Haken - Affinity

Arriving three years after their well-received third record The Mountain, British progressive metal standard bearers Haken's latest selection Affinity sticks out from the rest of their catalog for a couple of reasons, the biggest being that this is the first full-fledged LP featuring the band's new bass player, Connor Green, who replaced Thomas MacLean - one of the founding members of the group. Green's first recording with the band was a stopgap EP entitled Restoration, which featured material fashioned from the the outfit's hard-to-find demo album, Enter The 5th Dimension. It was tough to figure out whether Green was a good fit as I didn't find anything memorable about the bass work he contributed to Restoration, but with Affinity it seems like he's had more of a chance to lock in with the rest of the boys and deliver some solid parts.

Rather than go for the more literal concept album experience they've delivered in the past, Haken has opted to evoke more of a sci-fi / 80s Blood Dragon-esque feeling with Affinity. This new approach is lamp shaded immediately with the electronic tones of opener "affinity.exe" and is brought right up to the surface with the excellent "1985" which contains a surprisingly tasteful resurrection of old-school electronic drum hits and synth runs. Other highlights include the excellent pop hopefulness of "Earthrise", the Mountain-esque, deep space serenity of closer "Bound by Gravity", and a less than ideal amount of the 15 minute heavyweight "The Architect". This piece is the hinge the rest of Affinity pivots around, but except for a functional yet workmanlike opening displaying some of the most transparent bits of Dream Theater influenced material they've put together and a criminally underused Einar Solberg (of Leprous) who's black-ice vocals are relegated to the closing few minutes of the song. The other material found here doesn't so much "suffer" from post-Restoration Haken's sound but rather just kind of reinforce the direction they seem to be heading in -- sleeker production, less interesting vocal arrangements (The Mountain's harmonies seem almost alien compared to the single-voice approach heard here) and a bit of a missing element of the fun, wacky, admittedly gimmicky band that produced songs like "Celestial Elixir" and "Cockroach King". I'm not really going to miss the circus music breaks, but it's what that kind of stuff represented: unpredictability. They broke out the goofy shit just often enough to add an element of "At any moment this song could devolve into death growls and Muppet sound effects" that helped Haken stand out from the legions of other progressive metal Dream Theater tribute bands all playing different flavors of the same stuff. And when you strip away all those quirky "Haken-y" things from the music, stuff starts to sound kinda generic. In the end Affinity is just a little too sleek and polished for it's own good.

Edit: So since I wrote this I've had some more time to digest this record (and it's awesome packaging). I've softened up on it on the whole - the production is obviously better on a physical copy and getting a chance to look at the lyrics to figure out what the hell Ross is singing is a plus, but my first kneejerk reaction that Affinity wasn't going to replace The Mountain or even Aquarius as my favorite Haken album still holds. That doesn't change the fact that "1985", "Bound by Gravity", and "Lapse" are excellent songs, though.

B- 

Hyper Light Drifter First Impressions

Ever since Transistor I've apparently been infected by an aversion to new, challenging games. I'm hopelessly trapped replaying old favorites like Far Cry 2 (while eagerly awaiting the latest iteration of Ziggy's Mod for 3) and new ones like Mad Max, while being acutely aware of how excellent both Transistor and newly released Indie darling Hyper Light Drifter and I fully *intend* to complete them. Both of these games have incredible artwork, soundtracks, and mechanics, but Drifter is just... not fun to play with a keyboard and mouse and apparently I was scared off by the depth of Transistor's mix-n-match combat abilities.

I guess it's not really surprising since I'm working an actual, real, legit 40-hours-a-week get-paid-every-two-weeks job that my tolerance and willingness to seek out and endure challenging and original games has withered so severely, but yeah -- I'm basically the average consumer of video games at this point. I'm sure at some point I'll have the itch for these games again, but until then I'm pretty damn happy spending my reduced gaming time on sure bets. Pretty selfish, right?

Demon Lung // The Skull // Monolord

Bands names after other, more famous bands' songs have always sent up a bit of a red flag for me -- like, what better way to signal both your "respect the classics" cred at the same time as your crippling unoriginality? But, the exception proves the rule and I needed a lead-in for this, so here we are. Skip the later full-lengths and go straight to the source with these guys: debut album (22 minutes qualifies as an album now?) Pareidolia is a chunky spread of thick riffs, distorted female vocals, and... pinch harmonics? In my doom/stoner? Yes, Virginia.

