Mafia 3

So a bunch of gameplay was released for Mafia 3, the upcoming open world game from 2K and Hangar 13. This one is differing from earlier entries in the series by starring a biracial Vietnam jarhead instead of an extra from season 3 of The Sopranos, and there's been a lot of talk about the game's depiction of the protagonist's race as the game is set in New Orleans circa 1968 - cops will apparently act aggressively towards you in upper-crust neighborhoods, sometimes even forcing you to leave certain areas, and they operate along the lines of the usual video game police force, i.e. expect to get your brains painted on the curb if you so much as stand in front a cop and block his path.

What's strange about this approach is that, by all accounts so far, the police in Mafia 3 are much more limited in their interactions with the player than in previous games, which featured a surprisingly well-layered system of wanted states, both for cars and on foot, plus fines for stuff like speeding and running lights (along with bribes) that all combined to make the police feel like a real part of the game world. And if the state of polices relationship with black people today is any indication then you would think that driving citations and petty harassment via traffic stops would be the chief interaction between these two groups. Yet the developers opted to remove that layer of mechanics and opted for a more direct, GTA-style psycho cop style instead - I wonder if the traffic stop thing coupled with the black protagonist made things a little too real?

Also, just a note on the actual gameplay: Jesus, this game is violent. Lincon's animations coupled with the time period and the setting give me major No Country for Old Men vibes - you're really just playing as Anton Chigur here, right? Driving around an idyllic southern city, inflicting graphic acts of sudden death on other criminals (all of them white), I also can't help but be reminded of this piece. A video game where you play as a black man, killing truckloads of cartoonishly southern white guys, in a city with a less-than-excellent racial history? And what are your options for interacting with this criminal underworld? Destroy the leaders and take control/raise your own empire in the place of the enemy's - in other words, keep the status quo of crime and violence going but with different names and faces. By the end of it thousands of virtual people will be dead and everything will be exactly the same as before, but we'll have had a lot of fun in the process!

Soma: The Theory of Continuity

Source: Frictional Games

While Soma's ocean floor setting contributes a large amount to it's overall sci-fi affect, easily the most ambitious (and most talked about when the game released) element of the experience is the body-swapping narrative experiences by the protagonist Simon Jarrett. This is going to spoil the entire game thoroughly, so if you haven't already played Soma yet I really recommend it if you're at all interested in sci-fi or horror.

Early on in the game you encounter some audio logs from one of the people who worked at Pathos-II named Mark Sarang. Unlike most of the other crew members who had their minds scanned for the ARK project, Sarang had a strangely reverential view of the situation due to his belief in two phenomena he called "continuity" and "the coin flip". Whereas most of the scanned personnel considered the copy of their mind placed on the ARK as an entirely separate existence, Sarang and the handful of other crew that subscribed to his theory of continuity believed that they would carry on living in the ARK if they ceased existing directly after the scan was completed. At first blush this idea seems...pretty crazy. What's interesting, though, is that the player, despite better logic, has to give the theory a bit of credence because until now, Simon has "won" the coin flip every time. It's a trick, but an effective one since the player has never had the experience of "losing" the flip - as Catherine says, we came "Directly from Toronto" via the memories of the original Simon. It's only later on that we learn about what happened to the real Simon after the scan, and if the scans on the ARK never learn what happened to their previous selves (and how would they?) the "continuity" would seem to be perfectly preserved from their point of view. The way Soma sets up the coin flip situation throughout the game is really quite clever, as it's much easier for the player to forget that they're actually playing as a copy of a long-dead person since we go "directly" from Toronto to Pathos-II via the unbroken narrative of the game itself. Part misdirection from the developers and part willful ignorance the part of the players, just like Simon's character in-game, helps the game deliver it's powerful ending punch.

Soma also differs from other games that want to "say something" by not allowing the preferences of the developers to bleed into the game and affect the player's own natural arc of experience. Choices are presented, some of them incredibly poignant and difficult to make, like whether or not to turn off Sarah's life support, or euthanize Amy and Robin, and some seem easier (and some aren't really choices at all). In all cases none of them are referenced in the ending or are really brought by the game at all once you move past them - they're yours to think about, and you're always given as much time as you need to come to your decision. In the end, you just have to live with it and hope you did the best you could as Soma never really paints the two main focal points of the game, the ARK and the WAU, as hands-down better than the other option. It might not seem like a huge innovation in narrative technique, but when combined with the atmosphere of the rest of the experience it can be surprisingly affective. Few games trust you enough to let you think for yourself about what you're doing, and Soma shows how it can be done to greatly enhance the staying power of a story.

