Thopa gunner: maverick, bitch

Thopa gunner: maverick, bitch

 

Bear with me a moment, I swear this tangent is going somewhere. So, there’s this Simpsons gag about military recruitment. Where the recruiter explains they use subliminal, liminal and super liminal messaging. When asked to explain what super liminal messaging involves, he leans out a window and screams at a passer by telling them to sign up. Ha. Ha.

 

If I was to try and slot top gun maverick into one of those categories, it’s got to be super liminal.  If only because everyone already is well aware the original was also a recruitment tool for the navy. 36 years down the line, the cat has had kittens and those kittens have had kittens, and the proverbial bag was recycled into a coke bottle that was then used as a gravity bong before being discarded into landfill. Yet Top gun refuses to move on, so much so the film’s theme (join the navy) was about how little anyone in top gun had actually moved on… from the navy, which they joined…

 

I appreciate the mental gymnastics a screenwriter today would have to go through to write anything as corny and un-ironic as a top gun film. Though in that regard I feel they fall a bit short in places. The film has more cheese than the US food stamp program in 1986. While I'm down for an 80’s cheese fest, my lactose intolerant friends will attest there is such a thing as too much cheese. So let’s examine the post pizza depression of Maverick.

 

Much as the film tries to convince that there are actual narrative stakes at play you can feel the kid gloves of the soft writing underneath. I’m not saying someone has to die a sudden dramatic death, but the film telegraphs itself as too much of a feel-good flick to really do that. The only death in the film, join the navy, is forewarned and the most respectful adoring funeral one could hope for.

 

The messaging across the film is not only can you return to the past, but it’s as vibrant and good as you remember it. Nothing exists there to fundamentally challenge you, your sweet heart is still waiting, and you can comfortably be a big fish in a small pond, sticking it to your old man (Jon Hamm) by joining up, shipping out and flying boats at mack too. Needless of me to point out, that isn’t how the 80’s was: I know I was there. Like a lot of media, it’s riding nostalgia for a time that never was, which isn’t what the nostalgia of my childhood used to be, it used to be good, you’know, it was a purer kinder nostalgia, people nowadays use it as an escape but.

 

 A good portion of the film is characters lining up to metaphorically jerk Thomas Cruisé off with flattery and praise. Which I’m chalking up to the military recruiters knowing that no one under the age of thirty five was ever led to believe that they were good enough. If anyone can be used to symbolize a black hole of praise seeking insecurity, it would be the now 61 year old Tobias Cruz.

 

Paradoxically, the sheer volume of affirmation that Tommy Crush, maverick, is in fact the best fighter pilot of all time forever and ever left me with lasting imposter syndrome. I am now resigned to never being a top of the line fighter ace. The worst part of that is I've never even flown and have a totally unrelated fear of heights. Though that might speak to the boat having sailed on my own sense of self-worth.

 

Speaking of, Tumnus Crash does have a boat sailing scene. Where it is revealed that he doesn’t know how to sail, so that his new old girlfriend can girl-mansplain the basics to him. Doesn’t learning to sail boats sound like a great idea for a date? A good way to learn those skills would be to join the US navy.

 

It has occurred to me that pointing out the film as propaganda isn’t particularly clever. Critics like to think of themselves as clever people, because they’re people and everyone does that. The sheer obviousness of it goes some way to neutralizing the criticism of it being propaganda. Hence making it more effective propaganda: this is a super liminal thing I was talking about; awareness of advertisement doesn’t neutralize the effectiveness when it’s not trying to be subtle. If anything the knowledge goes some way to encouraging the same complacent mindset that made the original so effective.

 

If we’re on the subject of criticism, and this being a review; I think we are, blowing your nostalgia song on the opening sequence is crumby as hell. I’m fairly sure, based on nothing other than my own notional sense of entitlement; that if danger zone started blasting during the maverick dog fight sequence, it would be incredibly cringe, over the top, and quintessentially 80’s nostalgia perfection.

 

The other easy angle with Cruise is his cult affiliation, which I'm sure I could be scathing about, but I'm not putting in the research (reading wikipedia) to get enough material for a paragraph on the subject. I can stomach reading about the US navy, but thinking about that other aquatic organization gives me the ick.

