly shoot-em-up. You can see the amount of effort that went into every pixel.

But all of that is just dressing on the arcade action, the sweet dopamine addiction of random number generators vs. the reflexes you’ve got.

Current Mood: amused

TL;DR: Prey (2017) is a very pretty Bioshock in Space with some nice twists, and if you liked Bioshock and you like science fiction, you will like Prey. It runs well under Steam-on-Linux.

Prey (2017) was a fine video game, a nice “Bioshock in space!” riff with some interesting mechanics and so forth. Some of the extra elements made it more interesting than it deserved, but overall the experience was only a good one, not a great one.

For those unfamiliar with the storyline, you play Morgan Yu, and you wake up on a space station you and your brother Alex supposedly own, with no idea how you got there or what has happened to all the visibly dead people everywhere. You discover that the space station has been taken over by Mimics, alien creatures about the size of your head that can look like anything at all, and every pail, trash can, coffee cup, and so forth becomes a threatening object that you have to kill or escape.

It is, like most games of this genre, a combination of puzzle solving, resource management, occasional bouts of combat, and story gathering as you slowly piece together the disaster that led to your being in the crisis in which you find yourself.

The user interface is familiar, and the combat is nothing new to write about. Like in the original Bioshock, you quickly learn the “1-2 Punch” of combat for taking down some of the nastier foes (grenade, combat focus, shotgun finisher).

The setting is the Transtar Space Facility in orbit around the moon. It’s built around a Soviet-era core that the US and the Soviets refurbished, and then Transtar refurbished again, so there’s this transition of design styles. But Transtar was very much into the art-deco thing, so there’s lots of gilded wood and faux marble everywhere that’s not science or space-oriented, and except for the Soviet-era bathrooms in the old labs there’s not that big sense of transitions through time one gets when playing, say, Portal 2.

In Bioshock: Infinite there’s a place in the game where a revolution breaks out in/on Columbia, and the art is remapped to show a city under siege and the common people abandoning it. But that game was a bit railsy; you couldn’t go back and see some of the places you’d visited earlier had become. In Prey, you have the ability to leave the station via EVA suit and float around outside, going from airlock to airlock. You can revisit any part of the station you visited earlier. As the alien infestation transits from the initial invasion through two more phases and the station gets evermore dangerous, you can go back through all the areas you visited before, using new skills to gather new resources, and fight new aliens.

If you’re into SF and you liked Bioshock, you’ll really like Prey. The Steam version runs great under Linux.

There’s only one problem…

[Spoilers below]

There’s a scene at the end of the game that, well, I just hated. There’s an after-credits scene, fully interactive, in which you learn another truth about Morgan. Let’s just say that that scene destroyed the tenor of the game for me so completely that, unlike any of the Bioshock games, I have no desire to play Prey a second time.

Current Mood: disappointed

Omaha and I recently watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters. We were disappointed. I'm a big fan of Godzilla (2014); I think it did a good job of introducing Godzilla and showcasing what Godzilla was all about. I was a little disappointed that Byran Cranston's role was cut short, but the overall objective of the film was well-satisfied by the content and the visuals. Screenwriter Max Borenstein did a masterful job of understanding what a Godzilla movie should be about.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters screenwriter and director Michael Dougherty is made of different stuff. His Godzilla is the campy latter-day monster which gave us such ridiculous lines as "Gamera is friend to all children!"

In the first film, we were introduced to a relatively small but well-funded group known as Operation Monarch, a joint US-Japanese program in the wake of World War 2 to understand this thing that had been awakened in the aftermath of the Bikini Atoll experiments, this creature known as Gojira. Monarch knows of only two: a dead one whose radioactive remains have been stored away, and Gojira. The film opens with a third one attacking the nuclear power plant where Bryan Cranston and his wife work, and set up an epic battle between it and Godzilla. The movie follows a cinematographically coherent and competent course as the beast leads Godzilla on a chase from Japan's eastern coast to Hawaii, Las Vegas and ultimately San Francisco for the final battle. The capabilities of the human beings are fairly mundane and ordinary; we have jets and airplanes and we even try to nuke the bastards. Godzilla 2014 was not a science-fiction film.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is an over-the-top Avengers wannabe. This is a science-fiction universe. Operation Monarch has super-bases hidden all around the world, they have their own military force, and to top it all off they have the USS Argo, which is basically a SHEILD Helicarrier. It's a ridiculous piece of kit that the movie should never have imagined.

