marginalgloss

Exciting news! I guess Firewatch never struck me as a particularly cinematic game but I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes of this. John C. Reilly would make a nice Henry.

Lurking in the background of all this is Playstation Vue, which is Sony's plan to usurp cable providers by streaming live TV channels through your PS4 (or PS3/Vita/smartphone/tablet). There's another potential route to 4K content there that Microsoft isn't taking. The service seems to have launched to a somewhat mixed, muted response so far. It's a fairly ambitious concept, but I would imagine it could take years for them to negotiate worldwide media deals that can approach the kind of comprehensive local service offered by cable companies. Certainly the likes of Virgin and Sky in the UK would have every reason to try to stonewall them out of their market. But I kind of hope it's good? I for one wouldn't mind dumping my separate cable box and having everything just coming down one fat interweb pipe. (Until PSN goes down, anyway.)

I don’t think I’ll have time to read this before the podcast, but I’m interested to hear what you guys made of this book. I’ve read a good deal of Raymond Carver before, partly at university and partly in my own time, and my opinion of his work has always been pretty high, but he’s never been a writer close to my heart. As with WickedCestus, I have a pretty severe distrust of the ‘emotional minimalism’ that has (fairly or unfairly) come to be associated with writers like Carver. It’s worth talking about the way in which he’s become a poster boy for ‘flawless’ prose in creative writing classes everywhere. I wonder if his writing carries that kind of confidence itself. Are these stories which, in some way, believe themselves to be perfect? To put it another way, is it the author, or is it the way we talk about authors, that makes them seem exemplary? (‘Short Cuts’ was a good movie, though.)

I finished Yoshi’s Woolly World for the first time quite recently. It’s a beautifully made game, and scales very nicely in terms of difficulty. There’s plenty of challenge in it for The Experienced Gamer, but there’s nothing in it that had me thinking ‘nope, I cannot do this’ as there was in New Super Mario Bros U (which is so hard I’ll probably never finish it). It also has an extra difficulty mode which lets you basically just fly through levels forever, in case you get really stuck, or you want to play with someone a bit less capable. (If you dig the aesthetic, I think Kirby’s Epic Yarn is on the eshop now. That’s very good as well. Possibly easier, but with the same gorgeous aesthetic, and still looks really nice upscaled to something approximating HD. Also it has an odd interior decoration minigame? You might need a Wiimote…) I just started playing Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze with my gf. It’s clearly excellent, and defiantly old-school in design terms, but it’s pretty tough and unforgiving by comparison. It supports same-screen two player, but multiplayer actually makes the game a bit harder because the camera doesn't know quite how to track two players, so it’s often more fun to just pass the pad whenever you die. If you really want a good multiplayer platform game, Rayman Legends is brilliant on Wii U. It was, after all, designed as a Wii U exclusive, and it still very much plays like one, even though Ubisoft got cold feet about poor sales and ported it to every platform imaginable. I would even go far as to say it’s the only narrative-style platform game I’ve played which is actually improved by playing with another person.

I think the PS4 Pro is very much a ‘wait and see’ for me. I have no plans to buy a 4K TV any time soon, so the performance boost is the main appeal at the moment, but I’m really curious as to just how much improvement we can expect from this thing. I would have liked to have seen some kind of solid feature-based reason to upgrade: perhaps some kind of backwards compatibility, to bring it in line with the Xbox One… Lack of support for 4K Blu-rays is odd, especially since support for the new 4K standard seems to be one of the main reasons these new boxes are coming into existence. But it’s not a deal-breaker for me. We are so early into support for 4K generally; even DVDs still seem to be bumbling along in the background. I wonder if Sony have seen the numbers on existing Blu-ray disc sales vs streaming, and are doubting that they’ll be shifting so many new discs to make it worth the extra expense of fitting a better drive at this stage. (Also it's worth noting that AFAIK, 4K Blu-rays aren't backwards compatible with existing Blu-ray players, which might hamper the range of films released on that format in the short term.)

