MechWarrior 5: Clans is a great throwback with bad acting

I had one gateway to videogames: Wing Commander. The Wing Commander series, with its committed military sci-fi setting, cinematic presentation, and chunky combat, made an impression that has never really gone away. As the industry moved away from the PC and its expensive, dorky joysticks, Wing Commander was left behind too, and its legacy is remembered only by true nerds and the occasional video essay.

Wing Commander hit like an atom bomb, and the series had its share of pretenders: high-concept sci-fi games that wrapped themselves in the skin of a realistic military sim. Star Wars games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter skipped the Luke Skywalker fantasy and embraced the franchise’s best character, Wedge Antilles, casting the player not as a galaxy-saving wizard, but as a normal soldier behind the cockpit of a fragile starfighter. MechWarrior 2 was another claimant to Wing Commander’s throne, and it took up a lot of space in my tiny 10-year-old brain.

MechWarrior 2 is more X-Wing than Wing Commander: it has a story, but it’s not the focus. Instead, it does its best to simulate what piloting a 90-ton walking tank would be like. The rhythmic boom of heavy mech footsteps heard from inside the cockpit is burned into my brain, and the chunky, untextured polygon graphics, state-of-the-art at the time, do a great job of selling the fantasy of these nuclear-powered, building-sized death machines—especially when you blast big chunks off your enemies, disabling weapons and movement through laser amputation.

Where Wing Commander failed to adapt to the 2000s, MechWarrior survived. MechWarrior 3 was a frequent graphics card pack-in, though it had the sterile, Windows XP presentation of a lot of Microsoft-owned games at the time. MechWarrior 4 tried to bring the series back to its narrative roots and add some Xbox-era smoothness to the action, but it lacked impact. The series limped along, like a Jenner with a busted leg actuator, under the stewardship of B.C.-based Piranha Games, who spent most of the last decade honing their skills with MechWarrior Online, a team-based PVP shooter for the hardest of hardcore ‘mech fans. My allergy to the phrase “hardcore pvp shooter” and the lack of narrative for MechWarrior Online kept me at a distance, but in 2019 Piranha quietly released MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a new single-player, story-driven MechWarrior game in the tradition of the series (both MechWarrior 2 and 4 had stand-alone “Mercenaries” expansions.) Was this the coming of a new age of series, military sci-fi simulators?

Well, no. But its sequel, MechWarrior 5: Clans, just might be.

I’ve only played the first few missions of Clans (thanks, GamePass) but so far it’s a shockingly ambitious, confident experience. Piranha’s experience in the gameplay department is undeniable: the mechs are super fun to control, with the fluidity you expect from a modern shooter and the chunkiness the machines deserve. There is a very surprising focus on the story, and while I have some issues with the storytelling, the fact it’s there at all is wonderful. The story of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere has been told many times—you could think of this as a reboot of MechWarrior 2 if you really want to—but IGN’s review hints at some big ethical questions and grey morals that the earlier games didn’t touch on. It looks good too, though my trusty Series S struggles to keep its FPS high; I look forward to playing it for real on my PS5 one day.

The budget starts to show in the storytelling, particularly the voice acting. It’s clear costs were cut here. The script is serviceable, there’s a few too many in-universe slang terms for my taste, but the delivery is poor. I’m sure the sheer volume of lines required a very fast recording schedule, but Clans has a severe case of Acting Class Acting that is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

I’ll try to explain, but be warned I’ve been told this is a Pandora’s Box and, once you’re aware of it, you’ll start to hear it everywhere. Young actors are often taught to do every take a little differently: keep the emotion the same, but add a little variety to every attempt. An easy way to do this, especially if you’re pumping out hundreds of lines in a day full of in-universe slang and military jargon, is to change the word you’re emphasizing. So if your line is “He went through that door” you can say it like:

• “He went through the door.”

• “He went through the door.”

• “He went through the door.”

Boom, three variations, three easy takes, one happy acting teacher. The problem is, only one of these makes sense in context. Are there multiple people you could be talking about? Then the first take makes sense. Are you trying to emphasize how he went through the door? Use the second one. Were there multiple possible exits? #3. But it doesn’t make sense to use all three. It’s interesting but it’s not accurate. Clans is full of this trick and it’s due to a few factors.

One is inexperienced actors. This is the easiest and often-deployed criticism. “Bad acting” doesn’t really mean anything, and most paid actors aren’t bad, but they can be unprepared. Actors are like Batman: capable improvisers in a pitch but most effective when given time to prepare. If you have time to study your script, it’s clear who is going through the door, how, and why. But if you’re a non-union actor getting paid very little money to spend 6 hours a day in a booth for 3 days and you’re given a 300 pages videogame script full of words you don’t understand, you probably won’t spend all your free time between your other gigs, classes, and your joe job to do your script work.

Another factor is inexperienced or rushed voice direction in the booth. I suspect the recording schedule for Clans was very tight, so the voice director (if they even had a voice director) just doesn’t have time to give notes and 5 or 6 takes of every line. Stuff gets missed. An example line from early in the game: A friendly Mech pilot says, “Aff Cobalt.” How would you read that cold? “Aff” isn’t a real word and “cobalt” is a colour! What the fuck am I saying? Here’s the vital context for this line: “aff” is in-universe slang for “affirmative” and “Cobalt” is the callsign for the player’s unit. So what the line actually is, and what this actor, had they the time to prepare, would have written on their script, is: “Yes, NAME.” Either they weren’t given a pretty vital note or, for whatever reason, the director went with a take where the actor sounds like they don’t know what they’re saying—because they don’t. (Another really bad example of this is the actor playing the leader of all the clans mispronouncing his own title! Why didn’t anyone say anything to him?)

The third factor is overall direction. Almost every character I’ve encountered is a soldier, but very few of them sound like soldiers. This is a relatively recent cultural trend: emotionally-driven storytelling. Marvel gets a lot of the heat for this but I blame Christopher Nolan for it. Once Nolan started writing his own scripts, his plots got so complicated the dialogue, by necessity, completely flattened out. Nolan’s an efficient filmmaker and his characters speak in almost pure exposition: they’re either explaining the plot, or their emotional state. But actors hate being exposition machines. They’re soft, emphatic, emotional sponges—that’s the job! Even the best actors in the world have trouble saying these kinds of lines and, no disrespect to the cast of Clans, but they’re not Maggie Gyllenhaal and Matthew McConaughey!

So what we get is a cast of twenty-something aspiring actors handed a giant nightmare tome of a videogame script loaded with landmine words like “Freebirth” and “Batchall”, playing characters who don’t use contractions, who are, at the very least, highly-trained elite military pilots. And they sound like actors. No one in this game sounds like their job. Next time you’re on an airplane, listen to how your pilot says, “Flight attendants secure cabin for arrival.” Flat. Emotionless. Professional. Replace that with, “Target destroyed.” The intonation is the same, because the professional is simply giving a verbal update. But in Clans, and in a lot of media, you get, “Target DESTROYED!! WOO!!!” because the actor is trying to force personality and variety into every take, and isn’t given the direction to bring it down a notch.

The line in Clans that triggered this essay was something like, “The cowards are retreating.” Delivered by the leader of your Clan—basically a General and a Governor in one—this line gives us a lot of context with only one word: coward. A professional pilot would simply say, “Hostile contacts retreating,” or something, but the addition of “cowards” tell us a lot about this character: they’re overconfident and disdainful of their enemy. But our poor actor, desperate for direction, growls out “The COWARDS are RETREATING.” She doesn’t sound like a hardened Battlemech pilot who has risen through the ranks to become the leader of her people, she sounds like an actor in a recording booth in Vancouver who doesn’t have any idea what she’s saying and getting nothing but a thumbs up from the other side of the glass.

Next time a line makes you cringe, dig into why a bit more beyond, “bad acting.” It’s a whole ecosystem of time, budget, and direction that is often out of the control of the person reading a line off a page.

Star Wars Outlaws was pretty good but shouldn’t have been an open world game

I finished Outlaws last week and immediately fired up Jedi: Fallen Order, officially my favourite Star Wars game since KotOR. I liked Outlaws a lot despite the bugs and bloat: Kay Vess is a great new character, there is some incredible environmental detail, and the story is not only pretty good but sticks the landing—a rare feat for an open-world game.

But the needs of a giant open-world game that is full of shit to do really hurt that story. Outlaws, which is inspired by rollicking high-concept heist movies like Ocean’s 11, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Solo, is missing a key element of what makes those stories so much fun: momentum.

How much time passes in any of these three movies? I don’t think it’s really said, but it feels pretty quick; a few days or weeks at the outside. I have no idea how much time passes in Outlaws. The way the ship gets more cluttered (a nice detail), all the running around you do; it feels like you’re on that ride for months. I finished Outlaws in just over 40 hours—that’s a long game! The sheer number of outfits Kay acquires suggests a long timeline. I buy a lot of clothes, but I’ve never bought 20+ jackets in one week.

Kay and ND-5's relationship ends up being a high point but could have been so much more (not, like, in a sex way).

Kay levels up, but she doesn’t change. Humberly González does a great job with Kay, but she’s hamstrung by a bad piece of directing. At the beginning of the game, Kay is green, uncertain, and scared. González uses a halting, hesitant speech pattern to convey this. It’s a good choice. Unfortunately, nearly every line in the game is delivered…like…this? It’s a fine choice for when she’s bullshitting a mob boss, but just when she’s buying a pair of pants? Like, grow a backbone, kid.

The biggest issue with this is we grow in ability and confidence at the same pace that Kay does. That’s what’s great about video games with strong protagonists: we gain new powers, get better at the game, along with them. But Kay’s voice remains the same unsure, timid young woman—even though she can quickdraw and blast five Stormtroopers in under a second.

In a linear game they could have charted her growth but, in a game where you can do story beats in any order, there’s no sense of progression. The limited amount of crew bonding hurts this, too. You barely interact with your crew, so there’s no opportunity to show how Kay has evolved outside of her stats. The storytelling takes some hits, too—a few events seem to happen out of order, and the journal occasionally references things that haven’t happened yet. Or at least hadn’t for me. It makes the story feel like little more than a vessel to drive the action forward, which is a shame because the plot is a perfectly serviceable heist story with lots of betrayals, setbacks, and double-crosses, and a lot of the scenes are pretty good.

Firing up the Jedi games right after completing Outlaws put the latter’s shortcomings in an especially harsh light. Fallen Order’s storytelling is so mature and so thoughtful—moreso than any other piece of Star Wars storytelling since Andor. It has a clear theme and point of view, and it communicates this with great performances through wonderful characters. Outlaws doesn’t have the same ambitions, certainly, but you can see the narrative team trying to say something new about the seedy underbelly of Star Wars.

Here’s hoping they get to have more focus in the sequel.

Star Wars: Outlaws has Awesome Space Bars

I knew I was going to like this game, but I’m digging it a lot more than expected. Don’t let the slow start fool you — once this thing gets going it’s really slick and fun. It’s more of a stealth game than I was expecting, but as a die-hard Thief and Splinter Cell fan, I don’t mind a bit. One of the keys of those games is the strength of the main character and how that informs the gameplay. Outlaws gets that. The “Keep Talking” skill, where you throw your hands up and sweet talk a guard until you can quick draw on him, is outstanding game design.

But yeah this game has great bars, diners, and cantinas. You spend a lot of time in these, getting jobs, selling loot, and playing Space Poker. Each one is unique and takes on the flavour of, not just the planet you’re on, but the specific district of the city you’re visiting. The tiny little bar on a crappy space station has a totally different vibe than a small town diner.

Best thing? The diagetic music is loud! I loved all the bars and clubs in Cyberpunk, but the music was never as pouding as it should have been for an EDM bar fifty years in the future. The first nightclub you go to in Outlaws begins with a walk down a narrow staircase into a literal dance cave bathed in purple light with a goth band on stage shrouded in haze. It recreates the excitement and mystery of going into a new club better than any game since Hitman 3’s German rave level.

Casablanca: What is a Classic?

What is a "classic?"

Something made before you were born? Something in black and white? Something that you were introduced to by a loved one? Something you have an emotional connection to?

Everyone has their own answer, but when asked the question, you've got to at least consider Casablanca—even if you haven't seen it. Maybe especially if you haven't seen it. 

Casablanca is the purest example of the "Golden Age of Cinema." A heavy-shadowed noir with impeccable lighting, superstar romantic leads, great character actors—and quotable lines that have been memed, mixed, parodied, referenced, mocked, and reclaimed thousands of times in the 80+ years since its release.

Even people who haven't seen it know the basics. A soup of pop culture references, like the tacky paintings pressed onto diner walls where Bogart sips milkshakes with James Dean. Nostalgia defined and commodified, flattened and shrink-wrapped and mass-produced, until even the silhouettes of the characters are recognizable, their words processed and twisted until they are not endlessly quoted, but endlessly misquoted, like "Play it again, Sam"—a line that no one in the film ever utters.

What do people mean when they say "Play it again, Sam?" Or "Here's looking at you, kid?"  Or "We'll always have Paris?" Does anyone even know anymore? These lines have been elevated to the pop culture pantheon alongside other memes like "Mai waife!" and "Luke, I am your father"—another common misquote—with no consideration that these were once written by a screenwriter, memorized by an actor, and delivered on a set. Lines that were created to evoke an emotional response unique to the film they were written for have now been disseminated throughout modern culture, stripped of their initial meaning, now heavy with personal emotional investment.

With all the misquotes, tacky posters, bad Halloween costumes, and Animaniacs parodies, of course, Casablanca is "good." If it wasn't, how has it survived? We all know Casablanca is "good," even if we haven't seen it.

