The Mandalorian is Still Good

A very brief post/observation, but I finished ploughing through to episode 7 of The Mandalorian last night and it was the perfect palette cleanser to Rise of Skywalker. Indeed, I realized that The Mandalorian is so much closer to the general feel of classic original Star Wars (while also keeping its own style and pace) that it felt like a much more genuine Star Wars experience than the new movie did.

Anyway.....just a suggestion, that if you like Star Wars but maybe came out of the latest film feeling like you got mental food poisoning, The Mandalorian may be the cure for what ails you.

Key Points on Rise of Skywalker Two Days Later

Okay, it took two days to process this movie, but I think I've landed on the following points of closure for myself (both for the film and the Star Wars series in general). SPOILERS

My kid describes Star Wars IX as "weird and exciting" all at once. He has been practicing lightsaber battles for two days, wants an RC droid model for Christmas and spent some time with me hypothesizing and speculating about the film, which I thought was interesting.....it wasn't just me, essentially, but his directive was more basic an earnest than mine. While I was agonizing over insonsistencies, plot holes and story choices that felt too meta or too contrived, he was more interested in questions like, "Was Rey's dad bad like her grandfather or a good guy? Did her mom survive or did they both die? Why is Rey's lightsaber gold at the end? Why was Leia's lightsaber green at one time and blue another time?" Stuff like that.

My son was not concerned (or annoyed) with things I felt were just bad storytelling; I felt that the shots of an infinite number of star destroyers lined up in endless rows erupting from the planet was just stupidly silly, and a stark contrast from the vaguely more realistic depictions of starship fleets seen in every other Star Wars film (particularly the impressive shots of the Empire's fleet from Return of the Jedi). He wasn't noticing the bizarre pace of the film and its effort to cram two films in to one. But in talking to him about Palpatine and Rey I grew to like the idea that this plot point, as ludicrous as it was, actually made some compelling sense in terms of Palpatine's personality and lengthy backstory, particular his obsession with conquering death. It worked, in principle, even if it did a poor job of establishing the background details necessary for the story to make it work well.

In the end a lot of reviewers are pointing out that a fair chunk of this movie should have actually been the basis for the second film; clearly decisions internally at Lucasarts/Disney were not so focused on making a smart trilogy of movies as much as letting auteur interests of the directors and producers take precedence. I firmly believe that in the hands of a better, more focused director this movie would have worked exceedingly well. But then, I think a storyline that did not bring the emperor back (but still left a biological tie to Rey) while focusing on Kylo Ren as the final enemy would have been a more coherent, tighter script. Ah well! At least now it looks like almost all adult Star Wars fans are united on a common antipathy for the final film, even if  the grounds for that antipathy may be wide and varied.

Thirty Eight Random Thoughts Inspired by Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

I'm not going to review this. I will offer instead some random thoughts which went through my head while watching the ninth installment in the Star Wars saga, and a few that came shortly after. There may be indirect spoilers.

The opening is the single most jarring non-Star Wars-opening scene in the franchise.

The first twenty minutes (which were excruciating) felt like a summary of the middle film  Abrams never got to make.

Who built all these Star Destroyers? Kaminoans? Why did they bury them? Is that good for Star Destroyers....being buried in the planet's crust? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

Oh, I see...so why didn't they just call this movie Dark Empire - the loose adaptation?

Somebody thought these Leia scenes were a good idea.

These are painful to watch, and not in a "poor Carrie is dead" way, but a "Wow, this dialogue is desperately trying to wrap itself around the cutting room floor leavings of a dead woman's off takes from two prior films.

I like how they're trying to make a poor dead woman's last words recorded on film into profound mentor conversation.

Did Daisy Ridley feel awkward talking to a dead woman's ghost scanned in in post? Because it sure felt awkward to watch!

Why does Poe keep "skip jumping" into active debris zones? Hell, why does he need to do this other than JJ Abram's rule of cool approach to SF?

This movie is starting to feel like the Star Trek: Into Darkness of the Star Wars side of life.

Oh hey the movie got a plot going that wasn't trying to do exposition catch-up and it got interesting for a moment.

Lando got a big happy crowd reation.

Oh look a Sith Holocron.

Sure do wish the Knights of Ren had some depth or dialogue or really anything.

There a lot of stuff quietly being borrowed from The Old Republic series in this movie.

Oh snap I was totally right about Rey's parentage!

