Reflections on Far Cry 2

As the hype cycle for Far Cry 5 begins its spin cycle, there is one type of comment that I can count on seeing whenever the latest trailer is being discussed: How frustrating/bullshit Far Cry 2 was. I totally understand this point of view (because the game is absolutely unforgiving which can be grating), but I have a problem with the common examples people cite for this position, like:

• "Your guns would jam all the time but it never happened to the enemies."
• "Your character suffers malaria attacks which can literally kill you if you don't have any medicine, which you have to keep track of."
• "Once you drive outside of a town, literally everyone you encounter shoots you on site."
• "Every time you clear out an enemy outpost and drive away, the enemies would instantly respawn 30 seconds later. Makes no sense!"

Now, there are a lot of things I wish I could change about Far Cry 2. I wish I could fix the hilariously sped-up dialogue that sucks all the gravitas from the plot whenever you have to actually talk to an NPC. I wish I could alter the driving behavior of the vehicles, which all seem to have been designed to get bottomed out on the smallest possible impediments. I wish I could cut some of the main faction missions so that the actual plot of the game doesn't disappear into a hazy jungle of indiscriminate war crimes so quickly. The difference between my complaints and the common criticisms I see levied against this game are that most people have problems with fundamental systems (weapon degradation, the checkpoints) whereas I am fine with those as they are and mostly just wish more time to polish the overall experience would have been available to Ubisoft Montreal. The reason I'm pointing this out is so that you can plainly see that I am biased towards liking this game and treating its decision with some charity. So let's go through these complaints, starting with the easiest:

"Every time you clear out an enemy outpost and drive away, the enemies would instantly respawn 30 seconds later. Makes no sense!"

This is a very strange thing to hold against the game in my view. Far Cry 2 is an open world shooter, so of course you can expect to spend most of your time invoking stand-your-ground laws on foreign soil. Shooting = content in this game, so the infinitely respawning checkpoints doesn't seem that egregious, especially since the game does have an actual end to the campaign that forces you to begin a new game or load an older save file if you want to continue your mayhem. Yes, it is frustrating that the checkpoints re-populate basically the moment they are out of your field of vision but we have to remember that this was 2008. The only other open world shooters the team had to go off of was the original Far Cry - the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game and Crysis wouldn't drop until 2007.

People are definitely less forgiving of this system now that Far Cry 3 and 4 showed us how the concept of these checkpoint/outpost areas that were secluded little combat arenas could be handled (along with a change in the random patrol encounters) that were much less stressful. Although I would like to point out that one of the solutions discussed by the FC2 team was to have the checkpoints never re-populate, which is what happened with the outposts in FC3 originally, before everyone realized how boring open world shooters are when there are no enemies left.

"Once you drive outside of a town, literally everyone you encounter shoots you on site."

This seems like kind of a strawman but it really is something I have seen repeated often. I suspect this is more offensive to most peoples' suspension of disbelieve - it's just very "game-y" to them that every enemy would be immediately ready and willing to gun the player down. But... you're a mercenary, just like them. Doing bad shit, just like them. I dunno, maybe this one is dumber than the checkpoint respawns thing.

Another thing that people mention that is related to these checkpoints, is the frequency with which you are forced to blast through the same checkpoints during a single mission. This is a bit more subjective and problematic as just having to get through 1 more checkpoint on the highest difficulty can mean 30+ minutes of lost progress, which sounds sufficiently blood pressure-raising to be pretty memorable. Personally I can only think of 1 mission that 100% forces you to slog through the same checkpoints multiple times, but I can understand people who feel that this happening at all is ridiculous. Luckily the environments are designed in such a way that you can often juke or sneak past checkpoints (especially at night), but this would require you to get out of your vehicle, look at your map, and figure out the best route. Maybe too much effort than many are willing to expend.

"Your character suffers malaria attacks which can literally kill you if you don't have any medicine, which you have to keep track of."

This one is a bit tricky. I'm curious to know whether most players who stick with FC2 just go about their business believing that they have a finite supply of medicine or clue in to the fact that your medicine is actually infinite for the vast majority of the game. Yes, you actually have infinite medicine while out in the world, free roaming, on a mission, whatever. The only times (that I know of) when the game actually puts a limit on your medicine supply is after a certain threshold of main story missions have been completed, usually after 3 or so. At that point instead of having the option to pick up another main mission or a side quest, you will be forcibly given a mission to "find someone who can provide medicine", which is marked on your map.

Aside from that, the malaria attacks are pretty widely spaced (1 every 45 IRL minutes) so it's unlikely you will experience more than 2 during a single session. Even if you are caught without medicine (this is a very difficult scenario to engineer by the way), if you pass out you just wake up at the church in Pala or Mosate Soleo, depending on how far along you are. That said, I'm not sure how successful this mechanic is in the end, since you either 1) have medicine and thus can just ignore it or 2) don't have medicine and lose a lot of progress for kind of shitty reason.

"Your guns would jam all the time but it never happened to the enemies."

 The magnum opus of Far Cry 2 message board criticism and the grievance I have the least amount of sympathy for. It is frustrating that the enemies don't suffer weapon mishaps like the player but to me its just another gameplay element that contributes to the generally hostile atmosphere of FC2.