Not only do our heroes have absurd tech (did I mention the underwater drones they use to chase Godzilla around are rated for 2000 meters, but they can also fly?), but it's proposed that Ghidora, the three-headed super-beast that rivals Godzilla for strength and toughness, isn't even a part of the Titan ecosystem, but an alien who crash-landed on Earth before the advent of humankind and who has been battling with Godzilla ever since for dominance over the planet.

To add insult to injury, Godzilla's nest is in the heart of the sunken city of Atlantis.

There is one deliberately funny line in the whole movie.

The camera work is fair-to-average in this movie. Zack Snyder, for all his faults and they are legendary, is a master at communicating highly kinetic action. Director Dougherty is not. He does an okay job; it's definitely not the visual mess of a late Michael Bay film, but it's not really that grabbing. Speaking of Michael Bay, this movie is very, very teal-and-orange, giving Transformers 2 a run for its money. The movie is almost entirely shade-of-teal until Rodan, a lava-based monster, shows up, at which point it vacillates between the two colors, almost without rhyme or reason.

At one point, while watching the movie, I said, "So, we're gonna steal the 'open the bay doors' scene from 2012, huh? And we're really gonna steal the 'save the surviving child' scene from San Andreas, huh? And now we've stolen the 'fall-from-orbit' scene from Pacific Rim, too!" It was that kind of film, a sort of stew made from other, fresher movies.

Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are trying hard to reprise their roles, but they could clearly see the writing on the wall as neither of their characters makes it out of movie alive. Kyle Chandler was so obviously chosen because he comes across as Bryan Cranston Lite™ that it's a little sad to see him trying so hard. Aisha Hinds kicks ass as the Colonel in charge of the Argo, and Millie Brown does a very good job as a stressed-out teenager being torn apart by her parents' personal battles and the end of the world. Brad Whitford plays a hapless and somewhat useless scientist on board the Argo whose only job seems to be to say "What?" and give other people a chance to say, "Well, as you clearly may not have grasped, Bob..." It's a fine writing trick, but to heap it all on one dude is a bit unfair.

Godzilla was a good entry into the Godzilla pantheon. Godzilla: King of the Monsters should be allowed to sink beneath the waves, never to be heard from again.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Erik Elkholm, Primus

At the grocery store the other day, I saw Bulletproof "The Mentalist" Coffee on sale. So I picked it up. TL;DR: Do Not Bother.

The coffee touts itself as "especially free of mold and other contaminants," as if that were its primary selling point. That's not its primary selling point. It's primary selling point is that it's a medium-roast coffee that was extraordinarily slow-roasted.

This has two effects: first, it releases and preserves every last molecule of caffeine. High-temperature roasting tends to degrade the caffeine found in coffee beans. Americans have been taught to enjoy "dark roast" not because it's the most flavorful or the most caffeinated, but because it provides a uniform bitterness over the cheaper, soapy flavors that might be found in some cheap coffee beans. "Medium" roast coffee beans tend to have much more caffeine.

The slow-roast process is similar to sous-vide: hold the beans at a temperature that won't cause chemical degredation of the caffeine, but will also achieve the touted effect of guaranteeing that any living organic matter with the bean is also destroyed. Which is great, if that's what you want.

Second, coffee is not just bitterness and caffeine. Good coffees come with a host of oils, esters, and terpenes that strongly influence the flavor of the coffee. The long-roasting process used by Bulletproof boils these off and the result is a coffee that is simultaneously jitter-inducing even in the most caffeine-tolerant human beings, and yet also the most boring coffee yet invented. It's not "instant" coffee; that takes longer to out-gas and results in that flat, "brown" flavor that's endemic to brands like Folger's. It's just that there's nothing there to enjoy.

