Titanfall 2: More Thoughts

I'm 40 hours in to Titanfall 2's multiplayer and since everyone seems to either fellating its excellence or lamenting its release date, I wanted to put down some thoughts about the meat-and-potatoes gameplay itself, mostly balance, also because the developers themselves only refer to changes they make in very vague statements that make community discussions about balance and mechanics difficult. FYI I'm incredibly consistently mediocre at these twitch shooter Call of Duty games so I could definitely be off base/wrong about this stuff.

The titans are easily the best part of the game and definitely the most successfully implemented. Divided into distinct RPG-ish "classes" with individual loadouts and progression, I don't really have any problems here besides how weird and floaty melee attacks feel (tough to do in a normal FPS, I'd imagine it's much tougher with big robots) and the balance of some of them. Tone is the current bogeyman as she's very intuitive to use and her abilities fit together in a more complete way than most of the other titans, but it's not a catastrophic issue and truthfully just highlights how patchy some of the other titans' loadout designs are, particularly Northstar with her ultra niche™ tether mines and a core ability that is completely at odds with her playstyle and strengths and Ronin's hilarious vulnerability to melee attacks while his core is active, despite being the designated hand-to-hand fighter of the group. Other titans like Legion, Scorch, and Ion (once they fix vortex shield) have kits that largely complement their strengths and feel largely solid and well balanced, with Tone only standing out because of the degree to which her abilities feed into each other and aid her intended use. I would personally like to see a total reworking of Northstar's core ability and some hefty adjustments made to Ronin instead of nerfing Tone again, but since that's probably out of the cards at this point the best middle ground is a tweak to Tone's particle wall ability so that the cooldown only goes into effect once the shield is used up.

This weaponry of the game is tougher to meaningfully critique because so much of it depends on personal preference, as some weapons and tactics just click with certain players more than others while other, sometimes allegedly OP pieces of equipment are completely ignored. Case in point: the spitfire is pretty universally dismissed as one of the bottom three worst weapons in the game, but I do better with it than nearly any of the other weapons I've tried, which is all of them minus three or four. In my mind its pretty clearly got an edge over something like the devotion, even though the whole playerbase cries about the latter weapon. That said, I think that something can be done to bring the current top tier weapons down a bit to the rest of the arsenals level, those being the volt, the devotion, the alternator, and the car.

• Volt: Give this thing some recoil. It would still be a ridiculous laser beam but would hopefully be inferior to the assault rifles at long range.
• Devotion: Also needs some recoil, and that's all I'd be willing to change. No need to make it useless but it higher recoil would let it keep its niche as the rapid-fire LMG while making the spitfire preferable for long range fights.
• Alternator: More recoil would let this thing keep its close-range dominance while giving it an actual drawback.
• Car: This one actually feels fine, honestly. 

As for the abilities and combos like devotion + amp wall, cloak, stim, etc., I think they're fine. They're all on reasonable cooldowns and offer something to do outside of the usual "pick an SMG and wallrun all over the place" strategy. I personally don't enjoy standing behind a wall and holding down the trigger, but more power to those that do.

I also have mixed feelings about the maps in this game. I like Eden the most, but even that one gets on my nerves sometimes, and the design of certain gems like Homestead and Drydock make me scratch my head in total confusion. There's a mix of urban sprawl and traditional CoD three-lane design here that I find difficult to come to grips with, and after forty hours I think I should be past this stage. Like I said, I'm not particularly competent at Titanfall 2 and frequently am amazed at both the ability of my opponents to track my fast-moving character model with such precision and my inability to pick that skill up. While I'm sure that I have a lot of gitting gud to do, I think the game definitely has room for improvement in the balance department.

Fates Warning - Theories of Flight

Hold up. I don't think that's the right...

That's better!

Fates Warning is one of the more interesting bands in the progressive metal scene. Their first couple of albums in the mid 80's leaned further towards the power metal spectrum, particularly thanks to their vocalist John Arch's distinctive high-octave lines, often mirroring the guitars along a winding path that eschewed traditional song structures. After Arch was "let go" (fired) in '87 the band shifted into a more conventional heavy/progressive metal style with replacement (and still current) frontman Ray Alder taking over as they managed to piece together some success thanks to a couple of minor-league hit singles in the early '90s.

After '94s low point Inside Out, the band popped the clutch again and dropped into full-on progressive metal beginning with their '97 watershed A Pleasant Shade of Grey and continuing on into the present day, with their latest record Theories of Flight. Despite the cover art weirdly mirroring Chroma Key's Dead Air for Radios, keyboard maestro Kevin Moore was unfortunately not involved with this album despite his past work as a defacto member of the band throughout the 90's and 00's after his ejection from prog metal kingpins Dream Theater.

What's odd about Fates Warning for me is that I'm only really a fan of their later work in the late '90s and onward. Usually when I decide that I like a band, I slowly get acclimated to all of their material and grow to appreciate it, at least a little bit (Psalm 9, looking at you). Not so much with these guys. Between the awful production, twisty-turny-look-how-cool-these-songs-we-wrote-are quality of the material, and John Arch "Arching it up" all over the first three albums I really have no interest in trying to get through that stuff again. Their "commercial" period albums never grabbed me either as Ray Alder is wailing just as hard as Arch was while the songwriting was... well, you decide if you like it or not. No judgements, just "if you're listening to it, it's for you" and I'm not listening to it anytime soon. Their releases from A Pleasant Shade of Grey and onward, though, have really put the hook in me, especially after finding out that Kevin Moore played keyboards on several albums during this period. I'm a huge fan of OSI so going back to this Fates Warning material is kind of like reading a book backwards, I guess, so I already know the ending and I'm just trying to figure out if I like the rest of it.

Theories of Flight, then, arrives three years after Fates' return with Darkness in a Different Light, which broke a nine year silence that was welcomed with open arms. Continuing in the same vein as that record, Theories is a OSI-esque blend of thick riffs, heavy riffs, and crunchy riffs that will be familiar to anyone who listened to Darkness. In all seriousness though, Theories is on the whole much more cohesive and sharply written than its predecessor, doing an excellent job of blending guitarist and overall band mastermind Jim "Jimmy" Matheos' piercing axe work and progressive ambition, especially on the shorter and punchier tracks like "Seven Stars" and "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen". Vox man Ray Alder sounds better here at 49 than he has in decades as his lower, almost soulful range complements the more mid-tempo material beautifully. Special notice has to be given in particular for his frankly breathtaking performance on the second disc's acoustic materials, especially the cover of Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Pray Your Gods" and Uriah Heep's "Rain". Mainstay bassist Joey Vera continues to act as the quiet anchor of the group, capable of delivering both a dirty lead and a full-throated foundation to Matheos' leads apparently effortlessly. Bobby Jarzombek makes a much better case for his spot in this band on Theories than he did on Darkness, but it seems that much of the blame rests on the shoulders of both albums' mediocre production that is all too common in modern metal. Guitars and vocals are overpowering loud in the mix while the bassist struggles to maintain audible volume as the drums are reduced to a horribly compressed, flat sonic register that detracts from the listening experience here more than any of the material.

Like Darkness, Theories skips the ballad stuff and delivers instead several tracks of straight-ahead crunch ("Seven Stars", "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen", "White Flag"), knotty prog ("SOS", "The Light and Shade of Things"), and the Last Song on the Album Epic™ "The Ghosts of Home". With a runtime of just over fifty minutes and with only seven actual songs the whole thing is over surprisingly quickly - either a quirk of the material or the production, but in any case appreciated over Darkness's bloat (imo). The lyrics are vague and non-cringey, the writing is tight, and the second disc of acoustic stuff is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

B+ (with acoustic disc, A-) 

Fair to Midland

Still discussed and kept in piam memoriam in the alternative/progressive scenes today over half a decade since they quietly stepped out of the industry entirely, Texas-based Fair to Midland achieved through the run of just four albums seems pretty special. Managing to secure a high-profile record deal with Serj Tankian's label before dropping one of their two most notable discs Fables From a Mayfly, they seemed to have done everything right until then, laying a strong cult following foundation in their home state while cutting their teeth on stage with years of gigging marked by the release of two independent albums.

