Year of the Month
This is the angriest a book has made me since that fucking Ayn Rand book.
One of the reasons I’m a pacifist is because I do experience and understand the feeling you get when you meet certain people and come to believe that if you were to cut them, what would come out of them would not be blood, but dust and air. I want to remember that this vivid emotional reaction, however understandable, may not be morally justified, even when practical – that, while a person may come off as empty and soulless, that doesn’t mean that they’ve actually have done or will do anything wrong. All this not to convince you of my beliefs, only to explain that I do experience bloodlust and the experience of seeing other people as less than human.
It’s in this context that I want to talk about Who Moved My Cheese?.
Like much evil bullshit, there is a core of truth embedded in this book: in moments of intense stress, focus on what you can control. The fundamental goal of the book is for the management class to gain psychological control over the worker class, and this means that basic good advice is muddled in with completely rancid ideas, with the worst being “don’t question how a situation came about” (you may think that’s an exaggeration, but it appears almost-word-for-word multiple times). Who Moved My Cheese? is an international and long-time bestseller, because big, terrible corporations buy it up and give it to terrible managers who force it on their workers, and that motivation colors everything about it.
What really gets me is how fucking dumb it is. I’m not normally one to nitpick the lore of a story, because the most important part of a story is the emotional engagement, and if you’ll buy into the emotions, the practicalities will simply not bother you. People will often argue ‘well, I need plausibility’, and then will, without fail, bring up a story they love with a mountain of implausibilities (no Star Wars or Batman fan has the standing to demand realism and practicality). In this case, not only are the details of the world nonsensical, they don’t even fit into the logic of the parable.
The plot premise of the story is that there is a massive maze with cheese hidden in alleys and dead ends. There are two mice named Sniff and Scurry who are searching for the cheese. Now, you’ll have to prepare yourself for the unbridled, horrific, and unforgivable stupidity of what I’m about to say here: there are also two littlepeople (not an error, written all as one word) named Hem and Haw that are also in the maze searching for cheese. At that point, the point – indeed, the entirety of the rest of the story – was immediately and stupidly obvious to me. If it isn’t for you, you’re in luck, because the story will explain itself every step of the way in every sentence at least three times.
Anyway, what the fuck? Considering not just the simplicity but the overt didacticism of the book, this is a weird amount of complexity to introduce into the situation. The actual basic image of mice running around a maze looking for cheese is actually really good – another case of using one great (if unoriginal) idea to capture the imagination. Stories need to justify complexity before they justify simplicity; a story can justify having more characters if it’s intended to go longer. Two mice actually makes a pretty good basis for a parable; we have a very clear sense of mice and their motivations regarding cheese, we know the problems they have to overcome in a maze to get there. With two mice, we have a Goofus and Gallant thing going on, where one makes good choices and one makes bad.
Why in the fuck would you complicate this with tiny humans to represent the neuroticism you’re attacking, unless you believed your audience to be so literal-minded and so devoid of empathy or understanding that they require literal humans on the page to understand what you’re going for? It goes beyond lack of respect for the audience and straight into revealing fairly horrifying things about one’s view of the world. I see no alternative to interpreting this as a sincere presentation of the author’s worldview; a mind satisfied (indeed, self-satisfied) with interpreting Aesop’s Fables and nothing much more complex.
This actually comes up in a different way in the prologues and epilogue of the book. In the foreword, Kenneth Blanchard remarks that every single person he gave the book to had ‘negative energy release’ and thanked him for the enlightenment, and the fictional framing device has the characters all agree that this is a good story that makes them smarter and better, and they heap cheerful pity on the poor fools that can’t accept its correctness. The attempt to assault the reader into accepting the story with sheer brute force is embarrassing to read, and it too reveals both a lack of imagination and a sincere belief that this will work.
I had to load up some kind of criticism making fun of this book to decompress emotionally from its bullshit, and luckily the podcast If Books Could Kill had an episode on it last year. They describe the life story – or what we have of it – of the author, Dr Spencer Johnson. The given story we have is that Johnson was a practicing doctor who became disillusioned with the hopeless attitude of his patients and moved from medicine into a corporate job. They don’t speculate why this happened – rather, they illustrate the larger place the book had in the corporate world, in a time when downsizing was popular and the management class had to figure out how to sell people on losing their jobs.