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More thoughts on Sarang's continuity: it actually does make some sense from the way he describes it, in a weird roundabout way. Since the Sarang that gets scanned will have all the experiences of "Sarang prime" up until after the procedure, there would be a continuity chain to an outside observer. Of course, the scanned Sarang would probably be aware he's just a scan of the original once he's in the ARK, but he wouldn't feel any different, presumably. Oi. It's been suggested that Sarang was pushing his continuity theory for the benefit of his fellow crew members, but that seems doubtful since everytime we hear him speak or read what he wrote about the subject he's consistent about his belief. Whether or not he actually believed that the Sarang that he was, Sarang-prime, would actually experience literal continuity or was aware that it would be another "him" that would be "winning" the coin toss and he just figured that was so obvious he didn't bother mentioning it, isn't ever really addressed. I like to take what the game presents at face value so to me Sarang was actually buying this stuff. It's not total bullshit since in his own mind, any entity with all of his experiences and personality would seem to just be another copy of himself, and to anyone else it would just be like Sarang teleported onto the ARK. I think I need a drink.

Soma's Aquatic Aesthetics

Released at the tail end of 2015, Frictional Games' latest project marked a significant environmental departure from the haunted halls and mineshafts of their previous Amnesia and Penumbra titles by taking players on a mind-twisting journey through the dilapidated remains of a futuristic facility called Pathos-II located on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to talk about the overall design and aesthetic of Soma's world as it's some of the best environmental design and art direction I've seen in a long time. I want to discuss the game's plot at some point as well because it's fascinating but that will be at another time.

Exploring Upsilon, Pathos-II's power station. Source: Section-Nine

The interiors of Pathos-II are an interesting blend of chunky utilitarian design similar to something like the Nostromo from Alien but with an oddly high-ceiling, almost cavern-like motif featured in much of the initial areas like, Upsilon pictured above. It's not nearly as claustrophobic as the suffocating Beebe Station from Starfish and sometimes almost feels too... roomy. Not in a "this is so scientifically inaccurate, these corridors should only be X feet by X feet!" way, but in an industrialized, cold way: it's obvious from the start that Pathos-II isn't exactly a homey, friendly place, and it seems to suit the remaining functioning robots and station-wide AI, the Warden Unit, better than it ever did the crew members.

A constellation of Structure Gel occupying a nearly-collapsed section of site Tau. Source: rythymblow

 Everything's surface is cold and sleek like a hospital. Deposits of mechanical "structure gel" are everywhere, and it's hard to tell if the Warden Unit is plugging leaks and propping the walls up or slowly smothering Pathos-II to death. The living quarters and medical wing of Theta are the only areas that offer a break from the rest of the station's starkly pre-fab, no-cubic-inch-wasted design. While the open space would normally make one feel a bit less closed in, the illusion of a roomier space only made me even more aware of the fact that I'm in one of the most precarious and hostile environments a human can occupy, feeding my dread. Not sure if I picked up exactly what Frictional was putting down with that, put it certainly was effective in any case.

A laboratory in the medical wing, site Theta. Source: thundra

The crown in Soma's jewel, though, must be the sections of the game that place you outside of the relative safety of Pathos-II and force you to traverse the hazy ocean floor itself. Admittedly I haven't played many games (or seen many movies, even) that feature ocean floor environments as much as is presented here, but I can pretty confidently say that the art direction of these areas will remain as just as impressive as it stands now. The only recent games I can recall that looked as good as Soma does during these sections are Abzu and Mad Max, both titles that are well known for looking stupid good.