The movie is trying hard to give Poe and Finn new love interests, albeit with the briefest of effort to do so....wonder why....

Poe was a smuggler before?

That we are just learning this fact about Poe three movies in is a tribute to how clever and well thought out this trilogy has been.

Hey cool Endor's Moon really does have a grassy plains and a ragin ocean with a chunk of the Death Star in it.

So far the idea that the Death Star II had large debris raining down intact on Endor is the most believable part of this movie's logic straining levels of excess.

Rey can heal? Hmmmmm.

Kylo's guilty conscience moment almost feels like it was part of the plan all along. I think it was!

Oh look there's Luke's X-Wing, and it's covered in plant debris just like when we saw it in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than covered in rust from being submerged for a decade.

Good to know force ghosts are really efficient at interacting with things.

Okay, well maybe it's just Luke's force ghost.

I just realized Anthony Daniels as C3P0 has all the funniest lines in this movie.

So Star Destroyers carry world-destroying guns now. Sure, why the fuck not.

As a total aside I've been reading Justice League Odyssey and for some reason feel like there are some funny and vague parallels with this movie.

I didn't understand the real purpose of the tiny cone robot until stopping at Target after the movie where my kid begged me for toy lightsabers and a RC model of that robot. Ahhh now I understand.

Final sequence is just....like....why are they doing this? Why does anyone think this ridiculous CGI excess is a good and necessary thing? Maybe it is for the contemporary movie audiences but...seriously, it's not even remotely as interesting as what they did in the prior two films. Rogue One had a better end battle.

There's some good Kylo/Rey/Palpatine closure here. Except for the part about how Palpatine got closure like 36 years ago but whatever.

Oh hey look, Ian McDarmid actually is acting and chewing the scenery! This is good.

Oh, Ian McDarmid is now shooting enough force lighting into space to disable the entire Resistance fleet. Alrighty then. All those great Imperial public works were for naught, I guess.

The audience really ate up that final Rey and Kylo moment. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.

The whole "single weak transmitter" subplot to focus the ship/beast rider action on was so utterly contrived. Whyyyyyy.

Chewbacca may have only thought he was dead in this movie, but after seeing the movie himself he'll WISH he really had a moon dropped on him! Ba-dam!


I honestly never thought I'd see both Star Trek and Star Wars reach the point where canonical actual movies feel like bad fanfic, but here we are.

Holiday Buying Guide Part II: Five Cool Gamer Gifts

It occured to me I'd better get another guide out on this since I did a "part 1" already.....time flies when you're working too much to keep on top of the fun stuff!

Here's Five cool gamer-related gifts you can consider if you need a last minute purchase. As I am a well-rounded gamer into a plethora of content, this list will reflect the gamut from video games to paper and pencil RPGs, but absolutely will not talk war or board games because for some reason I have just never been able to appreciate the subtleties of the genre. To be honest, some of these will look like no-brainers as suggestions coming from me; anyone who follows my blog or games with me knows my predilections...

Number Five: Disco Elysium (PC)

When I started playing this I was expecting another obtuse indie RPG which left me desperately wishing for something else, either more complex and realistic or more basic and down to earth.....indie RPGs are all too often extremly narrow in their taste range. Technically, Disco Elysium may have a narrow taste range, but this is by far the finest example of a well-thought out, excellently voice acted, graphically interesting RPG experience that is absolutely unlike anything you will have experienced. It has trace elements of other film, game and literary genres running through it, with your protagonist being a drunkard who may or may not remember being a cop while his inner demons literally hound him, to a deep, intense focus on a single region of a city in deep dystopian trouble. If you have ever watched Twin Peaks, read Blake Crouch, played Deadly Premonition and enjoyed it, then you owe it to yourself to pick up Disco Elysium. If you like complex and interesting character driven RPGs but will punch the monitor if it's yet another story of a sixteen year old blonde kid about to go on his world saving quest.....then you really need Disco Elysium, the ultimate palette cleanser.

Number Four: Alien RPG

I just got my physical copy of the core book, dice and GM screen, but this is a graphically amazing game, a true coffee table set piece for fans of the Alien movies as well as an actually decent RPG. As I told my gaming group: I now have a game which by default lets me tell the stories I normally hack into my Traveller games anyway, but with lots of excellent, visceral art and specific details of the setting's universe. I will write more about this soon, but an excellent book releasing late in the year and well worth hunting down.