This gives me free reign, because I can imagine a few explanations for who Dr Spencer Johnson was and why he wrote this book. The most malicious reading is that, of course, Johnson saw that market of downsizing and decided to corner it (certainly Michael Hobbes makes a good argument about the shrewdness of Blanchard in his approach to publishing it). The best faith interpretation I can see, however, is that Johnson was motivated to help people do the best they could, but was incurious about why they think the way they do (which is interesting for someone with a BA in psychology) and what social forces create their situations. The Maze is something that simply happened, not a product of choices that somebody somewhere made.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Year of the Month
High fantasy for people what who have to work for money.
"There are other things than smart." / "Yeah, those are not smart."
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Fifteen, “Everybody Loves Grant”
“You guys always leave me hanging with the sexy sound effects.”
“Pretty sexy fist bump, though.”
Why are they so convinced Max is fat?! He’s not fat! He’s a regular guy! Is the joke that he’s not actually fat?
“We get it, you made a mistake and his name is Todd.”
“My friends love you!”
“Yeah. I really like them too.”
“Calm down. They’re just okay.”
“Carusoing wasn’t even cool when you did it six years ago.”
“Why’s he still wearing his shirt?”
“People wear shirts.”
“Well, my shirt is completely made from bug inks, and I’m cool with it.”
“Twinsies! Well, fraternal of course.”
“I think… knowing Grant is making us so much cooler.”
“I want to get to the bottom of why Sean didn’t want to have sex with us.”
“She has some great stories.”
“My husband’s dead.”
[cut]
“That was her best story!”
“Is that an indoor scarf?”
“Unexpected Dave!”
“Grant’s explaining the art to them! Now we’ll never know what it means!”
“Now in this situation, is he referring to his underwear as ‘baby’ or you?”
“You’re smarter than you are tall! Good day, tiny madam!”
“I am the cool guy!”
Verity
A classic C+ film that could have been B, but they had to go with the worst possible twist they could have gone with. The cast is great – this may be my favourite Dakota Johnson performance and Anne Hathaway is, of course, spectacular – but the ending is easily the least interesting out of all the ways I figured it was going.
“Why are they so convinced Max is fat?! He’s not fat! He’s a regular guy! Is the joke that he’s not actually fat?” This is an American TV/Hollywood body image thing as they do the same thing with the very average-sized Nick on New Girl (ironically, a lot of millennial women correctly saw Nick was hot). The show Ed had a fat teenage character and actually handled the plot well when the real actor got weight loss surgery for health reasons, so there’s been regression over time.
Mayhem Film Festival. Local horror / cult / genre festival was in town, so I’ve watched 13 features and 16 shorts since I last posted here on Thursday. Exploding brain emoji, etc.
Highlights:
Mārama – my favourite film of the festival was also the only one that had the director in attendance for a Q&A this year, which was cool. This is a kind of gothic revenge story I guess, with a young Maori woman being summoned to 19th Century England by a mysterious letter offering her details on the family she never knew. By the time she has made the weeks-long journey to the other side of the world, the person who wrote the letter is dead. There’s a familiar “woman wreaks vengeance on her oppressors” structure to it but the details are distinctive and unusual and the cinematography is gorgeously dark and sinister.
Ghost in the Cell – an Indonesian horror-comedy set in a prison that I can genuinely compare to both Hellraiser and Paddington 2, pleasingly. Wildly gory, oddly sweet, and with a surprising amount of dancing. I thought this was a really fun genre mash-up and I’m slightly disappointed to see that the director’s other work looks more straight-up horror as he’s really having a lot of fun in this one.
Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant – New Zealand body-horror comedy, I expected (and received) the familiar NZ deadpan wit but the horror side of this one went way harder than expected, really slimy, messy stuff – and with some solid points to make about reproductive rights into the bargain! Excellent WTF cinema.
Careful – a 4K version of this Guy Maddin film was the pick for the traditional “underseen older film” slot. I’ve had my issues with Maddin in the past – I can find his style overwhelming when it comes to full-length films, but I think he’s one of the best short-film-makers ever. This one didn’t exhaust me as much as some of his others, it’s definitely in his trademark “I love silent movies and pre-code horniness, strap in” style but kept me engaged throughout, really fun.
