Me and Mine

Announcing the Summer of Good Anime Movies!

The Summer of Harry Potter was a huge success in that I read all of the Harry Potter books in succession. It was also a huge failure because it took me three seasons, not one, to do so. This year, I’m setting my goals a little more realistically.

This is officially the Summer of Good Anime Movies. This largely came about because I get some internal shame when I remember that I’ve seen zero Hayao Miyazaki movies. I’m going to correct that, and then I’m going to watch some other critically acclaimed and popular anime movies that I also haven’t seen. I’ve picked 10, but the actual selections could change if I can’t rent some of these from digital streaming services, or if something really hot comes out over the summer. The good news here is that I could feasibly watch all of these over a long weekend, but I’ll try to spread them out. This list isn’t in any particular order.

Grave of the Fireflies

My Neighbor Totoro

Princess Mononoke

Paprika

Your Name

Spirited Away

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise

Perfect Blue

Ninja Scroll

Patlabor

Me and Mine

How RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Turned the Competition Into a Game

I’m a huge fan of reality competition TV shows, particularly RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a creative, funny competition between some wild personalities that never fails to entertain. But the All Stars seasons have broken the competition in ways that turn the results from the best of the best to the winner of a game, and there’s a big distinction between the two.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, here it is. A (flexible) dozen drag queens start. Through a series of challenges playing to the strengths of a well-rounded drag queen, they’re eliminated one by one until three (sometimes four) remain. Each episode, after a challenge, a panel of judges helps Ru select the top queen (who gets a prize) and the bottom two, with the rest being safe from elimination. The bottom two perform a lip sync and Ru picks who stays and who goes home. In each stage of the competition, the panel of judges and RuPaul select the winners and the losers. This is standard RuPaul’s Drag Race.

All Stars has been messed with from the start. The first season put every queen into a pair with a competitor. They both had to perform well to win challenges and it wasn’t until late in the game when competitors were judged on their performance alone. All Stars season two course corrected by starting everyone out on their own, but it still changed the competition. Instead of Ru picking the winner and loser each week, Ru picked the two winners and three losers. The winners would lip sync for the right to choose who went home. The losers pleaded their case. In the end, Ru still picked the top all star, but it was from a selection whittled down by the competitors and not the judges.

Throughout this competition, Roxxxy Andrews was consistently, repeatedly in the bottom. She was almost always up for elimination. She was consistently saved by her friends in the top. None of them would send Roxxxy home. They, arguably, sent home more talented drag queens, because of their personal biases. When Alaska won All Stars season 2, it could be said that she won it with an asterisk because she didn’t have to compete against the best; she just had to make sure none of the competitors sent her home.

But factors in season 3 of All Stars broke the competition in ways that fundamentally changed it from a competition to a game; no more a matter of being the best but playing better than the others. What follows will contain spoilers for All Stars season 3, which very recently ended! Do not keep reading if you are avoiding spoilers!

All Stars season 3 followed the same formula as season 2; winners pick who goes home. But it broke in three different ways. The first is that it offered an eliminated queen a way back into the competition. Every show does this, but it’s a bigger mess when they were eliminated by someone else possibly still in the competition. There was a big segment where all of the (currently) eliminated queens met with the competitors still in it and they argued about who eliminated whom and why. In the end, they brought back Morgan McMichaels, the first eliminated queen.

This is a problem. Morgan didn’t compete for most of the show. She had to sit out because she was eliminated. Being brought back when most of her competitors were already gone means she stood a greater chance of convincing the rest to keep her. Also, Morgan said from the start that she was going to eliminate her biggest competitors. Not the worst queens, the best. She’s not alone in this, as everyone is free to choose who they want to eliminate for any reason, but it puts a huge spotlight on the problem with letting competitors eliminate each other. Sometimes the best go home in a moment of vulnerability because they’re the best.