Number Three: Astral Chain (Switch)

The only downside to Astral Chain is that it's a Switch exclusive, so if you don't have one then this is not going to be a useful gift suggestion. That said: if you have a Switch, or someone you are buying for has a Switch, and they don't have this game, then you simply can't go wrong. Astral Chain is a futuristic dystopian cyberpunk action title focused on a world in which a handful of trained agents with the ability to harness the powers of extradimensional beings that are invading Earth use that very power to fight the invaders. It's complex, interesting, has a compelling narrative and excellent mission structure and is just so hard to stop playing. Easily my favorite Switch game purchase this year, in a year absolutely crammed with good stuff.

Number Two: Cypher System Revised

This is my permanent go-to system now for multigenre gaming, really weird settings, pretty much any game with my son (who is much better at understanding this game than any of the D&D-alikes), and it's the only system I feel like running these days aside from Pathfinder 2nd edition. Go figure! The Kickstarted revised edition was well worth the asking price, and is fully retro-compatible with the first edition; this changes nothing, just adds lots of extra good stuff and aims for a reorganizational approach to Cypher that allows for a bit more design flex while still being ridiculously easy to get in to. The first major support setting "The Stars Are Fire" also now out, focusing on SF gaming in Cypher.

Number One: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

This has rapidly become my discerning preference for D&D-like gaming. Pathfinder's focus on refining the numeric shenanigans of its predecessors have led to an interesting level of depth, design and lethality that values my time as a GM, provides a wealth of options to the players, but still delivers hardcore on "adventuring is a dangerous business." Encounters can be rough, and we've had more deaths in PF2E than almost any other edition, but the encounters won felt actually earned. The game rewards strategic thinking in play, and while the character generation is robust it eschews the "hours spent min/maxing" headspace of PF1E in favor of getting down to the nitty gritty of doing things in actual play. And play is where it's at; my group can't stop playing PF2E, and we just can't get enough of it.

Cepheus Light - Actual Play Comments and Comparing to Traveller

Our group was down a whopping 50% Saturday night so we decided it was once again time for an alternate game night. We picked Cepheus Light, on the premise that:

Half of us knew Traveller well enough to figure it out;
And the half that didn't would find it easy to pick up. Both assumptions were true.

In fact, knowing Traveller (MGT editions for most; back to CT for me) helped shine a light on why Cepeheus Light is both quick and easy and also where some differences lie. Here's what we noticed:

Character Generation - it's quicker because it drops lots of little stuff from the framework of more conventional MG Traveller (such as life events) and bundles a lot of stuff as alternate/optional rules. That said, we were quick to adopt most of the optional rules (including dumping iron man as a default, adding zero rank skills back in, etc.) since those are additions to the game which make it a tighter, more satisfying experience.

Other observations: the professions included covered most bases nicely. It was weird that the agent profession did not have stealth on the skill list. Most survival and re-enlistment rolls seemed weighted toward the easy end.

Cepheus Light includes a short experience mechanic which is atypical of Traveller but it does work well for a Light system like this, as you don't need to worry about training downtimes...just track XP. CL also wins out when it comes to equipment and augments; the game provides plenty of equipment and the cybernetic augment rules were quickly abused by the players. I designed at least one NPC for the game with psionics, too. The psionic rules are simple and get the job done.

All told, the vets to Traveller generated multiple characters in an hour, and the new players (and a lapsed player) caught on in 30 minutes or so. Cepheus Light as a quick pick-up-and-play system stands firm. When I compare it to Classic Traveller, I still think it could have been made even tighter without much loss of fidelity, though.

Actual play worked pretty much exactly like it does for either edition of MGT or the full Cepheus system; in fact I had to double check and confirm if some things I was using (such as assumption about applying effect) were actually in Cepheus Light or not. As a rule of thumb, if the rule added non-required complexity...it probably wasn't in Cepheus or was an optional rule.

So, in the scenario we played which involved an extraction team landing on a colony world with extremely strict laws to aid a spy in escaping with valued information the game played out fine. The rules reduce the skill system ever so slightly by combining some skills, but these were nominal changes at best; the characters designed felt robust enough for gaming and the combat mechanics had the essence of what was needed for a good shootout.

I included some nonhumans from what the book did offer....odd that we had reptiloids but they were more like "standard lizard dudes" and not the "disguised as the president" types, considering greys are one of the other species on offer. In the scenario, when the reptiloid was defeated they had to pull of his rubber mask which he used to walk disguised among men.