But here's the thing: Casablanca is REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

It's good now, in 2023, and it was good in 1983. It was good in 1953 when it was rediscovered and elevated beyond the standard studio picture the cast and crew thought they were creating: another noir romance, with maybe a touch of geopolitical reference to add authenticity, rushed out the door by the studio when the actual Second World War made the film's themes all too relevant.

It is astonishing this was made DURING WW2. Every character represents their own country's involvement in a war that was being fought while the cameras were rolling. 

Bogart's Rick is an American opportunist, made cynical by personal heartbreak, secretly doing the right thing behind everyone's backs—or whenever it suits him. Bergman's Ilsa is an Eastern European refugee who is wracked with guilt over her romance with Rick in Paris while her lover was tortured by the Nazis. The only real hero in the film is Paul Heinreid's Lazlo, a world-famous resister who uses the power of nationalism, courage, and a brass band to wage a guerilla culture war against the Nazis. 

The standout is Claude Rains as the local police captain, a pure opportunist who hangs out at Rick's to collect blackmail material and because he just likes the guy. In a movie literally stuffed with character actors, even the cartoonish performances have meaning, like Rick's jovial German stereotype. No scene is wasted, every line lands. 

And those lines! 

"Here's looking at you, kid." What starts as a cliched pickup line Rick has probably used on hundreds of girls morphs into a requiem for the time they had, the people they used to be, forever destroyed by war and heartbreak.

"Play it, Sam." The "it" is "As Time Goes By", a song about the fundamentals of romance and how love can survive the most horrific occurrences. A song loaded with the movie's themes written ten years earlier. Sam's reluctance to play the song for Rick or Isla and how he tries to pull Rick out of his depression gives Sam way more depth than any parody allows, where he is often portrayed as a piano-playing idiot savant. Rick saved Sam from Paris at great cost to his own happiness, and Sam's debt is to keep his boss happy and distracted—something Ilsa's arrival makes impossible.

Finally, "We'll always have Paris." Often omitted from this quote is the rest of the line:

"We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night."

The film's thesis distilled into three sentences, circling back to the groundwork laid by "Here's looking at you, kid" and "Play it, Sam." How many people even know this line comes from Casablanca? That it's Rick's last-ditch attempt to get her on the plane, absolving her of the guilt she feels for leaving him in Paris and to absolve herself for romancing Rick in the first place, for daring to be happy when her husband, the film's real hero, who roused an entire city with nothing but La Marseillaise, was languishing in a German concentration camp. 

It's breathtaking writing from a forgotten, unproduced play, delivered by one of the world's biggest movie stars, who thought he was making just another in a long line of forgettable studio pictures, elevated and sanitized and polished to a mirror sheen by pop culture erosion. The dopamine hits like a tidal wave: the peanut butter of nostalgic recognition blending with the chocolate of expert filmmaking.

If classics are tenured members of the faculty of film, some of them, as relics of their time, aren't allowed to teach anymore. But Casablanca is out there giving 1 hour and 52-minute lectures on the transcendent power of a good story, well told, every day.

Avatar: The Way of Water

The best science fiction serves two purposes: to transport us to impossible worlds with fantastic technology we can only dream of and to make an existing social issue digestible through a technological or sociological abstraction. It's entirely possible to watch Aliens and think, "Wow, cool machine guns," but there is an allegory for American imperialist bravado post-Vietnam there if you choose to engage with it.

Avatar: The Way of Water delivers impossible worlds and fantastic technology, but its allegories are shallow.

Straight off, the movie is way, way too long. You could easily shave the first hour down to fifteen minutes. My sympathies to the FOUR credited editors, but a movie that takes this long to get going and has intermittent voiceover is a structural weakness inherited from the first film. In Way of Water, the cracks in the foundation have spread to the walls and ceiling. 

When the evil human megacorp returns to Pandora, Jake Sully and his precocious teen Na'vi kids, including born-on-Pandora human kid Spider, wage a year-long guerilla war against them. They blow up a train and stage a very cool nighttime rescue mission in the rain, but when it's revealed that The Bad Guy from the first film has been reincarnated in his backup Na'vi body, the Sullys abandon Spider to torture and death and flee to the ocean. 

(The Sully family motto, repeated ad nauseam, is "Sullys stick together," but I guess that doesn't include their adopted human son. The implications of this racial segregation are explored about as much as any of the movie's themes, but I'll get to that.)

That paragraph worth of story takes an hour.

Hour two begins with the Sully family finally arriving at the Polynesian-inspired water tribe. It took me until minute 85, but I finally accepted that the movie doesn't really have a plot for 2/3s of its runtime. 

Those captivated by the potential of Pandora as a "real place" will probably love this part, as the movie fragments into a series of vignettes exploring the society of the water tribe, a mishmash of Polynesian culture, which was very hot when this movie was being shot. 

The main tribe, whose name I cannot remember and will not google, is covered in Polynesian tattoos. They exhibit elements of Maori war culture (though they never do a full haka, thank god) and are pretty much just Pacific Islanders but green. To my ignorant eye, there isn't any creation here, just elements taken from existing human cultures and blended into a soup, except now they ride dolphins.

I'm fine with taking existing human cultures and grafting them onto alien species: it brings an authenticity that is extremely difficult to manufacture. But why does the Na'vi islander tribe exhibit elements of Earth-bound islander culture? What is the connection between elaborate, flowing tattoos and the ocean? Why do the Na'vi warriors stick out their tongues as a sign of aggression, just like Maori? Is there a lore reason, or is it to make them more understandable to us, the Earth-bound audience? The answer to both these questions is yes. 

Consider the criticism of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, which took elements of Middle-eastern and African culture without casting many MENA actors. Villeneuve and his team put a lot of effort into making Arrakis feel like a place distinct from Earth-bound deserts, like the ocean tribes of Pandora, but Arrakis is still populated by humans. 

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Arrakis? It's all desert, and it's hot. Humans adapt to hot temperatures in specific ways and leveraging that history works in Dune's favour. It's not perfect, but there was an intention to the design and casting choices made that I just don't see in Way of Water. Javier Bardem as Stilgar is one thing, at least he's from Spain, but in Avatar 2, the ocean tribe's queen is played by Kate Winslet.

Maybe it's not fair to compare James Cameron to Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve is the best storyteller filmmaker on the planet, whereas Cameron is more of a tech genius. Both are interested in pushing movies forward, but Villeneuve feels like he's working out of a big city opera house, while Cameron works at NASA. 

The second hour of the film is truly beautiful. The open spaces of the island village and vast underwater areas give Cameron a wide canvas not possible in the claustrophobic jungle of the first film. There's something about the way the characters look in the water that makes them seem more real than they do out of it.

This brings us back to abstraction. If scifi is a way to abstract complex ideas away from fraught, real-world implications, the balance is extremely delicate. Take things too far, and the message is lost or rendered inert, don't go far enough, and the scifi element feels cowardly, a way to avoid engaging with the issue directly. Somehow, Cameron does both.

Let's count Avatar 2's layers of abstraction: 

- It's set on a distant planet, far in the future. This planet is 100% alive, even though they never say it is. It is though. Eywah, the Na'vi god, is the planet. I absolutely guarantee this will be central to the plot of one of the upcoming sequels, and it will be treated as a major revelation.

- All but one of its main characters is an 8-foot-tall blue cat person who can, through the use of glowy tendrils in their fleshy ponytails, commune with the planet and certain animals. This is also how the Na'vi fuck, which makes a sequence involving a teenage boy swimming into the mouth of a talking whale to interface with its glowing golden whale pussy pretty messed up.

- Some of the Na'vi kids call each other "bro" and "cuz" and constantly tell one another, "I got this." The Na'vi also have accents, which makes no sense since the movie shows us they speak their native tongue. Shouldn't Jake have the accent? Who cares.

- 95% of the movie takes place on CGI sets, ironically making the real sets in the human locations look fake. This is nothing normal to hold onto, especially since all the humans are either psychopathic military grunts, mercenary whalers, or a kid in a loincloth raised in the jungle.

- The intended way to watch this is in 3D, which sucks. Even in Super Laser Ultra IMAX Best Movie, the glasses dim the image and fuck with the frame rate, so the action is choppy and hard to parse. The 3D is actually less immersive since the glasses present a literal barrier between you and the movie.

All these layers pile up, like the beer glasses in that old drunk-driving commercial, presenting a movie that, despite all the filmmaker's efforts, you don't experience, you simply watch.

There is just nothing to grab onto. The characters are completely interchangeable. I kept wondering why there were two sons—I must have forgotten every other movie I've ever seen! The only character names I can recall are "Spider," because Spider, and "Toque" which is either a weird callback to Cameron's Ontario roots or proof that he hasn't been north of the border in a long time.

Zoe Saldana is as committed as ever, but she's relegated to the Mean Mom character who cares too much about nature, like a weird crystal-obsessed aunt who always smells like patchouli. Saldana doesn't really Arrive in the film until the very end when Cameron finally takes a break from trying to convince us the Na'vi are sexy and embraces the alien aspects of their design. Combat Ney'tiri is legitimately terrifying and the closest Cameron has come to horror since Aliens.

That sequence, coming about midway through Hour Three, is both exciting and a huge bummer. A really awesome whaling sequence pulls a balancing act that is very Cameron: it shows you all these cool toys and then punches you in the gut with the purpose of those toys. This leads right into the big climactic battle, the Scary Neytiri sequence, and an exhilarating, extended callback to Titanic. James Cameron is one of the greatest action directors of all time, but it's clear now his ego won't let him make a movie as simple as The Terminator ever again.

I remember watching Avatar and thinking, during the last battle, that I should be enjoying it more. "This is by the guy who made Terminator 2!" The action in Way of Water is better, cleaner, and easier to follow—the film's last third is rad!—but it takes so long to get there, with so much meandering exposition, bad dialogue, shitty teen drama, and superficial mysticism that it doesn't feel like an event. It's just another thing to watch.

2022 was the year Movies Came Back when Top Gun: Maverick made the strongest case yet for the IMAX experience. But Way of Water fails where Maverick succeeded in every way. Top Gun's cliches are just as predictable, but they elicit smiles rather than groans. Top Gun's characters are reduced to single-word callsigns, but I can remember every squadron member and not one of Jake and Neytiri's kids—except Toque. Way of Water spends a ridiculous amount of time trying to humanize its villain, a man who literally crushes his own skull with his bare hand, whereas Top Gun doesn't even have a villain! 

For all Cameron's effort into making Pandora "feel real," Top Gun was far more transportive simply due to its clarity. I would jump at the chance to see Maverick in IMAX again, but I'd much rather watch Way of Water on my TV. By streamlining the blockbuster formula, Maverick focuses on the thrills of the theatre experience. By going big, Way of Water makes the whole thing seem a little silly, like the commercials that play after the trailers promising that you'll "be a part of the movie." Despite all the money, all the time, and all the innovation, Avatar: The Way of Water never pulls you beneath the surface.

Elden Ring keeps blowing my mind

Yes, it’s another story about how good Elden Ring is. Sue me.

My wife was going out for the day one Saturday. It was rainy and cold (summer is fickle here) so I decided to stay in. I had just beaten the Fire Giant. She asked what I was going to do while she was gone. I confidently declared: “I think I’m finally going to finish Elden Ring.”

That was three weeks ago.

This weekend I made it halfway (?) down Miquella’s Haligtree. The week before, I finally explored Consecrated Snowfield. I discovered a massive underground area, capped with a lore-heavy boss fight. The week before that, I wrapped up some character side-quests (incl. stuffing guts up a dude’s butt?). All throughout, I’ve been getting my ass stomped in Crumbling Farum Azula.

After Breath of the Wild came out, I saw a lot of people making the same mistake: that BotW was astonishing because there was so much stuff to do . It was the same annoying quantifier that sunk No Man’s Sky before release. Even when Zelda showed us all a different way to make an open world, the wrong lessons were learned. It was stuffed with content, but it made exploration for exploration’s sake enjoyable,

Let’s ignore the well-trodded slag heap of the Ubisoft Open World and focus on Ghost of Tsushima. Even Ghost, with its lack of minimap and in-world guides, wants us to see everything. It’s organic but there is still a feeling of unease the player will miss out on content.

The Father of the Souls games, Miyazaki, doesn’t think of his games as content. Not even the narrative is handed to you or, if it is, it’s only a part of the story. In Dark Souls, if you follow the story in a linear fashion, the outcome is actually not great for the world. You perpetuate an oppressive cycle and you don’t even realize it. Your incuriousness damns you. But the storytelling is so obtuse that you don’t even realize you’re being played. It’s the BioShock twist without the villain’s helpful explanation of the plot.

Elden Ring is what I thought World of Warcraft was going to be before the tenets of the MMORPG was canonized. It’s a place that existed long before you entered it and there are many, many spaces that are not for you. The world is hostile the way the real world can be. When you are welcomed somewhere, it’s worth being skeptical about why.

This density is a hallmark of Miyazaki’s storytelling. To create the “Open World Dark Souls”, Miyazaki turned to the reigning king of dense fiction: George R. R. Martin.

The specifics of Martin’s involvement in writing Elden Ring were much discussed before release. Disgruntled readers, and viewers burned by Game of Thrones, were quick to assume he had nothing to do with Elden Ring at all. (The ending of Game of Thrones is about as good as the rest of the show and if that makes you angry it’s time to move on.)

But the truth of Martin’s involvement is fascinating and should open up a whole new world of artistic collaboration.

Basically, Martin created the history of the world of Elden Ring. All its kingdoms, kings, queens, lands, wars, struggles, secret societies, religions, and armies. He did what he does best: he created a world and imagined the people who live in it.

And Miyazaki blew it all up!

Elden Ring takes place after the apocalypse. The Gods Martin created have destroyed the world he so carefully constructed. You stumble through a broken world, like an outsider in the ashes of King’s Landing after Dany’s war, or frost-bitten Westeros in the wake of a successful White Walker invasion.

It’s the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies of video games.

