Titanfall 2: More Thoughts

I'm 40 hours in to Titanfall 2's multiplayer and since everyone seems to either fellating its excellence or lamenting its release date, I wanted to put down some thoughts about the meat-and-potatoes gameplay itself, mostly balance, also because the developers themselves only refer to changes they make in very vague statements that make community discussions about balance and mechanics difficult. FYI I'm incredibly consistently mediocre at these twitch shooter Call of Duty games so I could definitely be off base/wrong about this stuff.

The titans are easily the best part of the game and definitely the most successfully implemented. Divided into distinct RPG-ish "classes" with individual loadouts and progression, I don't really have any problems here besides how weird and floaty melee attacks feel (tough to do in a normal FPS, I'd imagine it's much tougher with big robots) and the balance of some of them. Tone is the current bogeyman as she's very intuitive to use and her abilities fit together in a more complete way than most of the other titans, but it's not a catastrophic issue and truthfully just highlights how patchy some of the other titans' loadout designs are, particularly Northstar with her ultra niche™ tether mines and a core ability that is completely at odds with her playstyle and strengths and Ronin's hilarious vulnerability to melee attacks while his core is active, despite being the designated hand-to-hand fighter of the group. Other titans like Legion, Scorch, and Ion (once they fix vortex shield) have kits that largely complement their strengths and feel largely solid and well balanced, with Tone only standing out because of the degree to which her abilities feed into each other and aid her intended use. I would personally like to see a total reworking of Northstar's core ability and some hefty adjustments made to Ronin instead of nerfing Tone again, but since that's probably out of the cards at this point the best middle ground is a tweak to Tone's particle wall ability so that the cooldown only goes into effect once the shield is used up.

This weaponry of the game is tougher to meaningfully critique because so much of it depends on personal preference, as some weapons and tactics just click with certain players more than others while other, sometimes allegedly OP pieces of equipment are completely ignored. Case in point: the spitfire is pretty universally dismissed as one of the bottom three worst weapons in the game, but I do better with it than nearly any of the other weapons I've tried, which is all of them minus three or four. In my mind its pretty clearly got an edge over something like the devotion, even though the whole playerbase cries about the latter weapon. That said, I think that something can be done to bring the current top tier weapons down a bit to the rest of the arsenals level, those being the volt, the devotion, the alternator, and the car.

• Volt: Give this thing some recoil. It would still be a ridiculous laser beam but would hopefully be inferior to the assault rifles at long range.
• Devotion: Also needs some recoil, and that's all I'd be willing to change. No need to make it useless but it higher recoil would let it keep its niche as the rapid-fire LMG while making the spitfire preferable for long range fights.
• Alternator: More recoil would let this thing keep its close-range dominance while giving it an actual drawback.
• Car: This one actually feels fine, honestly. 

As for the abilities and combos like devotion + amp wall, cloak, stim, etc., I think they're fine. They're all on reasonable cooldowns and offer something to do outside of the usual "pick an SMG and wallrun all over the place" strategy. I personally don't enjoy standing behind a wall and holding down the trigger, but more power to those that do.

I also have mixed feelings about the maps in this game. I like Eden the most, but even that one gets on my nerves sometimes, and the design of certain gems like Homestead and Drydock make me scratch my head in total confusion. There's a mix of urban sprawl and traditional CoD three-lane design here that I find difficult to come to grips with, and after forty hours I think I should be past this stage. Like I said, I'm not particularly competent at Titanfall 2 and frequently am amazed at both the ability of my opponents to track my fast-moving character model with such precision and my inability to pick that skill up. While I'm sure that I have a lot of gitting gud to do, I think the game definitely has room for improvement in the balance department.

Fates Warning - Theories of Flight

Hold up. I don't think that's the right...

That's better!

Fates Warning is one of the more interesting bands in the progressive metal scene. Their first couple of albums in the mid 80's leaned further towards the power metal spectrum, particularly thanks to their vocalist John Arch's distinctive high-octave lines, often mirroring the guitars along a winding path that eschewed traditional song structures. After Arch was "let go" (fired) in '87 the band shifted into a more conventional heavy/progressive metal style with replacement (and still current) frontman Ray Alder taking over as they managed to piece together some success thanks to a couple of minor-league hit singles in the early '90s.