I noticed the vehicle and starship rules were sufficiently slender that using them during play to work up quick vehicles was not out of the question. The starship statblocks were very easy to reference and I felt comfortable at the idea of running a starship combat if needed, though we never got around to that.

Anyway....in the end, it's indisputable that Cepheus makes for an excellent quick night of gaming, can subsitute for a full Traveller experience almost without effort, and is good for pick-up-and-play nights, especially if you roll some pregens first. My main question, though, was whether using Cepheus Light was a better choice than one of my other options, including the full Cepheus Engine, Traveller 2nd edition from Mongoose, or Classic Traveller, which I have in the digest size FFE reprint with a Vargr on the cover.

So....is it?

For me, I think there's probably something to be said for the more nuanced mechanical approach of Classic Traveller, and as much as I like the lighter mechanical elements, I feel like the detail you can get out of CT is just a bit more interesting, even if it means you have more fiddly mechanics to deal with, or a rules set which is a  bit more piecemeal and all over the place.

But...Mongoose's 2nd edition Traveller is a really hard package to beat. It has a solid evolution of the game, and there are clearly lots of influential details from MGT2 floating around in the optional rules sections for Cepheus Light. I can't even say it loses on portability; you can get an almost as portable version of the three books for MGT2 from the box set edition of the core rules, and which include rules missing from CL such as creatures and more details on aliens.

Still....if you want to play something that feels a lot like Classic Traveller as you might remember it (if not in reality) and you like a slimmer design approach, CL is a good fit. Will I use it again? I just might. But for my next serious campaign in Traveller I still think the MGT2 edition is my preferred resource.

Cepheus Light

If you're not familiar with the Cepheus Engine, it's the spiritual OGL-powered successor to Mongoose's 1st edition of Traveller. When they migrated to Traveller 2E, Mongoose managed to put out a very nice looking, useful product....but they left the OGL behind. For third party publishers this really only left them with one choice: keep publishing under the 1st edition Traveller OGL.

Eventually a fully functioning variant of the OGL for Traveller was released from Stellagama in the form of Cepheus Engine, a product essentially compatible with all of the 2D6 versions of Traveller,  designed to provide a Traveller-style ruleset to people who for whatever reason might not be interested in the Mongoose version or the immense 5th edition that exists somewhere in Kickstarter Land. For me, it's a nice ruleset although I do personally prefer Traveller 2nd Edition from Mongoose, which is a very complete engine with lots of changes I like.

Cepheus Light accomplishes very much the same thing MGT 2E and Cepheus Engine does, but in a tighter package that manages to evoke the feel of Original Classic Traveller while actually incorporating key elements from modern design that make it a robust package that straddles a fine line between old school and new, as well as being sufficiently versatile to cover multiple interpretations of Traveller style gaming.

If you're familiar with how ridiculously easy Classic Traveller is, then you'll have a sense of how Cepheus Light works, albeit from the MGT 1E OGL framework. Unlike CT, Cepheus Light aims for a more comprehensive ruleset recognizing the years of additional supplements as well as making it more sufficiently generic so that the players and referee can tailor the game to their own SF universe. There are 12 career choices, for example, as well as rules for augments so you can reflect cybernetics/bioengineering in your setting (a problem with CT, which was published before Cyberpunk left its permanent mark on SF).

Cepheus Light includes streamlined versions of rules for various features, most notably starship design and combat, which includes 19 pages of design rules and a bunch of clean stats for pre designed ships, as well as 10 pages on starship combat, half of which is an example of play. The only failing of this chapter is the fact that it includes no ship maps, a tradition in the Traveller universe of games....but a quick scan through Drivethrurpg.com will reveal hundreds of those you can deploy in a Cepheus Light game if that's your thing.

Unlike Classic Traveller, Cepheus Light is focused on the rules of MGT 1st edition from the OGL so things such as combat work with the more contemporary version of those rules; this may be a welcome style for people who remember the rather clunky modifier tables and armor mechanics of CT. All in all, though, the rules for Cepheus are incredibly straight forward; any Traveller fan will recognize them, and any new gamer will find this edition of the game easy enough to follow along with. It is actually easier to understand (imo) than both the 1st edition MGT rulebook and the Cepheus Engine full rules.