The remains of an assembly line at site Delta. Source: DokiQuies

Dim lights of outbuildings faintly pierce the darkness while spindly guide lamps provide most of the illumination during these sections as your chief source of illumination, a small flashlight, is more of a comfort blanket than an actual navigational aid. Algae and other undersea plant life sway in the current as barnacles coat the exteriors of the various man made structures you find. The expansive emptiness provides little respite from the harsh confinement of the station's corridors and, as the game went on and I spent more time in the various underwater locations like the sunken ruins of the Curie, Pathos-II's supply ship, the harsh walls of the habitats started to seem a hell of a lot better.

An obelisk of unknown purpose near Upsilon. Source: Aethere

 Abandoned fish farms outside of site Omicron.

Abandoned and derelict outbuildings (like the empty fish farms above) are everywhere as it seems no one is around to tend to them by the time Simon finds himself waking up in the facility. This location in the game is near the abyssal plain's drop-off point, the descent to the terminal depths of the bottom of the ocean floor doable only with the aid of a shark cage-esque elevator known as the Climber (below). Easily one of the most powerful vistas in the game, the machine rests in its mount on an arm precariously hanging off the edge into what as well may be deep space. Strange and unseen-until-now aquatic life, most notably brilliantly luminous jellyfish, drift by through the void undeterred by the increasingly inhospitable pressure.

The less-than-rock-solid walkway leading to the Abyssal Climber.

Bio-luminescent life around the Climber as it makes its descent. Source: Impetus

Soma saves the best for last, though. Upon arriving on the ocean floor you find conditions that are only marginally more human-friendly than the surface of an alien planet: your vision blurs permanently due to the astronomical amounts of pressure being placed on your diving suit and the only respite from the crushing darkness are the decayed ruins of the Pathos team's makeshift storehouses and obersvation shacks and a series of small guideposts guiding you to your next objective. The mechanical influence of the station's warden unit is just as present here as above: inky tendrils snake off into the darkness, far from the feeble comfort the few remaining light fixtures bring. Combined with the bizarre lifeforms on display (yes, those are spiders below) and the torrential current of the trench's tectonic activity rendering you nearly deaf and blind, that this environment, despite still sticking with the mechanics you've grown used to through the course of the game and being fundamentally similar to the other "walking around the ocean" bits you've played, manages to stand out as something so alien and unnerving is a big testament to Frictional's design work here. The idea of setting a horror game at the bottom of the Marianas trench seems so obvious and it works so well here that I'm surprised by how seldom it's been attempted.

Near the Climber's landing point in the Abyss. Note the distorted vision caused by the immense pressure. Source: Rain

An outbuilding near the Climber. Clouds of phosphorescent jellyfish and the Warden Unit's tendrils provide much of the little available illumination. Source: Chewable C++

An undersea cave coated in pycnogonid. Source: Kodijack!

Near the hub of the Warden Unit, nearly 100% of the environment has been subsumed by tendrils and Structure Gel growth. Source: AZWew

A guidepost in the abyss. And something else? Source: Fernando Esra

The remaining Pathos habitats you explore during this stretch of the game reflect the hostility of the local environment by featuring the most cramped architecture to be found through Soma's many different locations. Hallways are narrow and poorly lit as you make your way to the narrative's conclusion, hopefully finally understanding what happened to the crew members who seem to have vacated the facilities along with the motivations and fate of Pathos-II's Warden Unit AI system.

Mess hall of site Tau, one of the final holdout areas of the Pathos crew. Source: DOOM

Site Phi, and the home of the Omega Space Gun. Source: SABINA

Curiously, the final area you visit (above) is also probably the environment that seems the least infected with black goop and tentacles, which is kind of interesting if you have the context for it from the situation in game. And that's pretty much it. Writing this has made me really want to play through the whole thing again, so I might just do that so I can add some screenshots of my own and not have to rely on the dubious Fair Use policies of Steam users' screenshots. If this whole thing seems kind of fellating than I guess it really is - Soma is an incredible experience that I can't recommend enough to anyone interested in sci-fi, horror, existential weirdness, or just damn good looking (and sounding!) games.

