Tag: ps5

Reviewlets: Two thumbs up, one thumb down

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

My usual line on Beyoncé is that I’m a big fan of Beyoncé as an entertainer and maybe not such a big fan of her music. I buy everything pretty religiously as it comes out but what usually happens is that there are a few tracks from any given album that I like a lot and I can take or leave the rest of it. Her collaboration with her husband was an exception, and I liked her live album a lot, but Cowboy Carter is the first studio release from her where I genuinely feel like every single track is a banger. It is emphatically not a country album, despite the existence of maybe three country-ish songs (Protector, Jolene, and Texas Hold ‘Em) and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton both doing short spoken cameos. I don’t know what the hell it is. She calls it “a Beyoncé album,” and that’s just gonna have to be good enough for us mere fucking mortals. There’s opera on this damn thing. She’s doing whatever the hell she wants, and it’s amazing, and sooner or later I’m going to have to reconsider that disclaimer because she’s starting to stack up exceptions.

Oh, and speaking of the Jolene cover: it slaps. It’s a great update to the song and I love it. I love the original too. I love other updated versions of it. Music is good.

Shōgun getting a new Hulu miniseries somehow led, not to me not actually watching the miniseries, which for the record I’ve not heard a single bad thing about, but ordering the books, which are currently only being printed in two volumes because the motherfucking thing is 1500 pages long. I’m not even sure why I did it, to be honest, because I broke my current “don’t buy new shit” reading rule to do it, and even once they got here I was convinced that I was going to read a hundred pages and quietly put them away because they were going to turn out to be super fucking racist.

So naturally I blew through the first (700-page) volume in about a day and a half. I have not picked up the second yet, but I’ll have it read by the end of Spring Break. And it’s interesting– I kind of want to compare it to Gone with the Wind, except Gone with the Wind is a really amazing story that was written by a racist who wanted to promote racist ideas and is chock-full of racist characters, but Shōgun is a really amazing story chock-full of racist characters (basically every person in the book thinks everyone of a different ethnicity or religion from them is a subhuman, and some of them don’t even extend humanity to all of “their” people depending on their economic status) but I don’t think the book itself is racist, nor does reading the book make me want to look askance at James Clavell. If anything, I think Clavell would land on the side of the Japanese if he had to, and while I’m only halfway through the book it’s not remotely as white-savior as I was expecting it to be. Like, this would be a fascinating book even if Blackthorne wasn’t in it at all; the book doesn’t really revolve around him at all.

There’s an interesting article on Vox about how historically accurate the show is; the condensed version is “good enough,” and while I’m hardly an expert I certainly haven’t hit anything that had me looking twice. One way or another, I think I can probably recommend this pretty whole-heartedly, with a caveat that, again, I’m only halfway through right now and who knows what the next 800 pages will bring.

Fuck this game.

I finally deleted it today, after giving it way too many chances over the last, what, ten days? two weeks? since it was released; I was ready to fight Sony for a refund after twenty minutes, and while with a couple more hours of gameplay I’m willing to admit that the game does get better after a completely fucking inexcusably bad first half hour, the bug I ran into today where every NPC everywhere was constantly hostile for no reason at all and nothing I could do would fix it was the last straw. The game is just deeply fucking mediocre, riddled with bugs and a ton of absolutely bewildering gameplay decisions that I refuse to defend, and it’s not getting any more of my time, I give up. I’m not going to fight with anyone who enjoys it because there’s a kernel in there that could be fun under the right circumstances, and I think I was starting to get into it before the bug, but after a couple of hours of experimenting and looking at message boards and trying workarounds, I am not about to start over and I’m done.

I really feel like I ought to throw a movie review in here too, but I haven’t seen anything new in forever. Oh well. Let’s pretend Shōgun counts for both.