After '94s low point Inside Out, the band popped the clutch again and dropped into full-on progressive metal beginning with their '97 watershed A Pleasant Shade of Grey and continuing on into the present day, with their latest record Theories of Flight. Despite the cover art weirdly mirroring Chroma Key's Dead Air for Radios, keyboard maestro Kevin Moore was unfortunately not involved with this album despite his past work as a defacto member of the band throughout the 90's and 00's after his ejection from prog metal kingpins Dream Theater.

What's odd about Fates Warning for me is that I'm only really a fan of their later work in the late '90s and onward. Usually when I decide that I like a band, I slowly get acclimated to all of their material and grow to appreciate it, at least a little bit (Psalm 9, looking at you). Not so much with these guys. Between the awful production, twisty-turny-look-how-cool-these-songs-we-wrote-are quality of the material, and John Arch "Arching it up" all over the first three albums I really have no interest in trying to get through that stuff again. Their "commercial" period albums never grabbed me either as Ray Alder is wailing just as hard as Arch was while the songwriting was... well, you decide if you like it or not. No judgements, just "if you're listening to it, it's for you" and I'm not listening to it anytime soon. Their releases from A Pleasant Shade of Grey and onward, though, have really put the hook in me, especially after finding out that Kevin Moore played keyboards on several albums during this period. I'm a huge fan of OSI so going back to this Fates Warning material is kind of like reading a book backwards, I guess, so I already know the ending and I'm just trying to figure out if I like the rest of it.

Theories of Flight, then, arrives three years after Fates' return with Darkness in a Different Light, which broke a nine year silence that was welcomed with open arms. Continuing in the same vein as that record, Theories is a OSI-esque blend of thick riffs, heavy riffs, and crunchy riffs that will be familiar to anyone who listened to Darkness. In all seriousness though, Theories is on the whole much more cohesive and sharply written than its predecessor, doing an excellent job of blending guitarist and overall band mastermind Jim "Jimmy" Matheos' piercing axe work and progressive ambition, especially on the shorter and punchier tracks like "Seven Stars" and "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen". Vox man Ray Alder sounds better here at 49 than he has in decades as his lower, almost soulful range complements the more mid-tempo material beautifully. Special notice has to be given in particular for his frankly breathtaking performance on the second disc's acoustic materials, especially the cover of Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Pray Your Gods" and Uriah Heep's "Rain". Mainstay bassist Joey Vera continues to act as the quiet anchor of the group, capable of delivering both a dirty lead and a full-throated foundation to Matheos' leads apparently effortlessly. Bobby Jarzombek makes a much better case for his spot in this band on Theories than he did on Darkness, but it seems that much of the blame rests on the shoulders of both albums' mediocre production that is all too common in modern metal. Guitars and vocals are overpowering loud in the mix while the bassist struggles to maintain audible volume as the drums are reduced to a horribly compressed, flat sonic register that detracts from the listening experience here more than any of the material.

Like Darkness, Theories skips the ballad stuff and delivers instead several tracks of straight-ahead crunch ("Seven Stars", "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen", "White Flag"), knotty prog ("SOS", "The Light and Shade of Things"), and the Last Song on the Album Epic™ "The Ghosts of Home". With a runtime of just over fifty minutes and with only seven actual songs the whole thing is over surprisingly quickly - either a quirk of the material or the production, but in any case appreciated over Darkness's bloat (imo). The lyrics are vague and non-cringey, the writing is tight, and the second disc of acoustic stuff is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

B+ (with acoustic disc, A-) 

Fair to Midland

Still discussed and kept in piam memoriam in the alternative/progressive scenes today over half a decade since they quietly stepped out of the industry entirely, Texas-based Fair to Midland achieved through the run of just four albums seems pretty special. Managing to secure a high-profile record deal with Serj Tankian's label before dropping one of their two most notable discs Fables From a Mayfly, they seemed to have done everything right until then, laying a strong cult following foundation in their home state while cutting their teeth on stage with years of gigging marked by the release of two independent albums.