No Man's Sky: Sean Murray x Todd Howard

As we draw nearer and nearer to the much anticipated (understatement of the year?) indie darling No Man's Sky, the increasing degree of toxicity displayed among the fanbase and the general gaming community has been an unfortunate, if understandable, display of tall poppy syndrome as onlookers were treated to a roller coaster ride of leaked gameplay, shattered hopes, rekindled hype, and a healthy helping of crabs n' salt. All drama aside, the game is going to be out soon and hopefully hitting the ground running thanks to an (apparently) much needed and surprisingly thick day one patch. No Man's Sky launch has also been memorable as the only time that I can remember large video game publications breaking review embargoes to host gameplay on their sites before the game was even released, notably by buying copies of the game from retailers who had broken the August 9th street date  so they could stream it for themselves. I understand that review embargoes are shitty for everyone except publishers, but seeing professional journalists resorting to this kind of behavior just seems petulant - you couldn't wait like to get your clicks for a few more days?

Besides all of the drama (and there's plenty more where that came from) I can't help drawing a comparison from all of this stuff to Bethesda and Todd Howard, aka the Patron Saint of Steam Sales. Bethesda games, similar to No Man's Sky, take place in vast worlds filled with a bulging, nearly "limitless" amount of stuff to do and see driven chiefly by the player's own exploration. Bethesda games are also massive hype machines with maybe the most fervent, let-them-get-away-with-murder type of fanbases visible in mainstream gaming despite a routine amount of bugs, technical glitches, poor optimization/ UI decisions, and general writing that belie their success. When some of the all-time most popular mods available for your game are bug fix compilations, you know you have something pretty special on your hands. Hello Games' Sean Murray has been catching flak for his "lies" regarding a range of No Man's Sky features in a relatively short period of time, while Todd Howard has a pretty well documented Spin Zone tendency that has really never backfired. Since Bethesda games are pretty much universally smash hits, that must mean that either 1) the people who care about this stuff are such a small minority that it doesn't effect Zenimax's books either way (very likely) and/or 2) those same people end up buying the game anyway after they disperse enough energy grumbling on forums (almost certain).

I'm not saying Todd Howard or Sean Murray shouldn't be held accountable for the shit they say - they absolutely should, with the important caveat that these people are salesmen. Yes, they put enormous energy into these projects that they care deeply about, but they want you to buy that product enormously as well, so of course here and there they are going to splurge and let out a half-truth to drum up additional interest. As someone who has spent waaay more time playing Bethesda games than I will probably ever play No Man's Sky, I just find it interesting that people continue to support these massively buggy, ugly, and outdated Elder Scrolls / Fallout games while leveling so much more (comparative) criticism at Hello Games' first big effort when early, pre-patch gameplay has shown it to be infinitely more stable and bug-free than, say, Fallout 4 or *shudder* New Vegas was at launch. While I'm not personally incredibly grabbed by either Hello Games or Bethesda titles much anymore, No Man's Sky is definitely promising to be a very interesting experience.

Pinnick Gales Pridgen - Pinnick Gales Pridgen

Trust me, I didn't start this blog intending for it to be a catalog for all of dUg Pinnick's various side projects - it just happened. Today's example is the debut album from - you guessed it - supergroup Pinnick Gales Pridgen, a - you guessed it - an outfit specializing in hard // psychedelic rock, blues, and funk. Pinnick is well within his weelhouse here alongside guitarist Eric Gales (who plays guitar upside-down a la Hendrix, as does Pinnick) and ex-Mars Volta stickman Thomas Pridgen: Pinnick Gales Pridgen is an hour-plus long buffet of blues rock goodness that covers everything from instrumentals to ballads, but the wide breadth of material contained here makes for a record that feels less than the some of its parts at times.

Opening cuts "Collateral Damage" and "Angels and Aliens" start get the sled moving at a brisk pace, with Gales' tastefully biting licks finding a natural partner in Pinnick's all-encompassing backup harmonies. A short interlude, "For Jasmine", gives us a breather as we dive into the album proper: "Wishing Well"' and "Hate Crime" simply ooze dUg with their impassioned delivery and slow rolling riffs, "Been So High (The Only Place To Go Is Down)" is over ten minutes of honest to God Delta blues and Gales' playing continues to impress on "The Greatest Love" and the album's lone cover "Sunshine of Your Love". Pridgen keeps up with his bandmates but his playing on this record seems more locked in with the groove than above it - certainly not a bad thing given the material. Speaking of, PGP isn't something for those lacking in time: the runtime tops out in the 70 minute range and there are only 2 tracks flying in under 4 minutes, which prove to make this album less of a pleasure than it should be. The boys take plenty of time to wring these songs of every drop they can, which has the side effect of making PGP drag its feet in places, particularly the back 9: "Black Jeans" could be half as long as it is with no lost love, but and "Angels and Aliens" and "Hang On, Big Brother" might've benefited from some trimming as well. As it stands, though, Pinnick Gales Pridgen is much more good than bad as nearly every song stands out on its own as a well-crafted rock song. Long in the tooth but certainly worth keeping in rotation.