I really want to emphasize the amount of work the game does to shield you from this mechanic. The opening tutorial of the game explains that weapon stores always have an infinite number of "clean" copies of your bought weapons so you can never run out. The game's currency, diamonds, are scattered everywhere around the world, frequently in pretty in-the-way areas so you won't ever be hurting for funds to buy guns with. And then the guns themselves reflect their level of wear and tear visually: the longer you keep any 1 single weapon on your person while putting it through regular use, the grimier and dirtier it will get. In addition to the weapon stores you can buy storage crates for your safehouses to house singleton copies of weapons that are available out in the field, further reducing the need to rely on a single dirty AK for multiple missions. And if your gun gets super rusty and totally disintegrates? Yeah, it sucks and you could die. But you will probably also have to dive for that rifle that guy you just killed dropped, which will probably jam at the worst possible moment, forcing you to toss a molotov as a distraction that ends up causing a brushfire that sets off a nearby ammo pile, etc. The emergent gameplay possibilities are endless!

~~~

My intent with this wasn't to put the "cajualz" on blast for not liking the thing I like, just to vent a bit about the common complaints I see leveled against this game and how most of it is really overblown. Of course you are totally 100% within your rights to continue not giving a shit about Far Cry 2 (mea culpa: it took me over a year to even consider playing Nier:Automata) but hopefully this makes at least someone consider it or even just doing some more research on it before writing it off completely. Especially if you are bored to tears of the modern, whistle-clean Far Cry franchise as it is now.

Kevin Gilbert - Thud

Coming off the dissolution of art rock semi-supergroup Toy Matinee and the more freshly released debut smash of his then-girlfiend Sheryl Crow's career, Kevin Gilbert's first and unfortunately only fully-finished solo album Thud should've been just the first step of one of the more consistently fascinating singer-songwriters of the 90s. Shedding the prog rock excess of his previous work, Thud is far less self-conscious and pompous than the sometimes tiring squeaky-clean sheen of Toy Matinee got to be without losing any of the songwriting punch. Sadly it would end up becoming his only truly complete solo work aside from the stitched-together remains of his grandiose rock opera follow up The Shaming of the True.

Don't mistake a lack of art rock gloss for a "heavier, rawer" approach, though - Thud treads much of the same adult contemporary pop/prog ground that Gilbert had traversed before, just at a less frantic pace this time as more laid-back pieces form the bulk of the material, from the sleepy sing-a-long "Tears of Audrey" to "Joytown"'s darkly shuddering groove and the strangely familiar-feeling intro acoustic number "When You Give Your Love To Me". Gilbert indulges his Genesis-loving side only on a few select pieces, in particular the album highlight "Shadow Self" which is blessed with, among other things, a bass line so firmly in the pocket it would make Doug Wimbish jealous and "Waiting", a textbook Gilbert song if there ever was one: off-kilter arrangement, lyrics that lean heavily into black comedy, and a chorus that never takes the easy way out. Other highlights include the infectious toe-tapping polemic of "Goodness Gracious" and the lush backup vocals and lilting sway of "All Fall Down" while more pedestrian selections such as "Shrug (Because of Me and You)" and "Tea For One" are enjoyable but feel like they lack a certain oomph that would elevate them into the same altitudes as the other tracks.

From a production/technical standpoint, Thud is just as excellent and clear-sounding as you would expect from these types of industry veterans. Gilbert's voice is sharply audible and just loud enough to cut clearly through the the tracks without sacrificing the breadth of sounds provided by the backing instruments and the whole thing sounds quite simple and pleasant - definitely easy on the ears, with a nice dynamic range in the teens. And with the whole gang packing it in before the 50 minute mark is reached you've got a nearly perfect run-time as well. It's a rare piece of art that can provide such strong returns on such a meager investment, and that makes Thud more than worth the trouble of digging it up.

Brand New Immortals - Tragic Show

Stealthily dropping while soft rock hits from Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson and Matchbox Twenty were ruling the roost, Tragic Show is the first and only full length product of the union between singer-songwriter David Ryan Harris (think Dan Wilson if he hadn't met up with Adele), formerly of Follow For Now cult-fame; drummer Kenny Cresswell, who went on to work with Avril Lavigne (remember her??) and Candlemass; Johnny Colt, former bassist for The Black Crowes. Produced by Brendan O'Brien, who also worked with The Black Crowes and produced King's X's Dogman album, Tragic Show is one of the better obscure albums you might find in the $2 rack. As confident as any post-grunge mid-00's band banking on a middle-school-dance-friendly power ballad to take them to the top but packing the songwriting and production heat of industry titans, Tragic Show is a master class in song craft that would make even Kevin Gilbert jealous.

Ballads seem to stick to supergroups more strongly than rubber cement to model car parts and Brand New Immortals are no strangers to the sappy stuff. Late album slow-burners like "Satellites" and "Ill Conceived" would normally ruin any semblance of momentum that the previous tracks had accumulated but... well, Tragic Show has more hooks than your local Bass Pro Shop and even these mid-tempo pieces fail to bring the record down (particularly the spot at 5:10~ of "Ill Conceived" which is straight-up Zeppelin worship) as the atmosphere built by them never feels fake or out of place. Coupled with O'Brien's talent/obsession with creating and recording incredibly full band sounds, the guitar and drums thankfully never suddenly evaporate as they tend to do during other bands' softer moments. It isn't until the trio really opens up the throttle on more strident numbers like "Blacksun", "High Time" and "Let Me Up" that O'Brien's production really pays dividends though, as the fullness of these tracks elevate the material which would've been strong enough on its own. The term "heavy melody" was originally coined by producer Sam Taylor to describe King's X's early sound but I find it applies to Tragic Show as well as these pieces, in particular the aforementioned 3 fatter tunes, orbit around choruses that are downright bouncing. I still tend to think that the slower tunes drag what a might have been an utterly spotless rock record down a notch, but they have been growing on - in particular "Satellites" and "Ill Conceived", which I find is a lovely send off to the whole thing.

After all is said and down, Tragic Show is a stereotypical rough gem: arresting when held up to the proper light, but not without some rough edges.I emphatically recommend it for anyone interested in an album that arrived a couple of years too late to really make a splash while still bearing the mark of top-notch writing and production.

Living Colour - Shade

I have to something to confess: I haven't to anything Living Colour has put out more than half-heartedly since Collideoscope dropped in 2003, which itself was their first release since Stain put an end to a triple threat of excellent records 10 years prior. A couple of months ago I stumbled on their first EP released since before I was born entitled Who Shot Ya?, which was basically a cover of The Notorious B.I.G.'s titular track packaged with a couple of remixes by other artists. I saw that they had actually done a music video for the song and gave it a shot, curious to see how these guys had aged in the last decade and a half (the video itself is pretty good, if you haven't seen it yet and like hip hop or rock I recommend it). More than anything in the video itself I was blown away by Vernon Reid's guitar tone as I had never heard it sound so thick and chunky - he's always been an amazing player long suffering from a less-than-befitting tone which was never quite as full-throated as I would have liked, even at his heaviest. Who Shot Ya seemed to indicate a change to all that and when the full album Shade finally arrived after many years of delays, setbacks, and scheduling conflicts, I was very pleased to discover that his tone hasn't sounded this good in a long, long time. Truthfully his guitar and Doug Wimbish's bass both sound so huge I would've believed you if you had told me Brendan O'Brien had produced the album.

In reality Shade was produced and partially engineered and written by Andre Betts, a low-key industry vet with production and writing credits from the likes of Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, and Living Colour themselves. Credit where credit is due: Shade blasts out of the gate with all cylinders firing and basically never lets up until the last track is finished, which unfortunately don't quite end things on a super satisfying note despite a nice feature from Celebrity Jeopardy stary George Clinton. The pieces that work the best here are the ones most liberally soaked in the blues: the fantastic trombone and keyboard accent of "Who's That", the so-low-its-almost-crawling cover of Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues" and the straight-ahead blues rock of muscular opener "Freedom of Expression (F.O.X)", although that isn't to say the more hard rock oriented tracks disappoint. "Pattern in Time" sounds like a time capsule stretching back to the group's early 90's sound from their first two albums while unassuming foot tappers like "Invisible" and "Blak Out" are just plain groove machines. The thick, raw production really elevates the material here and erases any doubt that Living Colour might have lost their bite, even as they focus more heavily than ever before on topics of racism and inequality on the aforementioned "Who Shot Ya", "Program" (Why do I only ever hear black groups doing little skits like the one at the beginning of this song? It does a lot to humanize these bands) and a nice cover of Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" to round the whole package out. I mentioned the production before but I really have to stress again how rich of a an experience Shade is sonically. Doug Wimbish in particular sounds better than ever (think Rick Skatore on Strength In Numbers or Heavy Metal Soul By the Pound or dUg Pinnick on Dogman) while Corey Glover's pipes don't seem to have worsened with age an iota (his enthusiasm is infectious, especially on "Invisible", "Blak Out", and "Who's That"), and I've already noted how much fuller Vernon Reid's guitar tone is here. If it seems like I'm singling out stickman Bill Calhoun I'm really not, truthfully he's just been giving the same insanely tight performance for the last thirty years so it's hard to find much to say besides "he killed it again here". I find that the he isn't quite as in the pocket as he was on Stain but that was almost 25 years ago.