Ghost of Tsushima tells a pretty good videogame story in a beautiful world that is fun to explore. It is vast, but not overwhelming — like a solid prestige tv series.

Elden Ring barely tells a story at all. Instead, it presents a text. It is wide like Ghost, but it is also deep (literally: there’s an entire underground landmass). Elden Ring is overwhelming, but not in the traditional way we think of video games as being overwhelming. It doesn’t feel like content because the people who made it don’t think of it as content. It’s a space, a very video game-y space, that feels like it will continue to exist without the player.

There are parts of the world that are optional to the point of being repulsive. I didn’t find Miquella’s Haligtree because I was looking for it, I didn’t follow a walkthrough. Instead, I discovered it. I have been aging my character as I play because, after 85 hours, I feel like I’ve been lost in this world for decades.

Ghost of Tsushima is being developed into a feature film, a hilarious misunderstanding of what connects people to that story. Elden Ring is a video game, it could never be anything else. It exists to be discovered, to be engaged with, to be probed and, even after dozens of hours, to surprise.

My wife saw me playing this weekend and asked didn’t I already finish this? I shrugged. I won’t give an estimate anymore. I truly have no idea how much is left. I don’t care. I’m in it for the ride.

I am pleased to report that Rogue One still slaps

The only people who are still talking about the 5 Disney Star Wars movies are:

1) Star Wars people

2) Movie people

3) Emotionally damaged, terminally online people

As someone who fits neatly into all three categories, I can confirm that Rogue One still kicks ass.

A lot of the backlash towards Rogue One and The Last Jedi wasn't about the movies themselves. I can't believe anyone is able to watch these without conceding they are very nice-looking. These are well-put-together, expensive blockbusters. Few filmmakers can say their billion-dollar action/sci-fi studio blockbuster was a weird outlier on a brilliant career—but Rian Johnson sure can.

And how many people who will go to their graves declaring the Bourne trilogy as the greatest action franchise of all time are aware that the guy who wrote all of them co-wrote this movie? (And directed an apparently not-insignificant chunk of it after Gareth Edwards was fired—classic Disney Star Wars move.)

There are people who consider the late 80s and 90s as the Dark Ages for Star Wars, but for me, they're anything but. I came to Star Wars through the original trilogy, of course, but the video games and novels sustained me as I grew up. There were plenty of stories about the continuing adventures of the Skywalkers. But I always loved the stories of regular soldiers. The heroes of Stackpole and Allston's X-Wing novels, and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter computer games, star normal people. Even the Dark Forces series start you off as a normal soldier who never loses his blue-collar cool as he becomes a Jedi.

On top of these relatively grounded stories were countless novels about talking crystals and sentient planets and extra-galactic aliens. There were love stories and buddy comedies and young adult adventures. Star Wars was producing novels and games that felt like other movies, in the same way the original trilogy aped Lucas' favourites. Novels that felt like Jaws or Night of the Living Dead or The Long Goodbye with lightsabers and starfighters.

These weren't cash-cow paperback dreck. A brain trust was overseeing the canon of Star Wars—long before that was a word every Reddit poster had tattooed on their heart. Authors twisted their stories through the original trilogy, each others' work—and beyond. 

Star Wars could be anything. 

But now, after decades of concentrated marketing pressure, there is a prevailing sense of what Star Wars is allowed to be.

I know movie people, smart movie people, who are casually, contemptuously dismissive of Rogue One. People who can debate the artistic merits of The Batman or are looking forward to the spectacle of Avatar 2 won't even entertain the idea that Rogue One is #goodactually.

Why? The answer is never rational or thoughtful. "It's a tragedy" they'll say or "it's unnecessary" or—this one makes my blood boil—"I didn't care about the characters because they're nobodies."

These arguments aren't about this movie. They're about Star Wars™. What Star Wars is allowed to be.

(I did have a friend, who is not a Star Wars fan, complain the movie wasn't gory enough, that he wanted to see limbs getting blown off. I'll admit my argument against this was "Well yeah but it's still a Star Wars movie." So I admit I'm not immune to this either.)

The worst things about Rogue One are the added bits to connect the movie to the greater Star Wars canon: the weird "watch yourself" guy cameo, the C-3P0 and R2D2 cameo, the digital recreation of Peter Cushing. These are weird bumps in an otherwise really slick sci-fi espionage war flick—and how many of those do we get? And who better to make one than the guy who created the friggin' Bourne franchise?

The awkward cameos and already-dated technical flexes are especially weird because the real connections are all there. The sets, the costumes and the mustaches all evoke the gritty, improvisational feel of A New Hope—except this time it's shot by Grieg Fraser. The subtle callbacks to the original trilogy, like the clever digital insertion of Red and Gold Leaders, are delightful (and look great).

The story of Rogue One is a tragedy, but the story behind Rogue One is a tragedy too. If this wasn't a Star Wars™, people would have lost their minds when it came out. An original picture that looks, sounds and feels this good, from a script this tight, with this insane cast? Riz Ahmed three years away from a Best Actor nom? Alan Tudyk as a tragi-comic robot? Ben Mendelsohn's gross wet mouth? Mads Mikkelsen? DONNIE YEN?!?!

It would have been a sensation.

And yet, it's fitting that a story about complex underdogs, the grimy heroes of a war filled with shining examples of mythic Good, has slowly simmered into a modern classic. Now the dust has settled on these Modern Star Wars, the real heroes are shown to have been the spies and behind-the-lines troops that held up Sky where our myths were Walkers.

(But also that space battle is just, wow, I thought the little strike on Eadu was all we were gonna get and then BAM full-on fleet engagement AND air-to-ground combat. I've wanted to see X-Wings vs AT-ATs since the cover for Isard's Revenge.)

Quick Thoughts on 12 Minutes

12 Minutes is a new time-loop thriller point-and-click adventure game by the A24 of video games, Annapurna Interactive. Annapurna’s biggest success is probably The Outer Wilds, another timeloop game which deftly avoids the absolute worst part of timeloop stories—having to explain to people you’re in a timeloop over and over again—by letting the player character jump into a rocket ship and blast off into space.

Now, I’m all for new ways to tell stories in video games but the stories have to be worth telling.

The concept is ambitious, sure, but every element of its execution is poor. Right out of the gate, the decision to have McAvoy and Ridley, two actors from the UK, speak in American accents is baffling. There is no reason this game can’t be set in London or have the protagonists be English expats. The writing is stilted, awkward, and peppered with terms of endearment like "babe" instead of actual character connections and histories. There seems to have been close to zero voice direction: Ridley and McAvoy are fine actors, and there are multiple takes where their line reads are just plain wrong, something even an amateur director should have corrected.

You’re supposed to have a voyeuristic connection to these characters, but the animations are laughably stilted and awkward, the models frequently clip through each other, and the models themselves are mannequin-like and Ridley’s character (named simply "Wife" which is a whole other thing) has a distractingly perfect ass. Maybe that’s part of the point, maybe this is supposed to be some commentary on the objectification of women & voyeurism, but the writing is so bad it’s not worth investing in.

There is a moment during a rainstorm where you can look out a window. McAvoy exclaims "Heavy rain" and my god if that’s a David Cage reference, well, it tells you all you need to know about the quality of the storytelling here.

Amazon's removal of Indigenous people from New World is genocide

This is an expansion of a comment thread I wrote on Polygon. The comments of the person I was responding to have been removed for the sake of their privacy and my writing has been adjusted because of this.

---

New World is an upcoming MMO (think World of Warcraft) by Amazon Game Studios. Due to the cancellation of two other projects, it will be the first title the studio releases.

Yes, that Amazon.

According to the game’s webpage, in New World players will:

“Explore a thrilling, open-world MMO filled with danger and opportunity where you’ll forge a new destiny for yourself as an adventurer shipwrecked on the supernatural island of Aeternum. Endless opportunities to fight, forage, and forge await you among the island’s wilderness and ruins. Channel supernatural forces or wield deadly weapons in a classless, real-time combat system, and fight alone, with a small team, or in massed armies for PvE and PvP battles—the choices are all yours.”

— Amazon Game Studios

Pretty standard MMO-stuff, nothing to see here. But here’s how the game looks:

Do these outfits and setting remind you of a particular time in history?
Do you notice something missing from an image of people in wide brimmed hats, steel armor, and feathers battling in front of a wooden pallisade in a verdant green field, in a game called New World?

From Colin Campbell of Polygon’s initial preview of the title in 2019:

“There are no indigenous peoples. And according to developer Amazon Game Studios, it’s not really about invasion or America.

Except ... except there are human-like creatures on this Atlantic shoreline. They are shuffling zombies, variously called “Corrupted,” or “Withered.” They don’t have identifiable cultures, but they are extremely hostile to settlers. They aren’t portrayed like, say, the Wampanoag peoples that the Pilgrims encountered, or the Algonquian-speaking civilizations of pre-invasion Virginia.

The game’s lore says they are “former settlers,” who have been corrupted by the island.”

— Colin Campbell, Polygon

I have major issues with games celebrating the "Age of Exploration" from a purely European perspective, as much as I enjoy the visual aesthetic and storytelling potential of the era.

The erasure of Indigenous peoples from history and in pop culture is genocide. I don’t care that New World is set on "a magical island with no native life" if the people exploring that magical island look, dress, act, and use the weaponry of the soldiers who systematically murdered, displaced, and conquered the original peoples of the Americas and Caribbean. You’re still putting on the historical costume of a conqueror and by removing any mention of indigenous people, players get to experience the power fantasy of a conquerer without that darned colonial guilt.

The fact that the player is battling "unholy, corrupted" settlers doesn’t make it better: I’m sure the Catholic Church and other organizations used similar terminology to describe European settlers who attempted to co-exist with Indigenous peoples.

My comments were met with the expected dismissals: that I was taking things too seriously, that I must be someone who looks for things to be offended by, that no, actually, this isn’t literally genocide because this game isn’t literally murdering someone.

Now, If you are really interested in a discussion of modern cultural genocide, this is a good place to start.

I’m not saying Amazon, or the developers of this video game, are committing genocide themselves, but they are participating in cultural and historical erasure which is a continuation of the colonial genocide perpetrated by European settlers on Native Americans and Indigenous Canadians which exists today through systemic racism and the discovery of mass graves on the site of former Canadian residential school grounds among many other examples.

I remember seeing an argument when Greedfall came out: “The combat is fun, so who cares about the rest?” Greedfall a French-developed RPG where the player takes control of a colonialist settler whose job is to balance the needs of multiple factions in colonizing a New World which did have Indigenous peoples, they were just based on the Celtic colonization by the British, even though the settlers themselves were clearly modelled after the English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catholic Church. Greedfall does attempt some nuance and makes an admirable attempt at creating a mid-period BioWare RPG (Like Mass Effect or Dragon Age) in a very compelling setting, but the role of the main character leaves a bad taste in the mouth unlike the one left by Commander Shepard or Hawke.

You don’t have to care about this if you don’t want to. But I do. My intention isn’t to make you feel bad or to say the people who worked on this video game are bad people who don’t deserve their jobs or for their work to be appreciated by the people who will buy it.

As I said above, someone suggested I was someone who “looks for things to be offended by” and… they’re kinda right. I do look for ways to examine the things I take for granted and I do question my assumptions about history, culture, and the imagery I absorbed through my education. I’m not offended by New World—I think the last five years of public discourse have eradicated the meaning of that word—but, as I said above, I personally have a problem with using only three of the four pillars of the Age of Exploration: early gunpowder and single-edged steel weapons, multiple-mast sailing ships, and fabulous coats paired with funny mustaches, while completely ignoring the fourth pillar of that setting: the subjugation, eradication, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples.

Should our education be separate from our entertainment? I don’t think it should. A common argument is “We can’t have games about periods in history without mentioning the bad parts of those periods” and we mostly don’t! WW2 games and modern warfare games have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to address civilian deaths and the often manufactured or fraudulent reasons for war. And there has been an examination of a game called "Civilization" being solely about a race to settling cities and building roads.

If you only wish to engage with games as escapist entertainment, that’s fine. You can watchBand of Brothers just for the fight scenes. But I can’t just consume media without considering the consequences anymore.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)

In the mid-90s, Shane Black was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

After creating the buddy cop genre with Lethal Weapon, Black rode a dizzying lightspeed tightrope by writing a string of high profile hits that stuck close to well-loved Hollywood tropes while skewering the conventions of action filmmaking, traditional masculinity and gender roles, and movie stardom.

But then, in 1996, The Long Kiss Goodnight happened. Long Kiss is, on paper, the next step in Black's recontextualizing of Hollywood genre tropes: an action/noir/spy flick starring a woman and a black man in roles traditionally reserved for white men which is literally about a woman reclaiming her identity. It starred Geena Davis and Samuel L Jackson, two stars with plenty of action credits to their name, though Davis and director Renny Harlin were still stinging from the disastrous failure of Cutthroat Island, a one-two punch that neither ever recovered from.

Black has said that the studios begged him to make the lead male: "It might have made more money, they told me," He said, "but it had to be a woman. The lead had to be female."

When Long Kiss became one of the biggest bombs of all time, Black went underground to lick his wounds, and prepare for a comeback.

And speaking of comebacks. Robert Downey Jr. is perhaps the face of the Hollywood redemption story. Born into a house as rampant with celebrity as with drug abuse, Downey Jr.'s looks, his father's access to the Hollywood elite, and nuclear fission-level charisma made him one of the biggest stars of the 80s even as his catastrophic struggle with drugs and alcohol ensured his career was built on tindersticks. 

Starting, tidily enough for our purposes, in 1996, Downey Jr. was arrested multiple times for drug-related reasons. He blamed his addiction on his father's lifestyle, and told a judge in 1999 "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal."