C

I wasn't a fan of Eric Wagner's other recent work with Blackfinger as an object of Trouble-style stuff, but my ears perked up when stumbling upon this record. The lack of Bruce Franklin is certainly felt (although Matt Goldsborough's tone is so faithful to OG Trouble I had to check to make sure it wasn't actually Bruce) but this is close to a full reunion as we are likely to ever get because Bruce is working hard on that 2nd Supershine album (please). It treads the same ground as Trouble always has but it's refreshing to see lifers like these able to keep things so fresh this late in their careers.

B-

Falling more in line with Ufomammut or Electric Wizard, Monolord's Vænir is more interesting than this type of music usually is (add some points for that artwork) as they do a good job of supplying enough life-sustaining riffs to keep the listener from suffocating between songs. I find it hard to evaluate this kind of spacey stuff as part of the point seems to be to bludgeon you into submission with it's "heaviness" (ugh) so you can cruise through the rest of the disc in a zonked out riff-high. Whatever you want to call it, Vænir kept me interested throughout several plays so we have a winner.

B

10 Cloverfield Lane

A spin-off sidequel arriving eight years after the original was released, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie I really would've liked to be in the pitch meeting for. A mix of Barton Fink, Misery, and War of the Worlds might sound like a mess, but a lot of what we've got here is actually pretty solid. The two leads (Mary Winstead and John Gallagher, Jr.) play their roles well, if a bit straight-ahead, but John Goodman's performance is the real reason you're going to pay money for this: impressively overweight and messily overgrown with a scraggly beard, he gives off a sickly, near-death aura of general un-wellness -- Marlon Brando by way of Fallout.

The setup is thus: Winstead's character Michelle splits from the city and her boyfriend for reasons unknown before being run off the road by an unseen car -- cue one of the better title sequences in recent memory. She soon wakes up in an underground bunker inhabited by a dude named Emmett (Gallagher, Jr.), both under the watchful, crazy eyes of the warden of this dungeon, Howard (Goodman). None of them can leave, but not for the usual reasons -- according to Howard, the surface world has suffered some sort of catastrophe that has killed most everyone and turned the air into poison. The film then alternates between somewhat relaxed exploration/exposition (a montage of the gang enjoying life underground, for example) and more tense confrontations that due the bulk of the plot-work, which all involve Goodman acting insane and are, as a result, very compelling. He's the workhorse of 10 Cloverfield Lane, dragging the audience along through the quicksand of blandness when the film stumbles into it. While it's ostensibly a psychological thriller, there aren't as many nail-biter moments as I was expecting and the film seems more concerned with resolving the "is the air really poison or not" question while also tying into Cloverfield somehow. Because while this seems like a very compact and interesting psychological thriller, it's still related to Cloverfield in the end. I'll leave you to discover the specifics of that on your own, but if you're hoping that this might be the modern equivalent of The Conversation or Barton Fink should set your expectations properly -- ultimately 10 Cloverfield Lane is too interested in the sci-fi background of it's nascent little universe to really give these characters and this situation even time to really reach a boiling point. Despite all that, who knows when we'll see John Goodman in another role like this, if ever - that might be good enough of a reason to see it right there.

C+

Kendrick Lamar - Untitled Unmastered

Coming hot on the heels of another reflective album firmly anchored in the past (Steven Wilson's 4 1/2), Untitled Unmastered is similarly difficult to discuss without referencing the past material it's derived from, in this case stretching back to mid 2013, moving up to the present. Just as the majority of the material on 4 1/2 recalled Wilson's previous release Hand. Cannot. Erase in tone and style, Untitled Unmastered feels like a collection of To Pimp A Butterfly B-sides on the whole (not that that's a bad thing) -- the jazz influence is clearly once more, buttressed by Thundercat's presence on several tracks, but in a more subdued fashion. The wordplay is just as excellent as usual and the topics are the usual suspects - institutionalized racism, the push and pull of his new fame versus his roots in Compton, sex, money, etc. The vocals are solid but mostly unremarkable besides Kendrick's lines in "Untitled 2" where he affects an almost David Bowie-esque lilt to his lyrics. Untitled Unmastered further solidifies Kendrick's brand as "thinking man's (aka yuppies) hip hop" and it'll be very interesting to see where he goes from here.

B

Just Cause 3: Death of a Sandbox

I reviewed Just Cause 3 back when it came out a couple of months ago, and recently came back to it after seeing an announcement for the first major DLC drop due later this month and hearing about the multiplayer mod which is actually coming along pretty quickly. I've put about 8 hours into it since I stopped originally and while I'm having more fun with it than I was around launch, I'm still wondering what the hell happened with the series' "Chaos" meter in this game.