Plucked from the edge of insolvency and disbandment by Tankian's call, they combined freshly written material and reworked pieces from their earlier releases into an amply funded, lushly produced debut that started their unfortunately short run at mainstream success, Fables From a Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times is True. A rich draught of alt-metal and hardcore-tinged power pop, Fables cemented the band's reputation as up and comers to watch as they began their largest tour ever to support it.

Four years later saw the release of their fourth and ultimately final album, Arrows and Anchors, in 2011. Darker and more progressive than Fables with less of a fixation on high-flying choruses, it was (and probably still is) their best-selling effort. As you probably have already figured out, though, is that Fair to Midland didn't last long after dropping this album as mounting debt, family and scholastic obligations, and the large physical distance between the members all contributed to a quiet curtain call elaborated on by just a Facebook post from the drummer.

At this point hopes for a reunion don't seem to be running high anymore since the radio silence of the band members for the last several years began, but it took the Galactic Cowboys nearly seventeen to get back together after their last record, so we might just be in for a long wait. While the group itself may no longer be active, that doesn't change the fact that they produced some excellent music in their time together.

Titanfall 2

I never got a chance to play the original Titanfall, so when the sequel recently released and immediately went on sale for $32 I decided to give it a shot. For the most, it's damn fun and has an excellent balance between lightning fast twitch shooting and the real-time giant robot combat of games like Mech Assault 2, which younger me loved. There's a lot of hemming and hawing about release dates and player counts but I don't want to talk about that right now - instead I wanted to give some early-ish impressions of someone new to the series after about 14 hours of multiplayer experience.

• Tutorials. Where are they? There's a short introduction to basic moving and shooting in the campaign, but nothing similar for multiplayer. Either they assumed most people would be already familiar with the mechanics since they're similar to the first game, they thought people would pick this stuff up in an acceptable amount of time, or maybe I'm just dumb, but boy was I confused for the first 6 hours or so. Here is a rough list of mechanics/gameplay elements that (to my knowledge) are not explained at all by the game and if I think the game dropped the ball or I did:
• The mechanics of "rodeo-ing" a titan - how much damage does it do to them, why do I keep getting killed by a weird cloud of electricity whenever I do it, why is my guy yanking on a battery, why is he now throwing a grenade in the battery hole, etc. Verdict: Respawn dropped this one down a mineshaft.
• Your "tactical" grenade option is on a cooldown, so I just assumed you get one throw per cooldown cycle, right? Ha, wrong. You actually get two - if you look closely at the cooldown icon, it only goes down to the halfway mark once you throw the first grenade. Verdict: My bad, but in my day if something was on "cooldown" that meant you couldn't use it until it, ya know, cooled down. Get off my lawn!
• Remember "Prestige" levels from CoD? They're back, but they're called "Regeneration" and also aren't explained at all. Several rewards like weapon camos and callsigns are given after "Weapon ___ Regeneration" or "Pilot Regeneration" or "Titan ___ Regeneration" without any documentation of what the hell that even means. Verdict: Respawn let me down again here, but to be fair the only time you need to know what "Regeneration" means is when you're doing it, which means you've played this game a lot, so I guess this isn't as big a deal as other stuff

• Weapon variety. Titanfall 2 is very, very fast and the time to kill on the weapons are very fast as well, so death is sudden and potentially without warning. Naturally players having such a high movement speed means that lighter weapons like SMGs and shotguns are disproportionately effective, which is fine I guess, but it also means that precision instruments like sniper rifles and chunky LMGs are effected as well. I'm not saying that they're bad per se, but I wonder how much work was needed to bring these up to the level of the other weapon categories and if this type of weapon variety is even needed. 
• Primary/Secondary weapons. This is definitely the element I most wish was changed about this game. Currently we have ARs, shotguns, SMGs, LMGs, sniper rifles, and grenade launcher-type weapons as primaries which is fine. Secondaries, though, are limited to either anti-Titan weapons or handguns, which is... weird, since the primary weapons are already so effective at killing other players that backup handgun is never needed while being able to chip away at enemy Titans is pretty crucial to giving your team an edge. I doubt this is something they are willing or even able to change at this point but I would've really liked being able to run around with just a pistol and an anti-Titan weapon since they're actually all really cool.

So once you get past the learning curve and settle in, Titanfall 2 is awesome fun. It's also currently on sale down to like 50% of full price, which is insane for a AAA release that is this polished and smooth. If you're into fast paced shooters and/or miss the lack of Mechwarrior-type games we've endured for the last several years, you could do a lot worse for $30.

Mafia 3: Second Playthrough, Second Opinions

I saw Noah's latest insanely thorough analysis which happened to be about the Mafia series and wanted to add to his conclusions a bit (you should watch it though, it's excellent). I've been working my way through another playthrough of Mafia III to see what I missed and how I feel about it after saying my piece.

First, the technical side of things. A couple of patches dropped by the time I picked it back up and while this game is certainly never going to run as well as something like Mad Max, it does run appreciably better than it did when I was first going through it. Frame rates are generally in the high 40 - 60ish range with basically the same amount of random stutter caused by... I'm really not sure what. It's especially strange given that the earlier builds of the Illusion engine that the first 2 Mafia games ran on were so smooth, but to be charitable to the game it is definitely a real leap in terms of visual fidelity, and Mafia III's art direction is something I've only grown warmer on since my first run through. The facial animations (and most of the character models) are the best I've ever seen in an open-world game of this breadth and at certain times of day the environment looks absolutely gorgeous, particularly nighttime and the sunsets/rises. It rains too much and the sunlight reflecting off the wet asphalt completely blinds you and there is something very wrong with the chrome reflections on the cars, but I'm still impressed by the scope of the game and it's relative amount of detail.

The whole racism thing is handled mostly fine, if not really, really safely. Like I said in my review, Lincoln is so far outside the realm of the average person's existence (especially in 1968) that it there weren't as many opportunities for racism to be expressed through the mechanics as I had hoped. The differing response times of the police depending on the wealth of the neighborhood is a great touch that cleverly pulls double duty as narrative reinforcement and an easily tweakable difficulty setting, but I still wish they had carried over and expanded on the police interaction system from Mafia II. Constantly living in fear of giving a cop the tiniest excuse he needs to pull you over and ruin your plans for the next objective sounds like incredible to me, and while I understand that the developers wanted to create something appealing to a wide range of gaming tastes, I'm kind of hoping some enterprising modder is able to bring that system back in some form. The racism stuff in the narrative itself is honest and well written but it doesn't really go beyond "Man, racists suck. Doesn't murdering them feel good?" I mean yeah, but what after killing the same identical goon for the 500th time, it loses emotional heft. What if one of Marcano's capos was another black man (or woman)? Maybe it turns out one of the Haitans from the gang that Lincoln slaughtered had survived and was working with Sal so he wouldn't have the rest of them killed just like he did with Lincoln and Sammy? That would've been insane.

On the other hand, it's easy to forget how fragile Lincoln really is - you absolutely do not want the cops anywhere near you because you will get annihilated very quickly. Unfortunately, the game is so generous with placing the objectives in areas without any witnesses that it's very rare to be engaging in a battle in public. On top of that the only enemies who are able (allowed? Who knows) to call for backup are specific, lightly armed dudes who get smeared with giant icon over their heads to let you know when to worry about them. The AI in general is distressingly poor and is probably the single biggest letdown of Mafia III. If you're going to make your game's primary mechanic cover-based gunfights, having sub par AI really weights the experience down.