Shade certainly isn't subtle either musically or lyrically, but I don't think that's a bad thing in its case. As someone who has been listening to this band for a while it's a bit difficult to divorce myself from that experience and put myself in the shoes of someone who has never heard of Living Colour, much less the idea of an all black hard rock outfit. I like to think that Shade being released at this point in time with it's socially aware lyrics and Mike Brown liner artwork is less of a re-invention to the band's core audience and a wake-up to a larger music industry complex that found a place for Pharrell and Kanye but left this group, 24/7 Spyz, Follow For Now and others to fend for themselves in a post-grunge landscape. These groups have been a revelation to me in the last few years, and I can't even imagine the impact hearing a song like "Program" or "Preachin' Blues" would have on a black teenager in this era (if they dig it). More than just a collection of good tunes, Shade is a shoreline beacon for the next generation of disaffected youth of America that have grown tired of the current pop music scene.

Mafia III: One Year Later

Mafia III has generated a lot of strong reactions in the year since it's release, with many comments focused on its buggy initial release to its film-quality cutscenes and beefy, immensely satisfying gunplay while the game as a whole seems to have slipped into the back of peoples' minds while developer Hangar 13 plugged away for a year, releasing a major DLC expansion every couple of months until finally calling it after July's offering, Sign of The Times. While I think all of the DLC is worth the entry price, I don't think I'm going to cover how it all shook out in the same way that I talked about the base game, especially as Noah Caldwell-Gervais just put out another solid video going over exactly that and I'm still figuring out how what I think about all of it. If I had to give a quick hits list, I would say Stones Unturned is my favorite and the overall most well-done despite it throwing the "grounded exploration of racism" vibe of the base game out with the bathwater, out of the Sears Tower.

Faster, Baby! and Sign of The Times both have problems with their relation to the tone of the base game as well, but Stones Unturned felt much more committed to a singular tonal experience and consequently a bit more compelling to follow. Yes, that experience was naked Predator worship but the DLC's island setting was stunning and the focus on linear combat arenas, plus the new toys gifted to Lincoln along the way made the experience more than just passable. To me the cracks showed more visibly in the other 2 DLC packs as they failed to mesh their gameplay with their tones - the pairing of stunt driving a la The Dukes of Hazzard with violent rural bigotry in Faster, Baby! is about as natural a duo as you can imagine and Sign of The Times' earnest and very affecting portrait of a person who was psychologically ruined by a freaky cult features slo-mo gun battles in nightclubs with knife wielding Manson sisters who cruise around in funny car hearses with motherfucking Addams Family spiderweb grills. Also, there are "psychedelic" drug trip sequences because why not. So maybe Stones Unturned is my favorite because it just picked 1 thing and did it well without stretching itself out over a thinner, more repetitive sequence of missions like the other DLCs.

Past the DLCs and their individual experiences, though, I wanted to talk about an aspect of the Mafia III package that I haven't seen as many people mention as I would have figured: its presentation, from graphics to UI, and music choices in both its licensed soundtrack and original soundtrack. Because this game has some of the strongest presentation and sense of style that I have experience in quite a while.

Presentation

Lighting

Since Mafia III does not have a photo mode its difficult to produce screenshots that really do the lighting system at work here justice, but I've spent some time trying anyway and so have some other auteurs. Take a look:

No screenshots of the pre-rendered scenes, because that is cheating. Everyone has already mentioned how utterly amazing they look, and I am in complete agreement. I've played through Mafia III 3 times at this point and still find myself glued to the screen whenever a scene is playing, no matter how trivial. They're all executed with such style and pathos (as is the writing), and the performances are rendered so powerfully, particularly by Alex Hernandez, who plays Lincoln Clay, although truthfully the whole cast of characters is wonderfully portrayed.

Anyway, the lighting. You can probably tell by the daytime shots above that there is a noticeable amount of blur present, and while it isn't something everyone enjoys I feel like it fits the cinematic nature of the game. When you choose to open the main menu with a countdown reel and frame the whole narrative as a years-later documentary it tracks that the resulting images will be a bit more film-like than life-like, and while the overexposed sunlight can be a bit frustrating when it blocks out the road during the sunrise, it is more than when worth it when you find yourself in the bayou at a quiet moment as the wind breezes through the trees and the warm orange Louisiana light seeps through the canopy. Nighttime is where the lighting truly shines, though, as billboards and neon signage cut through the darkness and the rich interior illumination of bars, clubs, and even modest homes lend a real sense of place to the environments of New Bourdeaux. It's also the best time to enjoy the many minute details that dot the game's world and objects that contribute significantly to immersion, mostly related to the cars. Such as:

- The reflection of lights on car exteriors is fantastic at this time. Reflections also bounce of chrome bumpers and trim with equal fidelity, unlike during the day when they just look off.
- Headlights and taillights turn on & off slowly as the bulbs heat up/cool off instead of the instantaneous on/off of modern halogen lights.
- Car bodies shift noticeably when people get in and out, as well as when you turn the wheels while the car is stationary.
- Exhaust pipes start rattling once the car is started and fumes are only visible issuing from the pipe when the car is actually revving.
- A handful of cars in the game are customizable and feature different Mad Max-sized blowers that can be installed. Some of these are visible jutting through the hood a la the Black On Black's famous Weiand supercharger while some have custom hood scoops modeled specifically for that ride. Another little thing, but a nice touch all the same.

There are also a couple of more simulation-ish mechanics supposedly functional in the game code that were either removed during development such as the need to manage your car's fuel gauge and occasionally top up, and methods for the engine to track tire traction by factoring in different treads and fuel levels (!). Whether or not it was a good decision to remove these pieces is not the point of this piece, but even as Mafia III stands today it is obvious that a huge amount of work went into the design, modeling, and texturing of the cars in this game and in my mind it really stand out as great stuff. The Mafia series has always been a period piece and American cars a huge part of the time and place that is part of all of the games in this series, and Mafia III impresses in that area.



Audio

Like all period pieces, the visual side of things is only one piece of the puzzle. Creating and utilizing a suitable stable of sound effects and tracks is essential for building and maintaining the atmosphere Hangar 13 was trying to create here, and Mafia III is probably more successful in this realm than the visual aspect of its presentation - at least, I've heard a lot more people praising the soundtrack and included licensed songs than the graphics outside of the custscenes, and probably for good reason. The combination of original music and licensed tunes is so strong and well-used in this game I have a hard time of thinking of other examples that do a similarly good job. Like Grand Theft Auto, Mafia III's are never really mentioned or commented on by the game itself, unless you count the collectible album covers in the latter which seems like a stretch. The original pieces recorded specifically to fill out the game's aural space remind me of Red Dead Redemption in how they so excellently match the tone and feel of the game's themes while elevating the minutia of the experience like loading screens, small repetitive bits of combat, etc. Then there is a third group of pieces that could probably fall under the "Original Soundtrack" heading as they are found solely out in the open world as the "b-sides" of Mafia III, popping out from stereos, leaking audibly out of houses, and filling the jazz clubs found in the game's version of the French Quarter.