Plucked from the edge of insolvency and disbandment by Tankian's call, they combined freshly written material and reworked pieces from their earlier releases into an amply funded, lushly produced debut that started their unfortunately short run at mainstream success, Fables From a Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times is True. A rich draught of alt-metal and hardcore-tinged power pop, Fables cemented the band's reputation as up and comers to watch as they began their largest tour ever to support it.

Four years later saw the release of their fourth and ultimately final album, Arrows and Anchors, in 2011. Darker and more progressive than Fables with less of a fixation on high-flying choruses, it was (and probably still is) their best-selling effort. As you probably have already figured out, though, is that Fair to Midland didn't last long after dropping this album as mounting debt, family and scholastic obligations, and the large physical distance between the members all contributed to a quiet curtain call elaborated on by just a Facebook post from the drummer.

At this point hopes for a reunion don't seem to be running high anymore since the radio silence of the band members for the last several years began, but it took the Galactic Cowboys nearly seventeen to get back together after their last record, so we might just be in for a long wait. While the group itself may no longer be active, that doesn't change the fact that they produced some excellent music in their time together.

Titanfall 2

I never got a chance to play the original Titanfall, so when the sequel recently released and immediately went on sale for $32 I decided to give it a shot. For the most, it's damn fun and has an excellent balance between lightning fast twitch shooting and the real-time giant robot combat of games like Mech Assault 2, which younger me loved. There's a lot of hemming and hawing about release dates and player counts but I don't want to talk about that right now - instead I wanted to give some early-ish impressions of someone new to the series after about 14 hours of multiplayer experience.

• Tutorials. Where are they? There's a short introduction to basic moving and shooting in the campaign, but nothing similar for multiplayer. Either they assumed most people would be already familiar with the mechanics since they're similar to the first game, they thought people would pick this stuff up in an acceptable amount of time, or maybe I'm just dumb, but boy was I confused for the first 6 hours or so. Here is a rough list of mechanics/gameplay elements that (to my knowledge) are not explained at all by the game and if I think the game dropped the ball or I did:
• The mechanics of "rodeo-ing" a titan - how much damage does it do to them, why do I keep getting killed by a weird cloud of electricity whenever I do it, why is my guy yanking on a battery, why is he now throwing a grenade in the battery hole, etc. Verdict: Respawn dropped this one down a mineshaft.
• Your "tactical" grenade option is on a cooldown, so I just assumed you get one throw per cooldown cycle, right? Ha, wrong. You actually get two - if you look closely at the cooldown icon, it only goes down to the halfway mark once you throw the first grenade. Verdict: My bad, but in my day if something was on "cooldown" that meant you couldn't use it until it, ya know, cooled down. Get off my lawn!
• Remember "Prestige" levels from CoD? They're back, but they're called "Regeneration" and also aren't explained at all. Several rewards like weapon camos and callsigns are given after "Weapon ___ Regeneration" or "Pilot Regeneration" or "Titan ___ Regeneration" without any documentation of what the hell that even means. Verdict: Respawn let me down again here, but to be fair the only time you need to know what "Regeneration" means is when you're doing it, which means you've played this game a lot, so I guess this isn't as big a deal as other stuff

• Weapon variety. Titanfall 2 is very, very fast and the time to kill on the weapons are very fast as well, so death is sudden and potentially without warning. Naturally players having such a high movement speed means that lighter weapons like SMGs and shotguns are disproportionately effective, which is fine I guess, but it also means that precision instruments like sniper rifles and chunky LMGs are effected as well. I'm not saying that they're bad per se, but I wonder how much work was needed to bring these up to the level of the other weapon categories and if this type of weapon variety is even needed. 
• Primary/Secondary weapons. This is definitely the element I most wish was changed about this game. Currently we have ARs, shotguns, SMGs, LMGs, sniper rifles, and grenade launcher-type weapons as primaries which is fine. Secondaries, though, are limited to either anti-Titan weapons or handguns, which is... weird, since the primary weapons are already so effective at killing other players that backup handgun is never needed while being able to chip away at enemy Titans is pretty crucial to giving your team an edge. I doubt this is something they are willing or even able to change at this point but I would've really liked being able to run around with just a pistol and an anti-Titan weapon since they're actually all really cool.