Finally, I was glad to see Noah mention the final sequence of the game in a good light, as the confrontation with Georgi, Sal, and dealing with your lieutenants felt so damn cathartic that it almost made up for the 15 hours of interchangeable repetition before it. It seems like people agree that Mafia III's story is it's strong suit but I want to mention again the writing as it really struck me my first time with the game and is still keeping me glued to the screen during cutscenes. There's this fatalistic self-aware quality that sets it apart from so many other games because the characters here are all pretty sure they're going to end up dying by the end of it all. Lincoln and his lieutenants don't try to pretend like they're "good guys" and everyone has this kind of resigned nihilism that is right out of Cormac McCarthy. It can be a boring as hell, but the nuggets of humanity tucked inside Mafia III ultimately make it worth experiencing, I think.

Galactic Cowboys - Machine Fish

3 years after delivering the less than stellar follow up to their excellent first album, the Galactic Cowboys came down long enough to drop off another record, their first on the Metal Blade label after splitting with former label Geffen, producer Sam Taylor and guitarist/vocalist Dane Sonnier. Now with Brian Slagel working the boards and newcomer Wally Farkas filling Dane's spot on guitar, Machine Fish had plenty of opportunities to fall off the rails but instead manages to spin the wheel in the other direction and bring the Cowboys back on course.

An aggressive opening cut is business as usual with these Texans and "Feel The Rage" checks all of those boxes with a faster tempo more reminiscent of the thrash riff salad found on their first album, giving listeners a glimpse of a leaner, sludgy sound before rattling off a run of up tempo groove-fests that give bassist Monty Colvin and drummer Alan Doss license to throw their weight around. These tunes have an almost King's X-esque groove (King's X would coincidentally later join the Cowboys at Metal Blade two years after this album). The art rock progginess is dialed back which helps to give the songs some breathing room and keep your ears from feeling constantly overloaded - "The Struggle", "Fear Not", and "Red Sun" are basically hard rock tracks through and through and the vocal harmonies are used more sparingly, only really appearing as they did on previous records on a few pieces. Scattered among the rest of these lighter tracks are a couple of more traditional-sounding tunes that evoke the Cowboys' original, more Beatles-esque sound: "Psychotic Companion", "Easy to Love", and "In This Life" in particular will sound familiar to anyone who's heard their earlier material. Production and mixing are still solid, with Monty's bass tone and Wally's guitars lending a drier, more metallic tone overall.

Machine Fish benefited noticeably from its longer than usual turnaround time and new management and production. The writing is sharper, the songs are tighter and far less ponderous than Space In Your Face, but runtime still remains unapologetically long in the tooth at 69 minutes (the guilty parties are primarily the tiresome "9th of June" and "In A Lonely Room"). Better to have too much than too little though, right?

C+

Galactic Cowboys - Space in Your Face

A band's 2nd album is always going to be a monumentally important project. Fuck it up and you risk losing whatever meager success you've managed to scrape up so far, but blow things out to far and you could spin the cars right off the car. Stablemates King's X delivered a knockout with their sophomore effort Gretchen Goes to Nebraska a few years prior to the Cowboy's debut platter and with Sam Taylor again taking the producer reins along with Brian Garcia and old ally Steve Ames handling engineering, Space in Your Face dropped in June of 1993 to follow up on the modest buzz generated by Galactic Cowboys, further cementing the group's signature style of injecting booster shots of thrash riffing into the veins of their melodic rock.

The lead-in title track gets the blood pumping right out of the gates before dropping two mid-tempo rockers in the listeners path, erasing any potential doubts that the group would be dialing the harmonies or choruses back this time. "Circles In The Fields" and "Blind" continue the procession of solid, melodic riff-fests while the delivery and production return as good as last time. Monty Colvin's bass tone in particular cuts sharply through the other instruments and provides an excellent low end cushion for the rest of the music to rest on as Dane Sonnier maintains a nearly identical and instantly recognizable guitar tone throughout the record. Unfortunately that familiar tone coupled with the generally similar compositions contained on Space in Your Face contribute heavily to the sense of Deja Vu that listeners may notice while hearing tracks like "You Make Me Smile", "Blind", and "If I Were A Killer". The writing is still sharp, but the problems that brought the previous record down are still around, namely the length of the songs. Like before they're mostly too long, but generally the material here is less technical on the whole so longer songs like "Blind" and "No Problems" feel longer (and are longer, honestly) than they really should because you're hearing the same passages repeated more frequently.

Space in Your Face seems to have been created to appeal to the same fanbase that ate up Galactic Cowboys without changing up the recipe too drastically, but instead of expanding on their sound they put it in a kind of stasis, not really progressing into any new territory besides "Still Life of Peace", which is a hidden track, but not really regressing either: all the elements of their sound on that first album are still here, there's just... more of it. More of a disc 2 than a distinct body of work in its own right, Space in Your Face feels like the Faith Hope Love for the Galactic Cowboys: well put together and with some actually great material ("Where Are You Know" in particular), but it feels like they went through a checklist of what a Galactic Cowboys record should sound like rather than what it could sound like.

C 

Galactic Cowboys - Galactic Cowboys

Sam Taylor was a busy man in the 90's. Not content with just being the guiding hand in King's X's first steps out of obscurity he was also lending his producer talents to another Texan hard rock group by the name of Galactic Cowboys, made up of (at the time) bassist Monty Colvin, drummer Alan Doss, guitarist Dane Sonnier and singer Ben Huggins. While the early 90's tag team of producer Taylor and engineer Steve Ames helped refine the Cowboy's sound in a similar fashion to those familiar with King's X, this group showcased an altogether different set of influences and tastes with an emphasis on more aggressive, thrash-tinged compositions and an overall less progressive bent. The result was an interesting combination of multi-part harmonies like The Beatles, Anthrax-esque balls n' crunch, and a spacey, almost psychedelic vibe that gave them a sonic signature distinct from their brothers in arms from Houston.

Lead-in track "I'm Not Amused" gives you a good indication of the band's off-kilter sense of humor as samples of broken glass, mooing cows, and gang vocal arribas decorate Antrax-tinged riffing underneath Taylor's trademark multi-part vocal harmonies as a harmonica-drenched breakdown brings everything home. If that sounds like a lot of moving parts for one song, it is; luckily the band dials it back with the excellent follow-up "My School", a chugging train of giant chords and layered vocals laying on top of everything like a tapestry as heavier pieces like "Kaptain Krude" and "Kill Floor" alternate with quieter compositions "Someone For Everyone" and "Speak to Me". The production work in terms of sound quality is great across the board as no one instrument seems to be overpowering the others or fighting for space - if anyone knows how to amp a bass properly, it's Taylor and Ames, so no complaints there. The second half of the disc see the Cowboys get a bit more progressive with the sudden starts and stops of "Sea of Tranquility" and the Dream Theater-esque 10+ minute final track "Speak to Me" coupled with some excellent deep cuts in "Ranch on Mars Reprise" and "Pump Up the Space Suit" to wrap things up with more huge gang harmonies and propulsive guitar work.

In the end, the biggest hangup I have with Galactic Cowboys rests with length, not content. Of the 10 tracks on the album only 3 run less than 6 minutes and a total runtime of 60 minutes you've got a lot of album here, and with nearly every track built on a similar foundation of big harmonies and chug-chug guitar lines you have a recipe for listening fatigue. Less is more, and shaving off 10 minutes of the fat here would dramatically increase my desire to revisit this record (a common theme with the Cowboys).

B-

"This game clearly had so much work put into it"

Mafia III is just the latest example of this, but I've noticed that I have a tendency to go soft on something or even forgive some creative missteps if I feel that the object has had a lot of work put into it, and I'm wondering why that is. This is more common with games and especially ones with bigger budgets as they tend to involve teams of dozens, sometimes even hundres of people all working very long hours giving their blood, sweat, and tears to the project. Mafia III is a great example of this because it took people no time at all to see that certain aspects of the game had less time in the fire than others (cough cough mission designs cough) and I know enough about game development and corporate culture from my own experience to realize that sometimes you just don't have enough time to everything you want with a particular game, and that's the normal case. The best studios are the ones that can hide the crunch and stick the landing with a mostly complete, hassle-free experience - smile for the cameras, in other words. Their hard work clearly paid off, but what about the Mafia III's of the world? It's impossible to say for sure, but I doubt most of the people at Hangar 13 were just phoning it in and I find myself struggling to figure how to quantify that as I think about the game.