The influence of popular music in Mafia III cannot be overstated. Between the softly plucked notes of the OST accompanying the concept-art loading screens and menus and the naturalistic beauty of the title screen featuring Jimi Hendrix's iconic cover of "All Along The Watchtower" swirling all around, even the more technical "game-y" elements aren't permitted to deviate from the atmosphere Jesse Harlin and Jim Bonney's rich score have woven. Normally the main menu of a video game is the least immersive piece of it, affixed with a grid of options for tweaking controls and deleting old save files, but Mafia III's main menu has none of that: two simple options - continue, and new game. The PC version has a bit of a cop-out in the form of a splash screen menu that comes up before the game properly launches allowing you to tweak settings but it's clear that even the under-the-hood maintenance of difficulty settings and different resolutions are intended to be just as much a part of the Mafia III experience as the actual gameplay. The title screen's heavily stylized nature reminds me of similarly pathos-drenched titles like those of Frictional Games, notably the gut-twisting dirge of Amnesia: The Dark Descent  and the harsh glitch-horror aesthetic of Soma; Red Dead Redemption remains the closest point of comparison in terms of atmosphere and sound design to Mafia III in my mind.

Original Soundtrack & Other Assorted Noises

The original soundtrack is a rich stew of delta blues, swamp rock, and quietly plucked acoustic mood pieces that accentuate combat and cutscenes, never actually playing while the player is just roaming around, which is an interesting choice. If you're in a car then it obviously makes more sense to just listen to the radio but if you're pounding the pavements you are left with the raw sounds of the city to occupy your ears - cars fading into and out of earshot, the idle conversations of NPCs around you, and snippets of muffled songs faintly heard playing from within houses and buildings. While the conversations between NPCs are generally pretty funny and decent enough at selling the period (discussing that goofy new show Star Trek or remarking on L. Ron Hubbard's fantastic new book), the sequestering of the OST tunes into combat arenas and discrete story moments is maybe more common than I am aware of, as I have not played any open world games besides the Far Cry series and Mad Max in the last couple of years and both of those games weave their music into their minute-to-minute gameplay which I assume is the default way of implementing soundtracks. I would be curious to see if GTA V does this as well?

The rest of the music you'll hear outside of licensed material is more ephemeral - random jazz tunes and other forms of semi-elevator music not really significant enough to be included as part of the OST proper apparently. Just like Red Dead Redemption with it's saloon piano pieces! I haven't been able to find any credits for these tracks so I'm not sure who to give credit to for them, but they are another square in Mafia III's atmospheric quilt ranging from free jazz to instrumental slot-fillers on the radio to commercial jingles and more.

Licensed Songs and Radio Programs

Here we get to the real meat n' potatoes of Mafia III's audio - 100+ tracks ranging from set-in-stone classics (Rolling Stones, Jimi, Aretha Franklin) to long forgotten standards (CCR, Sam and Dave) down to (as someone who was not alive in the 60's) some fairly deep cuts, in particular "Needles and Pins" by The Searchers which is just bizarrely funny to me as a longtime Megadeth fan . That "100+" number seems a little high to me as someone with 120 hours in the game, because I experienced a lot of repeats on the radio during my time with Mafia III but whatever. This is the part of Mafia III people mention the most besides the cutscenes and for good reason, because it is incredibly impressive how well the soundtrack fits this game. You could write a whole essay on the relationship between the game and just Credence Clearwater Revival's music as it fits the game so well it's almost scary. Fuck, maybe I will because blasting through the bayou in a knockoff Ford Torino with "Born On The Bayou" piping in through the speakers is way way way more enjoyable and thematically on point than you would think it is reading it on a screen. Of course if you aren't a fan of AOR than you probably won't be spending too much time with the dial cranked but if you were willing to try the game at all I think you self-selected for enough of a tolerance of vaguely cinematic historical stuff that you will either grin and bear it or find something else to enjoy with the game.

Anyway, the final piece of the auditory puzzle I wanted to mention is the nature of the radio programs in Mafia III because they are a bit different than the ones you have heard in GTA and Saint's Row. There are only two actual "shows" in the whole game (three if you count the news bulletins that chime in about the latest interchangeable Sopranos extra that you rapidly ventilated and sprinkle in references to topical news events), one being a kind of revolutionary BLM type after hours rant (delivered by the golden-voice goodness of Dave Fennoy) and the other a landed-gentry polite racism talk show. What is most interesting to me about these smaller chunks of the radio content is how easy they are to miss, because as far as I am aware none of them are mandatory even though they are queued up to coincide with particular story beats, and they are surprisingly lengthy, coming to a total of about an hour of runtime throughout the game's narrative. If you aren't interested in buying the game just for the opportunity to listen to the in-game radio you can check out one of the shows here .

Prey First Impressions

One of my friends is a big fan of slower-paced action games, the kind that emphasize player agency and freedom instead of setpiece moments and cutting-edge design trends. Referred to as "immersive sims", these types of games are an endangered species in today's game development environment with just a handful of studios and projects carrying the torch that Deus Ex and System Shock set aflame - the Bioshock series by 2K Boston / Irrational Games (featuring former members of System Shock creators Looking Glass Technologies), Dishonored 1 & 2 by Arkane Studios (another harbor for former Looking Glass employees), Far Cry 2 by an Ubisoft team headed by emergent gameplay maestro Clint Hocking and GSC Game Worlds' S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, among others. Prey, the newest title by Arkane Studios, follows in these footsteps with an open-ended design methodology that will feel very familiar to any fans of the 'Shock series or its many children.

The game takes place aboard a space station called Talos I with you filling the shoes of Morgan Yu, who is basically a space-age yuppie caught up in a conflict with your brother Alex and a mysterious race of aliens known as the Typhon who have infested the station. While the premise is new and the CryEngine tech is quite nice looking the core gameplay will feel very comfortable to immersive sim old hands:

• You start off with a wrench and then can acquire further weapons in mostly whatever order you want
• You use "Neuromods" to upgrade Morgan's abilities and to unlock new ones. These are basically just Plasmids in space.
• You are guided throughout the station by a mostly unseen character while picking up audio logs and reading emails to give context to life on the station before everything went to shit (sensing a pattern yet?)
• Instead of scripted missions, you are given a loose narrative thread to follow and numerous optional objectives to complete at your leisure.
• The game has several systems you can interact with, including keypads you can hack, turrets and robots you can deploy, items you can craft, and enemies to fight, evade, and scan for research all nested in several expansive hub areas that are partitioned off with loading screens.

Sounds a lot like one of the 'Shock games, right? That's because Prey basically is the System Shock 3 we never got, and it is fantastic if you are a fan of that genre. I'm 12 hours in and I'm pretty sure I'm on the B side of the main plot and I still have several side quests I'd like to wrap up as well as a few more areas to comb through, all while continuing to make tough choices about how to upgrade Morgan and my weapons and making plans in the back of my mind about the strategies I'll pursue when I inevitably run through it again. 

So if this sounds at all like fun to you, I highly recommend Prey. It's on sale on Steam right for $40 and is well worth it for such well-wound package. After I finish it I would like to talk more in-depth about its design but I still feel like there is a lot to learn and absorb with this one, so we'll see when I get around to that.

Video Games as UBI and the Unnecessariat

Recently I was recommended this article about young guys my age are turning to video games in favor of that old chestnut gainful employment and found it pretty interesting. The rising importance of video games in my demos life doesn't seem very surprising to me, especially considering how quickly we've gone from:

to

The big takeaway: "For Hurst, the pull that games exerted on his son helped illustrate what's happening to young men in the broader economy. Between 2000 and 2015, he said, the percentage of lower-skilled men aged 21 to 55 who had a job dropped from 84 percent to 77 percent, "a massive change relative to historical levels." The decline is particularly acute among men in their 20s. Employment fell 10 points over the same period, from 82 percent to 72 percent. In 2015, he noted, 22 percent of men in their 20s who lacked a college degree had not worked a single day during the previous year—up from 10 percent in 2000." A couple of things here. First, as someone who enjoys video games quite a lot I think it would be insane not to admit their addiction potential (and if that isn't the right term for it I'm not sure what is) - its in their nature as games to be at least somewhat addicting dopamine release tools, they just require a significantly lesser amount of effort than playing a game of basketball or something. Since we all love dopamine (internet porn is pretty big I hear) it tracks that some people will choose to forsake their less-than-dope waking existence, especially if their choice of jobs is between flipping patties at Wendy's or stocking shelves at Ace Hardware and they can maintain a sufficient standard of living by either living with their parents or taking handouts from Uncle Sam. 

