Gears 5: An Unadmitted Failure

Posted on September 15, 2024 by JC

It has now been five years since the release of Gears 5 which I reviewed a few months after release here. Although acknowledging that the visual design and gameplay was very good, I was critical of the narrative direction and the ignorance (deliberate or otherwise), of the game’s writers. As the game was released on Xbox Game Pass (which is how I played it), it is hard to work out whether it was a commercial success but I would guess it didn’t make back its budget. The claim it was played by three million on launch is less impressive when you remember that many of these people could have paid as little as $1 for the introductory subscription price. I know I’ve taken advantage of this a few times and I can’t be the only one. Even those that paid the regular subscription price paid substantially less than what the game cost at retail. Although this cannot be good for retail (or even digital sales), Microsoft seems quite happy to release its major first party releases this way and at least as of writing, still have the money to lose.

What better indicates the failure of the game is the five years that have elapsed since release as well as the June announcement of Gears of War: E-Day.

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Being Cheap can be Expensive

Posted on September 10, 2024 by JC

I can be quite cheap with certain things. The main example would be with regard to entertainment. If you wait a few years to see a movie, buy a game or read a book, the quality isn’t going to diminish in the same way that mayonnaise will. So I have no problem looking for the best deal I can on entertainment (short of piracy or bootlegs), because I know I will be getting the same thing and for a lot cheaper. The price is more a matter of recovering development/production costs and the novelty of being new. 

I am quite the opposite when it comes to other things. If my car needs new brakes or tyres for example, I am not going to go for the cheap option. Equally so with regards to buying footwear, dental treatment and most types of electrical appliances. The cost of being cheap with many of these products or services can indeed be very expensive. What inspired this post has to do with an important household item that caused a lot more trouble in breaking than it would have if it had been changed when the signs were visible but less destructive. I warned the relevant authorities of the risk of what would and subsequently did happen. 

My role as a suburban Cassandra is really only relevant to the wider implications of this which I will delve into briefly below. Continue reading →

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Jane Austen and Feminists

Posted on August 31, 2024 by JC

One of the great things about my time in university was that I got to read and study a lot of great works of literature. One of the worst things about my time in university was that this was usually through the grimy, cracked lens of feminism or some other vile form of textual deconstruction. This was by no means always the case but even the best professors I had were careful at least to pay lip-service to these interpretations in their lectures. Thankfully, as memories of my time at university fade, the good I got out of it has retained its clarity. And it has not been hard to maintain this clarity when what you’re reading was clearly written by someone who does not share the worldview or intentions that the professor is trying to draw out of their writing. Whether it be Homer, Shakespeare or in the subject of this post, it is usually obvious what the author’s actual intentions were.  

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From Comedian to Punchline

Posted on August 28, 2024 by JC

The recent poor reviews of Joe Rogan’s Netflix special has me thinking about how quickly comedians can go from being funny to a living joke. Thinking about Rogan specifically, I remember learning of him around the time he famously (or infamously?) jumped on the stage while Carlos Mencia was performing and called him out for stealing jokes from other comedians. I didn’t even remember that he had earlier had a role on News Radio which I occasionally watched in the 1990s — though I didn’t particularly enjoy the show. I have never liked Rogan’s style of comedy but I wouldn’t have gone so far as to say he wasn’t funny.

If you’re familiar with Owen Benjamin, you can hardly be surprised with the public ridicule Rogan is receiving as it has been a long time coming. The success Joe Rogan found in podcasting allowed him to act as something of a gatekeeper to aspiring comedians and Benjamin himself was a victim of this though he appeared on the podcast on more than one occasion and they did have a good relationship. After Benjamin had the temerity to publicly share that he thought it was wrong to dress a little boy as a girl and give him drugs that will prevent him going through puberty, all previously wide-open avenues to his Hollywood success were closed forever. Now plenty of people are saying exactly what he said (I think even including Rogan), but it was still bad when he did it. And he ate a pot brownie and went crazy forever or something like that.