The nootropic "lifehacking" hacks often seem like joyless machines doing one thing: optimizing themeslves to manipulate the capitalist system. Bulletproof Coffee, especially a line named for a profession based on deceit, trickery, and sleight-of-hand, is perfect for them.

I, on the other hand, am going to toss this bag and go buy some Ethiopian or Columbian medium-roast from the local co-op.

Current Mood: disappointed

Over the weekend, Omaha and I had to have dinner but didn't have a good plan. As a last-minute thing, we decided to check out one of those pre-assembled, "cook at home" meals sold at our local grocery. This one was from the Home Chef Collection, and it was "Chicken breasts with fig sauce, with peas & rice."

What you get in the box: two pre-packaged chicken breasts, a tub of peas, a vacuum-packed container of pre-cooked rice, a pat of butter, a small container of fig sauce, and a baggie of parmesean cheese.

The packaging doesn't lie: if you are a highly experienced home cook, you can do the entire recipe in 20 minutes. If you're not, it's going to take somewhat longer. The only real timesaver in the entire recipe is that the rice is pre-cooked; that means that you can assemble and heat-through the rice, peas and cheese mixture while the chicken is cooking.

I made one change to the recipe: After removing the chicken from the pan, I put a splash of white wine into the pan to deglaze it before adding the fig sauce and water, which added to the flavor and made cleaning up beforehand. "Deglazing" is not something the recipe mentions or goes into.

But the rice is the only timesaver; otherwise, everything in the recipe could be assembled at home by an ordinary mortal, and it wouldn't cost $18 for two people; at most, you could cook that meal for two for only $8. I do appreciate that the chicken breasts provided were on the small side; most times, when you buy fresh chicken, the breasts provided are huge and more than one person could possibly consume. And the rice is easy to make; you just have to be willing to sit in the kitchen for an extra twenty minutes.

Instead of this route, I strongly recommend picking up A Dinner a Day and learning how to cook from that. It has meal plans, ingredient guidelines, weekend buying lists, and leftover management plans, and it actually teaches you a think or two about using pots, pans, and knives. Go through it for a year and you'll be able to cook anything you want after that.

Current Mood: full

Omaha and I went to watch Captain Marvel and I thought it was pretty good. Not quite in the Wonder Woman category of openers about superheroines, but definitely a good introduction to the entire universe of Mar-Vell, the Kree/Skrull conflict, and just a solid movie about the Marvel Universe, even if it is set in the mid-1990s. The CGI is better than usual, Brie Larson was amazing in her role, and overall the quality of the film held up.

Jude Law's Yon-Rogg is a perfect example of the gaslighting male and his end speech so perfectly mimicked the cadence of the MRA "debate me!" speeches, and Law delivered it with such a perfect wink of the eye (and the director emphasized by suddenly dropping all the music and some post-production clean up, to basically show him as he is, pathetic and whiny in the face of Danvers's strength), that I actually giggled.

I can see why so many immature men hated the movie. It's got so much going on it it; Danvers refuses mostly to just take a man's word for things, and the more she goes on the more she learns just how much the men in her world have been lying to her. At one point, the film takes a poignant moment and mostly says that being female in a world of male supremacy is more unifying than being black in a world of white supremacy is dividing, and I thought that was a pretty good message.

The reversion of Jackson and Gregg to their younger selves wasn't quite as smooth as everyone had hoped. Gregg, especially, seemed chunkier than I remember the younger Agent Coulson as being.

Current Mood: satisfied

Omaha and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet Director's Choice, and I think I had a much better time here than at the season premier. There were three pieces, and all of them were quite fun.