If this was really such a historic phenomenon you would think that we have begun to see at least some indication of these missing dudes' presence, but I don't I personally have noticed anything. As far as I can tell houses are still being built, roads are being maintained, and trucks are being driven... but to be fair, the type of guy that this article talks about probably isn't one that I would've really had much experience with in my life regardless. I grew up in a fairly affluent small town in Michigan and was pretty solidly middle-class so college was more of an inevitable thing to be planned for than a potential option among many, and right now I can only think of 1 guy I knew from high school who I know for sure did not go to college, and he is going to be in prison soon so... yeah. This trend of under educated guys dropping out of the workforce like this reminds me of another article I read about a year ago about a torrent of people, disproportionately white, women, rural and not well-off, who are not even "unemployed" at this point. They've been rendered obsolete by technology and automation and are currently committing quiet heroin/alcohol-aided suicide in pretty historic numbers as the global information economy leaves them in the dust (another great piece on this situation). This phenomenon of young men passing by the hours in front of video games seems like a companion piece to what is happening to their female counterparts, and while it certainly isn't ideal I wonder how much worse this will get before it gets any better, since I doubt Amazon has plans to slow down anytime soon. Luckily these gaming fiends seem to be pretty cool with it for now so we won't be seeing molotovs through the windows of Congress just yet, but I'm very interested to see how (if at all) the government begins figuring out new, more constructive pursuits for all of us in the unecessariat after the singularity.

(And yes, I acknowledge that games are a valid entertainment art form just like movies and books blah blah blah, that isn't the issue. The problem is that when you give people a relatively cheap and easy way to feel happy/engaged/challenged like you normally would at some crappy minimum wage job I'm not sure how surprised we can be that they choose illusion instead of reality).  

Living Colour - Stain

A 3 year gap and a shift change in the bass player department didn't slow Living Colour down a bit as they delivered their leanest and most focused album to date in Stain. Shaded more noticeably in metal and grunge influences than anything they had released before, Stain is focused less on breaking through the color barrier of the rock world than it is in showing everyone what Living Colour can do when their sole concern is making music that only they can make. Well, maybe not only they can make, but they certainly have a unique take on the downtuned grunge sound that pervaded the early 90s.

What's more surprising about Stain, though, is how little Living Colour's sound actually changed. The big choruses and foot-tapping hooks came along for the ride, as well as the insanely tight rhythm section of Will Calhoun and new recruit Doug Wimbish (bass duties previously provided by Muzz Skillings) while the whole package is glued together with guitarist Vernon Reid's iconoclastic riffwork and solos, which have never sounded better. Song after song he delivers high-bar guitar work, particularly on the tracks that bridge into solo sections that have a level of groove not seen recorded outside of a King's X album - see "Ignorance Is Bliss" and "Never Satisfied" for ample evidence. Reid's playing recalls John Petrucci's on a raw technical level but his style is purely in the service of the riff on Stain as he pivots effortlessly between heavy blues ("Mind Your Own Business") industrial thrash ("Auslander", "This Little Pig") and even a couple of lower key pieces ("Nothingness", "Bi"). Nearly a quarter of an hour shorter than its predecessor Time's Up, Stain took a hot knife to Living Colour's progressive excess and revealed a filthy, funky skeleton beneath.

Living Colour - Time's Up

Time's Up improves on every aspect of Living Colour's early sound and is up there with King's X's Gretchen Goes to Nebraska as one of the best (and most memorably so) 2nd records. 10 minutes longer than Vivid, Time's Up offers largely the same musical qualities of its predecessor mixed into more interesting and effective compositions by the band, touching on Bad Brains-style hardcore riffing, funk and R & B, and plain old hard rock delivered with a characteristic spin. The material is more diverse and the peaks are higher here, with fewer tracks that feel like a band grasping for an identity. The group's chops are just as impressive as they were on Vivid and the rhythm section of Muzz Skillings and Will Calhoun in particular shines on these pieces, particularly on standouts like "Pride" and "Solace of You". Guest spots from Queen Latifah, James Earl Jones, and others, along with a generous application of samples and a few short interludes help to break up the long stretches of music but at the cost of a runtime that always feels just a bit too long by the time we arrive that the closer. With songs this good I can figure a bit of excess, though, so it doesn't change the fact that this is a fantastic album through and through.

Living Colour - Vivid

An all-black rock band from Brooklyn forming in the 80's that were earnestly pulled along by the chain of the mainstream music machine as a hot new unit well-deserving of fame and fortune, Living Colour is probably simultaneously the most recognizable band of all time and the most forgettable. The story is so cliche its almost too trite to recount: a group of small-time Berklee notables under the stewardship of guitarist Vernon Reid, who was cursed to have his style always described as "eclectic" and nothing more insightful, along with drummer Will Calhoun, bassist Muzz Skillings, and frontman Corey Glover backing him up. Reid's regular presence on the international jazz circuit caught the attention of Mick Jagger who took a shine to the group and became interested in producing their first album, which was released in 1988 to critical and commercial acclaim, chiefly off the ample carrying capacity of lead single "Cult of Personality", which sits lazily at rest up there in the clouds next to "Highway Star" and "Career of Evil" in the pantheon of legendary opening album tracks. The rest of the album is unfortunately a bit light on the ground as the excellent "Funny Vibe" and so-good-I-didn't-even-realize-it-was-a-cover "Memories Can't Wait" do what they can to prop up the more quizzically played-straight numbers like ballads "I Want to Know" and "Broken Hearts". The groove is definitely real on the more metallic pieces ("Middle Man", "Glamour Boys") but there is feeling of the band holding back throughout Vivid, but that could just be me projecting. Regardless, Vivid remains a solid introductory effort thanks to the strength of a couple of choice singles which seemed to have given the band the time and budget they needed to fully realize their sound on disc numero dos.

B- 

Starsector

Starsector is a 2D open-world space exploration/combat/trading sim with role-playing elements. It first entered development in 2010 and I originally bought it as an "early access" type game (before Steam had taken that concept to into the mainstream and ruined it) around 2012, back when it was still in a very early stage of development and was going by a different name, Starfarer. Back then the game was a solid little 2D space combat sim with only a few light open-world exploration mechanics I played around with it for a bit but lost interest due to the long development cycle and lost track of it around 2014.

A few weeks ago I randomly remembered Starsector and decided to check it out and see what it looks like nowadays after 3 years out of the loop. As luck would have it just a few days later a major update to the game dropped, adding and improving on several features that had been apparently cooking for quite a while that fundamentally altered and fleshed out the core gameplay loop, turning it into something more than just a 2D space combat sim. Back when I was playing the main "objective" was just to fly around with your fleet, battling other factions' ships while accumulating money and enough resources to improve your own fleet so you could take on progressively larger fleets and armadas. Combat took place in discrete little arenas in real-time while you could pause the action to issue a wide range of commands to your fleet ranging from attack orders to escort assignments and rally points. This gameplay loop hasn't changed too much but instead has been augmented with a couple layers of additional mechanics like:

• Scavenging: Drifting derelict ships, dormant automated probes, space stations long dark and other objects are now sprinkled throughout the various star systems waiting to be discovered. These are often the subjects of missions but can be sought out independently while roaming about as well, and they often contain valuable rewards. Good stuff.
• Surveying: Also the subject of missions, uncharted worlds can be surveyed and cataloged freely to obtain detailed data on a couple of factors like amount and types of natural resources, habitability, etc. This is also an activity that is easy to do while just exploring random systems and can yield some major dosh.