Take Shadow Warrior 2, for example. It released to mostly positive reviews (more positive than Mafia III), comes from a respected developer/publisher team, and is, as far as the ten or so hours I've got in it indicate, a pretty solid game. It's also far, far less ambitious or big as Mafia III or even something like Far Cry 4, so it's.. weird for me. The obvious conclusion is just that Mafia III  didn't utilize the man hours put into it as effectively as Shadow Warrior 2 did, but it does so in such a strung-out, running-on-fumes way that it's tough to tell what they thought were the strong points of the game (narrative, setting). Shadow Warrior 2 is a great little game, but it's undeniably little, hollow, like a carnival game - there's no distant anticipation of narrative payoff or using systems to illustrate a point about the real world. Mafia III is a very long ways from perfect and probably even a long ways from excellent even, but I can't help but feel in my gut that just trying to build something like that with such a commitment to fidelity and setting is admirable even in the failure-case. If Mafia III's storyline was some sort of zenith of the genre (No Country for Old Men) than all would be forgiven and I could put this all to rest. But the fact that all this work, time and money was sunk into telling such a dyed-in-the-wool revenge story makes me wonder if it was all worth it in the end. Does it even deserve respect as a suck cost? I think so. Even in the end, with all it's problems, there are enough small glimmers of real honesty and emotion buried inside that pushes the balance into the black. But damn if that margin isn't thin.

Mafia III

The Mafia series never seemed to be able to catch the big break it seemed due for. Despite winning over critics and a small but jealously protective cult audience over the course of two titles - Mafia in 2000 and a loose sequel Mafia II in 2010 - development was never simple, with runaway feature creep, unreliable tech foundations, and a cumulative ten years of delay spent working on just these two games (a staggering amount of time nowadays, in the time of the two-year AAA development cycle) all resulted in games that, while certainly being impressive, especially on the technical side, never lived up to their Icarus ambitions. Six years on past Mafia II's release and with the freshly formed supergroup studio Hangar 13 at the wheel, Mafia III is able to coast over the potholes created by a foundation of rote mechanics into the sunset on the rock-solid tires of its narrative.

One of the biggest strengths of the Mafia series is immersion, which is not something you see developers really push for in large open-world titles. Minute daily tasks like actually working on your car yourself in Mad Max or cleaning your weapons in Far Cry are generally not part of the simulation boundaries, for better or for worse, but Mafia games bucked that trend by focusing (frequently to the detriment of larger narrative and gameplay elements) on the tiny details that really ground you in their worlds. Your character in Mafia II is not some legendary mercenary or chosen warrior - he's just a guy. A guy who likes to eat food, buy clothes, answer the phone and have long unskippable conversations, put gas in his car, and say "fuck" over two hundred times by the end of story. He can't really regenerate his health or take much damage before buying the farm so you kind of have to be careful, he can't run very fast, and he gets pulled over by the cops and given bullshit tickets just like anyone else. And that's great! Participating in all of those small chores and getting to know his limitations was a huge part of selling the idea of this protagonist Vito as being an actual person in this world, and having rules about how the game world worked made it seem like a real, actual place that at least kind of made sense sometimes.

Mafia III wisely continues (mostly) in this vein and Hangar 13 clearly wanted you to feel like protagonist Lincoln wasn't just some blank-faced killing machine: police react to you (slightly) differently depending on what area of the city - a fictionalized portmanteau of New Orleans known as New Bordeaux - you're currently in, and will respond to calls in low-income and minority neighborhoods slower than to disturbances in the more gentrified areas. People on the street will say hello to you and in what is probably my favorite detail in the whole game, Lincoln will actually answer them. He'll beat his hands on the dash if you tune the radio to a song he likes, he has real relationship history with characters you encounter and doesn't get along with all of them, and is aggressively pursued by police in a way that other NPCs aren't, which ties into the game's supposed preoccupation with institutionalized racism. Like Vito before him, Lincoln actually feels like a real person, mostly.  The almost simulation-ist details from Mafia II - the restaurants, clothing stores, gas stations, etc., are brought back in form only, denying you any opportunity to take a breather from your long, long list of dudes to kill to grab a bite to eat, buy some new threads, or really just exist in the world of New Bourdeaux as a person. Shops and diners now exist only as containers for collectibles or as free stops to grab a quick health pack from before driving to your next mission, which... kind of accomplishes the same thing, just in a less interactive way.

Interaction in the greater open world has been replaced with a much bigger emphasis on actual meat-and-potatoes gameplay, which revolves around taking down the criminal rackets of each district of the city. 10 districts, 2 rackets per district, ranging from extortion and bribery to construction fraud and organized auto theft. The unique nature of each racket is tempered by the similarity of the objectives you'll complete to trash them: interrogate some guys, slaughter a couple of small groups of guys (usually guarding something emblematic of that racket, like a warehouse full of stolen cars or a brothel) and destroy some stuff, and keep doing it until you trigger the racket's "stronghold" mission, which involves infiltrating a building and killing all the bad guys inside it, like a railyard used to stash guns.The high quality of the animations and the general beefiness of the combat coupled with the sandbox nature of the encounters allows for a bit of emergent gameplay to emerge, but it's unfortunately much too simple too cruise up and indiscriminately ventilate most of these guys without having to put much thought into it. Even on the highest difficulty enemies exhibit some pretty generous nearsightedness at odds with their Terminator-like aiming abilities, making it way too easy to get the drop on them, especially considering Lincoln isn't exactly built for stealth with his jeans and Army jacket getup.

Your willingness to experiment with the tools Mafia III provides will be a big part of whether you joyfully proceed through the districts or trudge with heavy feet. There's a large selection of handguns, shotguns, and rifles to play with as well as some upper-tier special weapons not available until you finish around 2/3s of the game, but the lack of variety in the enemy types coupled with the limited ammo capacity you begin with encourage brutal efficiency over playfulness. It took me about 30 hours to complete the game and for the last 10 of those the remaining objectives felt like a tax I had to pay to make it to the next cutscene. Maybe I'm just burned out on open world games at this point after spending so much time with Mad Max but the prospect of replaying Mafia III right now only seems enticing to see how the story turns out after favoring other characters.

Like previous games in the series Mafia III lives and dies by it's narrative, and thankfully the one presented here is an absolutely magnetic period piece. The game begins with a lengthy tutorial segment that pulls double duty as the setup for rest of the plot, introducing you to major players like Sal Marcano (the game's antagonist), his son Giorgi, and Lincoln's surrogate family in Sammy and Ellis Robinson, de facto leaders of a small blue collar district known as The Hollow. You're introduced to the game's mechanics at the same as the story is ramping up into the inciting incident that informs the rest of the game, and it's easily the best part of the game next to the last hour. The writing has an honest, intimate quality to it that lends the characters a true-to-life quality that makes them endlessly watchable (and since this is 1968 pretty much everyone is either drinking or smoking 100% of the time). There are no twists. There are no surprise betrayals. There is no bullshit. We the players simply propel Lincoln Clay along his course as he channels Anton Chigurh and delivers cold, systematic death to Sal Marcano's operations. It would be a lie to say it isn't gripping as hell to watch, or cathartic. The extended length of time spent coming to grips with Sammy and Ellis make their deaths at least slightly more impactful than usual and the weirdly few real, actual cutscenes are very well done, it's just disappointing when get about 6 hours into it and realize that, well... this is it.