 

I’m fairly sure Maverick won’t have the same lasting impression as the original, but I also know it’s not trying to. A sequel in the narrative sense moves the story on; keeping some underlying themes and concepts, whilst developing them. Ultimately they aim to supplant the original, successful or not. Tenga Topa gun maverick isn’t interested in moving forwards, it and a lot of modern sequels to 80’s classics have got more in common with a prequel if anything, ticking off a set of references and nods to the status quo. This is how modern ‘generative AI’ works; a scatter shot approximation of what it was fed. If the machines were trained on our cultural, no wonder they’re not creative.

 

Tron legacy was more forward looking. Yikes.

Stick fight: the games

 

Stick fight: the games

I invite you, slovenly constituted reader, to invoke powers hence untapped. Imagine with me; if only for a fleeting moment. Set the scene in hues of deepest black and orange, no wait - noir and ochre, add strings and flutes and drums: their pace quickening. Garnish the moment with the brutal glare of the sun’s gaze, the sink of sulphur and knowledge that only one man may live.

 

We stand equidistant, hands at our hips, four desperados, blue, red, yellow and green, for whom words have failed, and all that remains is the cradle of our heritage. 3,2,1 lunge. Hands run along the grain of the oak grips, we squeeze off wild shots, snapping the air with their howls. Screams shatter the tension like glass. Falling into cover, our hearts pound, sweat pours as every sinew strains to cling to life.

 

Red and yellow, rising like the dawn, turn their guns on each other. Hammers fall and blood sprays. Yellow takes a shot to the shoulder: their arm flies out wildly, hosepipe in its movement. It sends him off balance. The revolver races from his hand. Red’s head is whiplashed, lashing the air with yet more red. He’s dead.

 

Before he can hit the ground green is up, sparks fly from the barrel of his gun, nailing yellow in the side again. Green is seizing the moment by the throat; he jumps over cover, gun arcing down to lay the deathblow on yellow. He chokes. Yellow's foot, in a flurry of movement plants itself in his chest, his limbs shoot out spasmodically. The gun fires, nailing the already dead red. No redemption to be found.

 

Yellow is on him now, fists like a torrent of hail, he wails, wailing on green too stunted to process this reversal until finally he slumps down, and quietly expires.

 

Blue, the bastard, the dalliance dilettante, waits behind cover. Cradling his firearm, watching coldly while all but the pigs fly. Yellow, holding his claret soaked side, snatches a gun off the floor, and takes aim.

 

When blue doesn’t move, yellow inches closer, and closer. Until at last, blue doesn’t move just one too many fucking times, yellow screams,

”Shit on it!”

He fires wildly, leaps and spins and comes down with all the unfettered malice of a Valkyrie. There is an exchange. Here’s what’s traded: blows, bullets, insults, and a life. Yellow stands with a golden crown resting on their head. Blue lays with a glassy expression, laid out to rest.

 

Then the scene changes, the items swap around, but the ordeal repeats.

 

This is stick fight’s joy, sudden focused bouts of hyper violence, done to stick figures of course. While subjected to increasingly chaotic level designs and to the fickle whims of anyone wielding a snake based weapon, I'm not talking metal gear here.

 

We as people have a fascination with violence, one might suggest some evolutionary or cultural benefit of such, but really that’s beside the point. We have the horny now, and it needs indulging, or at least we like to think it does. The problem is, hurting people actually fucking sucks; or at least that’s what I keep insisting to myself: my experiments with flies and small rodents supports a different conclusion.

 

Movies are nice, but they lack the agency of games. While many games are starting to feel too realistic to depict hyper violence with all its kinetic rapture intact. Violence, like sex, largely lies in our own fantasies, hence why its depictions are best served stylized. Stick fight then is fun abstracted violence, caffeine free Pepsi max. Its lobbying system is really straightforward; taking place inside the game itself to do away with any menus, and it’s a fun way to kill a while on the sofa or over the interwebs.