Downey spent a year in prison and was released in 2000. Within a year, he had been cast in Ally McBeal, revived the show's ratings, won a Golden Globe and was then arrested again, fired from the show, and went back to rehab. It seemed like his comeback had happened, and failed.

Val Kilmer's story is less dramatic, but still classic Hollywood: after a string of unbelievable hits as iconic characters in the 90s: Batman, Jim Morrison, Heat's icy bank robber Chris, due to reports he was difficult to work with, Kilmer faded out of the spotlight.

So, then, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a story about how Hollywood fucking sucks by a bunch of guys that went through the ringer for Hollywood.

For Black, making his directorial debut, it's familiar territory: a neo noir comedy that splits the hard-boiled private eye protagonist in two. Downey Jr plays Harry, a bad thief who blunders through life, and Kilmer plays "Gay" Perry, a bonded PI who hates his job hiding in bushes taking snapshots of cheating husbands, and whose homosexuality is a deliberate inversion of the aggressive heterosexuality of traditional noir PIs. (Whether Black's characteristic lack of subtlety manifests in a portrayal of Perry that is more homophobic than subversive is up for debate.)

Kilmer's deadpan, played so effectively as a leading man in Heat and The Salton Sea, is hilarious and a true revelation for anyone not familiar with his breakout role in Top Secret! Perry is no effiminate stereotype: he is competent but jaded, and Black takes advantage of Kilmer's aging visage to show us a man who is perpetually so fucking tired. 

Adding to the subversion is Michelle Monaghan in her first lead role, and she brings the same laconic charm and grounded emotional accessibility that would serve her so well two years later, in the equally subversive (but way less fun) Gone, Baby, Gone and a decade later in True Detective. Monaghan easily keeps pace with Kilmer and Downey, and the three of them are a screwball bulldozer. This movie's charm could solve the energy crisis.

And then there's RDJ. After thoroughly committing to cleaning up his act, Kiss Kiss was the launchpad for a fucking ridiculous rocketship back to the A-list: in less than five years, he made this, The Singing Detective, fucking Zodiac, Sherlock Holmes, Tropic Thunder, and a little indie gem called Iron Man which I haven't seen but I guess is about a robot?

In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Downey isn't just fast, he isn't just charming, he isn't just a loveable pain-in-the-ass: he delivers one of the most effortlessly watchable performances in film acting history. Even without knowing his personal struggles he is electric, but when you do know what he's been through, his performance is the metatextual rocket fuel that Black always needed to make his "bite the hand that feeds" riff on Hollywood excess go. Gibson was too green, Glover too earnest, Willis too jaded—Downey had the right mix of talent, pain, and cynicism to finally make Black's screenplay really come alive, and Black places him in scenes with top-tier comedic foils like Kilmer and Monaghan. The entire process elevates it beyond the groan-worthy sexism and gay panic that may charitably be interpreted as attempts at subversion, but read in 2021 as simply ignorant.

This was Black's comeback too: Downey would bring him into the Marvel fold with Iron Man 3, an exploration of trauma that reads as extremely personal for Downey—no wonder he brought along the guy who helped him through it in the first place. After that, Black made The Nice Guys as a sort-of spiritual sequel to Kiss Kiss, but it's more a comedy and lacks the hard edge that elevates its predecessor. 

Black also made The Predator, where all of his worst instincts were laid bare: The Predator has none of the cleverness and subtlety that mask Black's sexism and homophobia. Instead of a perfectly-timed, mid-2010s riff on the excess of Hollywood blockbusters and reboots, it's just a mean, out-of-touch slog that does nothing to advance the Predator's status as a sexual icon.

But that was in the future. In 2005, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang saved two careers, launched another, and gave western filmmaking one of the most watchable mockeries of its own culture that (I hope. God I hope!) still holds up to this day.

Also, it's a Christmas movie.

Hitman 3's Story Fails Where Dark Souls Succeeds

Polygon's review of Hitman 3 starts like this:
Shockingly, what Hitman 3 wants most is to tell you a story.

Why is that shocking? Because Hitman 3 is the conclusion to a trilogy with terrible storytelling.

In Hitman (2016) there is a story between each level: a bald mega-assassin and sketch comedy dress-up champion known only as 47 and his handler Diana shoot, stab, poison, and ironically humiliate their way through the criminal elite. What story is there is easily ignorable post-Bourne euro-thriller stuff that feels like the plot of a Mission: Impossible movie: an excuse for cool stuff to happen in exotic places.

Hitman 2 saw its budget cut when developer IO Interactive was cut loose from long-time publisher Square Enix, and the result is cutscenes with static images: not the most gripping storytelling device. Still, Hitman 2 tries to continue the story from the first game, as a mysterious "shadow client" is revealed to have been behind all of 47's contracts, who are secretly members of a worldwide cabal called "Providence" which is exactly like "Quantum/Spectre" from the Daniel Craig Bond films, right down to the secret society pewter lapel pins.

For Hitman 3, there was a lot of press right before release about how IOI was making an effort to tie the story threads together and, look, they did, but they did so with barely more elegance than in the very first game. The genius of the Hitman trilogy's structure is that each game is fully playable in the following release: you can play all of Hitman 2016 & Hitman 2 in Hitman 3, allowing you to experience the story all at once. And doing it this way is somehow worse than experiencing it in three chunks.

Hitman's storytelling strengths have always been in how the stories play out in individual levels. The levels are designed to be repeated: the first trip through is often more a recon mission than an honest attempt, your successful assassinations usually due to fluke or relying on the old standbys like rat poison and a good 'ol bullet to the noggin.

(One thing Hitman simulates quite well is the confusion and disorganization that happens in an emergency. You can often pull a gun out and shoot your target dead and, as long as no one immediately starts shooting at you, get pretty far into your escape before the guards mobilize and start hunting you down.)

Each level is a puzzle box, designed to be played multiple times, and there are stories within the levels that are explicitly laid out using the game's Mission Story system, or left to you to discover. Anything unusual or eye-catching is usually a path to a murderin' and though it's not hard to guess what you have to do, you still feel really smart when you figure it out. 

(Shout out to my favourite kill in the series: a tech bro who has designed killer robots that identify their targets using a photograph has magazine covers of his own face all over his office.)

These stories range in plausibility from a check-your-brain-at-the-door blockbuster to the obviously absurd, and the black comedy irony of each is delightful. The storytelling within the missions know the idea of a bald guy wearing disguises to sneak into high security areas is absurd: that's why the people whose disguises you can wear are always bald men in their 30s or 40s. You buy into the fantasy because it's fun, the same way it's fun watching Tom Cruise haul ass through Paris or jump out of an airplane.

But ooof mama that meta story. See, I'm not saying the story in Mission: Impossible: Fallout is good, but the storytelling really is! There's great pacing, the stakes start high and get higher, there's some lovely emotional beats and some good humour. Writing something that balanced, and maintaining that balance through the production process, is really hard and unfortunately the storytelling in Hitman is just not up to it.

So where does my clickbait headline of mentioning Dark Souls, the Candyman of video game writing, come in? One of the things that Hitman does do well is seeding a lot of the connective tissue of their stories using environmental storytelling: notes, overhead conversations, signs and logos and newspaper clippings, & the granddaddy of non-traditional game storytelling: audio logs. Here, down in the margins between the absurd Quibi-original quality meta story and the Soderbergh black comedy of the mission stories, are valuable context for what you're doing, and little hints about the repercussions of your actions. They provide some answers to the questions asked during the game's unscrupulous cutscenes: tough, hard-to-answer questions like "Who's this guy?" and "Why did he get shot?"

I played Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 again within Hitman 3 specifically to give the story another chance. I remember being pretty meh on it the first time around, and pretty much just skipped the cutscenes for Hitman 2. However, now that I'm a vet of the series, I knew better to take my time and explore and eavesdrop and read everything as I was on my way to completing the missions stories. I knew to be curious and poke around and read the things that I found.

What I discovered was… the same information you get from watching the cutscenes. See, Hitman 2016 was sort of a reboot, but they also tease that the prior games in the series are canon: the post-tutorial cutscene has highlights of memorable kills from the original Codename 47, Blood Money, etc. All your faves! The problem is, Hitman 2016 also relies on that most tired of protagonist cliches: the mysterious past. 47 doesn't know where he came from, he doesn't even know his name, all he knows is that he's a trained killer and a killer drummer. 

Except, we do know where 47 came from: you go there at the end of Codename 47. You also go there at the end of Hitman 2, and it's the same place? And you've been there before? But 47 doesn't seem to recognize it except from his childhood memories?

(I haven't mentioned who the shadow client is: it's 47's long-lost "brother", another victim of the Black Widow-esque murder orphanage, who used you and Diana to kill the people who created them and then he's a good guy for a bit until he's tossed aside in a cutscene in Hitman 3.)

This culminates in Hitman 3's most desperate storytelling moments: the "revelation" that 47 killed Diana's parents—my first laugh out loud gaming moment of 2021 as the bad guy, The Constant, hands Diana a folder the subtitles helpfully label, I swear to god, "47'S PLAN TO KILL DIANA'S PARENTS"—and the ol' magic memory-erasing serum that is breathlessly introduced, explained, and then discarded by an NPC in the very last level.

Are these moments set up in the other games? I don't think so. I never came across anything that said Diana was motivated by revenge or that her family had been killed. It's also a massive red herring, in a "shocking" bait and switch loyalty reversal that shows Diana and 47 were working together the whole time to get closer to The Constant, a man who keeps walking right up to Diana, in person, with no one else around! 

(Also, it's implied the revelation 47 killed her family pushes Diana to finally climb to the top of Providence, to seize the power she's secretly always wanted and it's like, really? Can't she just want power? Does a woman have to be motivated by the death of her loved ones to be a climber? Kamala Harris didn't go into law because her family was murdered!)

Also also, why not make one of your earlier targets Diana's parents! Then the player would actually be complicit in their deaths instead of making you press the detonator button in a dream sequence at the end of the entire trilogy. Maybe that would add some consequences to your actions?

The little lore tidbits and environmental storytelling in the Souls games work because they add context to an intriguing setting and because the story in those games is so obtuse that it's a surprise they have one at all. The Souls series is intentionally post-Internet, post-GameFAQs, post-Reddit: you can't just hop on YouTube the day the game comes out and watch a walkthrough or fifty video essays explaining everything to you. The hostility is the point!

Hitman has no hostility, and hiding valuable insights is only valuable if those insights are insightful. There's no revelation in Hitman's storytelling, no deeper understanding of anyone's motivations, and nothing so clever as a tacit acknowledgement, in the big picture meta story, that the whole situation is ridiculous. The whole thing ends up feeling like a poorly directed sketch show with multiple writers each fighting to tell their kind of story. The result is an experience with some highlights but an overall feeling of bewilderment.

And then you throw a banana at a guy and it knocks him unconscious and his friend walks over and slips on the peel and he gets knocked unconscious and you're like: this is the story! I'm the story! I'm the best sketch writer! Stop telling me you want to tell a good story and just fucking do it. It's not like there aren't a ton of examples out there to draw from.

My Fave Stories of 2020 (In no order, except for the first one)

The Last of Us Part 2 - I thought Red Dead Redemption 2 was the final statement of this video game generation, and in many ways it is, but there was room for a counterpoint. If RDR2 is a seven-season prestige TV series, The Last of Us Part 2 is a film made by an auteur: a tight and polished masterpiece that, despite that comparison, could only be a video game. Director Neil Druckmann doesn’t mess around, as this profile in GQ showcases much better than I can. TLoU2 confronts violence in a way video games have only flirted with. It is not just about violence, but about the much more insidious and destructive cycle of violence, and the people who are born into it, forced to live in it, and choose to propagate it. 

Most games ignore the dichotomy of the violence committed by players with the humanity of the characters in cutscenes—Naughty Dog's own Uncharted series is celebrated for having believable human characters who are, no question, mass murderers—but Last of Us Part 2 tackles the issue head on. In playing two characters, you are both hero and villain at once, abuser and victim, child of violence and willing participant in vengeance, and the game works so hard to show you there is no such thing as a hero or a villain. You can always choose not to fight, but that will always result in your death— occasionally at the hands of the other protagonist, who you were controlling minutes ago—and that choice not to engage in combat isn’t the real issue. Ellie and Abby’s actions have led them into mortal danger, and to surrender is to die: the only real way to survive was to stay home, to let vengeance pass, and that choice is never given to the player. Never before has a videogame confronted violence as in TLoU2, to say nothing of how it interrogates its own past: in terms of narrative, this may be the greatest video game sequel of all time, possessing a thematic consistency that most film sequels can't manage.

The Part 2 of the title is deliberate as well: it doesn't feel like the "dark middle chapter" of a trilogy or a rehash of the first story. The Last of Us Part Two actively examines the choices made by the characters, and the player, in the first game. It doesn't do this through audio logs and notes found in the world (well, it does, but not only that way) but by the characters themselves diving deep into their pasts. So many zombie and post-apocalyptic narratives focus on 'survival' as if it is an absolute right, but Part 2 forces its characters, and us, to see the pain that survival causes and question whether your own life is worth the pain you've caused.

On top of that, it's easily the most progressive AAA title ever: featuring multiple POC characters, a front-and-centre queer relationship, a lead character with a non-traditional female body, and a trans character (who, it must be said, is being persecuted for his identity, but even that is handled with more nuance than expected.)

In stories told this year, it is without peer. It's not just the best interactive story of the year, it's the best story of the year, period.

FF7 Remake - I mostly watched my friend play FF7 on the old PS1 so many memories are more adjacent than personal, but even I was captured by the weaponized nostalgia of this game, which manages to give you all you want in a big-budget modern remake of FF7, while also questioning the artistic value of remaking art. FF7: Remake isn't just the title of the game, it's a mission statement

It also managed to capture the purest experience of playing a Japanese RPG: after watching the ending, I had to call a friend to explain it to me.