An open, lifeless world. Hilariously repetitive missions and gameplay, coupled with some of the most inoffensive, boring AI I've experienced since Far Cry 3. Playboy collectibles in a game "about" racism in the Deep South in 1968 (really). Side missions seemingly designed to elicit religious levels of boredom and a distinct scent of "not finished" hanging over the entire experience. Any yet, a simple narrative that clearly had so much work put into it, and is surprisingly affecting at times, occasionally dragging itself out of a pit of genre conventions and cliches to stand on its own as a real piece of art. Mafia III is a lot of things to a lot people and I don't regret the time I spent with it, but God damn if it bums me out seeing the potential they had with this.

Edit on racism: This is probably the biggest disappointment with Mafia III as it is a game "about" racism as much as Bioshock is a game "about" Objectivism. As a combat trained Special Forces vet with access to basically unlimited money and transportation (while being somehow immune to traffic laws), Lincoln is elevated above the mundane institutionalized bigotry that people in real life and even other characters in the game experience. It's hard to feel persecuted by a random NPC's snide comment when you can just blow his head off and immediately call off the cops for a nominal fee, and it's hard to instill a sense of vulnerability or world-weariness when the actual game seems so afraid of actually impacting your experience. Taken more charitably, you could say that the developers worked to minimize the impacts racism would have on the minute-to-minute gameplay in order to anesthetize you to its presence and consider it as just another aspect of the world, like the architecture or people's accents. And while that is an interesting target to shoot for, Mafia III suffers more than any game I've played in a long, long time from being made in our age of "gameplay and story" should be separate. Just makes you imagine how it would've turned out if someone like Clint Hocking had been leading Mafia III's development instead.

Mafia III First Impressions

I'm nearly twenty hours into this thing so I figure now is a good time to take a minute to write down some of my thoughts. Coming off of Mad Max, maybe the most well-optimized game I've ever played, Mafia III hasn't exactly knocked my socks off and everyone and their dog was putting the developers on blast for releasing a game that manages to run distinctly less-well than you'd think a game of this graphical caliber would. I'm not going to get into all that stuff here but suffice it to say that it ran decidedly poorly on my system initially, and after the patch it runs... better. Not Mad Max level smoothness but a definite improvement, so performance-wise at least things are alright.

The real meat and potatoes of this game is the story, and so far I've been impressed by the writing. The first hour of the game in particular is a really, really effective tutorial/plot hook setup and the way the story is being told in the past-tense through a kind of documentary and archival footage has kept me interested so far. Open world games tend to be terrible at this kind of thing with all of their faceless quest-dispensers but it's obvious that the developers tried to give these secondary characters at least a modicum of life, and it's very much appreciated since the main thrust of the narrative is pretty straight-ahead: revenge. Combined with juggling the loyalties of your capos (which I thought was introduced a little late actually) and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

The gameplay at its base level is pretty repetitive, as every district I've tackled so far has followed a similar template of progression: talk to an NPC, get some objectives that pretty much always involve killing dudes in certain locations, interrogate a certain enemy to reveal a bigger objective in the area and take it down to flush out one of the district mini-bosses. You do this twice for each district before taking down the leader of that district in a special, unique mission that have so far been pretty good. This type of stuff can really get old if you aren't someone who likes "making your own fun" and messing around with the sandbox of the game world, so buyer beware. As someone who spent hours fucking around with the outposts in Far Cry games I'm naturally predisposed towards enjoying this kind of stuff and the raw game feel of the gunplay and cover system go a long way towards keeping things from turning too stale as they're pretty great. The AI is mostly pretty blind but on the highest difficulty you're easy enough to kill that there's at least some tension in combat. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredible - lots of great period music and some almost Red Dead Redemption level soundtrack material, but the main menu sells Mafia III hard: a sunset over the bayou as Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" blasts out at you. So far, so good.

Edit: Literally 10 minutes after starting the game up for the first time after writing this I get a watch a great cutscene ruined by one of the character's eyeballs being apparently replaced with giant black shark eyes. Then I got trapped in an infinite loading screen. Nice.

Mafia III: Overexposure

Mafia III is due to release in a couple of days and I find myself kind of amazed at the amount of preview material available for it. Hours upon hours of gameplay, a wide selection of trailers and short teasers, and two developer-commentated, heavily controlled walkthroughs of pretty significant length, not counting all the social media posts and interviews that have the made the game and its developer Hangar 13 their subject. The frankly overwhelming amount of raw gameplay released (seems like everyone Youtuber and their dog got some hands-on time with it) gives potential buyers a much more informed picture of what the game is actually like than is usually offered for high-profile releases like this. In the wake of No Man's Sky-gate it's refreshing to see a tentpole release like this being clearly and plainly marketed by the publisher and to have so much of the actual minute-to-minute interactions showcased for anyone interested.

What's really interesting about this is that the publisher, 2K Games, isn't sending out review copies ahead of time so there won't be any up by the time the game releases on October seventh. People got upset about this as they always do, even though there are hours of gameplay available to watch on Youtube so you can decide if Mafia III looks fun to you or not. I just find it really strange that people place so much stock in professional reviews and would sooner trust some random asshole from IGN over their own personal judgement. Is it possible that the game comes out and is actually a total bomb? Of course. Watch_Dogs released as an ugly, bug-ridden mess and it went on to sell incredibly well in spite of that (or its story, characters, themes, gameplay, etc.), so it even working on a technical level isn't a sure thing. It's totally possible the game is buggy as hell and boring as shit, but from the ads I've seen - I mean "gameplay videos" - it looks like I'll enjoy this one. If you find yourself worrying about what review scores a game gets so you'll know if you should buy it or not, you really need to ask yourself: Why is that I trust the system (IGN/Gamespot/Polygon/Kotaku) over my own personal opinions and judgement? If you can't even decide which piece of media to consume because one got a 7.8 from Polygon and the other got a 8.1 from Gamespot and everyone knows that Polygon is a bunch of SJWs who knock games down for not having trans options for the protagonist, then Houston, we have a problem.

OSI - Fire Make Thunder

2009's Blood saw OSI iterate on their sound with some noticeable progress towards a fully blended mix of electronica and prog riffing. The groups hopefully-only-temporarily final recording as of this writing, Fire Make Thunder dropped in 2012 to sweep away all doubts that the group was done evolving by delivering their most crystallized sound yet.

Forgoing the use of any guest musicians or vocalists for the first time, Fire Make Thunder again sees Jim Matheos handling guitars, Kevin Moore providing lyrics and keyboards, and Gavin Harrison taking on drumming. Written in the same back-and-forth long distance fashion as the previous OSI records, what stands out about this album right from minute 1 is how rich and vibrant it sounds in comparison to Blood. Moore seems much more present vocally on these tracks as he drones out some of the best lyrics he's penned yet on "Invisible Men" and "From Nothing" while Matheos' playing is taken to another level thanks to the roomier production and less overtly electronic sounds found here, which had a tendency to obscure his picking. With less effects layers to take up headroom, his riffs are finally able to sit up straight in the driver's seat and hit the gas, as testified to by the opening crunch of "Cold Call", basically the entirety of "Enemy Prayer", which might be in the top five best instrumentals of all time, and his David Gilmour tribute in the second half of "Invisible Men". His bass lines have improved as well and the interplay between him and Harrison's drumming seems much more familiar and confident than what was found on Blood. Individually the songs still mostly alternate between Matheos' gorilla sized riff emporiums and Moore's samples and quite pieces but their is a unity of composition here that elevates the material noticeably beyond what they achieved with Blood or Free, for that matter - "Wind Won't Howl" starts off as textbook Moore electronica before gradually building into a full-forced climax once Harrison and Matheos join in to bring the song home. "Guards" is a teetering house of cards built on a skittering drum sample and an almost funk synth line by Moore before Matheos enters after the chorus. The closing track "Invisible Men" wraps the disc up by combining all the elements of OSI into one lengthy piece that makes "ShutDOWN" look like it was written by Twitch: Moore's lyrics and atmospheric keyboard work combine like never before until Matheos brings the thunder, and the song shifts into a Lynchian groove that recalls Pink Floyd at their best.