Bacchus was the opening piece, and it was a lot of fun. The point of the piece was to use dance to show the emotional energy of wine, merriment, and abundance. It wasn't a hugely complex bit of choreography, and there was no particular set. The costumes were gorgeous, the dancing precise and well-timed, and the forms of joy being displayed by athletically powerful bodies were various and engaging. Boys kissed boys, girls kissed girls, there were hints of a triad, and the whole thing came off as just a very pretty piece.

The Trees The Trees was a much more involved piece, and at first I worried it was going to be another disaster along the lines of Dark and Lonely Space from last year. It was much better. It has its pretensions; for one, one of the people on stage is a vocalist, striding across the stage and reading a poem aloud in a somewhat operatic fashion as the dancers act out around her. The poem, of the same name by Heather Christie, is a series of vignettes about 20-somethings trying to figure out how their lives are supposed to work. "I am the sort of handbag everyone weeps into because we have no jobs and no health insurance so also we can't have any babies and I want to talk about the future of my peer group..." The dancing is emotionally affective as it follows three couples interacting, coming together, falling apart, having their difficulties, all in a small, modernist apartment setting with only a couch. I liked it a lot, and it worked well for me. Omaha thought it was only passable.

The vocalist was Alicia Walter, who has her own fascinating history, and I'd love to hear the story about how she ended up on the Ballet stage.

In the Countenance of Kings was a dance about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I joked recently that I have now seen actual and somewhat successful "dancing about architecture." It's actually more than that; it's a very energetic piece about the kinds of people who live along that stretch of road. The music was The BQE by Sufjan Stevens, and is very listenable in its own right, but when joined by 18 dancers in costumes that reflected a kind of 70's inflected athleticwear, the rhythms and force of the piece was wonderful.

Fleetwood Mac

Omaha and I went to the Fleetwood Mac concert at the Tacoma Dome, and I had a very good time. We were on the floor, about halfway up from the stage, so the photograph isn't great. The crowd was a mix of people who've been listening since the 1970s and people who were younger than my first ISP account.

The replacement of Lindsey Buckingham by Neil Finn (former frontman for Crowded House and Mike Campbell, the lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers worked better than expected. Given Buckingham's penchant for melodrama, replacing him with two musicians who, together, add up to much more than his own talent and who bring some self-discipline and decorum to the show (and who are, together, probably working for less than what Buckingham would have demanded). Finn's voice is similar to Buckingham's, and Campbell's guitar playing is better.

Along with about every Fleetwood Mac song you probably already know, they played Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'," including a montage on the back screen of Petty's career, with several shots of Petty & Stevie Nicks working together, and Nick Finn & Stevie Nicks had a small, unplugged duet of the Crowded House hit "Don't Dream It's Over."

I did not know that Fleetwood Mac had started as a blues band, and that prior to the 1975 release of "Fleetwood Mac" (which had, grief, "Rhiannon," "Landslide," "Say You Love Me," and "Over My Head" on it), they had had two big hits with Peter Green's power-blues piece "Oh Well" and "Black Magic Woman," the piece most people know best from Santana.

Christine McVie is 75, Stevie Nicks is 70, John McVie is 72 and Mick Fleetwood is 71. Christine McVie looked and sounded a little tired but held up well during the performance. Stevie Nicks is still amazing, and Mick Fleetwood performed a 15 minute drum solo with a little assistance (but very little relief) from his drum set partner, Taku Hirano. Mick also introduced the touring members, the people in the back who aren't part of "The band" but who lend their support, which was delightful since often those people don't get much credit. You get the sense that Fleetwood Mac is Mick's band, and if you're very good you might get to play in it.

We had a lot of fun. The greatest emotional hit came from playing "Free Fallin'," and it's clear the band was still having fun on stage.

The playlist last night is below. There was no intermission.

The Chain

Little Lies

Dreams

Second Hand News

Say You Love Me

Black Magic Woman

Everywhere

Rhiannon

I Don't Want To Know

World Turning

Gypsy

Oh Well

Don't Dream It's Over

Landslide

Isn't It Midnight

Monday Morning

You Make Loving Fun

Gold Dust Woman

Go Your Own Way

Free Fallin'

Don't Stop

Current Music: Fleetwood Mac, "Oh Well"

Omaha and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet's All Premiere season opener, and it was a mixed bag. That's always true when you go to an all-premier; you're getting a combination of dances that either have never been seen before on this stage, or have never been seen before ever. The only distinction they have is that someone chose to bring them to PNB, and someone chose to pay for them. There were three this year, and I'm going to review them backwards.