Ghost of Tsushima - I was hyped for this, especially after its E3 gameplay trailer, and its final release made me realize something: AAA video game marketing has progressed, but AAA video game design really hasn't. Ghost is iterative on the open-world formula of Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild: it's more exploratory than the former, more story-driven than the latter, but still worries too much about the player missing content, even though its navigation is mostly HUD-less (Which works most of the time but is occasionally annoying: I'm a HUD-lite kind of guy, but Ghost is a little too hands-off sometimes.)

The combat system is great, the writing is great, the world is beautiful, but after the deeply personal analysis of our relationship with violence in The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost's interrogation of honor and duty felt artificial and hollow despite great performances from its cast The setup—a powerful rich imperialist saving his subjects by slaughtering hundreds of slathering, invading foreign soldiers—is kind of gross when you think about it. Maybe the sequel will tackle this issue with a bit more maturity. 

Also, comparing your videogame to Akira Kurosawa, maybe the greatest visual storyteller of all time, is… bold.

Animal Crossing - I love tiny houses and video game clothes and Animal Crossing has those.

Doom Eternal - "Can you turn it down a bit? It's just a lot."

Super Mega Baseball 2 - God I miss baseball

Jedi Fallen Order - I know this came out in 2019 but I played a ton of it this year: it's one of the best Star Wars games ever, and one of my fave Star Wars stories of the new canon. Sure it's a little rough, and they don't do as much with the Dark Souls inspiration as they could (everytime you die, you wake up back at the meditation point because Cal can read echoes in the Force. It's right there, guys!) but it's got charm to spare, the combat and exploration are a blast, and the lightsaber customization is a dream. Great performances too.

Cyberpunk 2077 - So many people saying this game "doesn't live up to the hype" but, isn't that their fault? Cyberpunk is a dystopian, cynical, violent nightmare of a genre and this game gets that—yes, it's a dated cis male power fantasy, yes it's misogynistic, yes it's xenophobic. That's all accurate to the genre. Blade Runner 2049 closed the book on cyberpunk for me, and even it’s attempts at feminism and progressiveness were hollow and male-centric, so what were we expecting from the guys who made The Witcher 3, where all sorceresses are mean, sexy, walking atomic bombs?

Does the game crash every time I boot it up? Yes. Does it look surprisingly rough running in 1080p on the PS5? Yes. Have I put it down a few times vowing not to play it again until they fix the bugs? Yes. Have I been drawn back to it time and time again because of the density of the city, the complexity of the storytelling, and the richness of the roleplaying is totally unique, warts and all? Absolutely.

Just like the genre itself, just like the company that made it, Cyberpunk 2077 is flawed, messy, vibrant, cool, gross, problematic, dated, ultra-modern, and, most of all, complex. I can't stop thinking about it.

The Sims 4 - This game is easy to alt-tab out of, making it a great game to play while you're supposed to be working at home, which may make it the actual game of 2020

Star Trek Online - I have been playing this game for… seven years? Can that be right? I've also spent a few hundred bucks on this "free" game because I gotta have my starships just right. Still the best Star Trek game ever, and probably always will be, targeted as it is to guys exactly like me, who care more about TNG and DS9 than Discovery and the JJ Abrams movies.

Blood: Death Wish - I was more of a Duke 3D kid—Blood and Shadow Warrior were too hard for me—but this is a great mod and works beautifully with the GOG version.

Avengers - People really praised the single-player story which I thought was...fine—it's really cool they gave Kamala Khan her own game—but the combat system is the best part of this thing. All the Avengers feel really distinct and actually require different play styles, not just learning new combos, that fit how they work in the movies: Iron Man is best for zipping around in the air blasting turrets, Captain America and Hulk are best in the middle of a fight, Thor gives heavy support to the melee fighters, Kamala heals and knocks guys around, and Black Widow zips around with a grappling hook landing blows on unsuspecting targets. They added the Kate Bishop incarnation of Hawkeye last week and she fills another gap: a true ranged character who can still hold her own in a fight.

Flight Simulator - My computer can barely run this thing, but for a while my morning routine was to fly over Toronto using real-time weather conditions with a cup of coffee. In July, Carly and I went to a cottage and when we got home I flew there and landed in the lake right where we had stayed. A magical, transportive experience that I can't wait to experience properly when I get a new PC.

Star Wars Squadrons - Not quite the X-Wing/TIE Fighter rebirth I was hoping for (the story isn't very good) but a step in the right direction: a fun multiplayer experience that offers a deeper, sim-ier alternative to Battlefront 2's arcade bones, and a big win for a Canadian studio.

Astro's Playroom - A pack-in game that reminds me of the demo program that came with my force feedback joystick in the 90s, Astro is secretly the best Sony platformer ever. The only PS5 game that really feels next-gen right now. That GPU song. 

AC Valhalla - Wow have I played a lot of this one. They've finally nailed the Witcher-style RPG they've been aiming for since Origins. The best thing about Valhalla is it's structure, which builds on the "every island has a story" idea of Odyssey, but does more with less. Don't sleep on this because it's "just another Ubisoft game."

Spider-man: Miles Morales - You know, I didn't love this as much as I was expecting. Great story, great bones, but I may have ruined the experience for myself by trying to play through the original again before booting it up. Looks and runs great though, a glimpse into what the PS5 is capable of, and the additions to the combat system are awesome.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping - I'm pretty happy I don't work in satire anymore, but god what a gift this whole debacle was. New York Magazine did a great end-of-year piece trying to make sense of it all.

Possessor - Brandon Cronenberg finally steps out of his father's shadow with this gnarly, mind-bending sci-fi horror about a corporate assassin who possesses the bodies of people close to her target to make their murders look like random crimes instead of corporate hits. 

I love me some psychological horror and sci-fi and this adds some incredibly realistic violence—and some pretty un-Hollywood nudity if you watch the "uncut version."

Due to the nature of the story, Andrea Riseborough isn't in this as much as I'd hoped, but she's amazing as always. 

His House - This immigrant horror story was a nice surprise on Netflix this year. There's something to be said for applying a fresh skin to an effective horror skeleton.  

i'm thinking of ending things - Say what you will about Netflix, but I can't imagine anyone else giving Charlie Kaufman this much money to make the Charlie Kaufmanest movie since his last one. Not as confusing as you've heard and way, way more than the trailers lead on. Definitely check it out if you're in the mood for something thoughtful—and surprisingly theatrical.

How To with John Wilson - This show is uhhhhhhh…. it's great

Uncut Gems - 2 hours of bottled stress. If you want to know what it's like to have a heart attack, watch this.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - I'll never see the colour green the same way 

Parasite - I mean, yeah. Bong-Joon Ho finally goes mainstream by making a more accessible version of the same movie he's been making all along. That's not a dig—all Bong's movies are great, and it's really, really cool this was as successful as it was, especially because it signals Bong's willingness to play the Hollywood game, which should lead to some wild shit if they trust him they way they have with Del Toro and Villeneuve. 

The Invisible Man - After watching this, I realized how often horror directors uses negative space to fuck with you into seeing something that isn't there, but Leigh Whannell's genius is that, maybe this time, there is something there.

Succession Season 1 - My post-Game of Thrones moratorium on "stories about rich assholes fucking everyone over" ended when I became the last man on Earth to watch this. Yes, it's very good.

Bacurau - What if a pair of indie Brazilian filmmakers (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles) made a riff on a John Carpenter action/sci-fi flick? Bacurau is making big waves in film circles (I just saw it was nominated for the goddamned Palme d'Or!) and I bet we'll see a Disney pic from these directors in a few years.

How To Get Into Star Trek: An Exhaustive List by a Bored Nerd

Okay, so, Star Trek.

Start with The Next Generation. It's still the platonic ideal of Star Trek which is a double-edged sword: it has great, high concept sci-fi writing and a solid ensemble, but has no idea what to do with its female characters when they're off-duty: the show's romantic plotlines feel like they were written by a prepubescent rock. Also be warned: The first season is so, so bad. Luckily, it's also almost entirely skippable. There are a couple of gems but do not watch the pilot until you're hooked. I love it but it's so slow. It really gets going in season 3 and is pretty much universally excellent, or at least highly watchable, until season 6. Season 7 has some lows, but also some of the best episodes in the series.

Deep Space Nine is the best show, objectively, but start with Next Gen. DS9 is like the Empire Strikes Back/Last Jedi of Trek--it confronts and questions a lot of the things the franchise takes for granted: like how do the Federation and Starfleet actually work and is its post-scarcity optimism just a front for a totalitarian society? Also, how does a utopia fight a war--especially when its allies are blood-crazed warriors (Klingons) and duplicitous spymasters (Romulans)? Like TNG, the first seasons are a little rough (though it has a great pilot) but once the Dominion shows up the show gets good and stays that way. (Just like TNG, the show gets really good once one of the main characters grows a beard...) Probably one of the best examples of tonal balance I've ever seen in a show, in a way you just don't see anymore since each season is over 22 episodes long there's A LOT of variety: from episodes about the horrors of war to a slapstick episode where the principal from the first season of Buffy causes the Roswell Incident in the 1940s. DS9 was also serialized in a way TNG only flirted with, though not as seriously as, say, Game of Thrones. Some episodes are totally disconnected from the overall story, while others are basically 2-5 episode story arcs.

DS9 also has the most diverse cast, anchored by a black captain who is also a widower and single father, and some of its best episodes are as much about black fatherhood as they are about a teleporting spaceman flying a laser-shooting spaceship.

My favourite thing about Voyager is the ship so no cast shot for this one

Voyager was an attempt to recapture the adventure of TNG but it's just...worse in every way. Some great episodes in there, though, especially the finale. They also really dig into the Borg, for better and for worse, and some of their "What does it mean to be human?" episodes with The Doctor and Seven are better than the Data episodes they're based on.

Fun fact: writer Ronald D Moore, who is the MVP of 90's Trek, pitched Voyager as "Battlestar Galactica but Star Trek" and tried to introduce real stakes and consequences into the show, which had worked really well in DS9, but the producers got cold feet so he quit Voyager to make... Battlestar Galactica.

Ditto Enterprise

Enterprise also tried to recapture the vibe of old Trek, this time with the 'cowboys in space' vibe of the original series, but is even worse than Voyager. Again, some good individual episodes, and the last season is pretty good and actually fulfills the promise of the whole show in setting up The Original Series, but I'd only watch it if you've watched everything else and are desperate for more Trek.

I avoided The Original Series for years because... it's a TV show from the 60s. But it's actually really good if you can get past the casual racism and sexism. (And to be fair, they did their best to address both of these in their own way, most directly in the episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and in the very existence of Uhura, who is not only a woman of colour, but an officer.) I only included a few episodes because I'm not that familiar with it.

Here are my "Get Into Star Trek" episodes in a rough order:

Colin, and you, at The Internet

First Steps

The Next Generation

Darmok <- This is the greatest Star Trek episode of all time. I hesitated putting this here because it's pretty weird, but it's just so good.

First Contact

Cause and Effect

Measure of a Man

Starship Mine <- Die Hard in space

The Game <- A fun one featuring a pre-fame Ashley Judd

Conundrum <- watch this one after the others, it works best once you know the characters

Deep Space Nine

Emissary (Pilot) <-- Don't watch this until you've seen Best of Both Worlds 1 & 2.

Vortex

Duet <- This is a heavy-ass episode but really sets up the kind of storytelling DS9 would strive for

Past Tense

Necessary Evil

Whispers

Far Beyond The Stars <- this is late in the series so you might be a bit lost at first, but is Trek's best attempt at tackling racism head-on

Sacrifice of Angels <- Oh what the heck: DS9 has the best space battles of the entire franchise (movies included) so I might as well throw this one in there too, though you will have absolutely no idea what’s going on and it’ll spoil a pretty major plot point. If you’re sold on DS9, skip this one for now, but if you think Star Trek is boring, check this ep out

Voyager

Caretaker (Pilot)

Year of Hell

Timeless

Counterpoint

Enterprise

Broken Bow (Pilot)

The Andorian Incident

Original Series

Where No Man Has Gone Before <- After the first pilot failed, Rodenberry made this one a few years later

Balance of Terror <- Basically The Hunt For Red October in space and features the first appearance of the Romulans

We have engaged the Trek

Essentials

Hooked? Here are the best eps for every series

TNG

The Inner Light <- Meet someone who thinks science fiction can’t be good drama? Show them this episode.

Q Who <- this episode features Q, who is in the pilot. He's basically Space Puck or Loki.

Best of Both Worlds 1 & 2 <- Greatest season finale cliffhanger ever

Family

I, Borg <- These four episodes (Q, Who to I, Borg) are all connected and fucking amazing, but watch some eps between "Q Who" and "Best of Both Worlds" -- it's scarier that way.

Skin of Evil <- Not a great episode on its own, but sets up a major event that gets a lot of play later on

Conspiracy

The Drumhead

Tapestry <- A personal favourite

Yesterday's Enterprise <-Watch Skin of Evil first

Sins of the Father <- this begins Ronald D Moore's attempt to really solidify Klingon culture and society, which he continues in DS9

Chain of Command <- this episode has been meme’d to death but is still excellent

Encounter at Farpoint <- You're probably invested enough at this point to make it through the pilot, which is surprisingly relevant to the finale. If you enjoyed the…thoughtful pace of Star Trek: The Motion Picture you’ll probably dig this. It’s fun to go back to season 1 and remember what a fucking asshole Picard was to everybody.