The second way in which the competition broke was that BenDelaCreme was allowed to eliminate herself. She was the obvious front runner, she won a lip sync late in the competition, and she sent herself home. Her reasons are inconsequential, but the result is that she was shaping the competition by having a strong presence at the start, and then she cut herself out, leaving everyone else to know that their victories are only viable in her absence. Ru consistently put Dela in the top two because she’s the best. When she dropped out, it let everyone know, including Ru, that she had no competition. Anyone who wins season 3 All Stars has to know that if Dela hadn’t quit, they probably wouldn’t have won.

Finally, and the worst way in which the competition broke, is that the final two queens were chosen by the eliminated queens. Bebe, Kennedy, Shangela, and Trixie all had claims to victory, but the decision on which of those two would lip sync for the finale was put in the hands of the people they eliminated. Shockingly, they chose Kennedy and Trixie. This is shocking because, while a strong competitor and a great drag queen, Kennedy won the least number of challenges of all of the top four. Shangela, who won the most, was eliminated by the queens who were no longer a part of the competition. For whatever reason, they chose Kennedy. The finale was between someone who was top 2 twice but won no lip syncs, against someone who was top 2 once, won that lip sync, but spent most of the competition in the bottom.

Trixie Mattel is an all star. She deserves to be recognized as such. But her win was cheapened by the changes to the competition that turned it from a best-of-the-best to a best player of the game finale. In the end, this was not the Olympics of drag. It was the Catan of drag. It was a game that could be lost by the best player for simply not having the personal connections to assure victory. While Trixie was crowned, no one achieved a victory because the best player could’ve been in the competition but they were recognized too soon and eliminated by those who could see it, and the best player walked out. While I expect twists and surprises in these kinds of shows, I hope that the next season of All Stars sets out the rules fairly from the start and reduces the amount of input by the eliminated queens so that they have less influence in the finale. It’s just not fair to anyone to call someone an all star if they’re not competing on an even playing field.

Reviews

Dark Souls 3

A short while ago, I’d committed to ignoring games described as inspired by Dark Souls. I’d played some Dark Souls and didn’t enjoy it much, played some Dark Souls inspired games like Lords of the Fallen and Bound by Flame and I didn’t like any of them. But this isn’t a consistent dislike. I really really enjoyed Salt & Sanctuary, but the qualities of Dark Souls that inhabited Hollow Knight turned me right off. And almost immediately after I’d decided that Dark Souls-like games were not for me, Humble Monthly gave me a copy of Dark Souls 3. I beat Dark Souls 3. I enjoyed Dark Souls 3.

I am ill equipped to describe what makes Dark Souls 3 so different from Dark Souls, and even less equipped to compare it to Dark Souls 2, but Dark Souls 3 hooked me fairly quick. I know how these games work and they’re very unforgiving, particularly of my overly-aggressive playstyle. With the help of a build guide to direct my efforts on creating a character I would enjoy playing with, a simple melee sword-and-board fighter, I sliced and chopped my way through hordes of monsters. The variety in combat encounters and enemies ensured that even my simple character build was never boring. Maybe Salt & Sanctuary made me a more patient player, but I rarely felt like the fights were unfair, even when I was dying to bosses over and over. I’d eventually learn their patterns and weaknesses, and chop them to pieces with my sword. Where as I found Dark Souls to be a largely frustrating affair, Dark Souls 3 never felt frustrating; it was rewarding.

What isn’t rewarding in the game is the storyline, or lack thereof. It starts with a cutscene explaining that the lords of cinder have left their graves and need to be returned to their thrones to rekindle the dying world. From there, there’s more or less nothing much to offer until you reach the end, and you get a short cutscene for your efforts. Sure, you’ll find other non-hostile people with some “quests” of their own, but there’s no journal. No quest log. Often, I struggled to even remember their names. Most items have a sentence or two of flavor text but that’s about it for worldbuilding. You could go end-to-end through this game and never learn a single thing about the lords of cinder that you’re mercilessly hunting down and killing.

This is a bit of a shame because the world they’ve built, without the exposition, is really interesting in that it’s not standard fantasy or grimdark. If anything, it’s sorrowful. This is a dying world, roamed by undead things, desperate for purpose and meaning. I find myself wanting to go back to Dark Souls again for another try to see if I can fill in the blanks because I want to learn more. Even if I can’t, if I can find in Dark Souls what I found in Dark Souls 3, that’ll be enough. Dark Souls 3 is a challenging game that rewards persistence and learning without feeling cheap.

