I regret to inform you all that the trailer for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is better than the game. As you can expect, the gameplay is basically Elite, with you flying a spaceship around catching criminals, robbing interstellar traders, and buying and selling cargo across the stars.
The neo-Western aesthetic is kind of neat in the trailer but it got kind of annoying in the game. Haha, this lizard alien talks like an American long-haul trucker. Oh neat, all the star systems are named after US states and the planets are named after podunk towns and cities in the American West. Haha haha.
And speaking of aesthetics, the game would have done better to stick to the cartoon stylings of the trailer instead of the computer graphics in the actual gameplay because at best those computer graphics are just serviceable.
The starship combat stuff didn’t really grab me, either. It was just kind of there. I suppose I could have given it a bit longer to see if it would click with me but the aesthetic wasn’t doing it for me so I just had to give up. Oh well.
After three years and over 400 hours, I’ve finally finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
Good god, but this game really brings to the fore the colonialist and imperialist roots of the standard Dungeons and Dragons setting. “Exterminate native peoples so we can seize their land and resources for ourselves” is the explicit goal of the game, after all. Much easier to ignore this subtext in a typical tabletop adventure campaign since most players are at the “exterminate” part of the equation and the colonizing thing is usually just implied in the background.
Anyway, the goddamn final dungeon in Kingmaker is bullshit. The thing about teleporting between different versions of the dungeon sounds neat but in practice is annoying. The fights are also hard but in a grindy way, not a fun way. And there’s another quest after this dungeon if you want to fight the real mastermind behind your troubles, but that bit is at least a little better. I may go back to see what happens if I max out upgrading everything in my kingdom and just use a cheat to go through the boss fights.
However, I don’t really replay this kind of RPG so this is pretty much it. My kingdom is ruled by a lesbian tiefling queen with her tiefling consort commanding an army full of mercenary wizards. I feel like the ending presentation could have used a little more flair, but I got a lot of game out of that $35 I spent so I’m satisfied.
I’ve bought the semi-sequel Wrath of the Righteous but I’m not about to immediately jump into it, especially since I hear there’s another set of DLC that’s coming soon. Hopefully Owlcat Games has improved the annoying stuff from the first game. Incidentally, isn’t the studio in Russia? I wonder how they get paid what with all the Ukraine war sanctions.
I watched Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and returned disappointed. I thought it was fine as a comic book romp but a much lesser movie than the original due entirely to not being as directly political. It has a vague something about resisting colonialism and imperialism, but it only gestures at the idea a bit and the actual central conflict is between one made-up country and another made-up country fighting over a made-up natural resource.
There’s a scene in the beginning of the movie where Wakandan soldiers fight French mercenaries trying to steal vibranium, then Wakanda captures these mercs and marches them to the UN to expose the hypocrisy of the UN Security Council classifying Wakandan hoarding of vibranium as a threat to world peace. That’s what the movie should have been about.
The conflict over vibranium was the natural consequence of what happened in the first movie and it would have been logical that it be the subject of the sequel, which is why it’s massively disappointing that it went where it did instead. We could have had metaphors about rejecting the Central African franc or throwing out Canadian mining companies but instead we got a movie about a flying Mexican guy fighting a superpowered black chick.
I didn’t hate the movie, I’m a dork for comic book shit and I actually did dig the whiz bang whale war shit, but we’ve got lots of comic book movies and zero blockbusters about pan-Africanism (besides the first Black Panther, of course). The first movie made me think, “Hey, Marvel finally learned how to overtly put politics into their movies” but its sequel makes me think, “Oh, it was just a one-off.”
I just finished reading Legion in Exile, book 2 of the Imperium of Terra series by Evan Currie.
In terms of writing craft it’s fairly average, but it does scratch my space opera military sci-fi itch. The setting is somewhat unusual for the genre since it’s very much into about the world after an environmental collapse, whereas English-language military sci-fi writers tend toward various flavours of right wing (from liberal centre-right to full nutjob) and would be hostile against anything that smacks of environmentalism.
But you see, centuries ago various groups of tech libertarians looted Earth and escaped to the stars, leaving the poors to choke to death on a polluted planet. A strongman seized power from the collapsing governments of Earth, enthroned himself as Emperor of Terra, and brutally placed the planet on a crash course to repair the environment. In the present day of the series, Earth is an absolute monarchy ruled by an Empress with a global aristocracy under her governing the masses. The environment is on the mend but is still nowhere near what it was before things went to hell, and the descendants of the space colonists laugh at Earth for being backward yokels. However, most of Earth’s citizens have been nursing a centuries-long grudge against the space diaspora and are itching for revenge.
