October Thoughts

Streets of Rage 4

It felt a little stiffer than I would have liked, but ultimately the intuitive comboability of the game won me over, at least compared to my experience with TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge. Where bosses in that game felt like they were just rolling through their movesets and phases, with little regard for what I was doing, the ability to interrupt (some, not all) moves and pick them up with OTGs meant that the game never really ground to a halt on my first playthrough. Only one boss – the one with a shield which uses ranged attacks – really frustrated me at first encounter (frustrated in the emotional sense, not the difficulty sense). I did find it painfully tricky to avoid enemy attack patterns, but part of that was poor positioning and restraint on my part. Hopefully as I keep dipping into it, I’ll overcome my sillier instincts. Streets of Rage 4’s concessions to the casual audience are also more comfortable than Shredder’s, in terms of both my own preferences and the arcade conventions of the genre. Although the stages are similarly sectioned into more comfortable “levels”, there aren’t any further betrayals like levelling or moveset expansions. Instead, you slowly unlock new characters, and if you do fail during a stage you’re given the opportunity to retry with bonus lives. I liked it. It’s a good way to get through the game on your first run. Shredder’s Revenge wore me out before its 16 stages were up. Here, I ripped through all 12 comfortably. There are some grindier elements, including the unlocking of alternate movesets in the DLC survival mode (DLC I committed to buying before even finishing my first run). But these look like cool bonus features to me, not ridiculous prolonging of the meat of the experience. The artstyle is lovely. The number of playable characters was surprising. I’m looking forward to spending more time with the game in days to come.

 

The Unhewn Throne

Ultimately, the ending didn’t satisfy as much as I might have hoped, but endings rarely do. Despite that feeling, I’d still say it came together alright. I was always more interested in the world than the characters, although I was fond of more than a few of them by the end. Whereas when I read The Black Company I dreamt of an adaptation, of that story retold, here I wanted more of the world. That might be in part due to the fleeting nature of so many of my favourites, so many teases of exciting peoples and places and people. Characters and strands of the world move in and out of the spotlight in sometimes surprising rhythms. At points I’d expected one, for example Talal, to take more of a spotlight. But Talal sort of faded into the background, somehow more sidelined by the concentration of characters around him. My instinctive criticism of leaches as the too-common source of magic was a little harsh, in retrospect. The world is dense enough, and the limited presence of the fantastical outside these powered outcasts works excellently. So yeah – an engaging tapestry of narratives woven around a powerful beating heart, a thematic core of emotions and being and what one must do, of how one rises to the challenge. I loved this.

 

The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route

I’m not the biggest fan of Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s “video essays” on video games. I find I often disagree on too many little things. He approaches the medium in a fundamentally different way than I do. At times he seems frustrated by the nature of games as games, sometimes in ways I can relate to but often in ways I can’t, in ways I reject. Somewhat surprisingly, I find his “casual” approach to video games more offensive than his casual approach to history, found in his travelogue content. Perhaps it’s because these videos can be taken more as tourism than as history. Perhaps I’m more open to light treatment of the historical endeavour than I might pretend to be. Perhaps it’s because of the way I love video games. Who can say? Whatever the reasons, I find his rambling, poetic, musing style more suited to his meandering through real American roads than the digital landscapes of Baldur’s Gate, Sera, Racoon City, or Thedas. For some of the same reasons, I find his cultural critique more compelling in this realm too. Much better, I think, for societies to attempt to address the sins of their past than the supposed transgressions in their art.

 

As for who I prefer when it comes to video games? Matthewmatosis, Joseph Anderson, Nerrel, Power Pak, Super Bunnyhop, Turbo Button, TheGamingBrit, Leon Massey, Raycevick. Nothing too exciting. There are more, but these are the channels that are appointment viewing for me.

 

Weird West

The Dishonored series always left me slightly… disappointed? There’s a lot going for it that should appeal to me – the philosophy of the immersive sim subgenre (aesthetic?), a linear but flexible campaign, diverse player character toolset, the gorgeous artsyle and grim world it depicts (whalepunk my beloved)… I should love it, I really should, but it never quite came together for me. Part of that is me not goving it enough time, of not replaying and replaying as I should. But despite all the improvements made from the original, I never quite got around to finishing Dishonored 2, and I only made it through the relatively short Death of the Outsider through gritted attrition. I think part of the problem is that for all the appeal, the open design of the games means I both push through them with ease and constantly feel unsatisfied with the way that I’ve done so. They just don’t seem to hit that sweet spot of completion and resistance, somehow.