Reference: From Software. Dark Souls 3 [Namco Bandai, 2016]

Source: Purchased from Humble Bundle as part of a Humble Monthly bundle.

Me and Mine

#content

Wow, it’s been a while. Not because I’ve done nothing, but because I’ve been stuck. I’m in a post-game slump after Assassin’s Creed Origins. After I finish a good game, it’s hard to pick up something else. I spent a lot of time trying out some games that weren’t up to Origins quality. I went back to Origins and did more leftover side quests. I played more less than great games. I “finished” Tom Clancy’s The Division, and tried to get into Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. Now I’ve got something good, Bayonetta 2 on Switch, and it’s going to take some time to get through it. It’s great, and I’m glad I’m out of the rut.

But while I work through Bayonetta 2, I’m chewing on ways to talk about some of this stuff I played without reviewing it. I’ve touched about a dozen games that either didn’t do anything for me, or just didn’t hold my interest long enough to get to the end. It’s rare that I review a bad game because life’s short and the supply of video games that are worth playing is huge. But there might some value in constructively criticizing these games that I didn’t find great. And then there are games like The Division, where I’m far past prime review time, but I still feel like I have something to say about it. Is that a review? Probably not.

All this is to say I’m still alive even if I don’t have much to say now.

 

Entertainment

The Summer of Harry Potter Wrap-up

Okay, so the Summer of Harry Potter became the Autumn of Harry Potter, which became the Winter of Potter, because I’m a slow reader. It also went that way because I had a hard time getting through those last two books.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was a slog. It ditches the whole Hogwarts setting for… camping. Aimlessly looking for horcruxes. Hiding from Death Eaters. It ditches the prophecy leading to the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort for some wand magic rules that weren’t important to the rest of the series until this last chapter. It reveals that Snape was actually good the entire time and gives him a most ignoble death for all of his sacrifices. It denies redemption for Draco and all other Slytherins, and some of the worst characters, like Dolores Umbridge, never get their due. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a bad book and a terrible end to the series.

Over the series, I’ve learned that Harry is the worst character, the rest of the cast isn’t much better, and Neville is the only character with any development. They’re largely brats who don’t learn anything except what they’re taught in wizard school. Neville, on the other hand, learns confidence and leadership, and even he immediately defers to Harry when he’s around, despite Harry proving to be an awful leader. And it’s like the whole prophecy introduced in Order of the Phoenix was meaningless. It teases the possibility that Voldemort got it wrong, that Neville is the one who will defeat him, and immediately forgets about it. Neville was never going to be the one. Voldemort choose Harry and he was right.

And Voldemort. Voldemort is an idiot, not a menace. How does he not know that someone is destroying his horcruxes until it’s waaaaaay too late? It’s obvious he notices when one is destroyed. Did he think those were accidents??? And he never suspects that Snape is not working for him. He kills Snape over the Elder Wand, not because he’s spent decades in Dumbledore’s service. I can’t really figure out how he got so many followers. He uses dark magic and kills people, two things that seemingly any wizard can do.

Speaking of dark magic, it seems that dark magic is a very bad thing until Harry and his friends use it. They use the Imperio curse to break into Gringotts to steal a horcrux, with the intention of screwing over the goblin that helps them steal it. None of that is good! And throughout the series, Harry uses dark magic, sometimes intentionally, to get things done, so how is he so different from Voldemort?

The series peaks with Order of the Phoenix. That’s when Neville didn’t trip all over himself, the department of mysteries makes the wizarding world actually wondrous, and real sacrifices happen. Everything afterward was a downhill slope to a poor end. I’m not happy about being such a downer about it, but at least I’ve experienced what Harry Potter brought to SFF. But please don’t ask me to finish the dreadful movie series.