#REVIEW: Nobody Saves the World (PS5, 2022)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games3 Comments

I haven’t reviewed a video game in forever, for a whole bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that that for a long time I was saving that for the YouTube channel, and– perhaps more saliently– it’s been forever since I actually beat anything. My gaming backlog, assuming I’m going back to anything that I started and put down, is literally longer than it’s ever been before, and contains some genuinely good games that I just stopped playing for no good fucking reason and moved, ADHD-style, on to the next shiny thing. I quit playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because it depressed me, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Armored Core 4, and a couple of others are also out there, and I’ve also downloaded The Surge and Sifu for cheap-as-hell and free, respectively, and not touched them yet. It’s too damn much, I tell you! Too much!

I started playing Nobody Saves the World because I’d hit a section of Prince of Persia that my platform skills weren’t up to par with without a lot of practicing and I wasn’t in the mood to beat my head against a wall any longer. Also, I thought I had downloaded a demo, but apparently I bought the entire game, I assume on the cheap, and then … forgot? But I played an hour and a half or so before realizing that I’d accidentally started a whole-ass new game and wasn’t playing a demo, and by then I was stuck. And I don’t mind being stuck, because this is a hella fun game, with its only real drawback being that it’s impossible to stop playing and it took up more of my life than I wanted it to on more than one occasion.

See all those characters up there? With the exception of the wizard Nostramagus, who is the only one with eyes, they’re all you, including the egg. At the beginning of the game, Nobody– a pasty white humanoid who looks more or less like the Pillsbury Doughboy without his clothes, and who, entertainingly, doesn’t appear in the above image– gets a magic wand that lets him change shape. You start off being able to turn into a rat, and over the course of the game gain a ton of other shapes, including a bee, a dragon, a robot, and the aforementioned egg. Each form has its own abilities and powers, most of which can be readily swapped between shapes, so by the end of the game you might be using the Dinosaur but have added the Slug’s mucus trail (seriously) to his abilities and also be borrowing a passive ability from the Bodybuilder that lets you knock enemies back further than you might have before. Everything, and I mean everything, is upgradable, and one of the reasons the game is so hard to put down is that there’s always a reason to play another three minutes– you’re either right on the cusp of gaining a level or a new form or a new power for a form or there’s a dungeon over there that’s ripe for pillaging or you just figured out how to solve a puzzle halfway across the map that requires the power you just unlocked, or or or or or.

It’s kind of repetitive, and at 25 hours for a damn-near completist run I’d say maybe don’t shoot for a completist run, but there’s a world out there to be saved and you’re the doughboy to do it, one way or the other. The art style is lovely and the music is burned into my brain rather unpleasantly and the sense of humor throughout is really great.

My recommendation: Go wander through a big crowd until you get Covid and an excuse to stay home for a week (Screw you, CDC!) and then download this (it’s apparently inexpensive) and go to town.

A poll

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

The scenario: You are a Persian warrior. You are exploring an ancient cursed palace. You come across your corpse with a bow that belongs to your friend sitting next to it. Which of these two things do you find worthy of comment?

#REVIEW: Lords of the Fallen (PS5, 2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games1 Comment

This could have been Game of the Year for me, if it had found a way to stop stepping on its own dick.

Post-Thanksgiving reviewlets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Thanksgiving was nice and peaceful, pretty much exactly the way we all wanted it, and rather than a big meal with a giant turkey we just made a ton of side dishes. Fried pickles and queso and mini cheesecakes and meatballs and a bunch of other shit that probably really doesn’t go together but we did it anyway. A small part of me misses mashed potatoes and stuffing and this corn casserole that is a family dish on my wife’s side of the family, but fuck it; Christmas is three weeks away.

Anyway, I’ve Consumed some Media, to use a deeply odious phrase, so let’s talk about it.

I finally finished Blasphemous II the other day, and other than an enormous and highly annoying difficulty spike on the penultimate boss, I’m a big fan. I turned my YouTube channel back on the other day so if you want to see what the original game was like, feel free (I don’t plan on going back to regular recording, but I wanted to watch some of my videos, so I had to turn the channel back on) but the basic idea is this: Blasphemous II is an outstanding Metroidvania with a deeply weird, pseudo-Catholic skin laid over it, only, like, insanely creepy Spanish occult Catholicism. It’s really something, and I’d love to pick the brains of the people who wrote it because I want to know what they’re like. The sequel smooths out some of the rough edges of the original, removing some bits of nonsense like instadeath from touching spikes and adding some weapon choice, and again, other than that difficulty spike, which nearly led to me putting the game down until I remembered I don’t take shit from video games, I really really enjoyed it.