So once you get past the learning curve and settle in, Titanfall 2 is awesome fun. It's also currently on sale down to like 50% of full price, which is insane for a AAA release that is this polished and smooth. If you're into fast paced shooters and/or miss the lack of Mechwarrior-type games we've endured for the last several years, you could do a lot worse for $30.

Mafia 3: Second Playthrough, Second Opinions

I saw Noah's latest insanely thorough analysis which happened to be about the Mafia series and wanted to add to his conclusions a bit (you should watch it though, it's excellent). I've been working my way through another playthrough of Mafia III to see what I missed and how I feel about it after saying my piece.

First, the technical side of things. A couple of patches dropped by the time I picked it back up and while this game is certainly never going to run as well as something like Mad Max, it does run appreciably better than it did when I was first going through it. Frame rates are generally in the high 40 - 60ish range with basically the same amount of random stutter caused by... I'm really not sure what. It's especially strange given that the earlier builds of the Illusion engine that the first 2 Mafia games ran on were so smooth, but to be charitable to the game it is definitely a real leap in terms of visual fidelity, and Mafia III's art direction is something I've only grown warmer on since my first run through. The facial animations (and most of the character models) are the best I've ever seen in an open-world game of this breadth and at certain times of day the environment looks absolutely gorgeous, particularly nighttime and the sunsets/rises. It rains too much and the sunlight reflecting off the wet asphalt completely blinds you and there is something very wrong with the chrome reflections on the cars, but I'm still impressed by the scope of the game and it's relative amount of detail.

The whole racism thing is handled mostly fine, if not really, really safely. Like I said in my review, Lincoln is so far outside the realm of the average person's existence (especially in 1968) that it there weren't as many opportunities for racism to be expressed through the mechanics as I had hoped. The differing response times of the police depending on the wealth of the neighborhood is a great touch that cleverly pulls double duty as narrative reinforcement and an easily tweakable difficulty setting, but I still wish they had carried over and expanded on the police interaction system from Mafia II. Constantly living in fear of giving a cop the tiniest excuse he needs to pull you over and ruin your plans for the next objective sounds like incredible to me, and while I understand that the developers wanted to create something appealing to a wide range of gaming tastes, I'm kind of hoping some enterprising modder is able to bring that system back in some form. The racism stuff in the narrative itself is honest and well written but it doesn't really go beyond "Man, racists suck. Doesn't murdering them feel good?" I mean yeah, but what after killing the same identical goon for the 500th time, it loses emotional heft. What if one of Marcano's capos was another black man (or woman)? Maybe it turns out one of the Haitans from the gang that Lincoln slaughtered had survived and was working with Sal so he wouldn't have the rest of them killed just like he did with Lincoln and Sammy? That would've been insane.

On the other hand, it's easy to forget how fragile Lincoln really is - you absolutely do not want the cops anywhere near you because you will get annihilated very quickly. Unfortunately, the game is so generous with placing the objectives in areas without any witnesses that it's very rare to be engaging in a battle in public. On top of that the only enemies who are able (allowed? Who knows) to call for backup are specific, lightly armed dudes who get smeared with giant icon over their heads to let you know when to worry about them. The AI in general is distressingly poor and is probably the single biggest letdown of Mafia III. If you're going to make your game's primary mechanic cover-based gunfights, having sub par AI really weights the experience down.

Finally, I was glad to see Noah mention the final sequence of the game in a good light, as the confrontation with Georgi, Sal, and dealing with your lieutenants felt so damn cathartic that it almost made up for the 15 hours of interchangeable repetition before it. It seems like people agree that Mafia III's story is it's strong suit but I want to mention again the writing as it really struck me my first time with the game and is still keeping me glued to the screen during cutscenes. There's this fatalistic self-aware quality that sets it apart from so many other games because the characters here are all pretty sure they're going to end up dying by the end of it all. Lincoln and his lieutenants don't try to pretend like they're "good guys" and everyone has this kind of resigned nihilism that is right out of Cormac McCarthy. It can be a boring as hell, but the nuggets of humanity tucked inside Mafia III ultimately make it worth experiencing, I think.