Reviews

Assassin’s Creed Origins

I tell people I have a love/hate relationship with the Assassin’s Creed series, but I’m going to be totally honest here: it’s mostly a love/annoyed relationship. I find them to be brainless timesinks, and that’s not really a bad thing. They’re a reliable, often enjoyable 20 something hours of game. I haven’t played all of them, and the ones I have played are often regarded as the bad ones, but I almost always get one when I want to kill time. Assassin’s Creed Origins, however, is better than a time killer. It’s a great game.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes the history-skipping game way back to ancient Egypt, in the times when Cleopatra’s brother occupies her throne, and he’s propped up by a Greek army. You play as Bayek, a Medjay, and you’re hunting down the people who killed your son. This mission will take Bayek all across Egypt and lead to uncovering a greater conspiracy.

Origins bins a lot of hallmarks of the Assassin’s Creed series. In doing so, it becomes a much more enjoyable game, and probably a more accessible game, but it loses some of what makes Assassin’s Creed unique. Origins presents a huge, sprawling Egypt, that you’re free to explore and engage with on your terms.

Origins took a lot of, let’s call it, inspiration from The Witcher 3. It’s very much about having a lot of stuff to do, and letting you do it in whatever priority you want. Often, you can even run off in the middle of a quest to do something else and then come back and pick it right up. While the quests aren’t quite as well written as The Witcher 3, and they rarely do that thing where it acknowledges when you’ve already solved a step in the quest ahead of time, they are competent. They don’t feel like a waste of time. Bayek himself, along with the rest of the cast, is also well written. Compared to some of the rest of the Assassin’s Creed series, this is the best it’s been.

What is loses is the strict focus on stealth. Bayek can get into a lot of fights and leave most of them alive, where most Assassin’s Creed protagonists would wilt like a flower. Additionally, if you do find yourself in over your head, you can simply run away and it’ll almost always work. This is in stark contrast with other games in the series, where enemies are almost omniscient and ever-preset to the point that being spotted means reloading a checkpoint. Add in that you no longer have the ability, or much need, to blend in with crowds, nor much need to run along rooftops to avoid being seen, means this Assassin’s Creed feels least like a game in this series. If it weren’t in a historical setting, with a single “assassinate” button, and good climbing mechanics, it’d be a different game entirely.

Some people aren’t going to like this shift; I’m not one of those people. I loved it. Like The Witcher 3, it hooked me early on and I spent a lot of long stretches of time playing it. Unplayed games notwithstanding, this is the best game in the series. The extra time Ubisoft put into its development clearly paid off; they made an Assassin’s Creed that I just loved.

Reference: Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed Origins [Ubisoft, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Me and Mine, Reviews

Night in the Woods

There’s an audience for Night in the Woods that this game will hit harder than the rest. Here are just a few touch points this audience will identify: instant messenger, away messages, sleeping until 4pm, dropping out of college, being in a band that never plays a show, working in a low paying, low skill job for too long, bailing on said job as often as possible, living in a dying town but coming back because it’s home. All of these things come together to form a picture of Night in the Woods, and it’s not going to connect with everyone.

You play as Mae, who’s recently dropped out of college and returned home. You pick things up with your old friends, learn what they’ve been up to since you’ve left, but there’s something else going on in Possum Springs. Mae has nightmares or visions and strange things around town that cannot be easily explained seem to follow her.

To Night in the Woods‘ credit, the characters are well-defined, and it’s a pretty big cast. Each has a unique voice and the often more to them than their initial presentation. This clarity of character definition extends to the beautiful art of the game. Night in the Woods has a distinct, clean art style that never looks bad or dull.

Where it didn’t quite come together for me was in the narrative and gameplay. It took a long time for the story to build to a point where it had to hooked. It is a slow starter. This may be purposeful, as a lot of the draw of the game is the connection you should feel to the characters, but it felt tedious at times. Adding to this tedium is the gameplay loop.

Here’s the loop: wake up and check your computer for messages from your friends. Talk to mom in the kitchen. Walk all over town, talking to everyone. They’re always in the same places, but they always have something new to say. After you’ve talked to everyone, go back to the one friend you want to hang out with that night and tell them so. Then go to a character specific scene that nudges the story forward a little bit. These end at home where you talk to dad, check your computer for more messages, and go to sleep.