If you bring up the scanner and aim it towards a creature you haven't discovered yet, you'll see a little red blob in the middle of its body. If you have discovered it, the blob will be green. (I think perhaps you see red/green blobs around you if you hit the L3 local area scan as well?) It is sometimes a bit funny about this - I'm sure I've scanned red blob creatures only for the game to tell me I've already discovered them, perhaps because they're a larger/smaller sub-species of the same genus? But it's the only clue you are likely to get that helps you find all the animals. I would guess the game can't give you much more direction because, like all the rest of the environmental detail, the game's algorithms only call the animals into existence once you get within a relatively small radius. If you're missing one or two creatures, at least one of them might be a bird. Birds are a pain in the butt to scan. In fact, scanning them never seems to work properly from the ground, so I often will go to the highest possible point, shoot them down, and scan their corpses. It's naughty, but valid. I feel like some latter-day Joseph Banks with a laser gun and a jetpack.

For a while, Pizza Hut in the UK did a thing where they would just squirt a long spiral of sriracha on top of your pizza after it came out of the oven. This seemed like a terrible idea - even to me, a man long wedded to a little plate-side puddle of sriracha for the dipping of crusts. Chilli oil, on the other hand, I will gladly pour everywhere on a pizza. It's been the saviour of many mediocre pizzas in my time. Though in terms of calories, it's probably much worse for you than ketchup...

Last night I landed on a planet populated by these...well, I don't know how to describe them... And then I tried to make friends and it all went horribly wrong. ...I'm still having a lot of fun with this game. One thing I've realised is that exploration is a lot better if you give up on the idea of using your ship to hop from outpost to outpost. Just find a planet you like and, as long as the atmosphere isn't too awful, pick a direction and start walking and scanning everything in sight until you find one of those machines for calling your ship. You probably won't die! Live dangerously! (The run-punch-boost helps enormously in this regard and I really hope they don't take it out!)

Ahhh that was nice. I feel like this video exemplifies the best storytelling aspects of Overwatch in general. It's silent. It lets the world breathe by showing without telling. The focus is on the environmental details, and the expression comes from the animation and sound, rather than quippy dialogue and lore and superheroes doing superpower things. It's just: here's a little story from this beautiful world we created. (Which the other videos sort of do as well, of course, but I like that this one is somehow both more and less outrageous than any of them.) Now if you'll excuse me, I think there's something in my eye...

Yeah, I've always found the loot box aspect to be dispiriting, but the Olympic games tie-in seems especially egregious. I don't even particularly care about getting any/all the skins, but it's somehow depressing to think that there's now limited-edition stuff that I'll never have any opportunity to get outside of this period. The counter argument, I suppose, is that sales from this cosmetic stuff will be indirectly financing new content going forward. Which is good. But we still don't really have any idea what that content will look like, or how much of it there'll be, or for how long the game will be supported. Of course I would like to see a trickle of new characters and maps for a year or two, but Blizzard seem to be taking a lot on trust at the moment. (It helps that the game is really good in spite of all this!)

I've mixed feelings about the survival/crafting/trading mechanics thus far. I don't think they are great, but at the same time, I'd really miss them if they were gone. They give me an incentive to go out on little adventures that I just wouldn't have otherwise. Like the other night I followed a '?' marker to a base that was submerged at the bottom of a really deep lake, even though I didn't quite have enough air to make a dive like that. It was thrilling to figure that out for myself, to be allowed to make my own mistakes; to feel that mystery of something unknown just out of reach. Another time I found a planet full of a valuable item that made the sentinels go completely nuts when I took it. Fleeing offworld with a hold full of great stuff, then being ambushed by a couple of pirates on the way to the space station, made me feel exactly like a slightly inept version of Han Solo. Or even just the feeling of sitting in my little spaceship while a radiation storm rages outside. It feels exactly like sitting in your car and zipping up your jacket, listening to the rain drumming on the windshield, knowing you'll have to go outside in a few minutes. Would it still be meaningful if you couldn't get wet? I'm a big fan of the idea that sometimes games should make players do things they don't want to do - or at least do things they think they don't want to do. Cut out such moments and you'd have no malaria and weapon jamming in Far Cry 2, no respawning enemies in the Souls games, no creature in Alien: Isolation. You've got to have some notion of risk for reward to feel properly rewarding. (Incidentally I'm not sure that making trading items stackable would necessarily fix the issue of limited inventory space. To keep the thing balanced - to stop players just nabbing Geknip x 99 and then making a vast fortune in one trading run - you'd have to greatly reduce the value of stackable items. And then players would end up having to collect more of those items to make it worthwhile, which is probably less fun for all concerned. Perhaps it would be better just to make the trading consoles more accessible, so you could easily get rid of stuff you no longer want to carry without just destroying it?) Still, I think the suggestion of an alternative 'free mode' is a good one. They could give your ship infinite hyperdrive, ensure your suit never runs out of juice, and render all the sentinels and wildlife totally harmless. But I'd be inclined to make it so that players can't rename planets/species in this mode, or get an endgame state when they reach the centre of the universe. No reason to give that stuff away for free when the rest of us have to work for it.