C+

Vektor // Haken

Possibly the most hotly anticipated release of the year, Arizona-based Vektor has quickly ascended to the top of the rethrash heap, fueled by their deep space flavored blend of blackened prog-death-thrash. Terminal Redux fills its disc up with a hefty runtime of 73:21, offering these boys plenty of rope to hang themselves with only for them to burn down the gallows and piss on the ashes: Vektor's engines are burning at full power from the opening crush of "Charging the Void" and they don't let up for a good 40 minutes before we get a respite with the cosmic melancholy of "Collapse" before burning up in the atmosphere with "Recharging the Void". Crafty writing ensures that you're never more than a couple of minutes away from a more melodic passage to snap things back on course while nearly every song has something special to demarcate it: from the planet-sized groove of "Pteropticon", "Pillars of Sand"'s careening bleakness, to the chunky sci-fi of "Psychotropia" nearly every song contributes to the album's narrative while standing out as fantastic blackened thrash in it's own right. Add a dash of spaced-out choir vocals on the bookend tracks and you have Peter Watts in space - a heady twist of the depressing limits of human life mixed with the untold possibilities of the cosmos.

B+

I can't remember the last time I flip flopped my opinion on an album this hard. Upon it's release I considered Affinity one of Haken's least interesting works, featuring boring songwriting and flat production - pretty much the opposite of what I consider it to be at this point. I do still have some problems with the production, but it wasn't enough to keep this album from basically living in my car the last 2 months. While it doesn't quite reach the same heights as The Mountain did it comes damn close: "1985", "Earthrise", "Lapse", and "Bound by Gravity" are all absolute gems and even at the low points ("Initiate", "The Endless Knot") the album flows by a noticeably faster pace than their previous work, making for a 61 minute-long album that seems much shorter than it should. Well-layered lyrics paint a vibrant picture of the rise of artificial intelligence, the arcane workings of the human mind, and the aftermath of the sun's eventual death, while some of the band's most focused and powerful songwriting and album design (credit goes to the fantastic Blacklake Design for knocking this out of the park just as hard as they did The Mountain) seals the deal. Affinity proves that The Mountain wasn't just a fluke as the band moves forward, each album stronger than the last, into the future.

B+

Ty Tabor - Naomi's Solar Pumpkin / Moonflower Lane

Striking out on his own first among his bandmates, guitarist Ty Tabor's first solo release quietly released via mail order to fan club members in 1996 stands tall next to his longtime partner dUg Pinnick's initial solo offering, Massive Grooves..., as a concentrated shot of all the things Tabor fans would want: a laid back atmosphere, Beatles-esque vocals (John Lennon in Ty's case), and his distinctively sinuous guitar playing, and Naomi's Solar Pumpkin succeeds in delivering just that.

Like Massive Grooves, there's a novelty to hearing so much of someone's writing and playing that's normally balanced out with two others on early solo albums to help cover the spread of any songwriting deficiencies and to keep the memory of any clunkers overly rosy. I think that, on the whole, Ty is a better composer and writer than anyone else in King's X and it especially shows on his first two solo albums (Moonflower Lane is basically Naomi's Solar Pumpkin Remastered): alternating between understated foot-tappers like "I Know Everything", "Had to Move", "Boy to Man" and "Hollow Eyes" and layered ballad-type pieces in "Without You", "That's All", and "Walk With My Love", Tabor displays a level of competence at power-pop that is rarely seen. Handling all instruments himself and keeping the runtime tight, Tabor produces an excellent little piece of melodic hard rock.

B+