All Good Things... <- In the conversation for best series finale ever

DS9

These are in order so, once you’re hooked on DS9’s specific flavour of Trek, watch them like this:

The Maquis

The Jem'Hadar

And then pretty much all of Season 3 & 4 but absolutely watch (and in this order):

The Search

The Defiant

Past Tense

Improbable Cause

The Die is Cast

The Adversary

The Way of the Warrior

Starship Down

Homefront & Paradise Lost

Return to Grace

Rules of Engagement

To The Death

Broken Link

If you've made it this far just watch all of 5 & 6. Even the ones that don't directly connect to the overall story fill in interesting gaps. Season 7 loses a bit of steam midway through, but the last ten episodes are all one long story and are fucking amazing. Oh man DS9 RULES!

Voyager

Deadlock

Scorpion

Blink of an Eye

Eye of the Needle

Mortal Coil

Dreadnaught

The Equinox

Latent Image

Endgame <- another great series finale

Enterprise

Regeneration <- this is a cute epilogue to the Next Gen movie "First Contact" so maybe watch that first. This episode is sort of a Star Trek riff on The Thing.

Season 4 is all pretty good and full of little 2 or 3 episode arcs, but especially “Borderland”, which features Data actor Brent Spiner, and “In the Mirror, Darkly”

To buck the trend, Enterprise has probably the worst series finale of the franchise. I’d skip it.

Original Series

Mirror, Mirror

The Trouble with Tribbles

Space Seed

City on the Edge of Forever

These Movies (but not the other ones):

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

2 The Wrath of Khan

4 The Voyage Home <-this one starts weird because of what happens in 3, but 3 isn't that great although it does have Christopher Lloyd playing a Klingon

6 The Undiscovered Country

If you’ve made it this far, you might as well watch the Robin Hood episode. OMG Georgie’s outfit…

Some other totally great but non-essential eps

TNG

Offspring <-Bring tissue

Masks <- These two are solid Data episodes

Disaster

The Chase <- this is both a fun episode and explains why all the aliens in Star Trek look like humans in makeup

Tin Man

Data's Day

Thine Own Self

Relics <- Featuring James Doohan as Scotty but instead of being a lame episode built around a cameo manages to tell a great story about getting old and becoming irrelevant

Descent <- this is a 2-parter which ties up two major storylines but the best part is watching Crusher take the con

Mind's Eye <- The best Geordie episode

Pegasus

The First Duty

Captain's Holiday

Gambit Part 1 & 2

Qpid <- Q turns the crew into Robin Hood and the Merry Men. It is exactly as stupid and fun as it sounds.

Ensign Ro <- Michelle Forbes rocks and her episodes introduce the Bajorans who are my fave ST species

The Next Phase <- Another solid Ro & Geordie episode

I'll also add the movies Generations and First Contact, which are fun but not amazing

DS9

The Visitor

Crossover

Little Green Men <- the episode I mentioned earlier where Quark, Rom , and Nog become the basis for the Roswell aliens, which also makes this episode the basis for The X-Files if you don't think about it too much

Oh man there's so much more--I don't have any holodeck episodes in the TNG lists!

Watched all of Trek and want to fully commit yourself to 90s TV sci-fi? Welllllll…..

Pssst… this show is better than all of them combined

Auspicious Beginnings: Wing Commander Privateer & Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

Auspicious Beginnings: Stories about how things start

"Protecting myself from your type gets expensive. And I'm on a budget."

A mining station carved into the structure of a massive asteroid. Landing lights, heavy metal plates and pressure doors. Duraplast domes provide glimpses of the sparse foot traffic inside, where exhausted miners and dock workers step aside to make way for powered carts hauling crates of imported goods to the commodities market. 

Your ship sits on the landing pad. A boxy chunk of a spacecraft, as aerodynamic as a shipping crate. A single laser is bolted to the hood. The radar is older than you are- it'll tell you where the other ships are, but that's about it. There's no way to know friend from foe until they start shooting. You've got just enough cash to make one improvement, maybe some better armor or another gun. On your way to the equipment bay, you pass through the ship dealer and pass through the shadows of a  titanic cargo freighter, a boxy little tank perfect for a bounty hunter, and a sleek military-grade fighter. "I hate to break it to you..." The gaudily dressed salesman tells you cheerfully, but forcefully: the cheapest of these is way above your snack bracket. 

Looking to make some scratch, you poke into the office of one of the Guilds: the lush, wood-panelled luxury of the Merchants Guild, or the gunmetal sparseness of the Mercenaries Guild. They won't take you without an upfront fee you just can't afford. So you browse the mission computer dumped into the concourse of the station and use its chunky buttons to browse through low-risk, low-pay patrols, cargo runs, and bounties. This one shouldn't be too bad, you think, not really knowing what "too bad" even means.

You head back to the landing pad. Glancing at your ship, hunk of junk that it is, you can't help but smile. It's garbage, but it's your garbage, and the universe of possibilities is yours.

RGO’s starting ship on the landing pad / Privateer’s starting ship on the landing pad

This is the beginning of Wing Commander: Privateer, the most beloved spin-off of the blockbuster Wing Commander franchise that drove PC gaming in the 90s. It is also the beginning of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, a brand new game by Double Damage that aims, in almost all respects, to bring that most elusive relic of 90s gaming, the space combat simulator, to modern times.

A quick perusal of the Rebel Galaxy subreddit shows why this revival has been so difficult. Gamers used to extended tutorials complain of the lack of onboarding, the complexities of space combat are reduced to complaints of "turning forever", one poster even muses what the point is of making a game so pretty only to cover it up with an ugly, chunky cockpit.

The point is immersion. In most modern games, players inhabit a character: Kratos, the Master Chief, Aloy. Conversely, many 90s PC game stories are transportive: you are the last surviving marine on Phobos; You are a traveler sucked into the world of Myst; You are a rag tag, down-on-your-luck space pirate at the edge of the frontier. Many of these games came with extensive manuals that often served as vessels for world building as well as teaching documents. This allows for player learning without breaking that all-important character immersion. In Privateer, nobody gives a fuck about Grayson Burroughs. He's a big boy, he can take care of himself. The same is true of Juno, the hero of Outlaw: She's in her 40s and was such a successful privateer that she actually retired. She doesn't need somebody talking her through how to target ships and divert power and shoot her guns. Nothing screams "classic PC game" more than having a manual in your lap.

They captured my essence perfectly with that guy in the Dwango ad

Both Outlaw and Privateer do something that few modern games dare: they just dump you into the world and expect you to figure it out on your own. The rules of both games make perfect sense, once you learn the controls. There are no hidden mechanics ticking away in the background. Everything you need to know is there on your dashboard or written down in your PDA. You aren't the Chosen One, or the Hero--in fact, you're kind of an asshole. Any of the thousands of other pilots zooming around in space could be the focus of the story. You don't matter.

Those first few trips out, either in the Troy or Texas systems, you might be completely lost, but soon the world starts to make sense. The big blue agriculture planet makes food, the mining station needs food; the mining station makes raw materials, the agriculture planet needs raw materials. Preying on the spacelanes are two types of hostiles: immoral pirates and overly moral religious fanatics. You accept missions to take them down by clearing out nav points or defending bases. Slowly, you start to bolt some better guns on your trashcan of a spaceship and other equipment: an afterburner, a missile launcher, a colour-coded radar.

You can only go so far. You join a Guild and notice many of the missions require you to travel to another star system, but you don't have a jumpdrive. The jumpdrive costs a lot of money, money you get by doing missions. It dawns on you: This is the tutorial. No, there hasn't been a checklist to follow or controller overlays showing you what buttons to push or impossibly patient NPCs talking to you like you're a baby. You've figured it out on your own. There's still a lot you don't know, and the sector is big & dangerous. You'll sort it out, make mistakes along the way, getting faster and stronger and smarter, until those days chugging back and forth stuck in one star system with an all-grey radar have become nostalgia once more.

"Oh, darlin', this is not gonna go your way."

Destiny 2's Opening Hours Are Brilliant

After spending the weekend wishing the Anthem demo was more like Destiny, I decided to cut out the middleman and fire up Destiny 2. Having never created a Titan in either title, I thought I'd play through the intro again instead of exploring the post-Forsaken game with my Warlock.

I'm glad I did - It reminded me that Destiny 2 has one of the most compelling introductions for a shooter ever.

FPS games generally have strong starts: The Covenant boarding the Pillar of Autumn in Halo, the unmistakable theme song of Doom's E1M1, any of Call of Duty's opening levels. The original Destiny has a relatively slow, almost spooky start: after being resurrected by your Ghost outside the city walls, you creep through an industrial facility being slowly introduced to The Fallen, one of the four major enemy factions. Destiny's opening is good but it's safe - your fledgling Guardian has few powers and the game slowly introduces you to its combat mechanics. Destiny 2 hurls you at the first level like the void-infused wrecking ball you are.

Destiny 2 picks up after all the various stories packed into Destiny. The achievements of your individual Guardian aren't explained, if the player only played the vanilla campaign or if they tore through all the expansions, mastered the raids, and are kings of The Crucible, everyone in The Tower knows who you are.

Something that Destiny does well is balance the single player storytelling with the multiplayer framework. You can see other Guardians running around in the open world, but you load into instances for story missions. This gives the impression that, yes, there are other Guardians running around taking care of business, but you are the one doing all the major stuff.

I really enjoy this kind of storytelling because it allows for the necessary FPS power fantasy while minimizing the games-as-service FOMO. As a solo gamer, I've never done any of the raids. In character, I justify this as being a specialist: I don't need to invade the Leviathan or close the Vault of Glass - there are specialized teams to take care of that stuff. I'm the lone wolf, the one who stumbles on the big problems and solves them, then lets the other Guardians clean up behind me.

Destiny 2 takes this idea, that everyone is special but you are specialist, and runs with it. The story picks up with your Guardian returning to the City after some expedition. While unfortunately, but obviously, the Guardian who appears in the opening cinematic isn't wearing your gear or flying your ship from the first game. This makes sense but is a bummer: my favourite thing about the original Destiny was spawning into each new expansion with all the wacky colourful space robes I'd accrued in the last one. In this playthrough, since I had made a Titan from scratch, it's not such a big deal.

The Tower, the last bastion of humanity, is in bad shape - similar to the opening levels of Halo and Halo 2 (Both developed by Bungie) your home is being invaded. Does the game start like Destiny, with you slowly infiltrating the Tower to quietly save all those vendor and quest NPCs from the first game?

Hell no. You literally spawn into a room full of fire and RIP through the invaders, The Cabal, who are basically Warhammer's Space Marines crossed with the Mangalores from The Fifth Element. We learn that these particular Cabal are from The Red Legion -  an ancient military force who "Have never known defeat." Yeah, well, our invincible light-infused Guardian who shoots lighting out of his fists when he body slams stuff hasn't ever known defeat either.

Another place where Destiny 2 surpasses its predecessor is characters. Each character class has a mentor, each voiced by a beloved nerd culture actor. In Destiny, you meet these mentors standing around a big table where they stay for the entire game. In Destiny 2, that table is smoldering slag in a ruined boardroom and your mentors are in the fight. Hunter Cayde, voiced by every nerd's best friend Nathan Fillion, is blasting Cabal with with his flaming pistol. Titan Zavala, The Wire's Lance Reddick, is holding an entire plaza single-handedly, and my girl Ikora, Firefly's Gina Torres, space-magic punches a spaceship with her bare hands. It's a spectacular way to introduce these characters and, additionally, give you a taste of your own Ultimate ability, which you probably won't unlock for hours.

When I was an improviser, one of my golden rules was to never have a scene with two people meeting for the first time. It's boring, and lazy, and safe. Instead, it's better to launch yourself into a scene by endowing your scene partner with being your best friend, or a hated rival, or a love interest. Destiny 2 does this well: you're the Guardian who cleansed The Black Garden, who killed Oryx, explored the Dreadnought - like a space fantasy Cheers, everybody knows your goddamned name!

Your reputation is well deserved. You pick up guns and tear through the Cabal, you toss grenades and unleash your super power, you float through the air blasting away enemies with pinpoint accuracy. All of this glorious, gleeful action is driven by a ridiculously bombastic and epic score by Michael Salvatori. Music has always been Bungie's secret weapon and while big, orchestral scores are more common in games now, Destiny 2's is particularly awesome. This game bangs with a good pair of headphones.

As you careen from combat to combat, Destiny 2 makes one thing clear: You are a living God.

Until all that gets taken away.

Destiny's lamest idea is where your superpowers come from: Light. Yes, Destiny is another "Dark bad, Light good" story. While the quality of the storytelling and writing for the characters has done a lot to alleviate the generic trappings of this setup, Destiny is at its worst when it's pontificating on unquantifiable things like "Power" and "Light" and "Darkness." In Destiny 2, the leader of the Red Legion, Gaul, takes your light away! Oh no!

What follows is a slow-paced sequence where your Guardian, battered and powerless, limps through the ruins of the City avoiding Cabal patrols. There's no danger here, you can't be spotted by the roaming tanks and spotlight-wielding aircraft, but the combination of music, lighting, and the sheer slowness of your Guardian is a powerful combination. It reminds me of the future war sequences from The Terminator - you are hunted and if you are caught, you will be killed. When you reunite with your Ghost, he makes it clear: you cannot be resurrected. If you die, you die for good.

After you escape the city, you journey into the mountains following a mysterious hawk who seems to be leading you somewhere. The music here is mournful, tinged with loss, but as time passes (The game informs you that you spend over ten days in the wilderness) you get stronger. The music gets more hopeful. Your first encounter with enemies in the wilderness, fighting a pack of Cabal war hounds who have savaged a group of powerless Guardians, is desperate and thrilling. You're backed into a corner, with only an SMG to defend yourself. These war hounds shouldn't be a threat at all, but here they can really mess you up. As you get stronger, you see the ruins of The City in the distance, you come across and defeat the Cabal commander of these war hounds and kill him, too. You've gone from blowing through whole platoons of Cabal without slowing down, to rejoicing in killing a single trooper.