 

As well as being violent, each round is an exercise in game theory; but that’s just a pretentious way of saying be careful not to be beaten while you beat others. Don’t let your own shotgun knockback send you flying into lava. Avoid snakes, no really, they’re hateful fuckers. And if ever you see a laser beam on a pivot: get to cover without hesitation.

 

I don’t think there’s much more to be said about it than that. It’s a very simple game that feels a bit like the web flash games of fifteen ago, but is much more polished in its design. So I won’t waste any more of your time gushing about it, unless you kept reading past that last comma, at which point you’re just reading another dollop of endless word salad that isn’t furthering any particular point other than to call attention to its own redundancy and lack of context, and so by your very reading it you become part of a vacuous moment that just doesn’t seem to have 

What is Oppenheimer's Lol Elo? who does he main?

 

I’ve been trying to decide how to feel about Oppenheimer. Deciding how you feel isn’t simply a process of deciding how you feel internally, but how that feeling relates to external social structures. It’s a question of how one wishes to present themselves to history, to your friends and loved ones. The boundary of self, the shield of absolute terror, is powerful yet illusory, unlike the power of the atomic bomb, which feels illusory but is, in the final instance, wack!

I was distracted by too many ‘big’ actors, I don't mean Andre the giant, I mean that films are often coded in such a way as to target our attention onto key characters because they are played by the tent pole figures. The film is packed with very recognizable faces with only faintly recognizable names and personalities. As such I understand the film entirely as x’s character talking to y. With the exception of Albert Einstein, who for once isn’t talking about saving energy on a smart meter I don't have.

Perhaps neoliberalism wears the guise of history like a triumphal roman general wears the guise of Jupiter for a day. Perhaps? But to say such a thing falls far short of the pretentious level Oppenheimer aspires to.

‘Quantum physics is unintuitive’ is a platitude often mentioned in the film, probably because it’s a recurring meme in introduction to quantum physics talks. It’s the speaker's way of saying, “please don’t switch off then this doesn't make sense, it won’t for a while, you’re not expected to grasp it right away.” which is predicated on an assumption that there is something to be gasped.

I feel it was a bold directorial decision to import this unintuitive dynamic into the film itself, while also inverting it; using the mystical hand wavy language that usually side-lines a talk about complex mathematical topics, to side-line the structural elements of storytelling.

It’s 22nd July 2023, this scene is in black and white, though it only exists as a text exchange on a messenger app. A friend explains why we shouldn’t necessarily bother with Oppenheimer. He is played by, (Googles actor) Oscar Isaac, but will only appear in this one scene. His testimony in this closed session left Christopher Nolan reeling from the psychic shock: when Nolan really wanted a public battering to martyr himself to.

 

“Hard truths but I'm giving Oppenheimer a 3/10”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

“Someone needed to tell Nolan to shut up”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

“Westworld season 3 energy”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.exe

 

“Also I thought he was going to ride the bomb and go yee haw but he didn't do that wtf”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

The only time I truly felt like I got a vivid feeling for the characters were during the more surreal scenes. They’re very evocative and great ways to communicate strong emotion. I walked away (closed the tab I was watching it on) wishing there had been more of that, but upon reflection I'm glad they were used sparingly and to great effect.

Sparingly and to great effect the dialogue was not. The dialogue largely functions to insist on a level of cohesion that simply does not exist, forcibly stitching one scene to a previous and future scene. The idea of an overarching plot is illusory, like red string between desperate newspaper clippings, the ideas I mentioned in the first paragraph, which the term illusory anchors to this one, is about deciding how I felt about something, but call-backs are not the same thing as cohesion, because this paragraph/scene doesn’t exist in its own right but as a crossroads tying other crossroads together: which as I’ve just demonstrated isn’t that complex or difficult, but it is obtuse.

I just remembered there’s a bunch of black and white scenes, again, which are all from Robert Downey jr.’s perspective. I’ve looked up some film interviews where the cast explain why it’s in black and white, just so there’s no ambiguity in your reading of the subtext. We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong answer. We wouldn’t want anyone to think about it too hard. Doesn’t Cillian Murphy look pretty when he’s angsty, love it!