If I have to provide a negative to this: it's that the rulebook itself, while illustrated, is otherwise using fairly generic stock art that is not that exciting or evocative. There is also a tiny section on alien races, but it only provides three examples (greys, reptiloids and insectoids), then refers you to another Stellgama product for more detailed design rules; there are also no rules on creatures. Not including even a page on some design rules hurts the product's universal applicability just a bit.

That said....you get a rule system that far exceeds most packages and at only 108 pages this is still probably the best bang for your buck in SF gaming right now; I'd say it's a better choice even than Classic Traveller which can also be found in POD on DriveThruRPG.com. Check it out! I plan to run an SF game soon using only these rules. I find the versatility in such a small package to be a very welcoming experience.

Deathbat's Highly Biased 2019 Shoppers Guide to Gaming Part I

The problem with writing a shopping guide on a non-monetized blog that is as much a personal exercise in writing for fun as it is for promoting anything out of the goodness of my own heart is that practically anything I advise will always necessarily imply a "YMMV" following it. For example: I happen to think that Terminator: Dark Fate, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Deadly Premonition Origins and The Mandalorian are all fine sources of entertainment. Stellar or for everyone? Well, remember: YMMV

That said.....here are four things you should think about when shopping for that gamer out there, or heck, just for yourself:

Books worth Grabbing
Eberron: Rising from the Last War is actually a really good D&D book and you should totally get it. Preferably with the amazing alternative cover art. If you're not in to D&D then you should also look at Shards of the Broken Sky for 13th Age, a fantastic campaign in the 13th Age world, running from levels 1 to 7. Or for that matter, take a trip to space fantasy land and check out the invaluable new Character Operations Manual for Starfinder, with new classes and options for players.  And of course, if you haven't seen Pathfinder 2nd edition yet, you should! More on that later though.

Portability
The Switch Lite is a cool gadget and worth owning if you are the least bit in to decent handheld, on-the-go gaming experiences. If you have some young tyke or old whippersnapper who might also appreciate a portable gaming experience, this is a no-brainer. Just remember to get an SSD card to go with it! The 32GB onboard memory fills up fast.

Once you have it, if your tastes are like mine then you should grab Deadly Premonition Origins, Assassin's Creed III Collection, Asphalt 9, Astral Chain, Pillars of Eternity and the D&D collections for Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate I and II. Also, check out Legrand Legacy, a worthy retroclassic RPG.

Free to Play King
The best free to play gaming experience on PC currently is Destiny 2. I will argue this objective, holy truth at this point. Sure, Warframe is out there, but that's sort of like comparing Star Trek to Star Wars, if Star Trek is Destiny 2 in this scenario and is about immortal space wizards fighting alien cults in a post-utopian apocalyptic solar system, and Star Wars was Warframe, a game entirely about Guyver-like bodysleeves who are also sort of immortal fighting alien cults in a post-singularity apocalyptic solar system. The main differences are one makes its microtransactions weird and hard to benefit from and the other makes its microtransactions even weirder, harder to benefit from and expensive as $#!*.

Past the Breakpoint
Despite its issues, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is actually a lot of fun, and much better on PC than PS4 (I run into almost no glitches or bugs at 4K on ultra settings on the PC). The graphics at this setting are so impressive I just can't stop treating the game like a beautiful forest/mountain excrusion sim punctuated by moments of intense violence.

Or, you know, you could go play CoD: Modern Warfare with all the sheeple. I will probably get MW as well when the price goes down at some point so I'm not one to gripe.

More advice to come! I plan to rant and rave about all sorts of things from this year now that my work life is calming down and I am finding more time to actually think.

Watching The Mandalorian

Two episodes of The Mandalorian have been released since Disney+ premiered a few days ago. Tonight I decided to bite the bullet and do the free trial, if only so I can see the show for myself rather than hear everyone else talk about it.

First: some Spoilers ahead! I suggest you go watch at  least the first two episodes yourself. If you are not sure it's for you, here's my suggested criteria for taking the time to do so; any one of these will do:

1. You like Star Wars, and have also enjoyed the expanded content beyond just the films;

2. You always thought Boba Fett specifically was a loser but the concept of the Mandalorians deserved more development;

3. Or you played a lot of Star Wars RPGs in the past and always wondered what those would look like on the big screen.

Really though, just enjoying SF on TV is a sufficient criteria. Also, SF with a nice budget.


