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-