My thoughts deep coming back to David Lynch and twin peaks: large casts, long stories that don’t always lead anywhere, surreal scenes, interconnectedness and symbolism, and an interrogation of the American perspective. In the return there is even a scene with the trinity bomb test. There are a lot of parallels here, but they are parallels never intersecting or coming any closer to make a meaningful connection along any axis. I’m going to repeat this point in the next paragraph, and build on it a little.

I wanted to draw my conclusion by comparing the two, but they aren't in conversation with one another, just like Robert Downey jr.’s and Cillian Murphy's characters. In an attempt to structure the piece I felt the need to invent an antagonist for the film, to give it a sense of final conflict, but as with a fair few Christopher Nolan films these days, the real antagonistic force in the story was Oppenheimer all along.

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

Fade to black.

 

 

Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

In a gentle star port out beyond the cares of wistful old terra; I watch the ships come and go from a sleepy little lounge. Maybe it’s just me? Sagging down, face pressed into white table cloth. I watch the effervescence flitter away in my Andorran chardonnay. Head heavy from long hours over the inky expanse of night, I pull up at her approach; I’ve seen plenty of stars before, but none that twinkle quite like her.

I try to smile, like the fool that I am, high-G acceleration day after day have done a number to this old mug. The Cybrex interface has left me with a slight tremor in my features. I must look like an old mutt in the pound. I certainly feel like one.

I don’t catch her eye, lucky me, another chance to straighten out at a clinic before picking up where we left off. It doesn’t feel like a lifetime ago, but it does feel like a dream. Even more cliché, but it’s true, I’m not trying to be corny: it’s just the way the implants make me.

A day later, the repairs are done, and I’m back in my shell; hauling cargo across an endless night. I just sit there and let the computer think it all over for me. I twiddle my thumbs and make those few minor adjustment now and again. I watch the stars flicker, I try to make friends with a few; me and proxima hit it off, she’s a riot, a real out there gal. The loneliness is setting in again, nothing like the stars to remind you how small you are.

I’ve been punching this run for the better part of a week, and the money’s good, but the only way to spend it is on a better ship, more features, and bigger engines. Whoop tee doo! Worth the overtime for sure.

We pilots aren’t like other people, and we’re not big on mirrors either. We haul ass, make bank and haul more ass. No time for a family, no time to stop and talk to the fifteen trillion souls of this galaxy, I pay fines, buy fuel and have my virtual therapy all through the same screen. I can’t remember the last time I took a stroll, or smelt flowers. Heck, all the shrink has to do is run down the clock, I’ve got more problems than they’ve got hours in the day.

I overshoot an orbital and come careening around at a 1/10th C, sloppy piloting. It’s faster to let the ship fly itself, but I got to feel something. Pilots need buzz: you hear that a lot. Out amongst the stars there’s nothing but a low thrum on frame shift drive. If you can make your soul feel that; make it buzz, just a little, then it ain’t so bad.

I think there’s some kind of war happening off somewhere deep on the edge of known space. That’s all I’ve got for news. There’s some factions back home got beef with one another, but I can’t tell one from the other, it’s all the same to me. They pay the same, issue the same fine; have the same rules, customs, regulations, demands. I’m not sure what they have to disagree over? How about the font size on a liability waver? Big whoop, thanks for the waste of recycled air. Back to shipping.

My shrink says I need an outlet, so a flash some cash on a combat model and go prowling for blood. It’s alright, certainly up the pace of things a little; though it doesn’t quite sit right with me. As I watch the flashing lights, and trails of shrapnel spill into the void. I feel as though pieces of me are flying off with them. No, I don’t mean my ship, I mean myself; though at this point that’s not a marked distinction. I wanted to visit the stars, and here I am taking out my frustration by ending the lives of two bit crooks. I’m doing the laws job for them, a janitor in space taking out just another form of trash.

I wanted to visit the stars, but there’s a thin layer of glass and million miles of void between me and touching her face. Space however is cold and empty, which is how I know I belong out here.

Marvelling at the scope at my own ignorance: BVGROTI takes on media empires with wanton abandon

 

It’s a tale as old as time (2008) Iron man film movie experience made super hero films kind of mainstream or whatever. People watched them before that, and they were alright, but the momentum of pumping them out became more of a thing at that point. This is the standard opener of a trope that had become tired and worn out, a thing that people are getting more and more sick off.