Lowlights:
Terrestrial – this seemed fairly well-received from other people I spoke to but I thought it was really weak. The programme description listed it as being “from the filmmaker behind Hot Tub Time Machine” which didn’t exactly set high expectations but I didn’t think it lived up to even that. It’s a similarly sloppy high-concept comedy, this time about a struggling sci-fi writer who invites old friends to his unexpectedly luxurious home only to act very oddly in their presence. I didn’t really buy their friend chemistry and the writing annoyed me throughout, it’s the kind of film that would be blandly OK as a Netflix watch but at a festival I want to see big swings even if they don’t land, not this watered-down bullshit.
The Whisper – a Uruguayan mystery from the guy who directed the one-take film Silent House a while back (which got a Hollywood remake). I would have forgiven the slow burn if the big reveal had paid off but sadly it didn’t for me at all, I was mostly frustrated with one because it has a great cat that is used well as the story unfolds, but everything else around it tested my patience alas.
I might write up the solid middle-of-the-road stuff later in the week.
I saw Careful decades ago, it was sold as “Riccola ad from hell” and lived up to that! Weird-ass flick.
Oh, this is super cool. I’m jealous.
an Indonesian horror-comedy set in a prison that I can genuinely compare to both Hellraiser and Paddington 2, pleasingly
Just take my money!
Don’t get me started about corporate malfeasance. (Our office went from zero days a week on site to three in about two days.)
Wife vs Secretary – But I guess we have to talk a little about corporate malfeasance since magazine publisher Clark Gable almost ruins his marriage with a deep inability to have a good work life balance and nearly does the same to his secretary Jean Harlow’s prospects for marrying Jimmy Stewart. (Not that Jimmy is worthy of her.) If only Clark had spent more time with his wife Myrna Loy, this would never have happened. You might thing with his cast and that title that we have an early screwball comedy. But by the three quarter mark we’ve lurched into melodrama. And there is only so much any cast can do with 30s melodrama intended to prop up the status quo. There is room here for exploring Harlow’s life as a career woman trying to find both marriage and fulfillment, but I don’t think the studios were ready for that yet.
Elementary, “Our Time Is Up” – Early in the series, and very briefly, Joan seeks therapy. Five years later, her former therapist is dead, and because Sherlock out and out steals the therapist’s notes, Joan can read the therapist’s assessment of her. Which would be more interesting if it made any sense that the therapist decided Joan would make a good mother. Do therapists make such observations? What’s more, despite Joan’s sister saying point blank that Joan shouldn’t let this long ago assessment affect her (and also that she has her hands full with Sherlock), Joan decides she wants to adopt. It all feels out of nowhere and out of character. The mystery is pretty good, and involves the therapist perhaps knowing too much about shady business doings. Leading to an incredible confrontation between Sherlock and the fixer for a crooked financier, played by Reg E, Cathy (in one of his last roles before his death). Tony winner Douglas Hodge plays the financier. Oh, and Sherlock is treating his head with a Victorian sensory deprivation tank, which is very cool.
MASH, “Ping Pong” – A heretofore unknown Korean civilian is base ping pong champ, and wants to marry his local sweetheart. Frank is mean to both of them. Meanwhile, an old friend of Potter’s who hasn’t seem combat in ages gets himself put in charge of an infantry unit to get a promotion and screws it all up. There are some interesting moments scattered about here but this one’s not very good.
Barney Miller, “Smog Alert” – Everyone copes with bad air (something NYC is more used to in the age of Canadian wildfires), and Fish passes out. We have the second and last appearance of Detective Batista, who is meant to replace both Chano and Wentworth (and sadly was not played by a Latina). And Officer Levitt’s role as the disgruntled short cop desperate to be a detective gets bigger. The hlghlight is Fish reading something he thinks is a message from his wife that is in fact a rather detailed bit of dirty grafitti. Abe Vigoda makes the most amazing faces.
American League Championship Series – Dear lord, the TBS broadcast team is awful. Brian Anderson kept insisting the Guardians were taking control of the game – they did no such thing – and the whole team kept saying the same things over and over. Hard to believe that this Ron Darling is the same one everyone loves on Mets games. (Also, HBO has a whole bunch of shows I have no interest in, as usual. And it seems tone deaf to call a show about divorce lawyers “War” in a world where there are multiple actual wars happening.)
No one is worthy of Jean Harlow!
All Hallow’s Eve – Shoestring budget and Damian Leone himself was critical of the movie later. Still makes Terrifier look like John Carpenter, and the sheer ineptitude of the dialogue and incoherent staging is sometimes hilarious. (Why is there an alien AKA obviously a guy in a suit wearing a stupid mask? Ah, just go with it.) Leone doesn’t exactly beat the allegations of misogyny with the mutilation of one female character so she wakes up, sans limbs, with WHORE among other slurs carved into her chest. The worst movie I’ll probably see this Spooktober.