So book 1 starts and it turns out the Empress wants to resurrect democracy and give commoners a voice in government again. However, the nobles and the military object to this idea and enact a coup d’etat, killing the Empress and massacring her most loyal troops. The protagonist is a rookie in the Empress’ legion assigned to protect her heir, so he fights his way off Earth with the princess in tow and they escape to look for support among the space diaspora.
The plot itself is pretty standard space opera – political intrigue, aristocrats in space, battleships blowing up, etc. It’s kind of weird that an absolute monarch should try to just plop democracy back after like 400 years of their family being in charge, but the books absolutely claim that the royal family’s founder actually meant it when he said he was only abrogating democracy “for the duration of the emergency” and that somehow his descendants also kept this commitment to a defunct political ideology over the generations.
Anyway, the environmental collapse thing was the main thing this series has that made it stand out for me. The rest of it is the kind of quality that you can expect from a military sci-fi space opera self-published on Amazon. It’s okay if you’re into that kind of thing.
I am currently playing 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and you know what? It’s so goddamn fun.
The thing that most impresses me about the game is that it does so much with so little. Your dumb AAA game will use a jillion teraflops to simulate the hairs on an NPC’s ass and put in so much work on stuff that doesn’t really add to the gameplay experience. But this game has the opposite philosophy: it pares down everything to the bare bones, which means at the mechanical level it’s actually a very simple game. However, it uses its very spare depiction of its world to make it feel like we’re playing in a much larger universe.
The game is about a group of high school kids who fight an invasion of kaiju by piloting massive human-shaped robots. You play the game in two different modes that you can switch between: a battle mode and a story mode.
The battle mode is set during the climactic showdown between the kaiju and the robots. You pick six pilots and slowly fight through each phase of the invasion on a real-time strategy map. You can also switch your team’s lineup, upgrade weapons, pick abilities to use, and do general RPG stuff.
This part of the game is decent enough. There are little animations that play when you try to decide what weapons or abilities to use, but as you can see from the image above, the map itself is very simplified. I don’t hate the existing battle mode that we got, and even enjoy the fights, but with the addition of a little more flash, the play experience could have been upgraded for me from “fun” to “ecstatic.”
I want to see mechs wrestling monsters while around them a city gets blasted to smithereens. I want to see my giant robot get knocked through a building and then take cover in a crater formed by a missile bombardment. I want to feel like I’m in a giant robot anime, by damn!
But the story mode delivers – oh, how it delivers. It’s what you should be playing the game for. The story mode is essentially a really simplified adventure game. You play through the recent past of each of the characters and discover the twists that their lives took which led to them piloting a giant robot on the day of reckoning.
The actual game thing that you do is essentially just pressing X. Your character is at a certain location and there are one or two people you can talk to and one or two objects that you can interact with. You progress through the dialogue and try out each conversation topic. Then you move on to the next location and keep doing that until you reach the end of the section you’re playing and decide if you want to continue with your current character or try someone else for a while (or maybe jump back into battle mode).
That’s how the story mode works, but that’s not how it feels. It evokes so much for so little. For me, it’s basically the world’s best anime protagonist simulator. I’m not a connoisseur of visual novels or dating simulators, but I’ve played a few, and in none of them did I feel like I was actually a student in a bustling Japanese high school like this game did. You walk down a hallway at school and there are other students passing you by, and in the background some of your classmates are chatting about the TV show they watched last night. You go with your friends for some ice cream after class and cars whiz by as you wait at the bus stop. Some jerks from the next school over try to start some shit and your friend steps in to back you up.
I call the story mode an anime protagonist simulator because it skips the boring parts of high school and just has the interesting bits in there. And what are those interesting bits? They’re mostly stories copied directly from science fiction movies and TV shows.
Yes, you’ll find that one character is living through the plot of E.T. the Extraterrestrial, while another is living through Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and yet another is experiencing the story of Total Recall. It’s not a simple one-to-one copy, though, and the stories make sense even if you don’t know what they’re referencing, but it’s fun to pick out what the original works were. And the characters’ lives are intertwined, so they get involved in each others’ stories, and a couple of times you even experience the same conversation again but this time you’re controlling the other person.