Upon this victory, you meet Suraya, and here the game continues its exploration of its own myths. All through the first game, we are told the world outside The City is a lethal wasteland. Suraya is proof it is not and actually rejects the comforts of the Tower, comparing it to a prison in one exchange. As you complete missions for Suraya, and the game falls into the structure that it will stick to for the rest of the game, Suraya grows to accept not just you, but all Guardians, even as you abandon her on Earth to jet around the solar system.

In the space of a few hours, you go from the most powerful creature alive to a wounded animal struggling to survive, then recover your power and set off on another grand adventure. Suraya is furious that you're leaving her behind but this is what you do: you don't sweat the details, you have more important things to do, whole planets to save, ancient cosmic mysteries to uncover. This build, more than a common abilitease, grounds in a way the first game failed to. By the end of the campaign of Destiny 2, you're more powerful than you were at the beginning, and each expansion grows your power further. Even at the conclusion of the campaign, with The Tower restored, you can still go back to The Farm, Suraya's refugee haven out in the wilderness, far from the City. There's no reason for you to go there, all the vendors you need are back at the Tower, but its existence is a reminder of how far you've come, and what you're fighting for.

Read more of my stuff!

Hey friends, some quick updates:

I’ve been trying to get more writing out into the world instead of sitting in my Google Drive, so I started a Wattpad account and a blog on Destructoid.

Wattpad is like LiveJournal for fiction. I’ll be updating stories every Sunday at noonish. I’ve currently got two stories up: Tech Support, which Tales from the Black fans might recognise, and half of House Sitter, a horror story I came up with while I was taking care of my friend’s cat.

Here’s the link to my Wattpad profile. Feedback welcome!

Destructoid is a video game site with a great community blogging system. I’ll be posting my One Game At A Time pieces there from now on. I’ll still be putting them up here on my personal site too.

Here’s my Destructoid page.

K thanks for reading!

One Game At A Time: Resident Evil 2 (2019)

I was a PC kid growing up with a console-owning friend: an ideal situation for a kid in the 90s. My buddy Matt had an SNES and later a PlayStation, so I watched him play a lot of the big 90s console classics. This included the original Resident Evil 2. I had always thought I didn't like horror, since my exposure to film was through my Dad who is a total wuss, though I always got a thrill out of films like Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park. I know I'm not the first person for whom Spielberg was a gateway to horror, but Resident Evil 2 was part of that, too. I recall being totally compelled by RE2. The setting, that ridiculous gothic police station, seared itself into my mind and the feedback of the action was addictive even though I wasn't playing the game myself.

 In the 20 years since the original I've become both a console owner and a PC enthusiast, as well as a massive fan of horror. Horror video games have had a huge resurgence this console generation spanning all budgets, tiny experimental titles like Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy, small-studio gems like Amnesia, and AAA titles like Alien: Isolation. (Isn't it fun that all those games start with the letter 'A'? What's up with that?)

 Capcom's own Resident Evil 7 was a revelation that totally hooked me: a playable Texas Chainsaw Massacre that masterfully captured both the tension of first person horror with the wild tonal shift and B-movie writing of the best Resident Evil titles.

 So, in preparation for RE2 I played a half hour or so of the PC version of the 1998 original. (Here's a guide on how to do that, if you're interested.) I didn't remember that game being so hard, though to be fair I wasn't playing it myself, but I'm glad I took a little tour into the opening hour. It made me appreciate the remake a lot more.

 January 28 2019:

Last night I finished the Leon campaign, which took me just under 7 hours. The game has two characters, Leon and Claire, each with totally separate stories that occasionally intersect. Upon beating one, you get access to "2nd Run" versions of the stories which slight differences. I don't know what those are yet.

This game is scary! The police station is just as ridiculous as before, but now whole wings of the building are plunged in inky darkness. The storm raging outside rattles the windows, and so do zombies clattering on the glass trying to get in. In a nod to the classic Resident Evil scare tactics, those zombies will eventually smash those windows and tumble into the hallways of the station. You can find wooden boards to carry around the stop them coming in, those these take up precious inventory space.

 The golden rule of Resident Evil is avoid the zombies you can, put down the ones you can't. That's easier said than done, as I often found myself taking unnecessary damage trying to avoid using ammo. The game's pacing is masterful, and when I say pacing I mean the way it doles out ammo and items. You're always short on ammo and healing items, but I never felt stuck. You learn to conserve, but you never end up with a ton of useless junk you'll never use. (Except for blue herbs, which cure poison and can give you a damage resistance buff. I didn't use those very often.) Zombies take a lot of hits, even headshots, which are hard to nail especially when you're under pressure. Knocking zombies down and running past them is the best option, but they might be stood back up next time you enter that room.

You will be re-entering the same places, and often. The game is structured into three large areas (the Police Station, the Sewers, and an underground Lab) and each as rooms and passageways that are initially locked but can be opened. It reminded me of the structure of Dark Souls, as locked doors are often opened from the inside after finding another way around. As the situation deteriorates and more monsters infest the building, the game becomes an exercise in route planning. You'll spend a minute hiding in a save room, staring at your map, trying to memorize the number of turns required to get from point A to point B. Zombies can bash through doors but the more monstrous creatures, like the infamous Licker, can't, so strategically clearing out windowless rooms can be give you some breathing space.

 One monster that can open doors is The Tyrant, and holy shit is this thing a masterclass in horror game enemy design. Tyrant is an eight-foot-tall behemoth dressed like Dick Tracy (complete with a fedora you get a trophy for shooting off) who is completely invulnerable. Bullets ricochet off his trenchcoat, and head shots only make him flinch. Grenades, flashbangs, shotgun blasts to the face--these will knock him down to one knee long enough for you to escape. Taking cues from Alien: Isolation, once Tyrant is unleashed on you in the campaign, he is always around and the game's sound design never lets you forget it. If you're in the same general area as each other, you can hear his heavy footsteps through the floors and ceilings and he can even smash through walls to get to you. Later, the game uses those unmistakable footsteps to announce the reintroduction of Tyrant into the story, and I swear I said "Oh NO!" outloud each time, as he always reappears at the worst moments. In creating the Tyrant, Capcom has accidentally created a blueprint for the greatest Terminator game ever made and someone needs to get on that.

Leon's campaign is sold fun from beginning to end and I'm really looking forward to starting Claire's story tonight. The story structure of RE2 deserves special mention: chopping the story into four (6 if you count the "secret-not-secret" extra characters) chunks encourages replayability for players who only have a few hours a night to play games. It reminds me of the structure of God of War, which used the different realms to chop up its story. I'm really intrigued to see where Leon's actions affected Claire's, and how her actions explain some of the surprises in Leon's story.

January 29, 2018

I put some time into the "2nd Run" of Claire's story last night and it was not what I was expecting.

At first, I thought I had made a mistake and almost went back to pick Claire's "new game" option. The game fast-forwards through the bits of story that overlap, so you get a truncated version of the opening cutscene - anything that you already saw as Leon is all quick-cut edited to give you the gist. I was a little disappointed in this because I really like how the game starts and I assumed that Claire's intro would be different. I now realize that the New Game versions of each story are structurally identical, with a few changes, and the 2nd Run is designed to be played after completing the first playthrough.

I did the thing I was supposed to do, is what I'm saying.

So Claire's 2nd Run is a sort of "behind-the-scenes" of what she was doing while Leon was running around the police station, except it's not really. Some doors that Leon opened are closed, some are still open. Lockers and safes are still closed, enemies are still around. It feels like a ROM hack of RE2 and once I got over the initial strangeness of it, I was able to buy in.

There's a funny side effect of this style of storytelling - since the enemies are tougher and more numerous, and since the player is so much better at playing the game now than they were the first time round, whoever you pick as your 2nd Run character ends up coming across as way more competent than your first pick. In my story, college student Claire just unloads incendiary rounds from a grenade launcher at the first glimpse of the unstoppable Tyrant whereas highly-trained cop Leon ran away like a baby.

The game is also messing around with my expectations. The appearance of the Licker in the original Resident Evil 2 is an iconic video game moment. In the remake, you enter that same hallway, which is still covered in blood, and round that same corner to find… nothing. Only the evidence of the Licker's passing - claw marks, corpses, and gore. In the 2nd Run, not only did they return the Licker to its place on the ceiling, but they even added it scurrying past a window just before you see it in another nod to the original.

Speaking of the Licker, I didn't realize until this playthrough that they're blind and can only detect you with sound. I haven't found a way to fully sneak by them yet, they're too fast, but it would be cool of Capcom had included a (brief) sequence where you have to be stealthy to evade them.

The 2nd Run really picks up when the stories diverge. In Leon's campaign, you face off against the monster G in the bowels of the police station, before joining forces with Ada Wong. Claire meets up with Sherry Birkin, has a run-in with Police Chief Irons, and meets up with Annette Birkin much earlier than Leon. So far, it feels like Claire's story is more connected to what's going on, whereas Leon feels like more of an outsider. The story is happening with Claire, and to Leon, if that makes sense. Just like in Leon’s campaign, you briefly take control of the supporting character: in this case it’s Sherry. Sherry’s sequence is absolutely terrifying as she evades a serial killer through the halls of an orphanage. There are a ton of horror references in this sequence, not the least of which a direct homage to The Shining, and it makes me excited for the recently announced Ghost Stories DLC.

I'll also note that there is some ingrained sexism in this: Leon gets to hang out with a sexy superspy in a red dress, where Claire is stuck looking after a little girl. The writers of 2018 do good work with material that's 20 years behind gender representation, but it's annoying all the same. It's definitely not a deal breaker, it’s actually nice that even pulpy video game narratives have come so far as to make something like this noticeable.

Once I slowed down and stopped playing 2nd Run in a rush to "get to the story" I enjoyed it as much as my first trip through the game. I'm excited to see where things change and where they stay the same, even as I dread taking another trip into the sewers.

Cleaning up before OGAT 2019

I’ve got a huge piece in the pipe for Red Dead Redemption 2 but there’s a lot in there to unpack and I’m not ready to give it my full attention yet. Short version: It’s the game of this console generation, for better and worse, and a towering achievement.

THIS piece is not about that. After slipping out of my self-imposed One Game At A Time restriction in the fall, I’m going to try and get back in the habit of limiting myself to a single game. As I’ve mentioned before this is as much to diversify my off-time as it is to allow me to soak up a particular experience. First up is Resident Evil 2, which releases this Friday, January 25. In the lead up to that, I’ll run through some quick thoughts on what I’ve been playing.

---

Dragon Age XI

I was always an arms-length fan of JRPGs. Nobody made JRPGs for the PC in the 90s. I watched my friend Matt play all of Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger but never actually played them myself. Even my first console, the Xbox, had very few JRPGs and my association with RPGs was limited anyway. I think the first CRPG I played was Fallout, which I still think is the best game in the series, and I remember reading about Daggerfall in PC Gamer and thinking it was probably too adult for me. The game that really cracked open RPGs for me was Daggerfall’s sequel Morrowind, which was sold to me by my friendly neighbourhood EB Games manager by comparing it to Thief. I didn’t play another RPG until Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox.

The first JRPG I played on my own was Eternal Sonata: a turn-based JRPG in the old style with gorgeous art and a bonkers story: you play as French composer Chopin as he retreats into his own subconscious while he lays dying in his sickbed. I have extremely fond memories of this game due to the state I was in when I came to it: after getting kicked out of theatre school, breaking up with my girlfriend, and, crucially, buying my own weed for the first time. I don’t remember the actual game so much as being in my bachelor apartment, nicely day-stoned, the sun streaming in through the window.

I’ve since played the major JRPGs for myself: FF6, 7, 9, & 15, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Fire Emblem, FF: Tactics. The usual. Dragon Age XI is probably going to be the first one of those I actually finish.

Credit must be given to Kotaku’s Tim Rogers, whose nearly-40-minute video review of XI completely sold me on it. Specifically, his insistence that the game is “Chill as heck.” Video games are an exercise in increasing tension. As the player becomes more accustomed to the controls and systems of a game, it will grow increasingly complex and loud. Dragon Quest XI doesn’t really do this. Sure, you start with basic physical and magic attacks, slowly gain party members, and some of those party members are support specialists rather than damage-dealers, but you also gain a spell well past the halfway point that does an insane amount of damage to every enemy on screen and never misses.

The thing that keeps sticking with me about Tim’s review is this: by his experience, most Japanese people (Dragon Quest is HUGE in Japan; XI sold over 3 million copies there) play Dragon Quest on weeknights between having a bath and going to bed. He calls Dragon Quest games “bedtime stories” and that is a fantastic way to play a video game.

There’s a lot to say about DQXI but I’ll leave it at this: It is a fantastic, maybe the best, “baby’s first JRPG” because it is proudly old school. There is no subversion of tropes or surprising mechanics. No one at Square Enix thought “How can we make a Dragon Quest game for a 2018 audience?” The game is as old school as it gets (The “battle victory” musical sting is in MIDI, for chrissakes!) and it’s all the better for it. This is the video game equivalent of the book on your nightstand: comforting, slow, long, and unsurprising.

---

God Of War

The absolute FLOOD of Game of the Year awards bestowed on God of War motivated me to pick it up again. I tried to play the New Game+ mode but, eh, NG+ modes just don’t do anything for me. Starting God of War maxxed out strips away a lot of the narrative tension that is the game’s best element.

It’s still very good, the dynamic between Kratos and Atreus is the best since Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, and the combat is very fun and chunky. I still like exploring and finding chests and it is still ludicrously pretty.

---

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

AC: Odyssey is like the girl you convince yourself you don’t have a crush on until you realize, oh no, I do have a huge crush on her! I was so burned out by Origins that I convinced myself I could skip Odyssey. Then the game got so much press I literally couldn’t ignore it. The best thing I can say about Odyssey is how I sold my Dad on it: Did you like The Witcher 3? Does the idea of The Witcher 3 set in Ancient Greece intrigue you even a little bit? Get this game.