Speaking of objectification! Watched Superstore’s “Halloween Theft” episode and while Dina’s costume is hot, something about Amy as Cleopatra made me pull at my shirt collar. “What would you do if you were me?” “Glenn, if I were you, I’d have killed myself years ago.”
Creepy — revisiting a Kurosawa Komedy Klassic (looks at text) uh oh. The first half of this remains exquisite horror cringe comedy, the standard bit of “is this odd neighbor really threatening or is the protagonist overreacting?” is completely tossed out the window. Look at the title! Dude is CREEPY! But Kurosawa threads the needle of being obvious to the viewer while letting his characters rely on their fixations and blind spots to get deeper and deeper in the shit. And then Kurosawa switches things up on the viewer, not in a “gotcha” way but in a grim redirection. The movie plays in part as a pisstake on American serial killer cinema and does a lot with how the protagonist’s (and others’) lack of communication exacerbates issues for someone to exploit, and while there is some overlap in hero and villain attitudes there is no simplistic “not so different you and I” bullshit here. But there isn’t the larger external dread that suffuses a lot of Kurosawa movies either, this builds to violence but not apocalypse, and I think that throws people off. Because the end is as dark as anything he’s done, so many of his movies close with people on their way to hell and here there is no journey, just a hard stop and a scream.
Live music — two shows in one day! I’m getting too old for this shit! At least that’s how it felt early in the day but I made it to the matinee show and had a great time, despite their name indicating a bit heavier sound Obliterati played very solid indie pop/rock that was a nice surprise and headliner Cameron Kieber, of the late and extremely great Beatings, released his latest album of darker-leaning indie, it’s been a while since I heard his full-throated howl of a voice and it’s been missed. Black Helicopter in the middle brought the real heaviness, they played a bunch of new stuff and it sounded fan fucking tastic, tons of energy and low end blowing the doors off the place. Then it was off to another show, Louder Joy also played some heavy (if not as heavy) indie and worked the power trio well as a lead-in to Sidewalk Driver, who were also releasing an album. They are a glammy power-pop band with occasional leanings into a Franz Ferdinand-ish indie and boast a great front man, soaring vocals and a Bowie-ish theatricality (multiple costume changes) in a dude who looks like Frank Black, his charisma is one of those things a person has or doesn’t and boy does he have it. A great damn time of new and old stuff, the crowd eating it up. Felt tired but pretty damn good after it all.
Amadeus — more music! This was fun, Hulce is a hoot and Abraham is the god of glowering, and it zips along well although it loses steam in the back half (and while the man is bad, Jeffrey Jones’ performance as the Emperor is superb, he can recognize if not understand talent and he can support it without understanding his outsized royal weight — it’s a really interesting character the movie loses track of, possibly because the emperor uh dies). But I’m not sure it has a lot to say about any larger inspiration or legacy, especially considering it makes up a virgin Salieri to contrast with the chad Mozart. If anything, parts feel like Milos Forman is restaging One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with a more sympathetic Ratched. Looks amazing though.
And of course Amadeus is generally inaccurate about the state of things between Salieri and Mozart when the latter was still alive, even if the “Salieri killed Mozart” stuff was indeed common gossip.
I saw Creepy at the very same horror festival I’ve just attended, ten years ago this weekend. Which is creepy in itself!!!! In the wake of “Terrestrial” mentioned above, I was discussing “worst Mayhem movies” with friends who have also been attending for years (before we knew each other in most cases) and one guy did indeed choose Creepy as his least favourite. I also didn’t care for it at the time but I wonder if it was just a film that didn’t suit being crammed into the middle of a very long day – I’ve generally enjoyed all the other K. Kurosawa stuff I’ve seen but the way this one set up its mystery and then subverted it kinda infuriated me.
Gasp! Are YOU the creep? Am I????
I think I’m higher on the movie than just about anyone, it’s definitely perverse and in a really weird way, because Kurosawa is not exactly a straightforward guy to begin with. But this is straightforward in significant ways, even with the subversion — there’s no uncanny here, it’s all “real,” for lack of a better word, and the movie does sort of deflate in the back half as opposed to opening up into strange territory.
Just checked the records and Creepy was actually my first Kurosawa, which is probably not ideal and another tick in the “rewatch someday” column.