Here's a weird piece of news that I thought might be of interest to Idle Thumbs readers: a professor recently discovered that the US and UK editions of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell contain entirely different passages. The differences aren't just to do with changing grammar and Anglicisms - some of the passages are just entirely different. For example: This is crazy. I can't recall any examples of this happening before, at least in fiction written and published in the same language. But then maybe it happens more than we realise. After all, it's the kind of thing that would be extremely hard to check outside of academia, especially prior to ebooks. As you might expect, the reason for the error is a matter of banal human error: somebody left their job, somebody else took over, and nobody bothered to check that their submitted amends were in sync across the pond. Working as an editor myself, it's all too easy to see how this could happen. Version control is a nightmare everywhere, all the time. Anyway, I enjoy Mitchell's extremely British comment about why it happened ('It’s a lot of faff – you have to keep track of your changes and send them along to whichever side is currently behind...and I have a low faff-tolerance threshold...'). Also, his subsequent refusal to clarify as to which version of the novel is the 'correct' one is great. You would think there is at least a file on his computer called 'Cloud_Atlas_FINAL.pdf' but apparently not!

Looking again at those tweets quoted by Polygon, I don’t really see how anyone could mistake this for ‘Independence Day from the aliens' POV’. This just seems like wilful misinterpretation. It also made me immediately think of this incredible gif, which…well, it’s hardly the Empire State getting blown to smithereens, is it? The average No Man’s Sky player is less like a city-sized spaceship with a big laser and more like one of those confused bug-eyed fellows who flies around the midwest molesting cows. Annihilating a planet is not possible, as far as I can tell. You couldn’t exterminate every life form and you probably couldn’t take all its resources either. As itsamoose suggests, the key thing is that scarcity doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense. You can’t deprive anyone of anything in this game. Does this matter? I think it does. It could be argued that all consumption entails destruction, that man should seek to absolutely minimise his impact on the world, much like the followers of Jainism; but surely somewhere there is room for compromise. It’s the difference between being a smallholder and an industrialised factory farming enterprise. It’s the difference between pre- and post-enclosure societies. It’s the difference between just taking what you need to survive, and intentionally depriving others for profit that goes beyond survival. NMS quite clearly lights out for the former in all of these cases. (For the record, I also think a game where you played an alien race that went around the galaxy destroying civilisations could be really interesting! It would also be neat to see a version of NMS which did map and model economic scarcity, but I fear that since the resources of each planet are algorithmically generated, this would require a great deal more computational crunch than the humble PS4 can currently provide.) I do think there’s an interesting post-colonial argument to be made about this game, especially regarding the practice of naming everything the player finds. There is, after all, something brutally presumptuous about imposing one’s own will on something so totally alien. But on the other hand, there’s a certain beauty in the project. Again, the players are not depriving anyone of anything that has existed in any meaningful sense. As it stands, it is only possible to make a creative contribution. Imagine we in the real world stumbled across an object floating in space: an artefact of some kind, a sort of Rosetta Stone, a map that recorded in an alien language the names of every star and planet in our galaxy, together with their coordinates. We would know nothing at all about the creatures who made it, and the names they wrote down would be meaningless to us, but their conventions for naming could tell us all kinds of interesting things about their civilisation. I think that something similar will happen with No Man’s Sky and the people who are playing it. Because what else has science fiction to tell us if not that the most alien civilisation is humanity itself?