Again, this may be purposeful. They’re replicating some of the tedium of living in a small town, where you know everyone and they’re all going through a similar routine. But it’s not particularly thrilling and I wish there were a way to move a bit faster. Mae’s not a quick walker and I got a bit tired of walking all over town at her slow pace. It plays like Super Mario Bros. at half speed and, instead of squishing dangerous mushrooms, you’re chatting up your friends and neighbors. If it moved a bit faster, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me nine hours to complete a story that could’ve fit within maybe a quarter of that time.

I picked up Night in the Woods because so many people whose opinions I respect loved it. I get why they loved it, because the writing is good and the characters are great. But I found it pedestrian to the point of being just okay. It’s got its moments but they’re deep in there, surrounded by a lot of slow walking and repetitive gameplay. I was honestly quite surprised to find this game has an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating on Steam. It is very much not going to please everyone.

Reference: Infinite Fall. Night in the Woods [Finji, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Me and Mine

2018 Goals

The new year is coming, so why not draft up some overly ambitious goals? Goals are better than resolutions. Resolutions rarely come with an end state. They’re just bland statements of things I’d like to do better without any particular way of measuring whether or not I am doing better. I can resolve to eat healthier, but healthier compared to what? “Eat healthier” won’t get me to the end of the year because I can’t point to any accomplishment. It’s hard to hold myself accountable with “eat healthier”.

With that in mind, I want to improve some things so instead of saying I’m going to improve them, I’m setting some goals. To keep myself honest, expect something like a monthly check-in. That’ll serve a dual function, allowing me to share what I’ve done throughout the year, and experience public shame over what I don’t do. That’s healthy, right?

Writing/Production

I’ve been writing a lot for the last several years about video games and it’s almost always reviews. Criticism has some value, but I’d rather get away from criticism and closer to critical thinking about the games I play. In 2018, I’m going to write about something, probably video games, without that writing being a review. Additionally, I want to do more videos. I dipped my toe in video production in 2017, but I want to do more of it. I’ll probably supplement reviews with video or do video reviews.

Goal: One video per month

Goal: One non-review per month

Exercise

I didn’t run much in 2017. I took most of the year off from running because I ran a marathon in 2016 and the training for it really burned me out. I started doing weight lifting instead, using the Stronglifts 5×5 program. I wasn’t perfectly consistent with it, but it got me started. In 2018, I’m going to switch to a program (GZCLP)  that I think will help me get to some weight lifting goals. I’m also going to do it while keeping my weight under control and not losing my ability to run a 5K.

Goal: Keep my body weight under 200 lbs.

Goal: Increase max 5 rep weights

Exercise Current Max Goal Max
Squat 200 300
Bench Press 140 200
Deadlift 225 325
Overhead Press 95 150
Barbell Row 115 150

Goal: Maintain the ability to run a 33:00 5K

Being a person

I spent entirely too much free time in 2017 sitting at home, doing essentially nothing. I also have a terrible tendency to buy RPG source books, read them, love them, and never play them. In 2018, I’m going to kill some free time by playing these games. I’m guessing I’m going to end up running more of these than playing them, but I’ll get some use out of them. I’m also going to go to a gaming convention of some sort. I’m going to interact with and talk to people who share interests similar to mine, like some kind of person.

Goal: Play each of these games once

  • The Dark Eye
  • The Strange / Numenera
  • Dungeon World
  • D&D 5th edition
  • Swords Without Masters
  • Stars Without Number

Goal: Go to a con

Me and Mine

Get Even

The number of video games that actually do something with medium that less interactive media (movies, TV) can’t accomplish is so vanishingly small. Video games are so frequently linear affairs without much opportunity for deviation that the rare ones that do something different stand out. Get Even stands out.

You are Cole Black and you can only remember one thing, a hostage rescue gone wrong. You wake up in a run down asylum where Red, your captor, has strapped a headset to you that can explore and replay memories. By replaying these memories and exploring the asylum, you have to put together the pieces to try to find out who you are, what you were doing, and who’s behind all of it.