 

Superhero-fatigue fatigue. People are getting increasingly tired of commentary about superhero fatigue and these online articles are being pumped out at ever faster rate, so that new hot takes don’t feel fresh or as interesting because of their sheer volume and repetitiveness, not to mention repetitive. Every time a super hero film comes out, which is more frequent than the tubes at peak times, it is accompanied by a super hero fatigue commentary. With outlets commenting on whether this is the straw that will break the camel's back in what has become a jenga of mixed metaphors, and forced similes like trying to cut a dead whale open with a spork.

 

I don’t chase trends, I preempt them in order to maximize my clicks and revenue. I’m already tired of superhero-fatigue fatigue and have grown disillusioned with my own review despite it still going fairly strong with a few ups and downs as is to be expected from any medium. I think this will be the end of the genre of metacommentary, any second now, purely because speculation and citing other think pieces is easier than saying something new, and saying nothing simply isn’t an option.

 

The above paragraph isn’t even insightful, it just explains a business that everyone already understands, but in such a snarky way as to count as a take. The genre of superhero-fatigue fatigue-fatigue is as tired and trite as the thing it’s attempting to comment on, mostly because of the media ecosystem it exists in is one in the same. It’s made of the same fundamental incentives, a form of memetic parasitism, unable to actually kill its host but slowly sucking on its vitality. Like how a poorly tacked on simile, can, or quite often will, ruin the pacing of a paragraph and make it harder for the reader to remember what you even on about and re-read the dam thing.

 

The first known depiction of the oroborus is in the 14th century bce or bc for those that don’t feel the extra letter actually does anything to separate the system from its ecclesiastical origin, (like the rest of post enlightenment thought.) found in the tomb of king tutankhamen, aka king tut for those that were often chided by him. In this version its about the union of gods of life and death and the ascendency of aten or whatever and enough exposition. It would make a really cool film, with lots of big budget SFX and a totally forgettable sound track, and then some other schmucks will do an adaption of the mahabharata which will lack any understanding of the SOURCE MATERIAL… I’m not even synthesizing here. This is just a one:one graft.

 

Google news dates the first article about superhero fatigue to 2013. I’m not going to go more in depth because I am intellectually lazy. The next is in 2015, and there's a few every year with a marked absence during covid times (wonder why?). It really kicked off big in late 2022 and has only intensified with each new release since. With 5/7ths of the articles listed coming from this period (there are 7 pages of results for the term, and late 2022 onwards is page 5 to 1, that’s why i used that number, i am very, yes!)

 

A fair number of the articles talk about how a given film overcomes the fatigue, Like The Ol’Superman of freddy Nietzsche triumphing over his own nihilism (would not make for a good adaptation unless they cast Leonardo decaprica sun as fred and he rocked the full brush tash.) that might just be the winning combination to overcome superhero fatigue!  

 

Thing that is popular continues to be popular is perhaps the driest take imaginable, so you need a supposed adversary to generate a story: One with all the same powers as the hero but set on making their life harder. It’s reasonable to assume a genre will have its day and eventually move on, I’m sure no one thought cowboy films would last forever, but was there a continual commentary of how each film overcame cowboy fatigue? I am genuinely asking this, I have not looked it up, but my guess is no?

 

To foresee and preempt the downfall of this narrative is to replicate its structure, to comment on how the superhero fatigue genre continues in spite of its evident tiredness is to become it entirely. It’s an ouroboros, that smacks of the reddit comment section and no amount of self-awareness can excuse it. This article is a waste of your time and mine! Tune it out like white noise and get on with your lives. Who cares about the streams of articles that deserve to be written by chat bots, go read Candide: that sounds pretentious but it’s just a lot of toilet humor and gags, it’s not a hard read either: it’s easier to consume than this and is more fun too.

The Odyssey of Valheim. How does it hold up compared with the masterwork of James Joyce?