A quick refresher, if you haven't played the previous installment in the series - Just Cause 2. You're dropped into the island nation of Panau to depose the local ruler, Baby Panay. The game has you do this by destroying various military infrastructure throughout the country like fuel tanks, generators, propaganda machines, missile silos, refineries, etc. The game incentizes you to do this by locking missions, vehicles, and weapon upgrades beneath a requisite amount of "Chaos". This is an excellent mechanic in a couple of ways - not only does it give you a good and (at least somewhat) logical reason to run around and blow shit up, but the way the different levels of "Chaos points" capped out were entirely under your control. If you didn't want the story to advance, it wouldn't -- it was all up to you.

Just Cause 3 takes a different approach. While some of the story is still driven by the amount of destruction you cause, the unit of measurement has changed - now different areas of the map are divided and subdivided into regions and provinces, towns and settlements. I'm pretty sure I'm in the back half of the narrative swing here, but already I've played about 15 missions that either didn't have any pre-requisite or it was so low I accidentally went over it while just wandering around the map. Just having the plot of the game be independent from the open world stuff is fine, but there's another, bigger problem: Avalanche axed the upgrade system. Not only does that mean no vehicle/weapon/armor gears (which was a big part of why exploration in JC2 was actually fun and worth your time) it removes any sort of difficulty curve from the game aside from the "Heat" meter, which is fucked up in it's own way. Now, I'm not trying to say that JC2 was some sort of skill-testing gauntlet, but at least the way Heat build up made sense and you had the opportunity to gradually upgrade your favorite weapons and vehicles as you saw fit. Interestingly, that was all removed in JC3, while a weird type of location-specific (basically only for military installations) Heat called a "Combat Zone" was added. What's missing? Upgradeable anything, basically - health, weapon stats, vehicle abilities - these are all fixed values that you cannot influence, only attain buy unlocking and air-dropping, which is no longer based around a pool of cash that you have but rather based on a timer depending on the ... coolness of the item, I guess.

While all of these changes were probably done in the name of streamlining, accessibility and fun, they come together to create a gamespace weirdly reminiscent of Mercenaries 2 -- another much-hyped sequel that suffered from the classic open-world "lack of challenge" syndrome. Obviously an open-world time wasting simulator like this isn't where I should be looking for tough tactical decisions from, but the removal of player agency to affect the difficulty of the game, coupled with the weird way Heat dissipates almost instantly after conquering a town/settlement in JC3 definitely contribute to the game being more of a relaxed jog than a back-against-the-wall fight for freedom. But should it have been? I dunno.

Orthogonal Unit Differentiation and Hit-Scan Weapons

If you haven't heard of the Game Maker's Toolkit, you should check it out as it offers some excellent insight and explanation of some big topics related to game design, and it does so with some super-slick editing that oozes careful creation. In particular, his video on Doom has some fascinating info on what truly made it so special: something called "Orthogonal Unit Differentiation", which is a term used to designate the practice of designing enemy types that are distinct in their abilities, appearance, and audio/visual presence, e.g. the difference between Doom's Imp, Cacodemon, and Lost Soul versus Battlefield's enemy dude, enemy dude, and other enemy dude.

It's obvious, but I had never really considered that the design of the enemies as distinct entities with wildly different strengths and weaknesses would be such a big part of Doom's legacy, but when he brought up Halo's similarly templated Covenant and Far Cry's pirates and privateers, I started to realize how right he was -- and when he used Far Cry's enemies as an example of poor orthogonal differentiation I found myself disagreeing - I think Far Cry has some of the strongest of this type of design found in modern games, but the reason they don't pop out as strongly as Doom's creatures has more to do with another hugely important aspect of it's design - hit-scan weapons.

The enemies in Doom are easily told apart from another by their weapons, a mix of projectile, hit-scan, and melee. A big aspect of this system is that players are able to dodge melee and projectile attacks but not hit-scan ones, forcing them to prioritize targets, strategize when encountering mixed groups, and reward skilled players by making most damage avoidable. Hit-scan weapons, however, don't allow for the same amount of depth -- enemies can miss and you can use cover, but it's basically impossible to juke hit-scan weapons. While the different enemy types in Far Cry go some distance towards forcing the player to plan out an attack beforehand (especially when attacking outposts), the fact that all of them are equipped with hit-scan weapons makes it much less a test of skill than it may have been otherwise. And it isn't like this type of design is some sort of dirty reminder of some terrible choice - Halo brought it and projectile attacks back and achieved great success, so it definitely seems doable, and Destiny has shown the mix still has potency.

I haven't had a chance to check out Far Cry Primal, but it stands to reason that Ubisoft would stick with the design methodology when it comes to enemies that they've been following to success since Far Cry 3. Since I doubt we'll be seeing projectiles in the franchise anytime soon, I wonder if adopting a simpler approach to enemy design and abilities like what was done in Far Cry 2 might suit the franchise a better.