Galactic Cowboys - Machine Fish

3 years after delivering the less than stellar follow up to their excellent first album, the Galactic Cowboys came down long enough to drop off another record, their first on the Metal Blade label after splitting with former label Geffen, producer Sam Taylor and guitarist/vocalist Dane Sonnier. Now with Brian Slagel working the boards and newcomer Wally Farkas filling Dane's spot on guitar, Machine Fish had plenty of opportunities to fall off the rails but instead manages to spin the wheel in the other direction and bring the Cowboys back on course.

An aggressive opening cut is business as usual with these Texans and "Feel The Rage" checks all of those boxes with a faster tempo more reminiscent of the thrash riff salad found on their first album, giving listeners a glimpse of a leaner, sludgy sound before rattling off a run of up tempo groove-fests that give bassist Monty Colvin and drummer Alan Doss license to throw their weight around. These tunes have an almost King's X-esque groove (King's X would coincidentally later join the Cowboys at Metal Blade two years after this album). The art rock progginess is dialed back which helps to give the songs some breathing room and keep your ears from feeling constantly overloaded - "The Struggle", "Fear Not", and "Red Sun" are basically hard rock tracks through and through and the vocal harmonies are used more sparingly, only really appearing as they did on previous records on a few pieces. Scattered among the rest of these lighter tracks are a couple of more traditional-sounding tunes that evoke the Cowboys' original, more Beatles-esque sound: "Psychotic Companion", "Easy to Love", and "In This Life" in particular will sound familiar to anyone who's heard their earlier material. Production and mixing are still solid, with Monty's bass tone and Wally's guitars lending a drier, more metallic tone overall.

Machine Fish benefited noticeably from its longer than usual turnaround time and new management and production. The writing is sharper, the songs are tighter and far less ponderous than Space In Your Face, but runtime still remains unapologetically long in the tooth at 69 minutes (the guilty parties are primarily the tiresome "9th of June" and "In A Lonely Room"). Better to have too much than too little though, right?

C+

Galactic Cowboys - Space in Your Face

A band's 2nd album is always going to be a monumentally important project. Fuck it up and you risk losing whatever meager success you've managed to scrape up so far, but blow things out to far and you could spin the cars right off the car. Stablemates King's X delivered a knockout with their sophomore effort Gretchen Goes to Nebraska a few years prior to the Cowboy's debut platter and with Sam Taylor again taking the producer reins along with Brian Garcia and old ally Steve Ames handling engineering, Space in Your Face dropped in June of 1993 to follow up on the modest buzz generated by Galactic Cowboys, further cementing the group's signature style of injecting booster shots of thrash riffing into the veins of their melodic rock.

The lead-in title track gets the blood pumping right out of the gates before dropping two mid-tempo rockers in the listeners path, erasing any potential doubts that the group would be dialing the harmonies or choruses back this time. "Circles In The Fields" and "Blind" continue the procession of solid, melodic riff-fests while the delivery and production return as good as last time. Monty Colvin's bass tone in particular cuts sharply through the other instruments and provides an excellent low end cushion for the rest of the music to rest on as Dane Sonnier maintains a nearly identical and instantly recognizable guitar tone throughout the record. Unfortunately that familiar tone coupled with the generally similar compositions contained on Space in Your Face contribute heavily to the sense of Deja Vu that listeners may notice while hearing tracks like "You Make Me Smile", "Blind", and "If I Were A Killer". The writing is still sharp, but the problems that brought the previous record down are still around, namely the length of the songs. Like before they're mostly too long, but generally the material here is less technical on the whole so longer songs like "Blind" and "No Problems" feel longer (and are longer, honestly) than they really should because you're hearing the same passages repeated more frequently.

Space in Your Face seems to have been created to appeal to the same fanbase that ate up Galactic Cowboys without changing up the recipe too drastically, but instead of expanding on their sound they put it in a kind of stasis, not really progressing into any new territory besides "Still Life of Peace", which is a hidden track, but not really regressing either: all the elements of their sound on that first album are still here, there's just... more of it. More of a disc 2 than a distinct body of work in its own right, Space in Your Face feels like the Faith Hope Love for the Galactic Cowboys: well put together and with some actually great material ("Where Are You Know" in particular), but it feels like they went through a checklist of what a Galactic Cowboys record should sound like rather than what it could sound like.

C