 

Telemachus:

It is first thing in the morning and the argument over readiness is in full swing, one player is gathering the last of their gear, debating on what and which to bring; weighing the cost in a purposeful deliberate but slow process. Across a small stretch of grass sits the jetty and the waiting boat. Another player sits by the oars, calling out and making the urgency of their need to depart felt. I myself dither between two positions.

Nestor:

Let me explain to the class, we’re playing Valheim, a Viking styled survival game it’s got a smattering of other games features, with some of its own charm. A flawed game, for sure, but a useful vehicle for this review: this is my third play through.

I strut along the pier to the waiting ship; the pier was as Stephen Daedalus puts it, ‘a disappointing bridge.’

Proteus:

We set off crawling against the wind and turn off to go up a river, there sits my own equally disappointing bridge, shoddy around the edges, and well…at once we realise the mast is too tall, and so the midsection of the bridge is unceremoniously brought down, and hastily altered.

I consider it the antithesis of London Bridge. This is where the book first really lost me, somewhere in the endless milling of thoughts, I lost the thread of what Joyce was really writing about, but I feel that was somewhat the point. The seemingly chaotic jumble of thoughts, yes thoughts, warts and all. Strangely punctuated? Did in-fact present themselves, very convincingly. My own attempt to invoke confusion here is far less clever: a disappointing abridge, though one without pier, for that was left behind by this point. Adieu.

 Calypso

It’s at this point the book brings us round to our protagonist. Takes it a fair ol’while tho.

Valheim is structured into a series of regions, with bosses for each, in an open world. Each region has its own tiers of mobs and environmental hazards, going up in layers that require by design the previous to be completed before real progress can be sought in the next.

This is less based on grinding personal stats and more around grinding food, armour and weapon types; which means you essentially are what you eat, and are only as big as the stick you carry. When cooking it perfectly possible to burn ones food and get coal. Much like Leopold bloom in this chapter of the book, where he burns his breakfast kidneys, while bring his adulterous wife: Molly, breakfast in bed. I had a similar arrangement with a smelter.

Lotus eaters

Back on the boat we take a different course to our previous, avoiding the grave markers from our previous expedition. Before I can tab out and look for some relaxing music to slap on during what is likely to be a lengthy trip, we instead reminisced about that prior adventure and decide that this voyage will be hopefully be different.

It is in this chapter we learn bloom has an erotic penpal, and uses a pseudonym to avoid getting caught. My own character in Valheim is named sten ormlegger meaning stone-snake-leg or as I like to think of it, rock hard big cock. There are three other infrequent players on our server not participating on the voyage, one using my real name, another using my screen name, and the third simply titled, “better than you,” an attitude I find I have an affinity for.

Hades.

The prior voyage was one of suffering; we build a low tier raft and sailed down the coast into the second tier area called the black forest. The boat was painfully slow, and so we pulled in at a set of ruins that we mistook for a cave and were set upon by a horde of angry forest creatures. Three died as we ran it back to the boat, the creatures followed into the water, pelting us with rock until the raft was smashed, and we drowned.

Aeolus

Out on the waves, with the winds at our backs, we started chatting about the day’s news and the general politicking of Westminster. There is very little else for us to do in game at the point other than hope the winds stay favourable, which they won’t.

In this chapter Leopold bloom narrowly misses running into Stephen Daedalus at a newspaper office, they’ll be of much importance to one another later in the story however, at this stage I can’t see what the two threads of analogous discourse are in the review, perhaps we will never know.

Lestrygonians

In the black forest lurks the trolls, they are blue, wear loincloths and are tall as trees. One must use the forest as a shield between you and them, or else one will find themselves quite dead. The only issue is they are strong enough to topple trees and smash rocks with their fists. In a reversal of fortunes of dear Odysseus, we have only lost a single craft to the man eating giants, during an ill-fated voyage by one of our players up a river. They can in fact toss rocks.

Scylla and Charybdis

The game has a fairly low level of graphical splendour; it’s nice enough to look at sometimes, just not in that perfectly rendered horse plop kind of way. Think ps1 graphics with shaders and better lighting. The debate on this issue, during our voyages, has been considerable and repetitive. One player asserts, “it looks like arse,” the other counters saying it’s stylised, and really good actually”

This misses the point entirely. The game is really quite small: Only a few gigs. I don’t much care to bloat my hard-drive with 4k textures that I wouldn’t give two shits about even if I could load them.