• Missions: I think these have been in the game for a while now, but this has been my first experience with them so I think it makes sense to include them here. These are simple single-objective tasks that send you to survey or scan distant targets in far-flung systems or deliver X amount of Y good to someone somewhere. Not particularly complex but they do a decent job of providing an incentive for exploration, which is the game's real strength because it allows the emergent potential of its mechanics to come up. You also have the option of taking a "commission" with one of the game's several factions which gives you a reward for destroying that faction's enemies while making those enemy factions immediately hostile to you. This basically lets you join a faction.
• Bounties: Similar to commissions, but these are constantly being posted by various factions and individuals for different targets all over the map. They seem to be split between general "Destroy X faction's enemy ships in Y area, get $$$" and taking out specific named NPCs commanding fleets ranging from 3-4 small frigates to enormous armadas. 

When I first played Starsector there were 3 factions: The Hegemony, which are kind of like the Imperium of Man from 40K without all of the gothic horror or kind of a low-tech Galactic Republic. Basically, the space government. There was also the Tri-Tachyon Corporation which was the Hegemony's rival and the designated "high-tech" faction and a Pirate faction, but since you couldn't ally yourself with them I guess they don't really count. Nowadays there are several additional factions present all with their own relationships to the others that you can undertake missions, bounties, and commissions for who are all out and about in the game's overworld, constantly battling each other (and you as well depending on your relations with them). This overworld is referred to in-game as "hyperspace" and it's kind of like a freeway system for space travel that sees a buzzing level of activity as enemy fleets duke it out (feel free to join in and assist your allies), smugglers and scavengers skulk around looking for their next big score while pirates and fanatic techno-religious cultists (one of the new factions) roam the void in search of victims.

 

Starsector's current map size as of version .8

The list of tweaks and changes goes on: a revamped skill tree, a substantially more fleshed out UI and lore, new skills and ways of navigating the game's enormous space, and a fully discrete tutorial that, while not perfectly successful in bring new players up to speed with everything going on, is an enormous step in the right direction and I find myself continually impressed with what has been accomplished here with such a small team as Starsector's developer, Fractal Softworks, is made up of just one full time dude and a handful of part time contributors. Then when you see the game's modest $15 price tag, relaxed system specs, and brilliant modding community, its just great to see a game with such a cool concept as this not succumb to the myriad ticket-punchers that end so many other early-access games. Starsector has come an enormous way since its very humble beginnings and I haven't even mentioned several of the other new things included in the latest version. This is simply early access indie development done so, so right.

More Mad Max Thoughts

I was thinking about the Mad Max game earlier (since apparently I'm turning into the Joseph Anderson of Mad Max) and I kind of came to a realization as why I thought the game felt it too safe, and it has to do with the cars (specifically Max's car, the Magnum Opus). See, in the movies it's made pretty clear that cars = life in the Mad Max universe and shiny new F-150s aren't exactly growing on trees. This is pretty obvious to anyone who's seen any of these films (especially Fury Road) but I think it's worth pointing out that cars are put on a seriously high pedestal in this franchise, and not just in the The Fast and The Furious kind of "these cars are real fast and look cool" way -- they're really more like horses, with names and personalities that haven been customized to the owner's tastes over the years, but far more valuable since you can't just wander out into the outback and lasso a car to replace the one that just got wrecked. Max's Interceptor in The Road Warrior is equipped with a bomb that will go off if anyone tries to siphon his petrol and we're shown several times in Fury Road that all of the vehicles in Immortan Joe's fleet have detachable steering wheels, unconventional fuel modifications, and in the case of the War Rig, a dead man's switch preventing ignition without a special sequence of switch flips. It's shown quite clearly to us how valuable and irreplaceable many of these vehicles are, so I think it's a real shame that Mad Max the game doesn't really continue with this theme and instead kind of goes in the opposite direction.

For starters, Max is able to steal any enemy vehicle with just a single button press - evidently they thoughtfully drive around with their doors unlocked all the time. This is pretty silly just in the least immersion-breaking case of you being able to theoretically sneak up on a guy and steal his car leaving him stranded in the desert (this never happens). It gets hilarious in practice however as, if you can get the timing right, you can pull enemies right out of their own cars while they are still moving. Often these car doors are festooned with rusty spikes and jagged tips probably intended to prevent this exact scenario from occurring, but whatever, they probably originally built the game to not let you perform these carjack stunts but in testing people hated getting run over repeatedly without any recourse so... there you go. This still would've kind of silly and dumb if the enemies were allowed to do this to Max's car as well, but no, instead of trying to give Max a taste of his own medicine enemies will just hop onto your car and try to kick you / punch you / stab you to death. This is a real bummer as you're frequently forced to get out of the car and leave your sidekick / mechanic buddy Chumbucket all alone and defenseless, but since none of the enemies can actually hurt him there's really no danger at all, even though Chum has lots of incidental dialogue about how scared he is, how dangerous the area you're in is, etc. It feels like a pretty obvious idea so I'm guessing Avalanche Studios at least thought about this but it's a shame nothing made it into the final game as that added tension of needing to protect Chum and the car would've added a lot of white-knuckle moments as you race back from whatever you were doing to save him before some scavengers run off with your Magnum Opus and erase about 15 hours of progress. What would've been really cool, is if at that point you have would've had to repeat some of the introduction missions of the game and gone back to the Boneyard, grab another of the 5 car bodies, and try again with a stock Opus. Maybe too punishing since you're asked to get out of your car a lot, but still probably would'be felt more in line with a post-apocalyptic hellhole than what we got.

The other aspect that the game slides backwards from in relation to the films is enemy variety. I don't mean the variety of the enemy factions as those are actually fine even if they are all kind of same-y - I mean the cars. For a Mad Max game there is a dishearteningly small pool of included car designs that you will encounter way, way too often by the end of the game, and it's so fundamentally at odds with the universe this game takes place in and the generally accepted ground rules of post-apocalyptic media that I honestly believe that this was just a result of Avalanche's inexperience with making a Mad Max game, as this is an issue that the developers must have been reminded of time and time again as they were putting this game together.

 
This isn't every vehicle in the game, but these are definitely the most common ones you will see in your time in the Wasteland. Notice the repeats? Yes, every vehicle has totally separate entries in this menu for its "no armor", "some armor", and "tons of armor" versions (as you progress through the areas of the environment and get closer and closer to Gastown, the enemies get tougher. In this case "tougher" just means "has more health" but whatever, you will see 13 of the vehicles on this page so often that they are honestly the only enemies that exist. What's worse, there is a lot of overlap between enemy factions here: 3 factions have a heavily armored car with shredder tires (top left, far right middle row). 3 factions have a "rammer" car with a huge cowcatcher and distinctive exhaust (2nd from left, top row and 2nd from right, middle row). 3 factions have a similar looking coupe-type vehicle with a flamethrower mounted in the back (far left, middle row, 2nd from right bottom row). 2 factions have pickup trucks filled with dudes who try to board your car (2nd from left, middle row). And then all 4 factions have their own front-line "infantry grunt" vehicle that makes up the bulk of convoys and a significant portion of patrols (right 3 top row, left 3 bottom row). The excessive repetition stings even more considering that many of the vehicles are modeled after the cars featured in Fury Road, a film where you couldn't find a repeated car model with a gun to your head.

Like the issue with Max's carjacking and Chumbucket's invulnerability, I'm sure the obvious solution to this was already thought of by the developers (obvious to me, at least): take the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, and reshape to generate random procedural enemy vehicles instead of Orcs. This is almost certainly an insane amount of work however, so I can understand why they weren't able to do something like this as I'm sure they recognized the potential of semi-random convoy or camp leaders for Max to take on. What is interesting to me is that there hints of a more modular car customization system a la Mafia II that exists, as a there are certain late-game vehicles that belong to a smaller faction which are like twisted, even more souped up versions of the "regular" enemy vehicles seen in the image above. These vehicles strangely are the only ones in the game that you cannot capture for yourself and feature some very cool and unique parts and chassis, so it's a bit of a bummer that they weren't able to do more with that - maybe since each "region" of the map is under the control of a leader who specializes in certain aspects of car combat (one is all about armor and tires, another is all about engines and exhausts, etc."), the enemies in that region maybe could've had distinct, unique customizations in order to survive against the leader's people. Which brings me to another strange piece of this game: the people.

