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.