...Anyway, minor spoilers ahead! A few, I will try not to do much (some reviews I have read don't even do the courtesy of not explaining they are about to broadcast the entire plot, including a huge reveal that I feel is much better experienced in viewing than my telling you what it is).

Right off the bat, my gut impression after the first two episodes is, "It's Lone Wolf and Cub, but with Star Wars trappings." I also liked that it leaned hard into a strong "space western" thematic; you will get shades of classic spaghetti westerns out of this series as well as throwbacks to classic ronin-themed samurai films. I won't explain why, but you will see.

The two shows break with some Star Wars conventions. No classic music; no screen crawl at the start. Fine with me. It does not always break with "Star Wars-isms" though, and some of them are a bit annoying. An example: the Mandalorian approaches a door for a secretive bounty, and is greeted by a robotic eyestalk, just like in Return of the Jedi. This scene is here because of that callback; it doesn't mesh well with the "lore I remember" which raises questions about why a creature I vaguely recall as being some sort of cyborg monk in Jabba's palace would also be on this other unrelated planet. But....the fact that the old Expanded Universe is no longer canon also means perhaps that the robot eyestalk deal is really just a "door answering service" in the outer rim, maybe?

These Star Wars-isms are more annoying in the first episode, but they start to diverge quickly enough as the plot and setting start to take better hold. The events in the series are post-Empire, so take place some time after the Return of the Jedi. The locations all appear to be in a very lawless Outer Rim, and The Mandalorian dives in short order into some serious world building that thoroughly takes advantage of the "show, don't tell" approach. This pays off exceedingly well.

Throughout watching episodes one and two I quickly got in to it for being it's own thing; sure, it's Star Wars, and I sort of feel like I'm watching Star Wars because it keeps throwing things at me on screen that are reminding me its Star Wars....but it's also very much its own style of film, exploring a new niche in the Galaxy Far, Far, Away that we have sort of wanted to see on film for a long time now, but really only seen in books. Arguably it does a better job of this than Rogue One or Solo, both of which tested the waters but maybe were also too timid to really try and expand the idea of what a Star Wars tale could be.

Well, I didn't want to pay for another service....but I'm hooked. If this is indicative of the average quality of what Disney has lined up, I guess it will make for a fun ride.

"Never Go Full Retro" - Gone Retro (console gaming, that is)

So for an early holiday gift I decided instead of spending $100+ on Modern Warfare to get one of these:

For reasons that I will elaborate on more in a moment, I picked up a Playstation 2 slim model for a cheap price and snagged some games with it. The experience of "stepping back" about 19 years to a time when gaming was very, very different in the video game market has been interesting and illuminating....

Some of the impetus for this has been a burnout on my part with this year's never ending wealth of churned Triple-A product and controversies over RMT (real money transaction) schemes that are now the fuel for the "games as a service" approach to the industry that is also quietly killing it. My games on my PC and modern consoles are more or less segregated into two categories: those which I doubt will ever "end" or have no desire for me to stop playing them (I can't be incentivized to purchase more content if I stop playing) such as pretty much any game on the market currently (Call of Duty, Fortnite, Destiny 2*, Ghost Recon, etc.), and those which still offer a more traditional model, and try to use DLC/expansion pass content to get some extra cash (most Sony exclusive titles, for example). There's also a third party niche which Nintendo is dominating on the Switch, in which you get a plethora of one-purchase-and-done content for retro remasters and indie titles.

This last category, with the Nintendo Switch, is the one I have spent most of my free gaming time messing with. I've put more time into the Resident Evil releases on Switch along with Baldur's Gate, Deadly Premonition and Assassin's Creed III than I have on any of the AAA releases this year, and that's kind of weird. Weird not so much because I'm spending time enjoying good games, but rather because games that are often a decade or more old are proving to be more fun, more engaging, than what we have on the market today.

Anyway, with that thought in mind I stopped in at a local shop in Santa Fe (8-Bit Retro Video Games) and on a lark decided to grab a PS2 Slim model. I snagged a few titles with it: Silent Hill 2 being a no-brainer; I played it when it was new, and again a couple times, but I could always go for one more. Parasite Eve (and ancient favorite from the PS1 days), and then Resident Evil: Code Veronica topped it off (but the disc turned out to be a dud and I need to return it). The next day at a local shop in Albuquerque I found dirt cheap copies of Splinter Cell (always wanted to play it but never did), Twisted Metal Black, Phantasy Star Universe and a couple others....most of these are about $1.95 to $4.95 at the shop I visited, but I noticed that many of the old faves I'd like to try again such as anything in the Silent Hill series are hard to find for less than insane collector's prices.