Why, oh why, do games ship with high end textures as bloat ware, this shouldn’t be necessary on a PC. How hard would modularity be to implement, given some games have additional optional textures packs in excess of 30gb, not super hard I’d gather.

Wandering rocks

In the book this chapter consists of a bunch of short views from a whole host of characters, if you think I have a way of alluding to that is the scope of this review you are sorely mistaken. It took me a while for conceive a debate on hamlet as being close enough to a rönt on graphics bloat.

Sirens

It’s fast approaching 4pm (3.39pm) as I write this and I need to throw my pizza dough together for my supper. So to save on chatter I’ll talk of that thing that so often tempted us off course. The open ocean in Valheim is populated with sea monsters that stalk any so misfortunate to enter. Island hoping is safer but far slower. The voyage we undertake after this one would take a full hour and a half, on the way out and a mere twenty minutes on the return, after a player joined the server and said travel on the open sea is far safer than we had assumed. This is the voyage I will write about from now on.

Cyclops

During our circumnavigation of the coastlines, we came close to third and fifth stage biomes, so that as we rowed slowly over choppy seas, leaches from the swamp swam after us in a meagre attempt to pester. We largely ignored them, and hoped in turn they would ignore us. Yet they kept probing in an attempt to unsettle, mindlessly blind and hostile, unthinking things.

Bloom is this chapter is confronted with a set of Anti-semitic remarks directed at his person while in the pub. Not bothering to hang around long after that, he first politely ignores, then corrects them, and leaves. In so doing he displays a degree of wit, in his use of deflection and decorum, that could never be expected of his monstrous detractors. The rules here are inherently unfair because where bigotry is normalised they are held to an entirely different standard. They are blind to this privilege of course, bigots being narrow sighted Cyclops.

The chapter stuck with me, it’s a very accurate depiction of interacting with a bigot; which in truth has little to do with Valheim, thankfully.

Nausicaa

One need not romanticise this game, turning around to see it wondering the shores: it is as dishevelled as our Leopold bloom, but mistake not: like him, it has charm in abundance. There are simple flat textures when using portals. The sounds in caves are looped in a very predictable pattern, and graphics are very simplistic, as is the games structure and progression (yes, unlike Ulysses)

The open ended nature of it, and the capacity for a situation to go from fine to fuck very quickly makes it really quiet engaging on occasions; while at other times it’s relaxed and laid back. it’s a nice mix and it feels good enough to play, at least early on that none of these are really deal breakers. The same cannot always be said of Ulysses, see the next chapter.

Oxen and the sun

I don’t know if this review will be at all amusing, alea iacta est, In Ulysses this chapter is a progression of writing styles culminating in the present of 1920, consequently it becomes more comprehensible as it goes on, simply because Iċ ne sprece Englisċ. Perhaps the same can be said for this review? For it is debatable after reading if i can really speak English.

 

Circe

We find our Promised Land, where the second boss was located, we set up a little portal home, ran back to get some much needed food for the voyage; then off again to bring the boat to home. We waited a little time for our other player to join us, but didn’t really want to hang about, so left promptly.

Eumaeus

Back at the village one of the players was defending it from a mob attack, luring them away from the settlement before they can smash it all to bits. These happen periodically and generally set about ruining’s one’s day. The game has a fair few “fuck you,” aspects and this is one of them. Combat is largely about managing stamina, and stunning one’s opponents, it’s definitely in the same vein as dark souls but less tight in its execution. I’ve still yet to decide what the point is in the special attacks.

Ithaca

The building system is a lot of fun. There a need to properly support structures, and allow smoke to leave closed rooms; mistakes are easily rectified. These limitations are little challenges to seed creativity, just to get the ball rolling. Everything snaps together nicely and it still looks fine when it doesn’t so it’s quite visually forgiving too.

My own home morphs and expands as required but others are more purposeful. Some building tree houses, elaborate in detail. While others build interlocking struts that are angled in a way that make the entire structure feel precarious. There is fun to be had if one wants it, but building something just good enough is done easily enough, if it’s not your bag.