Odyssey has all the Ubisoft problems that it’s fashionable to harp on: it feels like a structure cobbled together by thousands of different people, like the houses in Ready Player One, because that’s exactly what it is. For all the things it borrows from other games, its best addition to the open-world RPG structure is baked into its setting: each island you sail to has its own storyline, characters, and explorable areas. The game calls the story “Your Odyssey” but that’s not an eye-rolling marketing gimmick: it does feel like you’re set off on this sprawling, epic story. Whoever is working on the inevitable new Mass Effect game should take note: This is what Andromeda should have been! A sci-fi RPG, trading this game’s island hopping for planet-hopping, sells itself.

---

Golf Story

I don’t have much to say about this game except that it’s super cute and exactly what I wanted: an RPG where you play golf instead of fighting monsters. If that sounds at all appealing to you, you should get it. It’s on everything, but it is especially on the Switch.

---

Celeste
Smarter people than me have written plenty about Celeste—the surprising/unsurprising indie darling Game of the Year winner that brings the peanut butter & chocolate marriage of Super Meat Boy’s pixel-perfect platforming with “Grown Up Video Game Storytelling.” GUVGS is what I call games that are praised for their more nuanced approach to characters, which usually means they’re about mental health, by telling stories that are big steps for the industry but are still a long way from, say, The Favourite.

Celeste is one of those great games whose story could only be told properly as a video game. Taken just as a story, it’s a sweet but shallow examination of depression and milliennial anxiety: You play as a young woman dead set on climbing a mountain despite what her (very real) dark side tells her about herself. Playing the game though, persevering with Madeline as she climbs this mountain while struggling with panic attacks, oppressive parental figures, gatekeeping, two different kinds of “nice guys”, and her own demons. It really is great and, like the Souls games, its difficulty should be seen as a feature and not a barrier to entry.

---

Spider-man

Only in a year like 2018 would Spider-man not be a shoo-in for Game of the Year. Hamish Black of the Writing on Games YouTube channel said it “Brings joy back to videogames” and that is wonderfully accurate. I take back what I said about not liking New Game+ modes, because playing through Spider-man’s story with all abilities unlocked is a total blast. After seeing Into the Spider-Verse I downloaded the soundtrack and played this game for hours. I haven’t done something like that since I was a kid. That Spider-man also manages to tell a GUVGS (For a Spider-man game packed with supervillains, the tensest moment is Peter and MJ having a misunderstanding over text) in between moments of the absolute best traversal system ever implemented in a game is masterful. This thing drips fun.

To Catch A Thief: Revisiting Deadly Shadows, Thief 2014, and Dishonored's DLCs

Once a year, I'll get an overwhelming urge to play Thief, either the original Dark Project or The Metal Age, it doesn't really matter. Both come from the same golden age of Looking Glass Studios, still the best development house in video game history, and the choice of one or the other is one of the degrees: Dark Project has some better levels, Metal Age has some better mechanics, but they are essentially interchangeable. I'd for love someone to port Dark Project's levels into the Metal Age engine so you could just play both in one sitting. That's because Thief is more than just a great game: it is, like all Looking Glass games, a wonderfully complete world with an unparalleled atmosphere. The hollow, ambient music, the exquisite sound design, the script and lore, and especially its main character, Garrett.

Stephen Russell's performance as Garrett is one of the reasons I became an actor. His weariness, his confidence, his knowledge of when he's in over his head: he's the perfect anti-hero. When I get that urge to play Thief, I'm really getting the urge to be Garrett. It's the same reason I go back to Wing Commander & Mass Effect: not because I love those games, which I do, but because I love Christopher Blair and (my) Commander Shepard.

So, in the spirit of cleaning my backlog and One Game At A Time, I decided that instead of playing through T1 or T2 again, I should really try and give the rest of the series one last shot. And yes, I am including Arkane's excellent Dishonored series as part of the Thief continuum. Arkane has built literally their entire company off refreshing the Looking Glass classics and I'm all for it. They even went ahead and just cast Stephen Russel in Dishonored 2, making the homage official.

Thief: Deadly Shadows

When Looking Glass folded in 2000, Warren Spector brought a lot of people over to John Romero's new company Ion Storm, where they would continue the Looking Glass legacy for a time. Spector, of course, hit the ground running with Deus Ex. Deus Ex changed games forever and I've always seen it as the ultimate Looking Glass game: it has the all the world building, tension, storytelling, and mechanical depth of the great LG titles.

Ion Storm also brought over most of the Thief team and a lot of the concept for Thief III. However, despite Ion Storm's rockstar developer mentality, they were still living in the same industry that killed Looking Glass, and that's how we got the Thief: Deadly Shadows that we did: a clunky, buggy, poorly-optimized mess that was jointly developed for the PC and Xbox. 

I ricocheted hard off Deadly Shadows when it came out. I hated how small the levels were, it ran like shit on my PC, and it looked like shit, especially compared to Splinter Cell which took everything I loved about Thief and Metal Gear Solid and turned it into the game my 17-year-old self had always wanted.

Fans have put a lot of work into Deadly Shadows over the years, culminating in the Thief 3 Gold upgrade which is easily downloadable and comes with a handy installer. Gold includes the famous Sneaky Upgrade which, among many improvements, removes the mid-mission loading screens, returning one of the best things about Thief to Deadly Shadows: those huge, sprawling, labyrinthine levels.

So playing Deadly Shadows in 2018 is a much more pleasant experience than it was in 2004. The best thing about it and the thing that no other game on this list has is that it's just so fucking Thief, man. The atmosphere, the storytelling, the watercolour cutscenes, the Keepers, and the Hammerites and The City and fucking Garrett are all here and they are just as good as they are in the first two games.

The City hub is the best innovation and it recalls the best missions in T1 and T2. Wandering the City streets, avoiding the Watch, eavesdropping on people for tips on loot and ripe, fat targets for burglary, Deadly Shadows has the best sense of immersion in a series that is known for immersion. The hub City is also the best thing about the 2014 reboot and if there ever is another proper Thief game, it needs to be this: What Cyberpunk 2077 is doing to Deus Ex, someone needs to do for Thief.

So I definitely enjoyed my time with Deadly Shadows a lot more this time around, but I didn't get very far into it before I had another hard rebound. For all the fixes that Gold and Sneaky Upgrade bring, the game is still buggy and rough. I encountered a massive bug in that very same hub area: for some reason, everyone in the world was not only totally aware of where I was but hostile to me and to each other. This led to pure chaos and violence on the streets which, while admittedly kind of cool, made it impossible to progress and forcing me to start over. While I'll give it another another shot soon, I decided instead to cut my losses and try...

Thief (2014)

No one was expecting Deus Ex: Human Revolution to be any good. I didn't even buy it, my friend Josh, who got me into Thief in the first place, (We did a project on it in English class. We went to an art school.) Actually bought it for me on Steam. I was expecting an action-heavy, watered down experience. I was totally wrong. I couldn't believe someone had made a first-person stealth game in 2011, so much had the genre moved towards the third-person action thrills of Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid.

I was really looking forward to Eidos Montreal's attempt at a new Thief, as I'm sure was everyone who enjoyed Human Revolution. Sure, HR had some rough edges, but it was a really confident statement, and a much greater improvement on the Deus Ex formula than Invisible War was. Despite being, narratively, a prequel, it feels like the follow-up Deus Ex always deserved.

Thief 2014 is not the follow-up Thief deserved. While Deadly Shadows was able to hold onto a lot of its spirit in its transition to consoles, and Human Revolution proved there is a market for slow, steadily paced first-person stealth RPGs, Thief feels like a step back. It feels like it should have come out before Human Revolution.

There's some good stuff in here, for sure: gone is the optional third-person view, returning to the series that unbeatable first-person tension. The console-first development focus allows for one major innovation over its PC-first predecessors: vibration-based gameplay mechanics. Thief 2014 has the best lockpicking mechanic in any game, vibrating the controller as you find the sweet spot, and I love that you can look around while you pick a lock, watching with held breath as that guard inches closer down the hallway to you, before you set the last pin by feel alone and swoop into the room. This feedback applies to finding hidden switches behind picture frames and in bookshelves. It's great.

The swoop mechanic is another fantastic addition, possibly borrowed from Dishonored, giving Garrett a quick, silent, dash in any direction. It's not invisible and you won't be silent on broken glass, metal, or through water, keeping it from being overpowered. It speeds the game up but can also get you in trouble: it's easy to swoop out of one guard's way and right into anothers, or to accidentally cover too much ground and end up in bright light.

Speaking of Dishonored, I wonder if the team at Eidos Montreal got a cold feeling in their stomachs when footage of that game started surfacing. Dishonored's Dunwall is a fantastically well-realized world, a decidedly Steampunk vibe with a heavy influence of whaling culture and the oppression of a city under quarantine. Much like the prior Thief games, the fantasy elements are pushed to the margins and when they are brought to the forefront, they are more occult than mystical. Thief 2014 flattens the world of The City, going for a more direct steampunk vibe, and a lot of the character of the earlier games is lost. That Thief 2014 took one of the most intriguing worlds in video games and turned out this generic, too-dark Steampunk world is especially egregious considering many former acolytes of Looking Glass had, in the interim, created some of the most memorable spaces in gaming, not the least of which was BioShock: Infinite's Columbia, which came out a year prior to Thief 2014.

For everything Thief 2014 does right there is something it does wrong, and the account ends up feeling unfinished, as many reviewers have said, but there are lots of things that should have been nixed in pre-production. The game's hub world, which sees Garrett breaking in and out of buildings to get through the City, is a great idea, but it's married to a terrible minimap. This is a particularly bad bit of design because all three prior games had much better solutions: static, hand-drawn maps and an on-screen compass. This small-scale Hub was handled much, much better in Eidos Montreal's next game, the criminally underrated Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

So the official follow-up to Thief has its flaws, what about the spiritual?

Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall and The Witches of Brigmore DLC

I loved Dishonored and I have no idea why I never played these two DLC episodes. I guess I never cared much for Daud as a character? These extra episodes, narratively, are actually a lot more satisfying after playing Dishonored 2, as they do a much better job of making Delilah Copperspoon a fully realized character.

The best thing about both of these episodes is playing as Daud, who is 100% a killer, even if they do make his motivations clear and understandable. It's always liberating to play a character who has no moral quandaries about killing, it's the whole reason Trevor is in GTA5, but leave it to Arkane to also make the 'rampage guy' a character with enough depth to be worth exploring. Doing a "high chaos" run as Daud fits the character but also the situations the player is put in: when the Overseers invade your hideout, there's really no reason to be shy about killing them all.

If nothing else, Brigmore adds some great levels to the Dishonored toolbox and it definitely worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre or the series.

Clearing Out My Backlog: Assassin's Creed: Origins

Part of the mission of One Game At A Time is to refocus my energy and start experiencing games on their own merits, not as examples of trends I have to keep up with. When I decided to start this, I knew one thing would play a major part. I'm calling it triage.

A habit I've carried over from my younger days is binging on video games when I have the time to do so. When my life was heavily structured by outside forces, like school & work, I would relish the opportunity to close the blinds and tuck into a game for hours, or days at a time, when I had the chance. Now that I'm freelancing and setting my own schedule, it's easier for me to burn a day playing a game rather than fulfilling my own deadlines, which can always be pushed back. Working creatively on a long deadline is weird, it's easy and sometimes beneficial to fuck off and not work for a day, then have a love affair with your project the next day. You can also work whenever in the day you like. I've been on a routine of waking up early, playing a game for an hour or so with my coffee, then writing until the early afternoon.

This is all fine, except when I fall into an old trap: playing a game compulsively "just because I have the time." I realized just now that I've been doing that with Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Origins made a big splash when it released last year because it was a big refutation of what Ubisoft had been doing with AC for a long time. To grossly oversimplify things, they turned Assassin's Creed into The Witcher 3, adding sidequests, crafting, gear, a truly massive open world, and improved combat. All these improvements and the intoxicating Ancient Egyptian setting was enough to really get its hooks in me when the game first released. The one thing they didn't learn from Witcher 3, was how to tell a story.

In my Backlog entry on Horizon, I talked about the storytelling in open world games being flawed. Assassin's Creed has always struggled to tell a compelling story, bloating its narratives with tons of characters who pop in and out of the story, low-to-no emotional stakes, and sprawling storylines that go dormant for hours to spring back up again as if no time had passed at all. Witcher 3 addresses this with its storytelling-style quest log, giving you a new paragraph to read for every event that occurs in every questline. God of War handles this by having Atreus, Kratos, and Mimir chat about what they're doing and why- an organic approach to Witcher 3's solution.

Origins does neither of these things. Its quest log is barebones: "Bayek and Aya race to Siwa to stop..." I actually can't remember the name of the Third Act bad guy and I literally just turned the console off. The death of Bayek's best friend, who walks you through the tutorial, is handled as a major emotional climax dozens of hours after he last appeared in the story. I get that Bayek is upset by this character's death, Abubakar Salim's performance is one of the best things about this game, but I'm not!

Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton covered Origin's Third Act expansion in a positive light but it was the breaking point for me. I kept repeating "Who are these characters?" And "Why am I doing this?" Long after where I expected the game's climax to be.

I was looking forward to Odyssey, the sequel to Origins, but a recent IGN video and this week's experience with AC:O has dropped it from my schedule. In adding choices to the dialogue, it seems they've just given you the option of skipping through the BS, and the appearance and performance of the male lead (You can now, finally, choose between a male or female protagonist ala Mass Effect) is cartoonish: the guy reads like he's in a community theatre production of 300.

Here's hoping the next big three open world games, Spider-man, Red Dead Redemption 2, and especially Ghost of Tsushima, pick up where God of War left off.