I played this for about two hours last night - long enough to get my ship fixed, to explore the first planet, and to jet off to a second world - and I'm really enjoying it so far. There's one or two odd bugs, like the game insisting I have a free inventory slot before I can talk to an alien. And you can't seem to re-name planets if you make a mistake or change your mind. I wanted to name my first system 'Norman's Sky' (a dad joke, in memory of my dad) but I accidentally just called it 'Norman's', which is not the worst, but makes me feel faintly stupid every time I look at it. I imagine the single-submission limit is to stop their servers from falling over with millions of repeated renamings and they will probably unlock it at some point. But for the most part it's been a smooth and relaxing experience. It is, as many people have pointed out, an extremely chill game. I'm just pottering about, seeing what's over the next ridge, what that '?' icon is on my HUD, or just scanning and documenting the local wildlife; it's just a trickle of quietly satisfying moments. I was surprised by just how much there is to see and do at first, though like Animal Crossing, I don't think it will benefit from people trying to rinse it in a few long sessions. It feels like it ought to be picked up and put down occasionally. It is a very specific kind of experience. If you ever enjoyed playing alone in the survival mode in Minecraft, or ever just refreshed the world generator to see what kinds of incredible things you might see over the next horizon, you will probably get a lot out of this. I am not in the least bit bothered by the absence of other players. It really does require you to set and manage your own micro-goals, and accept that many of them won't provide immediate fulfillment. (As in life, etc.) I really like that there isn't a mini-map. Too often I end up playing the mini-map in open world games and largely ignoring the actual world in front of me. But I was also surprised to discover that there doesn't seem to be any kind of 'maxi-map', either. That's quite a radical design decision - I don't think it's a bad one, but unlike Minecraft, the intent seems to be that players should always be pressing forward onto the next thing, rather than staking out a space and securing it for themselves. (Which in turn makes me wonder how base-building is going to work in this context - how and why should I build my own home if there's no convenient way to return to it from time to time?) At one point I discovered a crashed spaceship, and I was astonished to find that it wasn't just part of the scenery: if I could scavenge and build the necessary parts, I could fix it and take it as my own. But some of the materials didn't seem to be present on this planet, so I had to leave it; and of course I have no way to figure out how to find it again now. I think the game wants me to feel like that won't matter - that there'll be countless more crashed spaceships out there for me to fix up - and that's probably correct. But at the same time, I worry that if I find something else that's even more amazing, I'll want to have a way to get back to it again.

Alice Munro’s stories have a very peculiar, particular quality. I feel like I could identify one of her stories quite easily, if it appeared in a collection with her name removed. Yet at the same time, I find it difficult to distinguish between her works in my mind. I’ve read one or two of her books prior to this one, and I’ve certainly read her stories in other publications like the New Yorker or the Guardian; but I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I don’t think I could actually name one of her stories off the top of my head, or give a description of what happens in it. Maybe this is just me with a poor memory for such things, but I think it’s also that her stories tend to exude such a powerfully specific sense of place. For me, coming from a place like London, small-town Canada seems awfully distant and strange; add to this her tendency to be sometimes nonspecific about time, and you have a tendency for these tales to feel like they exist in a world of their own. Another thing that adds to my sense of these stories as being somehow non-specific is that they’re difficult to describe. You couldn’t reduce them down to an elevator pitch, or if you did, you’d lose what it is about them that makes them interesting. The author’s prose has a kind of snowballing effect: the gradual accumulation of characterful details that at first seem kind of disconnected, almost meaningless, until the weight of all this observation attains its own momentum and careers through the story under its own energy. The stories are not without tension and drama, of course, but I always feel as a reader that Munro has everything absolutely under control. There’s something quietly commanding about her writing, as she were always taking the long view and the wider context over the short-term thrill of sensation. Here’s a link to ‘I and the Village’ by Marc Chagall. One for the shopgirls everywhere.