In a lot of ways, Get Even reminds me of Condemned: Criminal Origins. Like Condemned, you have a handful of non-gun tools to explore environments and collect evidence, like blacklights, thermal vision, and an environment scanner. Collecting this information and finding documents are an important part of the game as you attempt to sort out Black’s memories. While using these tools to meticulously scour rooms is kind of fun, often I just found myself in rooms littered with documents to dump a lot of information.

However, this isn’t a walking simulator. There are guards and mercenaries everywhere. Black is equipped with a couple useful weapons, but discouraged from using them. This means most levels are stealthy affairs, and the stealth in the game isn’t exactly great. You can view enemy vision cones with your map, but the enemy’s vision extends far beyond what the cone indicates. This is no Metal Gear Solid. Additionally, you’re told upfront that your actions, including killing people in your memories, have consequences. So you’re given a cool weapon to play with, and told not to use it.

What Get Even does really well is mess with the player. At the start of the game, you know as much as Black does, so the game can reveal things to you and Black at the same time. This exploring of Black’s memories where Black doesn’t know what happens next leads to some situations where you as the player can and should question whether what you’re seeing is what actually happened or only how Black wanted to remember it. This merging of perspectives and unreliable narration are head games that other media can’t pull off, so Get Even‘s experience is pretty unique.

Looking at The Farm 51’s past titles, Get Even should be the game that gets them more positive attention. It’s a cool game that tries to create a different experience from most games and succeeds in many ways. Get Even seems to have flown under a lot of people’s’ radars, and it deserves more attention.

Reference: The Farm 51. Get Even [Namco Bandai, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Reviews

Oxenfree

One of the things video games struggle with is human dialog, especially when they introduce player choices. It’s often stilted and flows poorly, if it’s written well at all. Many games can get serious kudos if they manage to get dialog and conversations right. Oxenfree is a game that gets it very right and it might be enough to cover its flaws.

In Oxenfree, you control Alex, a high schooler who’s gone to a beach party on a small island with her friends. However, the island has a dark history and Alex and her friends have to uncover it to find a way to save themselves when the night takes a turn for the worst.

The thing that Oxenfree does best is its conversations between characters. Your four friends are fairly chatty. The dialog is natural and well-written, but what Oxenfree brings to it is that you’re given up to three dialog choices, and when you makes those choices, you can interrupt your friends. Mass Effect did this, but your friends in Oxenfree actually react to it. It’s such a minor thing, but it goes a long way toward immersing you in what is going on.

Night School Studio is comprised of some former Telltale Games developers, so it should be no surprise that your dialog choices affect the story and how other characters think of you. However, instead of an outright “character B will remember this” type statement, you don’t really get a lot of feedback on when you’re changing hearts and minds. The only feedback you get is a little thought bubble over someone’s head with someone else’s face in it. It gives some indication that they’re thinking about that person, but not explicitly why. I like this a lot because it made my own choices feel more natural and less like I’m trying to push a friendship slider in one direction or another.

What might turn some people off is that there isn’t a lot more going on here than walking around this island and talking to your friends about the weird stuff that’s happening. There’s some very light puzzle solving, and you can choose to do a lot of backtracking to find collectible items that flesh out more of the mysterious island, but don’t expect to manage an inventory, or jump on a platform, or shoot anything. I’m not sure there was any point in time I could’ve “failed”, just dozens of opportunities to alter the story in negative ways.

While the gameplay is very light, I could not stop playing Oxenfree. I played it all over the course of a single day with the game lasting about 5 hours. The intrigue-filled story and the immersive dialog kept me around. If I was going to put it down at any time, it would’ve been during some of the item finding I did, where there wasn’t a lot of dialog but still got some payoff by finding another piece of the mystery. It nails a foreboding and dark story without being totally grim or colorless. It’s the perfect way to spend a winter weekend.

Reference: Night School Studio. Oxenfree [Night School Studio, 2016]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Ne Cede Malis