I know about Neal Shusterman’s Unwind “dystology,” (fuck you, it’s a trilogy that got dragged out to four books because one of them ended up longer than the author wanted) because my students are reading the first book. They really enjoyed it last year and I resolved to read it at some point or another, and then I found a really good deal on the entire set (four books plus a fifth that is apparently a short story collection, by other authors?) and picked it up. There may very well be a full post coming from the series once I’m done with it, but I wanted to complain about something very specific and very weird about the third book: the main characters spend a fair amount of time hiding from the authorities on what is more or less a Native American reservation, only the weird thing is that the book treats all the characters and situations taking place at the res as people we should remember and events we should know.

I was convinced this place had never been mentioned before. I am open about the fact that my recall between books isn’t great; this is a YA book, so I don’t really get to blame my reading comprehension … but this was a lot, and I didn’t remember any of it. So I actually took the step of going back through the first two books today and looking for any mention of this place. And do you know what happened? The first book literally passes over it, saying “this character had some adventures, and we’re not going to talk about them,” and no, that’s not a joke, and I remember noticing it and raising an eyebrow on my first read, and the second book mentions that this one character did some stuff on a reservation during happy adventure time. And that’s it.

It’s obviously possible that the short story book fills us in, or that it’ll happen as a flashback later on or some shit, but this was a really bullshit move. Questioning myself over whether I’d read anything about this place and these characters before seriously affected my enjoyment of the book, and the whole thing was either a deeply bullshit move (if it’s a short story published somewhere else) or a seriously bad authorial decision if it isn’t.

This one’s going to have to be a full post on its own, but before I write it: has anyone out there read this? Because I need to talk to someone about it and hash some shit out before I write a big post out about it. The short version is that I think Sapolsky does make a pretty good case that there’s no such thing as free will … and I don’t care. There’s a lot more to say but that’s the gist. Anybody read it? Let me know.

It’s here

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

This seems as good a time as any to point out that Diablo IV released yesterday, and if you’re the type of person to care about such a thing– and even if you’re not– that evening livestreams are gonna be a thing over at the channel for the next little while. I’m not going to commit to every evening or anything like that because presumably my family wants to see me, but I don’t feel like this game works for my normal half-hour-to-forty-minute video format, so livestreams it is. Here’s a link directly to tonight’s stream; I think a small number of my students showed up toward the end, so chat got kinda lively for the last 15 minutes or so, which was nice. Go check it out, and hopefully I’ll see y’all in there once in a while.

I have updates about Dr. Curry; the short version is that I’ve Done Stuff, but said Stuff hasn’t resulted in any actual, like, action yet. I’ll fill y’all in tomorrow.

Where am I?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video gamesLeave a comment

I need you to understand that when I say I have spent the entire weekend playing this game I mean I have spent the entire weekend playing this game:

It’s a game about fishing. There’s no combat. You fish. I’ve been fishing all weekend. I made my wife make fish for dinner. I’m going to dream about the theme music tonight.

You should play it.

What day is it again?

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games3 Comments

This has been keeping me busy for the last couple of days:

I don’t know how familiar you are with Stray, but I’ve been jonesing to play it literally since the first moment I heard of it, before the PS5 even launched– it was originally talked about as, if not a launch title, something really close to it, and it just came out yesterday. I’ve got two livestreams up at the channel and I’m expecting a third Friday night; the game is short so I might finish it then or it might require one more (and then maybe another to try and snag the trophies) but I’ve been having an absolute blast with it. Even if you don’t normally follow my channel or video game YouTube in general, give this five minutes if you’re a cat person. It’s really cool.