So partly to get around that weird controller issue I mentioned with Xenoblade Chronicles - and partly because I'd been thinking about getting a regular twin-stick controller anyway - I ordered a second-hand Wii Classic Controller Pro from GAME, for the princely sum of £8. Oddly, it came unboxed, but it appears to be brand new. And it works very well! I had been thinking of getting the Wii U Pro controller, but for the most part it seems like most of the Wii U games that support the Pro controller also support the older Classic Controllers. The backwards compatibility isn't totally comprehensive, but it's good enough for the price. It also spurred me to get on and finish Yoshi's Woolly World. That is a really nice platform game which, by the time you get to the final worlds, hits a perfect sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility. I always felt like I was being challenged, but I never hit anything that felt impossible to finish. And the music in YWW is just so good. I mean it's...really, really good. It has the immediate tuneful quality of what we think of as 'video game music' from the 16-bit era, but it's all beautifully produced live instrumentation with incredibly careful attention to detail. I can't remember hearing such on a video game lately, or anywhere (outside of Mario Kart 8?). I know it does get mentioned from time to time, but I sometimes feel like we take things like this for granted; because my goodness, the standard of the music on the best Nintendo-published games is just so far ahead of what most video games do it's shocking. But then again, even the title music on Kirby's Epic Yarn was enough to make me well up, so perhaps I'm just growing soft.

This is vaguely starting to creep its way back to my 'one to watch' list, though I'll certainly wait for the reviews to come out before I think about buying it. Certainly it's cool to see such a big game with a black protagonist, but I do wonder how the game is going to handle that; the earlier titles weren't exactly known for their sensitive treatment of racial issues. Like many other people, I loved the first Mafia, but the second game left me somewhat disappointed and confused. There were some beautifully crafted set pieces in Mafia 2 - the first time you walk into Little Italy is an extraordinarily detailed piece of environmental storytelling - and the city as a whole was a beautiful creation. And of course the concept of having the world change so dramatically between two periods of time was a brilliant idea. I didn't especially mind the absence of side-missions or extra activities, but for every great story mission, there were at least two or three that were just inexplicably dull and menial. Some of them were so bad I started to wonder if they'd run out of time or budget late on in development and just had to work with what they had to get the thing finished. The whole prison sequence where you're mopping out toilets? Dashing between petrol stations to get ration stamps? Even that one great moment where you get to only has you drive up outside while the rest happens in a cutscene; you don't even get to pull the trigger. I always rather liked the argument (originally featured in Rock Paper Shotgun, I think) that Mafia 2 was secretly a game about the real nature of crime as being mostly pointless, boring legwork, much like any other job - except with occasional lashings of ultraviolence. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Added my deets mainly for Overwatch (PS4), but also NNID, and 3DS friend codes for whatever. I don't play many multiplayer games but you can come and visit my castle in Fire Emblem: Fates! BTW it's worth remembering the 3DS doesn't notify you if someone else enters your friend code - it has to be a mutual exchange of codes before you're connected - so if you want to add me, drop me a line.

It's just occurred to me that by the time you guys get around to covering the last book/movie in the series, we'll be able to buy and read the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is the new canonical instalment in the series that currently only exists as a play in London. I'm certainly going to read it; do you think you'll cover it? It's odd that they haven't announced a world tour or some kind of live cinema broadcast of this show yet. I mean, there's millions and millions of kids all over the world who would be dying to watch this, and they've chosen to restrict it to the most exclusive and expensive of all media. I'm really not sure how to feel about that. It's a valid artistic decision on JKR's part, and personally I love going to the theatre, but it also flies in the face of the open, international, multi-lingual phenomenon that the books have become. Incidentally, latest news out of the previews in the West End is that the live owls have had to be retired from the production because they weren't behaving. (Which is probably a good call, though there's better reasons not to have birds of prey on stage than 'they're not working properly'. I really don't think any owl is going to be happy in a crowded theatre in the first place.)

So it looks like they'll be implementing a sort of XP debuff penalty for people who regularly leave games before they're finished (news via Eurogamer and elsewhere). I think this is...a good idea? Particularly since the currently Weekly Brawl mode with randomly-selected heroes does seem to be attracting quite a lot of ragequitting from people who don't get to play as their favourite in every round, at least on PS4. You could almost argue it's too mild, given that XP is effectively meaningless in terms of loadouts in this game. But I'm not sure what else they could do. In terms of capping duplicate heroes, my feelings are: eh, I dunno. I like the feeling of having to play the hand I'm dealt in terms of my team mates. And isn't it an option already in custom games? Though of course that relies on you being able to find a custom game with the settings you want which, in the absence of dedicated servers, is a bigger problem entirely...