Cacti, by Alexander Ekman

The last piece, Cacti is ballet comedy, and it was successful. Cacti has twenty people on stage: sixteen dancers and four musicians. The dancers each have a small wooden platform of their own, described in the text as a "Scrabble piece" although none of the platforms have letters. There are four voiceover pieces, two of which seem to be quoting from the worst, most pretentious critical reviews the choreographer ever garnered, one is the inner monologue of the choreographer, and one is a recording of the dialogue between two dancers as they go through the motions as if in rehearsal.

Cacti is technically demanding; with sixteen people on stage weilding heavy pieces of wood and flowerpots with dangerously spiny plants in them, there are dangers aplenty, and the dancers go through a dizzying array of complex interactions and physically demanding body moves in very rapid succession, all the while playing roles that are alternatingly funny, incongruous, or just outright silly, and you get more than one laugh out of it. There are four movements, and all of them are distinct, interesting, and tell a story about just how much the choreographer hates pretentious critics.

Silent Ghost, by Alejandro Cerrudo

I trust Cerrudo; his Little Mortal Jump, which I saw in 2016, was an amazing sequence, with its beginning silliness and its ending passion, all highlighted though large black cubes on casters that, when turned, revealed lights, costumes, and other paraphenalia that led the viewer through the idea of people seeking immortality through intimacy. You can see that the "little mortal jumps" he wants to get across are the heart-stopping courage it takes to be vulnerable with someone else.

In that light, Silent Ghost is... okay. But just okay. Cerrudo remains a technically challenging choreographer pushing his dancers to their limits, seeking that exact edge at which their expressiveness to the audience and their own physical limitations are both at their utmost. Cerrudo's taste in music has always pleased me; he has a really good ear for chosing music that communicates authenticity and verisimilitude, for getting across to the honest the place and time he wants to invoke.

But Silent Ghost doesn't seem to have anything to say in quite the same way Little Mortal Jump did. The pieces were all pretty and strong, but that's a lot of what they had to say: these dancers are pretty and strong.

I mean, that's not a bad thing to say.

A Dark and Lonely Space, by Kyle Davis

See separate review TL;DR: I really didn't like it.

Kyle Davis's A Dark and Lonely Space claims, in the liner notes, to tell an anthropmorphized story about a planet coming into creation. If it did, it didn't succeed.

I recently read a heartbreaking blog post, which I can't seem to find once more, from a woman who went through the music program in college and obtained an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in composing music for the symphonic orchestra. Her final was just that: she had to compose a symphony, and it would be played by a symphony. It was the finest night of her life thus far, but it was laden with two realizations: she would never hear it played again, and she would never compose again.

Because she was middle class.

She didn't have rich parents who could afford to send her around the world, attending conferences and garnering patrons of her own. She didn't have an in to the patronage system that her peers did. Many of the new compositions and such you hear these days, if you listen to anything composed since the 1960s, is composed by people who have very little to say. Their world is backstopped by money. No matter how hard it gets, they have a place to go.

A Dark and Lonely Space feels like something written by someone who had that kind of patronage. I don't know if Davis did, but damn if it doesn't feel like that, because A Dark and Lonely Space feels like someone with nothing to say trying too hard to say, well, to say anything.

The music for A Dark and Lonely Space was composed by Michael Giacchino. Giacchino is an award-winning composer who's written music for a lot of different movies: Inside Out, the Star Trek reboots, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, as well as soundtracks for the video game series Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. So let me ask: can you hum anything by him?

John Williams, Ennio Moriconne, Hans Zimmer, and Danny Elfman have all written scores that stay in our minds long after the show ended. Elfman recently complained that directors now want wallpaper music, music that doesn't stand out, that pushes the audience's emotions from behind without being a prominent feature.