This game will not click for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Like I mentioned, it’s just so goddamn fun. I enjoy identifying the Robot Jox design elements and figuring out how the characters’ lives intersect with each other. I like feeling like I’m a kid in a Japanese high school anime and I’ve got an alien I need to hide from the Men in Black and also I have to stop the invasion from The War of the Worlds.
A couple of warnings, though. First, just like with many other adventure games, I got stuck a couple of times when I couldn’t figure out how to progress past a certain point. I say you shouldn’t feel guilty about just googling that shit. Keep that advice in mind if you play.
Second, and somewhat more egregiously, time travel is a very important part of the story, and since this is a Japanese story about using military weapons to fight off an invasion, there inevitably shows up two characters from Japan’s most infamous period of militarization. I guess the one guy is okay, he clearly doesn’t care about ideology and is just trying to get by, but the other guy is a true-blue patriot and he keeps shouting about defending the motherland and whatnot. Which would be okay if it was about almost any other country, but not when it’s Imperial Japan. The game isn’t a cryptofascist Trojan horse for Japanese imperialism, but this part definitely left a sour taste in my mind.
Anyway, keeping these things in mind, I would still heartily recommend this game. Like I said in the beginning, it’s great fun and I’m enjoying almost everything about it.
Goodbye, Eri is a one-shot manga about a high school boy who is obsessed with making movies. The first film he makes is a predictably tearjerky documentary about his terminally ill mother. However, at the end he’s unable to join his mother for her final moments and instead runs away, but in his film he adds a special effect to make it look like the hospital is exploding as he flees.
The story begins as he shows his creation at the school festival, where it sinks like a lead balloon. Almost everyone in the school thinks the ending of his film is stupid except for one girl who insists that there was the germ of an interesting idea in there and he just needs to watch more movies to learn what works. Of course, he will be watching the movies with her, since she needs to make sure that his cinematic education proceeds appropriately.
The girl is not manic, but she definitely looks pixie-like and is certainly the kind of film buff a movie nerd would wish for (i.e., almost a full MPDG).
The boy eventually comes up with an idea for his next movie, which will be about a boy who showed a movie about his terminally ill mother which was received poorly by his fellow students, but who then met a girl who constantly watched movies with him and taught him about making a good film. Also the girl is a vampire who’s terminally ill.
Written out like that, the movie sounds earnestly dumb, but it comes across as rather sweet from the perspective that we see, which is entirely from the point of view of the mock documentary that the boy is shooting.
As you can guess, the story plays with ideas of the fourth wall, with unreliable narrators, with constructed images and artifice, and even with death and how the people we’ve lost are still alive and with us anyway. I don’t really want to spoil too much of the story, as it’s best enjoyed without too much foreknowledge, but I do recommend it as being a surprisingly deep exploration of a lot of emotional territory from the guy who wrote a manga about a teenage boy who transforms into a demon made out of chainsaws who uses his powers to hunt other demons (Chainsaw Man, though that manga was also a lot deeper than the bare description would make you think).
I saw Morbius. It’s actually not as bad as people say. I think the main issue is that audiences are approaching it as a superhero movie when it’s actually horror. I mean, a scientist accidentally invents vampires after trying to cure his rare blood disease, that’s a solid horror setup. And the parts where the protagonist goes nuts with his vampire powers are greatly entertaining, just tearing throats open and grabbing people from above and whatnot.
But I don’t blame people who expect a superhero movie because the movie itself mixes superhero stuff in, to its weakness. Yeah, okay, the protagonist is horrified by his monstrous transformation and tortured by the guilt of the lives he’s taken, that’s perfectly fine horror movie stuff. But why is he fighting a random counterfeiting ring he stumbled across? The movie is only 1 hour and 44 minutes long but there were scenes that still didn’t need to be there. I really wish the movie just unabashedly went full horror and gave up any superhero trappings. For example it had several Dracula references, but instead of only being cute little Easter eggs, I would have preferred that it really cranked up the parallels to the classic vampire story. Or just make it about a dumb smart guy who inadvertently unleashed vampires on the world. Mad scientist + vampires, what’s to hate?
Anyway, it was an okay movie, but I can see a much better movie hiding in there, and I wish they’d made that one instead.
