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-