Matheos and Harrison's renewed vigor is confidently matched by Moore. Whether he's chopping up and distorting a drum beat for the into to "Big Chief II", delivering some crushingly dark lyrics in a near whisper in "For Nothing", or applying his talent for crafting atmosphere in the haunting synths of "Invisible Men" and "Indian Curse", he steps up to the plate and really adds that special ingredient to Fire Make Thunder that sets it apart from the rest of their catalog. "Warm" or "Hot" were never words anyone would use to describe OSI's music, but the spark of life visible throughout all of Fire Make Thunder adds a human element that Blood was missing. With this album they finally achieved the aural synchronization they've been striving for ever since Office of Strategic Influence. We can only hope they'll be able to build off Fire Make Thunder's success and deliver an even greater follow up.

B+

OSI - Blood

2009's Blood, OSI's third release, signaled a new chapter in the group's history by not featuring Mike Portnoy on drums or a guest bassist - the drum seat was filled by Porcupine Tree's Gavin Harrison while Jim Matheos handled both guitar and bass duties himself. Mikael Aekerfeldt of Opeth lends vocals to one track much like Steven Wilson did on OSI's debut album but that would turn out to be the extent of the guest appearances on Blood's standard edition release.

A more aggressive slant is foreshadowed by the crimson-soaked packaging and Blood's content doesn't renege on that promise, opening things up with the band's most straight-ahead track yet recorded in "The Escape Artist", including a compact guitar solo of all things. The tone of the rest of the record is darker on the whole but not just in a way that the heavy songs are heavier: there is a cohesive unity to Blood's composition that elevates the individual songs past the previous electronic/metal either/or approach that marked OSI's previous output as songs like "Radiologue", "Terminal", and "Stockholm" all blend Moore and Matheos' distinct songwriting into a powerful synthesis of sparse electronica and battering-ram riffage. The tracks all feel tight and fat-free (except for "Be The Hero" and it's  strange, 2 minute quiet intro) without wandering into Chroma Key synth-pop territory - these pieces have a clearly identifiable "OSI-ness" to them that some of the lighter material on previous records lacked, coupled with some of the strongest standalone songs they've ever written: "Radiologue", "Terminal", and especially the haunting title track are immediate home runs that do well to prop up some of the weaker numbers. Blood's heavier tracks in particular suffer for being played a bit too straight and the similarities between "The Escape Artist", "False Start", and "Be The Hero" stand out more since they're put up against the more distinct soundscapes of the quieter tracks "Terminal", "Stockholm", and especially the title track, which deserves a shout-out for being the headiest shot of concentrated atmosphere and keyboard work the band has ever assembled.

Gavin Harrison does a good job of propelling Blood's more turgid moments as he's got a style all his own, playing more beneath the rest of the music than alongside it. His drumming doesn't feel as chopped up or restricted as Portnoy's and it lends an organic, almost jazzy feel to the album, especially on the lone instrumental "Microburst Alert" and the heavier tunes. The only real casualty of Blood's instrumental makeup is the bass: Matheos is a capable player, but nothing he provides ever really stands out in a way that Sean Malone or Joey Vera's grooves did. Moore's vocals are reassuringly somber, and the vivid lyrics he provides for "Terminal" and the title track only further cement his reputation as prog metal's Peter Watts.

Blood, finally, represents both a peak and a valley for OSI. They achieve a sonic mind-meld with a consistency unseen in their earlier work, but it seems to have come at the cost of some of the more experimental material found in past albums. It doesn't really drag so much as stew in it's own juices, and while that can make for a great album to visit when in a certain mood it's liable to grow stale on you.

C+

OSI - Free

While most supergroups are considered a success if they can release a single disc of quality material, OSI bucked the trend in 2006 by dropping another album on the progressive scene entitled Free, again helmed by co-captains Kevin Moore and Jim Matheo with Mike Portnoy returning on the skins. Sean Malone is sadly absent, as is Steven Wilson as Joey Vera (Armored Saint, Fates Warning) steps in for bass duties for certain tracks while vocals are provided entirely by Moore this time around.

As the next stage in OSI's evolution as a unit Free leans closer to Moore's area of expertise than Office of Strategic Influence ever did, with several songs that wouldn't seem out of place on one of his solo albums. "Go", "Home Was Good", "Simple Life", and "Better" in particular are more minimalist and reliant on atmosphere than ever, eschewing Matheos' pipe-clearing riffs completely, instead trading in on Moore's singularly droning vocals and keyboard work to carry the weight. Other tracks, like the excellent title track, "Bigger Wave", "Once", and "All Gone Now" allow more room for Matheos' guitar parts to share the load, but never in a way that's completely smooth. Just like with Office of Strategic Influence songs have a clear demarcation between the "Moore sections" and the "Matheos sections", but the more obvious compartmentalization lends things a sterile, clinical air that fits the material. On the whole Free is a looser album than it's older sibling, dropping most of the progressive flourishes that decorated Office of Strategic Influence for cleaner, less forced vibe. Portnoy's caged-beast percussion is a clear highlight, injecting some much-needed emotion into Moore's icy compositions as he synches up with Matheos to deliver even bigger grooves than those found on the previous record - see the title track, "Bigger Wave", and "Better" for details. And if you're concerned about the previous album's political slant, Free's lyrics drop the current event angle entirely - relationships are the primary focus here. Those hoping for something more similar to Moore's work with Chroma Key will also find something to hook into here as Free shifts into synth-pop territory on a couple of occasions with "Simple Life", "Better", and "Once" and the songs on the whole are trimmed down in length across the board - nothing to be found here over six and a half minutes. And as before, the record is capped off with an excellent light acoustic number, this time in the form of "Our Town", bringing things to a satisfying close.

While it wouldn't be until their next record, Blood, that Kevin Moore and Jim Matheos would really begin to fuse the disparate halves of their songwriting inclinations into a cohesive whole, Free's songwriting lacks much of the baggage of their debut and feels more adventurous and experimental as a result. It isn't always elegant, but the band managed to capitalize on their different areas of expertise in an impressive way that never feels self-indulgent. Definitely worth a listen if you liked anything on OSI's previous record.

B

OSI - Office of Strategic Influence

A heady blend of influences and approaches as supergroups tend to be, OSI's debut offering Office of Strategic Influence presents the oil and water inclinations of chief songwriters Kevin Moore and Jim Matheos at the point of their greatest bifurcation. Graced by the presence of assorted genre alumni Steven Wilson, Mike Portnoy, and Sean Malone it had quite a diverse cast and was released to general critical approval but never seemed to gain the traction it really needed to take off, a trend line that the project's later albums would continue to ride.

The disc initiates with some of Moore's reliably cryptic samples starting things off before the loud n' proud instrumental workout of "The New Math (What He Said)" begins in earnest, rising in intensity before dropping off into the restrained electronic groove of the title track "OSI" (by the band OSI, off the album O.S.I.). Here is where Moore's vocals kick in and we hear one of the biggest differences between OSI and other prog bands: instead of the usual vibrato soaked wailing you hear from singers in other progressive bands of this ilk (Looking at you Dream Theater!), Moore has a delivery that lands somewhere between Trent Reznor and a very sleepy Steven Wilson, employing a hypnotic near-monotonous range that gives the album a decidedly nocturnal atmosphere. Sean Malone's rich bass tone provides a groovy foundation to heavier numbers like "Head" and "Horseshoes and B-52's" while Moore's distinctive synth lines and creative sound effects lace things with a hazy coat of electronica, alternating between the heavier, more traditional progressive metal passages found throughout. The lyrics provided by Moore, while not explicitly political and in keeping with his typical stream-of-conscious writing style, have a definite fixation on current events of the time without ever straying into earnest criticism or task-taking (the name of both the band and the album is a reference to a real-world US government propaganda office established during the Bush administration), keeping things appropriately mysterious.