Woo, live music! Saw Black Helicopter in Cambridge ages ago but didn’t quite appreciate them.
I’m up to episode 5 of Crystal Lake. One thing I didn’t except from this series is the humor that is present in almost every episode. Sometimes it seems to be a black comedy. Linda Cardellini (or however you spell it) is the focus of the show as Jason’s grieving and psychotic mother, but Will Catlett as sheriff Brooks is the moral center of the show. Like most series, this probably shouldn’t be 8 episodes but I’m enjoying it so far. My biggest complaint is it’s taking a long time to get to the Jason Factory.
This sounds like a Surf Dracula issue, although I suppose Jason was notoriously bad at surfing and water-related activities…
Sweet and Lowdown — Continuing my Allen retrospective, this is the story of Emmett Ray (Sean Penn), a peacocking Depression-era jazz guitarist, the second best guitarist in the world (after Django Reinhardt). Ray is a drunk, a petty con man, a gambler, and a womanizer who disappoints everyone who depends on him. He sets up housekeeping with a sweet, mute laundress (Samantha Morton). At first he’s horrified with the idea of a mute for a girlfriend, but he’s such a narcissist and also so fundamentally insecure that she’s his perfect woman. Someone who just sits silently and smiles while he monologues about his own greatness and is still there when he arrives him after a three day bender.
Penn and Morton both received Oscar noms for this film, both deserved. These are not subtle performances, but they’re real. Penn’s Ray is such a dipstick at every moment, but then he sits down to play and is immediately not only confident and charismatic, but also not self-conscious (the only times in the field where his insecurity is not bubbling just under the surface). He pulls faces, he flops his legs around, and he looks just like someone pouring everything he has into the music, suddenly no longer able to spare the focus necessary to care what other people think. (Allen pulls back on the jittery cinema verité style he employed throughout much of the 1990s here, although the camera still moves as the audience’s viewpoint, in particular in the guitar scenes.)
Morton disappears from the narrative for a chunk in the second half, and the movie loses some steam even as she is replaced by a loquacious Uma Thurman. But this is a sweet, melancholy, funny movie, the type that Allen’s done so frequently and so well over the decades.
Morton is phenomenal in this, if you’re going to cast someone who only communicates through facial expression she’s number one with a bullet. The sequence where she has obviously mediocre sex with Penn and then has an eargasm to his music is great.
“I MADE A MISTAKE” Agreed on the second half, the ending makes up for it. The talking heads this time feel different with all this history and analysis recontextualized as the subjective, the personal and heartbroken. This, Radio Days, and Purple Rose of Cairo stand out from Allen’s other movies and form an unofficial trilogy about popular trends and forms and their greater meaning to the person on the ground, separate from material analysis. On a less fancy note, Ray muttering about Django being better is always funny.
I love how Emmett inevitably brings up Django when singing his own praises. As self-aggrandizing as he is, his commitment to the art is so pure (even surrounded by his every other base characteristic) that he can’t bring himself to lie about it.
Nostalgia is one of the Woodman’s major themes (query whether it’s because he’s a generation older than than the Boomers who first supported him as a filmmaker, let alone writer and comedian). You bring up a great point about this being part of a trilogy where nostalgia about popular art is text. But the idea pervades his work (Annie Hall obviously is a nostalgic retrospective on a relationship that was over, and it’s part of why I loved his unsung You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which is not that far off.)
Last nights theme was Europe does America in the New Hollywood era
THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS– The title is self explanatory, and it lives up to its premise, with the added twist that both the owner of the armored car company protecting the loot (Lee J. Cobb) and a group of plucky theives (led by Gary Lockwood) are planning their own schemes, with Jack Palance as a rogue FBI agent planning his own mission that may or may not mirror the other two plans. This is a pretty big production for a movie that was primarily shot in Spain, with significant work completed in San Francisco (complete with anachronistic Randolph Scott movie posters on the freeway underpasses), L.A. and of course, Las Vegas. Interesting but not entirely compelling. Elke Summer does convey a sense of ambiguity concerning her role as the security firm’s mole, and fear that Lockwood is just stringing her along.
THE INSIDE MAN– This is kind of an Italian version of LA SAMURAI, with Jean Louis Trantigent as a methodical hitman completing an assignment in 1973 Los Angeles, only to realize that he’s to be taken out by Roy Schneider after finishing the job. In a nod to neorealism, Melville fetishization of procedure seems diminished by the filmmaker’s fascination with Los Angeles’ urban topology, even if it isn’t as literalist as the following year’s GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS. The film has its fans among L.A. movie nerds but it’s kind of a slog.