I learned a few things right off the bat when I got home and hooked up the PS2 to the main TV:

Retro Consoles and Modern TVs: modern TVs often don't even have the plug ins for composite cables; my one 4K TV/monitor is missing this plug in. The main living room TV does have the necessary plug ins, and the Ps2 did work (whew). I have since read that there are better ways to get a cleaner screen image, and am investigating options. I also discovered that the backwards compatibility of the PS2 to run PS1 discs does not play nice with my TV; it appears it can't reconcile the old 280i resolution of PS1 games and does not know what to do, so the screen goes black. I don't have a solution to this (yet) but working on it with an HDMI adapter to see what happens. Worst case, I have an older TV I can drag out of storage if needed....until then, no way to try out the old PS1 titles.

A Completely Dedicated Gaming Environment: Plugging in the PS2 and turning it on was sort of alarming. My only point of interaction with the OS for the PS2 was to set some graphic standards, the time, and memory card management. The PS2 does not want any of the following at all:
--an internet connection to function or update
--my name or any other personal information
--to track my gaming habits, issue points for playing, or any other gamification of gaming
--it does not want to show me ads for other games or products
--it does not care what I am playing at all, in fact
--it does not need to download anything from the disc
--It does not want anything from me, at all, other than for me to put a disc in the drive and play

Yeah. All the Playstation 2 wants to do is let me play games. That's it.

I've owned consoles since the PS1 came out**; I had a PS2 when it released, I loved Dreamcast, I've been with every iteration of Xbox; but after close to a decade of console makers and game publishers chipping away at the core foundation of what a console once was (a machine you play games on), it's downright freaky to go back to one of these machines and suddenly be reminded that this used to be a simpler hobby without a lot of complex monetization and data tracking involved.



As I played Silent Hill 2 again and Splinter Cell for the first time I found these experiences just as compelling as any modern experience, though with the caveat that each game was complete as presented on the disc; I knew for a fact that no updates would need to be downloaded, and these games harken from an era when the game wasn't released until it was actually done, as in QA tested and ready for public consumption. No beta test, no need to download patches, no need to download updates, nothing within the game immediately selling product from active ad placement (Death Stranding, looking at you); not that some of that didn't happen back then....the roots of our corruption in this hobby are long and deep, after all, but in the nascent stages we could little have imagined what that would eventually blossom in to.

Today I snagged a few more old favorites or titles I never played but always wanted to: The Thing, Black, Run Like Hell (speaking of early product placement in games...) and the original Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare. I've played two of these (Ghost Recon and The Thing). Whether I have opportunity to play more or not, my son is already hooked. As I explained to him: this machine is from a time when it said the game supported multiplayer, it actually always meant local split-screen or shared screen; the idea that you could only play together online on separate consoles was super rare. We played some Twisted Metal: Black and an old Robotech game. He was hooked. Old Robotech is like, "Transformers, but really old, you know?" and he is totally, actually right.

So.....long story short....I'm taking the money I would have spent on Call of Duty Modern Warfare and other modern releases (also, I quit Fortnite cold turkey when they rebooted to chapter 2) and buying some retro game fun, instead. I think I'm getting the better deal.




*I'm enough of a Destiny fanboy that I give Destiny 2 a pass. Everyone has their special zone of interest, and immortal space wizards made of eldritch light fighting alien cthonic cults throughout the solar system is sort of my thing.

**Okay technically I started with an Atari 2600 in....ah, 1977 or thereabouts, whatever date they first sold it in the Sears Catalog back then, but I hate dating myself.

Film Reviews: Zombieland: Double Tap, The Lighthouse and Terminator: Dark Fate

I have caught three movies in under three weeks and frankly all three have some merits (and issues) worth talking about. Except for The Lighthouse which I caught with a friend, my son was also present and had his own awesome takes. Here goes!

Zombieland: Double Tap

Son's Take: about halfway through the movie, and then afterward: "This is not the movie I expected it to be, I am very disappointed in it." Later: "Papa, I saw the trailer for this movie and it looked just like Zombie Tag, which was an amazing idea, but the movie wasn't anything like it. This movie was scary a bit but it was also boring and not funny at all."