In keeping with the alternative style of singing is the general songwriting restraint and dexterity displayed on Office of Strategic Influence. Moore and Matheos as the principal songwriters clearly aren't much interested in colossal progressive "epics" a la Transatlantic or boring displays of technical ability, as the spare (for this genre, at least) runtime of just under 48 minutes coupled with seven of the ten sings clocking in at five minutes or less means that there is little room left for noodling. What's really surprising is how plentifully hook and catchiness is found here - "Head", "OSI" and "Hello, Helicopter!" basically drip with groove-heavy bass lines provided by Malone while "Dirt From a Holy Place" and the middle sections of "ShutDOWN" give the listener plenty to latch onto before the excellent ending coda of "Standby (Looks Like Rain)" passes.

Despite the very different musical preferences of the players, Office of Strategic Influence stands out from the progressive crowd not in spite of, but because of that push-pull tension. It's less cohesive than the later OSI records but not any worse for it as the songwriting and atmosphere here are strong enough to get all the threads through the needle convincingly.

B-

Dead Money

The first piece of major DLC released for Fallout: New Vegas also turned out to be it's most controversial. Tasking players with breaching the vault of the mythical Sierra Madre casino to plunder the treasure locked within, Dead Money differed from the rest of the DLC and even much of the base New Vegas itself in it's oppressive and desperate atmosphere, marking a sharp about-face from the Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic escapades of the rest of the game. Dropped into a decrepit villa, stripped of all your gear and forced to work with a ragtag group of other captives to pull off "the heist of the centuries" for the mysterious Father Elijah, ostensibly the one who lured you to the dead casino in the first place.

A number of design elements make sure the interesting setup don't go to waste by piling on the tension: you and your gaggle of mandatory teammates have an explosive collar locked around each of your necks, wired to go off if even one of you buys the farm. Your collar in particular is sensitive to the frequencies emitted by the still-active radios and speakers littered around the compound, adding an extra wrinkle to your exploration while also making for some intense races against the clock to sprint to a safe zone, oftentimes without knowing if one will even be there. Ammunition and healing items are rare and only dispensed by vending machines that accept the proprietary coin of the Sierra Madre and nothing else, forcing you to make every consumable you run across count while coldly murderous security systems ensure the halls of the casino are never really safe. On top of all that, the area is cloaked in a blood red toxic tint known as The Cloud - don't linger in it too long unless you enjoy being poisoned. Pound for pound, Dead Money's atmosphere (no pun intended) is incredibly effective at flipping your presumably high-level character (the DLC is intended for experienced players who've finished most of the base game) on their head.

Source: CynicalBounce

Adjusting to the villa's hostile environment is just the easy part, unfortunately, as it quickly turns out that you aren't alone among the ruins and dust. Enigmatic roving scavengers known as the Ghost People stalk the grounds, laying increasingly vicious traps for you and generally contributing to your increasingly serious hypertension condition. These guys have some of the coolest designs in the whole franchise and while exactly who they are and where they came from is somewhat addressed they never lose their air of Silent Hill-esque inscrutability. Completely silent save for easily-missed breathing, they amble out of the crimson shadows and approach you with a methodical obsession, absorbing far more damage than anything shaped like a person has any right to and are only truly dispatched when dismembered - leave them dead but intact and they'll rise again to resume the pursuit.

The thread of the plot is pretty linear here, but not without reason - I found myself thankful for the clear objectives as the rest of the Sierra Madre gave me plenty to worry about. The story of the Madre, the people who built it, and the others you encounter during the run of the events of Dead Money all contribute to a common theme found in New Vegas and it's DLCs: letting go of the past. No spoilers, but things come to a head in a great way and the climax of the heist had me, literally, on the edge of my seat. While the game's chunky, inelegant flow and stiff gunplay lent themselves surprisingly well to a survival horror design ethos, the characters and world of Dead Money are the true treasures at the heart of the Sierra Madre.

B+

Mafia 3

So a bunch of gameplay was released for Mafia 3, the upcoming open world game from 2K and Hangar 13. This one is differing from earlier entries in the series by starring a biracial Vietnam jarhead instead of an extra from season 3 of The Sopranos, and there's been a lot of talk about the game's depiction of the protagonist's race as the game is set in New Orleans circa 1968 - cops will apparently act aggressively towards you in upper-crust neighborhoods, sometimes even forcing you to leave certain areas, and they operate along the lines of the usual video game police force, i.e. expect to get your brains painted on the curb if you so much as stand in front a cop and block his path.

What's strange about this approach is that, by all accounts so far, the police in Mafia 3 are much more limited in their interactions with the player than in previous games, which featured a surprisingly well-layered system of wanted states, both for cars and on foot, plus fines for stuff like speeding and running lights (along with bribes) that all combined to make the police feel like a real part of the game world. And if the state of polices relationship with black people today is any indication then you would think that driving citations and petty harassment via traffic stops would be the chief interaction between these two groups. Yet the developers opted to remove that layer of mechanics and opted for a more direct, GTA-style psycho cop style instead - I wonder if the traffic stop thing coupled with the black protagonist made things a little too real?

Also, just a note on the actual gameplay: Jesus, this game is violent. Lincon's animations coupled with the time period and the setting give me major No Country for Old Men vibes - you're really just playing as Anton Chigur here, right? Driving around an idyllic southern city, inflicting graphic acts of sudden death on other criminals (all of them white), I also can't help but be reminded of this piece. A video game where you play as a black man, killing truckloads of cartoonishly southern white guys, in a city with a less-than-excellent racial history? And what are your options for interacting with this criminal underworld? Destroy the leaders and take control/raise your own empire in the place of the enemy's - in other words, keep the status quo of crime and violence going but with different names and faces. By the end of it thousands of virtual people will be dead and everything will be exactly the same as before, but we'll have had a lot of fun in the process!

Soma: The Theory of Continuity

Source: Frictional Games

While Soma's ocean floor setting contributes a large amount to it's overall sci-fi affect, easily the most ambitious (and most talked about when the game released) element of the experience is the body-swapping narrative experiences by the protagonist Simon Jarrett. This is going to spoil the entire game thoroughly, so if you haven't already played Soma yet I really recommend it if you're at all interested in sci-fi or horror.

Early on in the game you encounter some audio logs from one of the people who worked at Pathos-II named Mark Sarang. Unlike most of the other crew members who had their minds scanned for the ARK project, Sarang had a strangely reverential view of the situation due to his belief in two phenomena he called "continuity" and "the coin flip". Whereas most of the scanned personnel considered the copy of their mind placed on the ARK as an entirely separate existence, Sarang and the handful of other crew that subscribed to his theory of continuity believed that they would carry on living in the ARK if they ceased existing directly after the scan was completed. At first blush this idea seems...pretty crazy. What's interesting, though, is that the player, despite better logic, has to give the theory a bit of credence because until now, Simon has "won" the coin flip every time. It's a trick, but an effective one since the player has never had the experience of "losing" the flip - as Catherine says, we came "Directly from Toronto" via the memories of the original Simon. It's only later on that we learn about what happened to the real Simon after the scan, and if the scans on the ARK never learn what happened to their previous selves (and how would they?) the "continuity" would seem to be perfectly preserved from their point of view. The way Soma sets up the coin flip situation throughout the game is really quite clever, as it's much easier for the player to forget that they're actually playing as a copy of a long-dead person since we go "directly" from Toronto to Pathos-II via the unbroken narrative of the game itself. Part misdirection from the developers and part willful ignorance the part of the players, just like Simon's character in-game, helps the game deliver it's powerful ending punch.

Soma also differs from other games that want to "say something" by not allowing the preferences of the developers to bleed into the game and affect the player's own natural arc of experience. Choices are presented, some of them incredibly poignant and difficult to make, like whether or not to turn off Sarah's life support, or euthanize Amy and Robin, and some seem easier (and some aren't really choices at all). In all cases none of them are referenced in the ending or are really brought by the game at all once you move past them - they're yours to think about, and you're always given as much time as you need to come to your decision. In the end, you just have to live with it and hope you did the best you could as Soma never really paints the two main focal points of the game, the ARK and the WAU, as hands-down better than the other option. It might not seem like a huge innovation in narrative technique, but when combined with the atmosphere of the rest of the experience it can be surprisingly affective. Few games trust you enough to let you think for yourself about what you're doing, and Soma shows how it can be done to greatly enhance the staying power of a story.