Michael Giacchino excels at that sort of music. Can you remember anything Michael Giacchino wrote? I can't. Which is disappointing because I'm a big fan of the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending, and the music for A Dark and Lonely Space is the Jupiter Ascending Symphony, adapted by Giacchino for this ballet.

The music is bombastic and noisy, brassy and intrusive, yet at the same time completely unmemorable. If there's a place for that kind of music on the ballet stage, A Dark and Lonely Space isn't it; it's just that Giacchino writes a lot of science fiction soundtracks and Kyle Davis was writing a science-fictiony ballet and apparently thought it would be cool to marry the two.

Writers have a saying: always honor the promise of your premise. Your back-cover blurb, your liner notes, your cover art, and your opening scene all describe your premise. The pre-credits act from James Bond always shows the premise: a spy of great charisma and derring-do, killing bad guys and wooing bad girls, and the movies succeed when they follow through. Jaws has a woman eaten by a shark in a small village; Jurassic Park has a nasty fight with a caged velociraptor go wrong. The premise is about scary animals and the people who have to deal with them.

A Dark and Lonely Space opens with a huge premise: a woman at the stands fifteen feet tall at the back of the stage in an enormous, ethereal dress, and sings at the audience in wordless operatic fashion...

... and that's it. The costumes are generally uninteresting. The dance isn't technically challenging, there are no particularly skillful or risky moves, with few lifts or catches.

As the opera singer sings, the light focuses on the "newborn planet." They twitch uncomfortably under the glare, but it's a twitch we've seen before; avante garde ballet has been experimenting with getting these incredibly physically beautiful people to move in uncanny and discomfitting, alien ways for a while now. Crystal Pite's Emergence is my favorite example of that.

There are several movements in the piece. There are a lot of dancers including four menacing figures in dark masks, our "newborn planet" is played by a distinctly androgynous and enby figure, and there are nine male/female couples who represent... what? The other ~~nine~~eight planets? But none of the dances add up to anything.

I get that dance, dance without a well-known storyline, a narrative, a sequence of emotions communicated through expression and costume, has a problem like instrumental music: it has trouble communicating with its audience. Vivaldi's Four Seasons only communicates that Winter is cold, Autumn has winds, Summer is nice and Spring is hopeful because we've heard those themes in other places and we know what Vivaldi is trying to say even before the first notes are played. Davis doesn't have that kind of illuminating platform on which to rest our expectations, and he fails to deliver. There's no narrative in A Dark and Lonely Space that I could follow with any coherence.

A Dark and Lonely Space has a full orchestra, a large chorus in the upper boxes of the audience, the woman singing opera, and a cast of over twenty people. It's an enormous production. It must have been expensive to fund. I wish it had been worth it.

Current Music: Michael Giacchino, The Jupiter Ascending Symphony

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Elf Sternberg

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Elf Sternberg

Entries tagged with review

Mass Effect: Andromeda [Game, Review]

The Invincible (both the video game and the book) [review]

The Invincible: the video game

The Invincible: the book

Faith and Deviation

Technology And Its Disconnect

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Technical details

Tori's Sake & Grill (restaurant, review)

The Callisto Protocol [video game, review]

Deathloop (Video Game)

Free Guy (movie, review)

Movie review: Free Guy [part 1]

Pacific Northwest Ballet, "Rep 4"

The Ascent [video game, review]

The Turing Test [video game] [review]

Doom Eternal, initial impressions

Doom (2016)

Review: Prey (2017)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters [movie, review] ★

Bulletproof "The Mentalist" Coffee: Do Not Bother

Kroger's "Home Chef" make-at-home meals: A good idea, but overpriced.

Captain Marvel: Pretty Damn Good

PNB Director's Choice 29109

An Evening With Fleetwood Mac

PNB Premier, Silent Ghost by Aljenadro Cerrudo and Cacti by Alexander Ekman