What did we play?
Gears of War, Act One: “Ashes To Ashes”, Chapter One: “14 Years After E-Day”
New project idea here – I enjoy having something to say every week, but I don’t have time to complete a whole video game in a week (that time where I was writing about games weekly was me writing about my favourite games from memory). I’ve also always wanted to go through Gears of War beat-by-beat, because it’s one of those things that’s measurably terrible, but still has a large place in my heart and some magical core to its heart. The only part of this game I consider technically unimpeachable is the voice acting, particularly John DiMaggio’s unnecessarily incredible performance – probably his performance outside of Bender – and everything else is deeply flawed on a fundamental, conceptual level.
The game’s central innovation is the cover system – actually invented for kill.switch and used in proto-form in a few games, including Metal Gear Solid 2, but used to full potential here and influencing an entire generation of video games that came after (including Mass Effect). Realistically, the game’s explosive popularity comes down to its co-op system (also fairly unoriginal), allowing two players to go through the story together. The fundamental feeling of the game is two buddies going through an awful world together, owning evil as they just try to survive. To extent, this makes the generic, non-specific setting and very vague sense of how anything works into virtues rather than demerits; players can project whatever values they want onto the world.
The opening cutscene already shows many of the virtues and even demerits of the series when it shows Dom finding player character Marcus in his cell in prison; we have DiMaggio’s wry performance (“Is that right?”) as well as Rule of Cool hitting inconsistently. The prison is a cool setting, but it raises too many questions that don’t get by on pure dream logic – apparently, all the other prisoners were pardoned without Marcus even knowing, and the layout of the prison makes sense for the logic of the game but little for the internal logic of, ya know, running a prison. This same didn’t-quite-think-that-through thinking is in the conception of the gameplay; the section outside the prison exists to teach the player to flank their enemies, but if you actually flank them, you get killed pretty quickly because the enemies charge up to you.
That said, you’re taught very quickly how to survive in the game. Your character has recharging health, represented onscreen by the logo becoming increasingly detailed in the middle of your screen. You’re taught to find cover immediately and sporadically poke your head out to fire on enemies (or blindfire if they are charging across the battlefield for no reason). It’s a game that rewards patience over strategic thinking; you can wear down enemies over time because you have recharging health and they don’t. Whilst being a good shot is obviously helpful, a weak but bloodyminded player (like myself) can blast through, particularly when coasting on another player.
(One early mistake: bots on your team can be downed, but are still alive and can be saved by walking over and picking them up. In multiplayer, including co-op, players can save each other. In single player, if the player goes down, they’re out. The sequels would fix this.)
The basic idea of the prologue here is good, though – you as Marcus are rescued from prison and asked to rejoin the fight, raising interesting questions – who is Marcus, why was he in prison – that make me want to play the game. There’s a bit of dialogue I’ve always liked for its simplicity (“You could get into a looot of trouble for doin’ this.” / “Not anymore. Things have changed.”) that the game and original trilogy simply never quite paid off – the second-worst aspect of the story of these games is that answers to questions are legitimately the least interesting and most obvious that you could possibly come up with. It successfully implies that things are bleak now, but we ultimately get very little sense of how things were before the war, let alone before things got worse. There’s also a basic, sensible understanding of how to use setpieces in the actual game to enrich the experience; another little innovation (I don’t know how original it is) is a cinematic camera move, somewhat controllable by the player, when interesting things happen, and here we have a helicopter attacking the building the player is in, and hanging dead bodies implying horrible violence in the prison.
It’s kind of the bare minimum of what you have to do to make a video game feel alive (and, I presume, deeply influenced by Half Life doing the same kind of thing). The problem here, as will be throughout the whole game, is a lack of imagination; there’s no coherent viewpoint or philosophy, even a primitive one; there’s no specific sense of a real place with a real history. It’s like they consistently went with the first idea they had and said “good enough”, which it basically was.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds against my niece. I won them all, but she played well, just couldn’t catch a break.
Metal Slug Advance Game Boy Advance: Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Played the first two levels. It’s an interesting take on the series gameplay, less immediate and with more emphasis on navigation than on shooting everything. You still can shoot everything, but it takes more work and planning. And it looks as great as any other Metal Slug.