Ah, I remember quite enjoying HHhH - I wrote this about it on goodreads. Good and worthwhile, though flawed. It was a while ago now, but I too remember finding the author's intrusive narration quite irritating. In a different novel that might have been all right -- or something like a Knausgaard* book, perhaps -- but in that context it felt like a poor match for the straightforward historical fiction which, for the most part, he really nails. The aftermath of the assassination attempt is just fantastic, and all the more unbelievably heroic for being (AFAIK) a true story. * - though I don't really like him either but, y'know.

Just thought I'd echo the other comments here and say that I really enjoyed this week's episode for being free from the usual topic-led discussion. I also liked that it wasn't so much focused on things that have been happening in the video game community lately; sometimes I feel that this aspect has led the previous podcasts to be centred around 'Issues In Games Journalism' in a way that I find a bit wearying. There's a tendency for those discussions to become circular, oblique, and inward-looking, and they're probably only going to be of interest to a small sub-category of players who are interested in the comings and goings in an even smaller circle of writers and websites. But perhaps that's just me, and I really hope that doesn't come across as grumpy or unappreciative. I think I'm always going to enjoy a commentary which actually engages with the substance of a thing itself, rather than engaging with the meta-commentary around the thing. Like: I've been really interested to hear about why Rob didn't get on with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture*, but I couldn't care less whether somebody describes it as a 'Walking Simulator' or not. It's an adequate bit of highly contextual shorthand which gives a player an idea of what to expect from a game, but at the same time it tells you nothing at all about the content of the game, or its quality. (Is there more to it than this? Other art forms have had such terms for hundreds of years, and there seems to be a tendency for game critics to re-invent the wheel in this regard. Hasn't it always been established that terms for genre don't imply qualitative judgments? If I go to see an opera described as bel canto, for example, I know it's probably going to feature singing and music in a certain style developed from a certain cultural and historical context; but at the same time, I know nothing at all about what exactly it's going to sound like because the term encompasses a wide range of possibilities. And those two words might be spat with disdain or pronounced with pleasure, but the merits of that judgment exist independently from the work itself.) * - even though he's completely wrong about it, as with Alien: Isolation and Dark Souls. But that's just, like, his opinion, man.

I too am a poor inhabitant of the PAL region who has only just picked up Fire Emblem Fates. I did think about starting a thread for it; to be honest I was surprised to see there isn't one already... Anyway, because the special combined edition was sold out, and because I knew I wanted to play both campaigns, I did what seemed to me like the only sensible thing: I bought the Moody Goth Teens physical edition (Conquest) and then immediately downloaded the Friendly Redheaded Ninjas edition (Birthright) as DLC. And of course I'm playing the latter version first, like an idiot. Still, on Hard Classic mode it hardly seems like the 'easy' option... It's entirely tremendous, anyway. The whole presentation is so lush; it feels like such a *quality* experience on 3DS, which is a rare thing to say about any kind of console game these days. But such are the joys of console optimisation; and, presumably, one hell of a cash injection from the big N after the success of Awakening.

This seems like an obvious choice of title but once I had the idea(s) in my head, I couldn’t get them out. * - I have tried this more often than I would like to admit in polite society. ** - I have only tried this without the root beer (which is not that easy to find in London!). But it’s basically a combination of all the things I love so it’s probably good.

Yeah, I think my favourite moments of the book could have been better expressed in the form of a short story, or in a collection of thematically-linked stories. I'd be very curious to read some of those now. Re: the theme of violence against women, and how the novel does or doesn't develop it, the book actually throws up the same kind of questions for me that I've always had regarding the place where Twin Peaks ended up... (big spoilers to follow! really big!! I mean it!!!) I think those are the same basic questions you could pitch at Mr Fox, even if there isn't a single character on which to pin them.