_


More thoughts on Sarang's continuity: it actually does make some sense from the way he describes it, in a weird roundabout way. Since the Sarang that gets scanned will have all the experiences of "Sarang prime" up until after the procedure, there would be a continuity chain to an outside observer. Of course, the scanned Sarang would probably be aware he's just a scan of the original once he's in the ARK, but he wouldn't feel any different, presumably. Oi. It's been suggested that Sarang was pushing his continuity theory for the benefit of his fellow crew members, but that seems doubtful since everytime we hear him speak or read what he wrote about the subject he's consistent about his belief. Whether or not he actually believed that the Sarang that he was, Sarang-prime, would actually experience literal continuity or was aware that it would be another "him" that would be "winning" the coin toss and he just figured that was so obvious he didn't bother mentioning it, isn't ever really addressed. I like to take what the game presents at face value so to me Sarang was actually buying this stuff. It's not total bullshit since in his own mind, any entity with all of his experiences and personality would seem to just be another copy of himself, and to anyone else it would just be like Sarang teleported onto the ARK. I think I need a drink.

Soma's Aquatic Aesthetics

Released at the tail end of 2015, Frictional Games' latest project marked a significant environmental departure from the haunted halls and mineshafts of their previous Amnesia and Penumbra titles by taking players on a mind-twisting journey through the dilapidated remains of a futuristic facility called Pathos-II located on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to talk about the overall design and aesthetic of Soma's world as it's some of the best environmental design and art direction I've seen in a long time. I want to discuss the game's plot at some point as well because it's fascinating but that will be at another time.

Exploring Upsilon, Pathos-II's power station. Source: Section-Nine

The interiors of Pathos-II are an interesting blend of chunky utilitarian design similar to something like the Nostromo from Alien but with an oddly high-ceiling, almost cavern-like motif featured in much of the initial areas like, Upsilon pictured above. It's not nearly as claustrophobic as the suffocating Beebe Station from Starfish and sometimes almost feels too... roomy. Not in a "this is so scientifically inaccurate, these corridors should only be X feet by X feet!" way, but in an industrialized, cold way: it's obvious from the start that Pathos-II isn't exactly a homey, friendly place, and it seems to suit the remaining functioning robots and station-wide AI, the Warden Unit, better than it ever did the crew members.

A constellation of Structure Gel occupying a nearly-collapsed section of site Tau. Source: rythymblow

 Everything's surface is cold and sleek like a hospital. Deposits of mechanical "structure gel" are everywhere, and it's hard to tell if the Warden Unit is plugging leaks and propping the walls up or slowly smothering Pathos-II to death. The living quarters and medical wing of Theta are the only areas that offer a break from the rest of the station's starkly pre-fab, no-cubic-inch-wasted design. While the open space would normally make one feel a bit less closed in, the illusion of a roomier space only made me even more aware of the fact that I'm in one of the most precarious and hostile environments a human can occupy, feeding my dread. Not sure if I picked up exactly what Frictional was putting down with that, put it certainly was effective in any case.

A laboratory in the medical wing, site Theta. Source: thundra

The crown in Soma's jewel, though, must be the sections of the game that place you outside of the relative safety of Pathos-II and force you to traverse the hazy ocean floor itself. Admittedly I haven't played many games (or seen many movies, even) that feature ocean floor environments as much as is presented here, but I can pretty confidently say that the art direction of these areas will remain as just as impressive as it stands now. The only recent games I can recall that looked as good as Soma does during these sections are Abzu and Mad Max, both titles that are well known for looking stupid good.

The remains of an assembly line at site Delta. Source: DokiQuies

Dim lights of outbuildings faintly pierce the darkness while spindly guide lamps provide most of the illumination during these sections as your chief source of illumination, a small flashlight, is more of a comfort blanket than an actual navigational aid. Algae and other undersea plant life sway in the current as barnacles coat the exteriors of the various man made structures you find. The expansive emptiness provides little respite from the harsh confinement of the station's corridors and, as the game went on and I spent more time in the various underwater locations like the sunken ruins of the Curie, Pathos-II's supply ship, the harsh walls of the habitats started to seem a hell of a lot better.

An obelisk of unknown purpose near Upsilon. Source: Aethere

 Abandoned fish farms outside of site Omicron.

Abandoned and derelict outbuildings (like the empty fish farms above) are everywhere as it seems no one is around to tend to them by the time Simon finds himself waking up in the facility. This location in the game is near the abyssal plain's drop-off point, the descent to the terminal depths of the bottom of the ocean floor doable only with the aid of a shark cage-esque elevator known as the Climber (below). Easily one of the most powerful vistas in the game, the machine rests in its mount on an arm precariously hanging off the edge into what as well may be deep space. Strange and unseen-until-now aquatic life, most notably brilliantly luminous jellyfish, drift by through the void undeterred by the increasingly inhospitable pressure.

The less-than-rock-solid walkway leading to the Abyssal Climber.

Bio-luminescent life around the Climber as it makes its descent. Source: Impetus

Soma saves the best for last, though. Upon arriving on the ocean floor you find conditions that are only marginally more human-friendly than the surface of an alien planet: your vision blurs permanently due to the astronomical amounts of pressure being placed on your diving suit and the only respite from the crushing darkness are the decayed ruins of the Pathos team's makeshift storehouses and obersvation shacks and a series of small guideposts guiding you to your next objective. The mechanical influence of the station's warden unit is just as present here as above: inky tendrils snake off into the darkness, far from the feeble comfort the few remaining light fixtures bring. Combined with the bizarre lifeforms on display (yes, those are spiders below) and the torrential current of the trench's tectonic activity rendering you nearly deaf and blind, that this environment, despite still sticking with the mechanics you've grown used to through the course of the game and being fundamentally similar to the other "walking around the ocean" bits you've played, manages to stand out as something so alien and unnerving is a big testament to Frictional's design work here. The idea of setting a horror game at the bottom of the Marianas trench seems so obvious and it works so well here that I'm surprised by how seldom it's been attempted.

Near the Climber's landing point in the Abyss. Note the distorted vision caused by the immense pressure. Source: Rain

An outbuilding near the Climber. Clouds of phosphorescent jellyfish and the Warden Unit's tendrils provide much of the little available illumination. Source: Chewable C++

An undersea cave coated in pycnogonid. Source: Kodijack!

Near the hub of the Warden Unit, nearly 100% of the environment has been subsumed by tendrils and Structure Gel growth. Source: AZWew

A guidepost in the abyss. And something else? Source: Fernando Esra

The remaining Pathos habitats you explore during this stretch of the game reflect the hostility of the local environment by featuring the most cramped architecture to be found through Soma's many different locations. Hallways are narrow and poorly lit as you make your way to the narrative's conclusion, hopefully finally understanding what happened to the crew members who seem to have vacated the facilities along with the motivations and fate of Pathos-II's Warden Unit AI system.

Mess hall of site Tau, one of the final holdout areas of the Pathos crew. Source: DOOM

Site Phi, and the home of the Omega Space Gun. Source: SABINA

Curiously, the final area you visit (above) is also probably the environment that seems the least infected with black goop and tentacles, which is kind of interesting if you have the context for it from the situation in game. And that's pretty much it. Writing this has made me really want to play through the whole thing again, so I might just do that so I can add some screenshots of my own and not have to rely on the dubious Fair Use policies of Steam users' screenshots. If this whole thing seems kind of fellating than I guess it really is - Soma is an incredible experience that I can't recommend enough to anyone interested in sci-fi, horror, existential weirdness, or just damn good looking (and sounding!) games.