The Batman is good. Like damn, those 3 hours flew by. It’s nice that we skip going through Batman’s origin one more time, and it’s certainly novel that the first villain we get to in a Batman reboot is The Riddler, but it works in this movie.
Politically, the movie kind of covers the same territory as in The Dark Knight Rises since it’s about gross inequality and popular reaction to it, but it handles the issue a lot better than the earlier film since it actually has an idea of what it wants to say on the issue. Bane’s live action introduction had a confused and ambivalent reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protests that were ongoing when it was made. However, the world that created The Batman has had over a decade to think over the Occupy movement’s ideas, as well as a global pandemic and a summer of BLM protests. In fact, I would characterize this particular reboot as a post-BLM ACAB version of the Batverse, inasmuch as it can be in a fictional setting where the protagonist’s main problem with cops isn’t that they’re violent but that they’re not directing their brutality toward the right people (i.e., criminals).
The pundit Anand Giridharadas has a quip about billionaires and how they whitewash the terrible reputations they earned while amassing their wealth by giving back some scraps from their fortunes in the form of charity: “Batman is what all these plutocrats do. You cause problems by day, in the way you run your company, and then you put on a suit at night and pretend you are the solution.”
The movie is essentially that quote presented in dramatic form. The problems of Gotham are caused by Bruce Wayne’s family, by their peers, and by the people who enforce their rule – cops, lawyers, mobsters, and so on. Bruce Wayne, ignorant of the larger context, tries to fix things with a child’s understanding of the situation by beating up poor people who’ve turned to crime. It’s not even a band-aid solution, since the worst that a band-aid can do is be ineffective, whereas in the movie, Batman’s example inspires other people to fix their own problems with violence. Of course, socioeconomic inequality isn’t a problem you can punch into submission, and it’s striking how one of the takeaways from this superhero movie is that almost everything heroic that we watch the protagonist do is completely useless and ineffective.
But the movie can only go so far in this critique. The superhero story is rooted in private actors using violence to impose order on a chaotic society. It’s a worldview conducive to being “tough on crime” and unswerving support for the police. Fundamentally, a superhero movie is pro-cop. Which is why, after a supervillain-caused natural disaster, Batman ends up letting go of his original mission of cowing the people of Gotham into submission and instead helps in relief efforts with the US military.
In the end, Catwoman asks Batman to run away with her, but he refuses and instead chooses to stay and help Gotham. She notes that his mission will never end and she ends up walking away from the disaster of trying to save a city that’s actively trying to commit suicide. Batman’s decision is presented as a noble sacrifice, of placing duty over love, but ironically, Catwoman’s proposal that she and Batman spend their lives robbing hedge fund plutocrats probably would have done more to address Gotham’s fundamental problems than Batman’s idea of punching street thugs and the occasional crooked cop.
Anyway, it’s nice when a superhero movie gives you something to think about besides the fight scenes.
I finally saw Matrix Resurrections. It’s a lot better than sequel #2 and 3, which I know isn’t saying much. It’s because it’s actually about something. While the first Matrix was about capitalist exploitation, alienation, trans identity, and escaping Plato’s Cave, Reloaded and Revolutions were about fighting killer robots with kung fu and machine guns (except those movies wouldn’t admit that they were shallower than they thought).
However, the thing that Resurrections is about is suffocating nostalgia for a time when the audience was 20 years younger and didn’t have as much grey hair and wrinkles. But it doesn’t examine this idea in any meaningful way and something like 20 percent of the movie is watching clips from the older Matrix films. It reminds me a lot of Trainspotting 2 in that it’s an unnecessary sequel about old people terminally obsessed with their youths.
Yes, I know this movie was forced on Lana Wachowski. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. But I don’t even hate it. I think Resurrections is okay. The fight scenes feel perfunctory and I never went “wow” like I did in the first movie, but I’ve seen worse on a Saturday afternoon.
However, now I’m curious how the studio-mandated sequel without Lana Wachowski would have turned out. I know that studio oligarchs are terrified of losing money and would probably have made a mediocre failure like the sequel to Pacific Rim, but there’s a non-zero chance something really dumb could have been produced. What if Warner Brothers just gave in to every filthy lust they had and created something of the purest, crassest commercialism, with the first Matrix only slightly updated for modern audiences? What if Neo teamed up with Spider-Man to fight Mark Zuckerberg, and as a sop to philosophy fans they have Slavoj Zizek in the lower right corner of the screen providing a running commentary on the action? Because I wouldn’t watch that, but I’d laugh my ass off at the headlines, so it would have at least been a worthwhile commercial endeavour.