Dad's Take: I enjoyed this film, as a sort of direct "ten years later but also like no time at all has passed sequel to the original" type thing. It was more comedy in the same vein as the first, but also felt entirely needless and despite being an hour and 38 minutes long I kept checking my watch in hopes it would end soon. It somehow managed to be both entertaining and boring all at the same time. The first movie was a road trip comedy disguised as a zombie survival film. The second movie is exactly what you get when you make a sequel to something that stood well on its own to begin with and needed no sequel, as if the entire film was cobbled together from additional content filmed during the first and left on the cutting room floor. Funny but entirely unessential. C+

The Lighthouse

I showed the trailer to this film to my wife and son and both were like "That looks neat, we want to see that," but thankfully I went with my friend who also appreciated a good, weird film and as a result I did not have to explain topics such as hallucinatory masturbatory mermaid sex to my son; that  conversation is mercifully pushed off. This allowed me to enjoy a unique film that I hardly ever expect to see in theaters anymore; a film which dances between surrealism and horror while demonstrating that both genres walk the fine line between the terrifying and the absurd....and The Lighthouse does this masterfully.

This is my first experience with Egger's film style, and now that I've seen The Lighthouse I must see The Witch next, and hopefully will also enjoy it as much as this movie. The Lighthouse itself is an amazing treatment, an historical descent into madness which left me elated to see Defoe as an actor let loose while Pattison (our future Batman) demonstrate he's got the chops for some serious acting. Filmed in a 3:4 format designed to induce claustrophobia while reveling in a stark black and white film style, The Lighthouse is a trip that everyone serious about surrealism and horror should take. A+ if you're in to this kind of thing.

Terminator: Dark Fate

Son's Take: After seeing this last night my son went on to a fascinating diatribe about how Terminator: Dark Fate not only surprised him with how good it was, and wasn't just good becasue it "started off with action right away," which he very much appreciated, but he then went on at length to tell me the film inspired him deeply, and he now not only wanted to be an augmented superhuman himself, but that he wanted to affect change in the world in a deep and profound way that he wasn't entirely clear on at his almost-eight-years-old perspective on the world, but he was working on it. He proceeded to tell me he wanted to be just like "That guy who made change happen for real," and then proceeded to accurately quote Martin Luther King Jr. to which I was like "You mean Marti...?" and he was then, "Yes! Martin Luther King Jr.!" and I was pretty much, okay, this is extremely interesting.

Dad's Take: This left me with piecing together what was in Terminator: Dark Fate that so inspired my son to somehow equate the movie with what I suspect are recently learned lessons in school about civil rights activist King Jr. and I suspect it was (itsy bitsy spoiler) Dani's speech moment in the film....you'll know the one when you see it. Also, the cool augmented superhuman, and the persistent message throughout the film that the future does not have to be written in stone, even when it seems to be; but the mere fact that Terminators are being sent back to change the future fundamentally means the humans of the past who know about them can, in fact, change the future.

Okay, all that aside, the moment in the film I thought was most controversial was the completely normal way in which the border situation was portrayed in the film followed by the Rev 9 Terminator cutting its way through dozens of border patrol and military personnel in about thirty seconds. It was controversial, I felt, because the movie did a great job of humanizing Mexico and then turned the border to the US into its own distinct and ominous obstacle as a side issue within the main story itself, done so matter of factly and without commentary yet inevitably forcing many in the audience to consider what it means to live in a country that has managed to do "that thing which inherently does not feel right" to itself, all in the name of border protection. If it failed at all here, it was that the holding facilities as depicted were a bit too clean and not as oppressive as what we actually have in reality.

In the end, this was a perfect soft reboot of the Terminator franchise. It negated three of the six movies in the franchise mere minutes into the story, and proceeded to set up four protagonists who each contributed in meaningful ways to the story, plot and dialogue in memorable moments that only initially riffed off of what had come before, then proceeded to tread new and fresh ground...a welcome change of pace from other films which fall into the pitfall of aping without understanding prior entries in the series.

Schwarzenegger himself was my favorite part of the movie, FYI. I will speak nothing of how his role plays out (best to see spoiler free), merely that I felt he had all the best lines and his story was singularly unique in its approach to how he got to continue to play in the Terminator sandbox, and it worked exceedingly well.

So...yeah! We loved this movie. A+ for sure.