Throughout Mad Max, you do most of what you do in order to help the people of the Wasteland. Whether that's taking over outpost camps, wrecking convoys, or clearning minefields and etc., it's all ostensibly to further Max's own personal goals while helping the "normal" people of this world get out from under the thumb of the game's antagonist, Scabrous Scrotus (yes, that is really his name). And to some extent, your progress is tracked and reflected in the game world - the "threat level" of each area goes down, reducing the frequency of enemy patrols, and whenever you take an enemy camp it's repopulated with friendly NPCs who are for some reason shown dismantling everything. Yes, even in the post-apocalypse where water is more valuable than gold you can stand and watch these people for hours hack, saw, and grind away at the metal structures that can only have been put together with countless man-hours and resources. It doesn't make any sense and the game only gives this lame "we have to make it so there's no reason for them to come back" excuse as a hand-wave, but that makes even less sense. No one has guns in this world (except snipers. Snipers with fully-functioning rifles are littered all over the place but Max possess literally the only other firearm you will see in the game) so what are they going to do? Ram their cars into the outpost? It would've made way more sense if, every time you captured a camp, you had to defend against an inevitable counter-attack - kind of like the 2nd stage in a boss battle. And depending on the amount of perimeter defenses that you destroyed on your way in (stuff like flamethrowers, snipers, and bizarre automated turrets) the fight would be easier or harder since the people you liberated it for might not have enough tools to push back the enemies. That could've fed into a larger system of territory control for each region's leader in a similar way to the gang fight mechanics from GTA. As it is now you just kind of clear out camps and the enemy factions just kind of accept their losses and leave you and the camps alone in a very un-Fury Road manner. Just having something really small like the outpost retaliation mechanic in Fac Cry 4 would've gone a long way towards making this seem like more of a constant struggle that Max and the player are helping out with instead of the one man army conquest that it is now.

This is getting long and kind of ranty so I'm going to end it here, but I might write something about the car combat as well since it's mostly good but way too easy and has some strange quirks about it. We'll see.

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

Since the early 00's Mastodon has been slowly prying open the mainstream hard rock/metal market with their idiosyncratic trade-off vocals, technical yet increasingly groovy riffs, and an ever-improving ear for the ever-important hook. They've created bizarre and ambitious concept albums loosely based around the elements of water, earth, fire and whatever "aether" is, as well as more literal tales like Moby Dick and other loose chronologies that flow through the course of their records. These albums all feature pretty universally  excellent artwork and the group's success at blending progressive rock's focus on ambition and craftsmanship with the songwriting and memorability of popular hard rock is second in my mind only to Tool. But whereas Tool's music was a deep pool that I enjoyed exploring, Mastodon has never really "clicked" for me. Not for lack of trying either! I've lost count of the number of times I've run through Leviathan, Blood Mountain, and especially Crack the Skye, earnestly trying to find and lock on to the supposedly amazing material contained within without much luck. After Once More 'Round the Sun seemed to cement the band's more radio-friendly approach as their immediate future direction I had checked out, more or less for good until I heard rumors of the impending follow-up release, titled Emperor of Sand. So I decided to check it out and see if this was finally going to be that fabled album at long last that moves all the pieces into position and allows me to really dig into this Atlanta quartet.

The first few songs are fairly light fare, with the radio friendly "Show Yourself" clocking in at a svelte 3 minutes while a generous helping of guitar hooks courtesy of the excellent team-up of Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher squarely dropped on top of the typical world-class drumming of Brann Dailor keep the front half of Emperor of Sand feeling fresh and inviting, as hooky tunes like "Precious Stones" and "Steambreather" provide a catchy cushion to the more taxing and overt sludge/prog of numbers like the excellent "Roots Remain" as the album moves into its 2nd half with more than just radio play on its mind. Rearguard tracks like "Andromeda" and "Scorpion Breath" do their best to hold up the record from the typical back-half slump as the full-figured closer "Jaguar God" shuts things down on a solid enough note.

If this review doesn't seem particularly insightful, that's probably because it isn't, for the reasons I gave at the top. Mastodon's music has always kind of just washed by me in the background of my head, even though I can recognize that they can write some damn good songs. Brann Dailor is frankly one of the greatest drummers alive right now and I will always be interested in whatever he is working on, but the rest of Mastodon's sound after giving Emperor of Sand several spins, for whatever number of reasons, just does not work for me. It's especially tragic because they are one of the few legitimately cool progressive bands to have ever existed and they remind of Blue Osyter Cult, but it looks I'll have to wait for another Mastodon record.

Albums From The Attic: Isreal Kamakawiwoʻole - Ka 'Ano'i

I can't pretend to know the Hawai'ian islands to the degree that singer Israel Kamakawiwoʻole did, but after a short couple of months spent working on the small island of Moloka'i I like to think I understand a little bit of the appeal of that tropical chain.  While reggae music seems to have been a relatively small but significant subgenre here in the US's pop music scene, world music (and especially island music) has always been an understandably underground affair with few mainstream advocates - Peter Gabriel is the only one who comes to mind. The music of Isreal Kamakawiwoʻole, unquestionably the most celebrated Hawai'ian musician of his time, was able to leap over the cultural divide and find crossover success in the mainland thanks to the resonance of his 1990 single "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World", heard in film and TV soundtracks throughout the world ever since. While that single and it's 1993 containing album Facing Future earned him his biggest success, Isreal's debut album released in 1990, Ka 'Ano'i, has fallen into the shadow caused by his more eagerly received later releases.

Encapsulating a breadth of genres, Ka 'Ano'i effortlessly slips between old-time folk/island/reggae standards and traditional Hawai'ian pieces with equivalent ease. Bouncy opener "Margarita" sets the tone for the rest of the disc as follow-up "Coney Island Washboard Woman" clues you in to Isreal's sense of humor, before his gorgeous vocals and lazy ukelele playing provide a brilliant counterpoint in slower tracks like the etheral "Kainoa" and the excellently sleepy cover of "You Don't Know Me". Traditional Hawai'ian folk numbers fill out the rest of the record's modest 33 minute runtime, the strongest being the lilting "Ka Na‘i Aupuni" while Iz's best-known recording appears in an early prototype form to round out the package. While he is supported by a competent backing band, the strongest tracks on Ka 'Ano'i are the ones with just Iz and his ukelele, especially as some of the more over-produced and cheesy electronic instrumentation creeps in on "Men Who Ride Mountains" and "Sea of Love" to detract from the simple brilliance of Kamakawiwoʻole's vocal talents. The production throughout is warm and intimate and the whole thing is honestly just a simple joy to listen to.

Even if you don't recognize his name, you almost certainly will recognize at least one of these songs and will have a tough time not enjoying your time with the other excellent material found on Ka 'Ano'i.

Titanfall 2's Identity Crisis

Respawn dropped a trailer for the upcoming free DLC update yesterday showcasing the grand reveal of 2 new "Prime" Titans (fancy skins), the return of a map called Colony from the original Titanfall, and a new weapon, the R-101 (mostly just a reskin of the R-201). As such it was time for everyone to weigh in with their insightful comments on why the game is still continuously bleeding players even with such an "excellent" post-launch content model and it's "amazing" gameplay. I've seen a couple of people hitting on the real reason but they're drowned in the stormy seas of "lul @ EA" and "something something release date". As someone with just over 100 hundred hours clocked into this thing I think I've arrived at the big reason the game is failing to draw in new players: It's fundamentally not fun for weak players.