 

And with Weird West, Raphaël Colantonio and new developer Wolfeye Studios have done it again. Supernatural westerns are a genre I love, moreso than alternate colonial struggles, and yet it’s still not quite coming together. I see the systems are there but they resist engagement. I captured one or two bounties alive, slowly whittling down their protectors through stealth. I placed and kicked and shot a few barrels. I lay down a couple of traps. But ultimately, the path of least resistance was to walk in and start blasting, so inevitably each encounter turned from a series of quicksaves and attempted stealth takedowns to blasting, blasting, blasting. Not that that’s the worst way for a western to go. The fairly flimsy story doesn’t drive much engagement either, although I’d say a flexible story is a good choice for a style of game where loading screen tips advise that you can kill pretty much any character you choose. So by the end of the first character’s journey, I was just a bit… unsatisfied. I’ll probably being going on the Pigman Journey soon enough, and hoping that it clicks more there.

 

One aspect that’s weaker than Dishonored are the progression mechanics, something that you should know will be doubly disappointing for me. There’s multiple ways to build power – Nimp Relics, Golden Ace of Spades, amulets. Nimp Relics are a rough analogue to runes in Dishonored, increasing the powers of the character, while amulets add minor little stat buffs the way that bone charms do. Unfortunately, there’s only a couple of amulet slots, whereas the Dishonored games allowed up to 10. The buffs from these were mostly never too impactful, but having so many meant you could satisfy that itch of character development and differentiation without getting into the full stat/level/resource grind that characterises so much of the present zeitgeist. You could also meaningfully adapt your bonuses to you preferred playstyle and include situational bone charms, since you had so many slots. I never really felt like I was missing out by adding a “fun one” to my loadout. When you only have two slots, you have to be a little more selective though. Since I had a high reputation and I was struggling with damage output, I had no reason not to use it. The Golden Aces of Spades could have rounded things out, but instead they’re just stat boosts. Increase crouch speed by 10/20/30%, increase health by 10/25/50%, increase gold found yada yada. It’s boring.

 

Green Lantern: Far Sector

Well this whole thing was just a bit of a mess, in an endearing way. It was perhaps the most perfect way I could return to superhero comics (which are, by the way, a genre consisting of little more than a swarm of generic blights on the beautiful medium with which they are synonymous in public consciousness). Despite rejecting the stale conventions of Big Two production, unburdened by returning characters and recycled legacy and repeated conflicts, it felt like the quintessential contemporary comic. The pacing, the tone, the dialogue, the nature of the storytelling were so familiar given by concentration of reading in the DC Universe post-2011. It even repeats the follies of so much contemporary media, seemingly deliberately. The boomeristic references to memes (including doge) and cryptocurrency, to the point of plot relevance – oddly enough – were an odd choice. One that does work is the final line, in which Jo “finally” recites the Green Lantern oath. But it’s not a triumphant culmination. She’s been a Green Lantern through the whole book, different in an interesting way and thus not lesser, and it feels like a smart pastiche intended to spear “originism” (as I’m choosing to call it) through the chest. You get a whole 12 issues of a Green Lantern story, not 12 issues of “oooh she’s gonna be a GL one day”. You get what I mean. Not everything comes across this way, even amongst the more appealing elements. Occasional flashes of something better could not bely the usual feelings. At my harshest I judged it as sloppy, careless, uninspired. Far Sector, better than most, at least has moments that might be described as highs. Most comics in this vein only gesture towards moments that could be better, stories that might actually entertain, enthuse and enthral, rather than just suggest at such. This work, at least, threatened to be good. Unfortunately, the threat was unrealised. Despite the relatively slow pace, we get neither a complex narrative nor a well-realised understanding of character. Not that art is a dichotomy between these two, but I sort of expected on or the other. What other draw is there to this? What are you here for?

 

Jemisin’s handling of emotion as a thematic bind pales in comparison to the less overt, more impactful use of the same by Staveley in his Unhewn Throne trilogy, partly out of length, but seemingly also out of interest and depth. Take the most frequently discussed form from each story – absence. The imposed suppression of the Emotion Exploit is relatively unexplored compared to the disciplined emptiness of the vaniate. By the end of Far Sector I didn’t really quite get how the Emotion Exploit affected people, for all the characters willing to expound on how it affected the world. Perhaps that was the point, that even the characters who wholeheartedly believed in it were not so detached from their emotions as they might seem. But I suspect not. In the meantime, by the time three novels were done, I understood the changing place of the vaniate in Kaden’s life on a range of levels, as well as a comparison to the different methods of the Csestriim, Ishien, and the converse found in the experience of the gods. Part of this is the nature of the medium Far Sector has far fewer pages, and each can only do so much in the linguistic space. But it also failed as an evocative exercise. The big consolation for me here is that I have started reading and enjoying prose again, that I can move beyond her dabble in capeshit and enjoy the more acclaimed of Jemisin’s works, The Inheritance Trilogy and Broken Earth. I’m looking forward to trying those one day, and its no great loss that a bit of work for hire is an uncohesive flop.