The nice feature of this is that a well-furnished the home improves the rested buff, meaning that having a nice home does actually confer a gameplay advantage.  

Penelope

In summery Valheim is definitely a game, and one best played with friends. If you’re wondering who is Penelope/Molly Bloom in this review, it is you dear reader, faithful or not, I wait until the very end to consider your perspective and do so in the custom of sailors, fleetingly.

Cloudpunk: lost like tears in rain

 

…loading //:: Ice_breaker.Mc

 

The genre of cyberpunk has an unspoken rule. Wikipedia defines the genre as lowlife and hightech, which functionally speaking is fine. The bvgroti has his own stipulations. The bvgroti is a fanatic. He reads gibson like it’s scripture. Adhering to it harder than a computer does a line of code. Bvgroti knows that cyberpunk is when tech breaks society, and consequently society becomes incomprehensible and incohesive. A cyberpunk protagonist who has any idea of what’s going on? Yeah? Nice oxymoron, you Wilson.

 

I was given Cloudpunk by a friend; they didn’t say why, but they said it was up my alley: they were right.

 

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You play as a delivery driver, just arrived in the city, working their first night on the job for an illegal delivery company: cloud punk. The city is falling apart. Systems fail at random and the city engineers have no idea what’s going on. If you smell social allegory, I have some good news for you cupcake, your brain isn’t totally fried yet. Lets stick some trodes.

 

The gameplay isn’t complicated, you have a hover car, you fly it about the city, picking up and dropping off packages while heavy synth music and rain hammers down from on high. You meet characters along the way, they all have a lot of personality squeezed into a few fleeting lines. You get out your car and walk around sets of interconnected platforms, where you can buy noodles and watch the ceiling of clouds pulsate in swirling mauve tinted patterns

 

Days later I'm talking to a friend pointing out how so many of the characters in this game are very obvious sci-fi references, he hadn't noticed. The hardboiled android detective Huxley is my favorite character, when i tell him he goes quiet for a moment, at the time I didn't really notice.

 

The game is pretty even though it’s rendered in chunky pixel form. The character models don’t really line up to their head art, but none of that bothered me, it uses its style to go for scale, having large busy environments that won’t melt your gpu because their pixels are the size of your fist. What it does with the environment is smother you with ambience, it’s very immersive, better than any stimsim.

 

The emphasis on the game is not the challenge, the way it keeps you engaged with the story is the decisions the player is given; i don’t think the decision affect the story in any meaningful way, but they clearly affect other characters, and i can’t help but care a bit about them; asking the player to make judgment calls about individuals with limited information and with questions that often exist in gray scale. It shouldn’t work, but the questions are often actually interesting and with no clear answer.

 

My favorite was the quarantine block. There is a gas leak in a city block, you have room for three people in your car, there are six people to choose from, the company wants to make sure the job pays for itself. Some of the people are horrible, there is a CEO who doesn’t know what company he runs, a rude scientist, a haunty posh woman (Mrs Octavia Butler). Then there are the nice but poor people, a retired army sarg, an android fresh out the box, and a kind doctor.

 

To my shame I left the new android behind and took the posh woman. I had dropped her off at an apartment earlier in the game. I had met her husband, an android; they had both been so privileged that they barely saw me as a person, but they were happy together and that meant something to me. If i hadn’t known them, would i have picked differently? I didn’t know the others; they could have had family too… fuck.

 

Each delivery is its own little story, and they often link back and reference one another. There’s a lot of emphasis on android and automata as second class citizens, it’s used mostly as a race allegory, and the story is very quick to stress the wealth divide and how exploitative the system is. It leaves one with a lot to think about, and while cruising around the city; that’s what I was doing, quietly mulling over the things i’d been seeing, the lite challenge supports the story by giving it room to breathe, it’s good game design.

 

This all culminates in the driver meeting the city's emergent Ai consciousness and being asked to sort the mess out. How? Delivery and choice making, of course. Needless to say the story is loaded with the feels, I was surprised at how moving it was, that each character with so little dialogue manages to connect so easily with me. It’s a lovely short little game. Best experienced and not taken secondhand.