In any case, this is not about Owen Benjamin as his is very much a special (though also righteous), case. Here I want to go over some examples of comedians that Rogan is now looking to follow. That is people who were very successful for how funny they were until they suddenly weren’t. Continue reading →

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The Last Tomb Raider

Posted on August 20, 2024 by JC

After recently replaying Crystal Dynamic’s 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, I became interested in replaying the two original titles they developed after they replaced Core Design. The first game they developed was Tomb Raider: Legend which was developed on a completely new engine with a new story. This was a an enjoyable game at release but hasn’t aged so well. It still has its moments and by most accounts was a big improvement on Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness which is the game that ended Core’s involvement with the series. They followed this up with a remake of the original game on the same engine that connected events of Legend but I did not replay this. The events of both games were used for the story in Tomb Raider: Underworld which was released in 2008.

Although the development duties for the franchise were transferred to Crystal Dynamics, the series creator Toby Gard was still involved for their first three entries. Underworld did not perform poorly financially or critically but it seems it still wasn’t the blockbuster the parent company Eidos Interactive were hoping for. Apart from the spin-0ff  Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, this was the last Tomb Raider game released before the 2013 reboot. So it was also effectively the last game in the series that played similar to the original games and involved the series creator.

I came away from my recent replay of Tomb Raider: Underworld with a much more favourable opinion than I had of the reboot.

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Gaiman’s Secret King

Posted on August 7, 2024 by JC

Neil Gaiman has been in the news a lot recently been the subject of a number recent accusations by women which have been covered extensively by Fandom Pulse and some smaller online outlets. As a result of this, his dedicated subreddit has gone into protection mode along with most mainstream media which necessitated the creation of another subreddit for discussing these revelations. But even this online outpost has carefully curated its content and won’t abide having nasty, evil, racists like Jon Del Arroz and Vox Day anywhere near them. Naturally, these revelations have also led many to take another look at his work and the perverted fantasies that have more basis in reality than previously realised.

I’ve never read anything by Neil Gaiman and though I didn’t feel deprived before, I am now rather glad that I haven’t. And this is whether or not the accusations are true as some of the material linked above is more than a little disturbing. The closest I’ve come to reading Neil Gaiman is watching the 2007 adaptation of his book Stardust. I vaguely remember enjoying it so I thought I would watch it again in light of the recent revelations. It should come as no surprise that I noticed a lot more wrong than right on a second viewing. Continue reading →

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Adapting Dune’s Characters to Film

Posted on July 31, 2024 by JC

There are three film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune and while none of them come close to the brilliance of the novel, they all have at least something to recommend them. Perhaps Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-to-be-filmed Dune would have come closer but we’ll never know that. If one had to pick which one came the closest, I would have to go with John Harrison’s miniseries made for the Sci Fi Channel in 2000. There were plenty of changes and omissions but it was overall the most faithful to the novel and is still enjoyable today even with the now very dated visual effects. David Lynch’s 1984 film was the only one made while Herbert still lived and that had his direct input but I personally don’t like it. I also don’t think that my opinion would much change if it were given a director’s cut though I would allow that this would improve on the theatrical release’s very truncated third act.  Most recently was Denis Villeneuve’s two-film adaptation which had the advantage of an enormous budget and the almost limitless potential found with modern visual effects. Villeneuve’s started very well but was let down in the second part  by the unnecessary changes made to novel’s narrative and most egregiously with the characterisation of Paul’s beloved concubine Chani.

Having seen all of these films fairly recently, I got to thinking what these films did well and considering the actors chosen to play the source material’s varied and fascinating characters. One could forgive both the 1984 version and the 2000 miniseries for being limited with regard to visual effects but the characters can still be done justice if nothing else. All three films made very good, acceptable and sometimes bad choices and this post will be devoted to considering the best for each major role.