I’m reading Civilizations by Laurent Binet. It’s an alternate history novel about the conquest of Western Europe by the Incas.
It starts with a different end to the Viking expeditions to Vinland and continues centuries later with Christopher Columbus getting his just desserts from the Taino. Decades after that, the bulk of the book covers the Sapa Inca Atahualpa’s conquest of Western Europe, and then there’s a substantial epilogue covering the young mercenary Miguel Cervantes’ adventures across the Mediterranean.
The book gives a lot of lucky coincidences to its protagonists, while the indigenous Americans adopt and invent new technologies too quickly, but I’m not complaining since otherwise the story wouldn’t exist. The realistic outcome would have been the one that actually happened in our world, and who needs to run over that again? We can just handwave all that science stuff about Eurasia’s larger disease pool and virgin soil epidemics and whatever.
Anyway, if you’re familiar with Spain’s conquest of the New World then a lot of the Inca section is basically that with the parties reversed. In our world Atahualpa’s father the emperor died from smallpox and a civil war broke out, with Atahualpa defeating his brother to become emperor.
However, here Atahualpa loses and is chased out of the empire with his last 200 followers. They desperately repair Columbus’ wrecked ships and escape east to unknown lands with a Cuban princess who learned Spanish from a certain enslaved Genoese captain.
They end up in Portugal immediately after the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1531. The chaos gives them a chance to survive and they end up meeting the queen of Spain. However, they’re forced to attack and capture the queen and kill 3000 of Toledo’s Christians after learning that the Inquisition is planning to kill them. There’s a short detour to the centre of learning, Salamanca, for the group to learn about this New World, but the Toledo massacre marks the beginning of a series of escalations that ends with Atahualpa capturing the king of Spain.
The small band had only been doing what they needed to survive each succeeding crisis, but after making contact with Atahualpa’s brother and making peace, they gain the resources to aim higher. Atahualpa uses the gold, silver, and gunpowder supplied by his brother, in exchange for technology and various cultural products (wine, trompe l’oeil paintings, honey, and so on) to become first king of Spain, then Belgium and the Netherlands, and then eventually he unites Germany to become Holy Roman Emperor. Along the way he triumphs over the pirate Barbarossa, takes half the North African coast, and is dubbed conquistador.
Atahualpa’s success is due to the radical reforms he enacts, somewhat by accident and somewhat by design. After first taking the Spanish crown, he guarantees freedom of religion to reward his first European followers, the oppressed Moors and Jews of Spain, but also to allow space for the Incan worship of the sun so central to their rituals and politics. Ending the Inquisition is a popular move and converts quickly flock to a religion backed by a victorious conqueror.
Atahualpa’s second radical reform involves Germany, where by now he has gained a reputation as a champion of the poor, thanks to implementing in Spain certain quasi-socialist Incan political structures (taxes paid in labour, housing provided free by the state, abolition of serfdom, and various radical changes that accord with historical records from our world). Germany has seen repeated peasant revolts over the years and the downtrodden see in Atahualpa their salvation. In turn, Atahualpa is glad enough to invade various German states at the invitation of the residents in his lust for Charlemagne’s throne. A complicated public dialogue with Martin Luther ensues so that Atahualpa can secure the votes of the Protestant electors, but it breaks down and the peasants rise up in anger that their greatest chance has been lost. The electors beg Atahualpa for help and he imposes order and becomes Emperor of the Romans.
Thus, in this alternate world Atahualpa has forestalled Europe’s Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany, enacted the Peace of Westphalia a century early, and sidestepped the enclosure of the commons that was to come in later years.
Anyway, this book is pretty fun if you’re familiar with the history it changes. It’s just deliciously clever at developing a world that parallels but doesn’t mirror our own. I probably missed a bunch of stuff in the Cervantes section since I’ve never read Montaigne, who appears as a character, but oh well.
The book is translated from French but I didn’t really notice anything awkward because of this. The vast majority of translated works I read are Japanese, Korean, and Chinese comics, but now that I think about it, the few translated novels I read tend to be French.
So yeah, I recommend this book for aficionados of history.