In terms of skill floors and ceilings, Titanfall 2 has one of the widest gaps between shit players repping team potato and 1000 DPI former Quake pros with wrists more bulging and beefed out than most dudes' biceps. That isn't an issue in and of itself, and neither is the snowball-y the-rich-get-richer killstreak system that rewards those better players with their Titans far earlier than their opponents - the real problem, and one that other, more team-based FPS games like Killing Floor and Overwatch mostly solved, is giving the average player who doesn't know how to bunny hop across the maps at 55 MPH a way to contribute to the match. While there is a killstreak reward (referred to as "boosts" here) that gives you an extra battery to give to a teammate's Titan for a bonus shield, it's not particularly deep or something you can base a strategy around.

Next to that we have the Titans themselves, which are divided into 6 distinct "classes" this time around. They're all unique in appearance and abilities and provide another thick layer of strategy on top of the manic ground game of the PvP combat, and that uniqueness gives the game an almost MOBA-esque feel (especially in modes with AI grunts like Attrition) as well as giving players a "character" to identify with and "main", similar to Overwatch. However with only 6 different choices any hope of a competitive playlist seems DoA, without even mentioning the balance of those individual Titans Titanfall 2 straddles a middle ground between full-on hero focus a la Overwatch/Dota with a small degree of customization as a holdover from it's days of aping the Modern Warfare games that it was built from. While customizing your particular Titan in the original Titanfall seems to have been a well-received feature, I'm much more interested in seeing how far Respawn can push the hero archetypes with this franchise. Possibilities for more traditional team-based shooter classes like healers and supports seem wide with the broad sci-fi universe that the games are based in, and a the Titan that wasn't just a DPS front-line combat machine seems interesting at the very least.

Titanfall 2 will continue to bleed players until all that remains is a crusty enclave of big fish in the very small pond of Titanfall games, and I don't want that to happen. If Respawn embraces the strength of their Titan designs and allows for some more varied gameplay with alternate avenues to victory for all of us who aren't 15 year olds wired up on Adderall that would do a lot to bridge the gap.

KXM - Scatterbrain

The sudden formation of KXM in 2014 and their debut album released quickly afterwards was one of my favorite records of recent years. Who would have thought that a group comprised of members of Korn, King's X, and Dokken would've sounded so good? While the disc had it's share of clunkers and sounded a bit too much like a dUg Pinnick solo album at times, it had plenty of strong moments and the fresh blood and enthusiasm exuding from guitarist George Lynch and drummer Ray Luzier seemed to have galvanized Pinnick and finally have provided with him with some bandmates that he could bounce material off effectively since his longtime comrades from King's X. Personally I assumed 2014's KXM was strictly a one-time affair due to the busy schedules of everyone involved, but the announcement of a second album was heavily anticipated by me personally, and so far this new release Scatterbrain has been receiving high marks from whatever rock press is left these days. So is it worth the buzz or has KXM gone the way of The Winery Dogs and lost the plot?

Judging solely by the singles released ahead of the album, Scatterbrain at least isn't a total loss. The opening one-two punch of the title track and follow-up "Breakout" begin things well, particularly the latter track with its multi-part vocal harmonies, climactic finale and that 100% grade-A-filthy main riff from George Lynch. "Big Sky Country" sees the trio stretch out over a bluesy groove as wide as a flood plain before moving into the first of the disc's more challenging tracks, "Calypso". Harsh, almost dissonant guitar leads alongside a doubled bassline provide a dark undergrowth as tribal drum rhythms propel us deeper into the jungle, while gang vocals anchor the chorus and provide an interesting counterpoint to Pinnick's impassioned wailing. It's a far cry from KXM's previous material and is the first of several tracks to experiment with more alternative genres (and one of the more successful ones at that) as the group moves right along into the reggae-funk of "Not A Single Word", which is again elevated by the stellar playing of George Lynch who is rapidly climbing the ranks of "most underrated guitar player". His combination of swaggering crunch and playful eagerness for experimentation, particularly on high-water-marks like "Obsession", album standout "Noises In The Sky", and "Never Enough", as I found myself constantly impressed not only by his raw riffwork but his tone and choice of effects.

This is the part where I talk about the other band members and how they contribute greatly to Scatterbrain's successes as well, but while I will (and they do) I think George Lynch really stole the show with this one. Ray Luzier is obviously an immensely talented drummer and shows off more of his extensive range here but I can't help but get a Mike Mangini vibe from his playing - he's almost too good for my liking and at times its a bit odd to have the relatively straight-forward hard rock of Lynch and Pinnick being supported by this highly technical web of polyrhythms. With that said the production of Luzier's drums in particular and the record as a whole is altogether fuller and noticeably more rich here than the stiff, at times grating mix found on KXM, despite that album having a slightly higher DR score than Scatterbrain - strange. The material on Scatterbrain also feels more developed than what was found on KXM, with a few songs that I suspect would've ended up as solid clunkers had they been included on that album ("Stand", "Together") managing to shift gears midway through and at least partially redeem themselves with a well-done bridge or solo section. While the record slows down towards the end with more misses than hits, the laid back lullaby of "Angel" ends things on a high note. And its those peaks and valleys that make Scatterbrain all the more memorable and successful as a follow-up to KXM. Pinnick, Luzier and Lynch cover a surprisingly wide area swath of genres with this one and it seems plainly evident how much sheer fun they had recording it, navigating deftly throughout each piece's own little twists and turns. An expansion on their debut's foundation, Scatterbrain reassuringly signals that there is still plenty of gas left in the tank here and against all conventional wisdom and historical trends, KXM manages to be one of the few supergroups worth keeping a close eye on.

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals

Anime has never been a genre (style?) that I've been particularly interested in. My experience with it is about as shallow as it gets as I can count the number of actual shows I've seen on one hand, not counting the scattered reruns of Cowboy Bebop thanks to Adult Swim, and from what little exposure I've had to other popular shows hasn't exactly grabbed me. In particular I've always felt a bit weirded out by the "idiosyncrasies" of the style (high pitched shrieking female voice acting, the V sign thing, sweat drop/angry indicators, etc.) and I always kind of wondered why I didn't feel the same way about Western shows/movies and their own tropes and recurring elements, and I Hiroki Azuma's brilliant book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals has helped illuminate that for me.

Hiroki Azuma is a social critic, philosopher, and PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who focuses on postmodern and other topics of "new" criticism (my term, not his). I was made aware of him through a link to both a short profile of him as well as a link to his most well known book, titled Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Written originally in 2001 it is a fascinating examination of not just the Otaku subculture of modern day Japan but our postmodern society in general and the increasingly "nonnarrative" direction culture is going in. The main thrust of the book is that Otaku culture and the products (both physical and cultural) they consume are increasingly lacking in what Azumi terms a "grand narrative", instead moving more and more towards hollow combinations of attractive elements. In terms of the general anime style this means easily identifiable traits Azumi refers to as "moe-elements" constructed to encourage certain emotional reactions - cat ears, maid uniforms, etc. The reason Otaku are drawn to these products is not the appeal of some "grand narrative" that attempts to grapple with the human condition or any other similarly lofty goal, but because they assemble disparate combinations of these "moe-elements" into easily categorize-able entities, hence the "database". Each individual work is therefore not meant to be enjoyed on its own but rather as an endless game of musical chairs with characters, settings, and designs from other works as part of the "database" of "moe-elements". It's kind of abstract so if this explanation doesn't make any sense... just read the book.

While Azumi focuses on Otaku culture in particular, I think that his ideas on the trend of cultures moving towards postmodernism "nonnarrative" seeking and "database" attraction isn't something unique to Japan. Many subcultures raised around small niches probably show signs of this slide towards postmodernity and one that immediately comes to mind for me is the metal community, especially internet hubs like r/metal. The focus has always seemed to be on quantity above quality, with members competing to see who can rattle off a more impressive list of underground post-rock-doom-sludge-prog-shoegaze-whatever bands than engaging with the actual musical product produced by these acts in a critical way. This trend of engaging with products and culture on a "database" level can probably be seen in the modern video game community as well as films, which have long been the subject of diligent categorization by devoted "buffs". Whatever you think of Western culture's trajectory in the coming years, you could do much, much worse than Otaku: Japan's Database Animals as a thoroughly educating and entertaining piece of work.