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Not with a bang but a wimper

Posted on July 23, 2024 by JC

I will state at the outset and without a hint of irony, that /pol/ on 4chan is far more reliable for news than any mainstream news website. In stating that, I still don’t recommend getting your daily news there as there is a lot of bad content to sift through and often images that are very, very unsafe for… anywhere. It is fortunate therefore that we have many noble, self-sacrificing souls that go through and clip interesting threads or posts and share them through other mediums. One such post follows below.

I should add that this is an older post but it checks out.

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Going Deeper with BioShock

Posted on July 16, 2024 by JC

BioShock was released in August 2007 on PC, Xbox 360 and later PlayStation 3. While this was a few years into the console generation, it was one of the games that really defined it; as indeed did a number of games released that year. It was a spiritual successor to the System Shock series with the creative director Ken Levine having been heavily involved in the development of System Shock 2. It was critically and commericially sucessful and saw two direct sequels over that same generation with BioShock Infinite arriving in 2013; the year the PlayStation 4/Xbox One generation began. It was also one of the last games I remember being truly amazed by when I first saw it running. That is after spending half a day on compatabilty issues with my video card but it was worth it. What’s more, it still looks great today due largely to the incredible artistic design that is a fusion of steampunk and art deco; both also matching the game’s setting. 

Something seen on release and still today, was the focus many put on the socio-political aspect of the game’s story and setting. This aspect was not subtle as in the opening minutes of the game, on entering the underwater world of Rapture, you are presented with “No Gods or Kings, Only Man” emblazoned on a wall with a giant golden idol of the game’s initial antagonist Andrew Ryan hovering above it. If that was not obvious enough, you are then given a video monologue by the same man making his Objectivist beliefs about as subtle as a rusty razor. Following this, you are shown the beautiful underwater city before being introduced to its insane and murderous inhabitants contrasting the inward ugliness of this otherwise beautiful world. 

Gaming journalists of the time (and still today), thought they were very clever pointing out that “Andrew Ryan” was an anagram for “Ayn Rand” and some even went so far as to claim it was a sort of interactive refutation of Objectivist philosophy. On the surface, there is truth to this analysis but if you go deeper (and in Rapture you will), then there is a lot more going on. I’d not be surprised to learn that many of these same journalists went no deeper than the game’s first few levels or at least, paid no attention to anything beyond what was fed to them in the opening moments. 

In truth, there is a lot more going on thematically and much of it is a lot more timeless than a 20th century polticial philosophy.

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Revisiting Arkham, Raiding Tombs and a trip through Mordor

Posted on July 8, 2024 by JC

As I just recently had the first big computer upgrade in almost a decade, I wanted to see how some games I’d previously played at release on low or medium settings looked today when on max settings. So I reinstalled Tomb Raider (2013), Batman: Arkham Knight and the  Shadow of War, the sequel to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Only one of these was a new experience but I will qualify that by adding that they all fit into what I described as The Genre Amalgamation three years ago. I was also reminded in a recent video from David V. Stewart on Assassin’s Creed Shadows that he describes these games as “mud genre” which is a blunter but no less accurate way of describing them.

This post was also partly influenced by the disastrous launch of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League with visuals objectively worse than Batman: Arkham Knight; a game that came out almost a decade earlier among many other problems. This had me curious to see it again and I am struck at how great it still looks — even compared to much more recent games. That the former was made by the same studio is very illustrative of the rapid decline of major publishers and developers. 

In fact, despite last year being a very good one, there is still a dearth of innovation evident in major releases and outside of advances in visuals, games play much as they did more than a decade ago which also explains why so many remakes and remasters are being done instead of new games. The only new “feature” that publishers seem to want to include is that of “live service”. And this “feature” is much to akin to almost any introduced by Microsoft in that it is usually to the detriment of the software. In terms of games, it just means publishers want you to pay for the game and then keep paying for it with microtransactions for cosmetic items and other such digital nonsense that will be lost when they inevitably shutdown the servers a few years later.

The purpose of this post isn’t to complain about current trends but merely to consider (or  in two cases to reconsider), the above games.

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