Like much of Babylon 5, “Comes the Inquisitor” must be contextualized within the larger narrative; I’ll try and keep spoilers outside the episode itself brief and vague. The context is that Delenn (Mira Furlan), representative of the Minbari aliens and crucial player in the upcoming war, has been asked to submit to an interrogation by her superior to determine if she’s ready for what comes. Her interrogator is the mysterious Sebastian, who claims to be a human from 1888, and he subjects her to torture to try and confess that she is not up to the sacrifices necessary. All the great elements of this story – the magnificent performances from Furlan and Wayne Alexander, conveying the sheer force of will of Sebastian required to do what he does, as well as the occasional turn of phrase and intense direction – fail to overcome that the narrative basis is bullshit.
From the moment Sebastian comes onscreen, it becomes obvious how the narrative will turn out; even if I didn’t know Delenn and the depths of her fanaticism by this point, it’s fairly obvious that she’ll reveal depth of character that will impress Sebastian, which is to say that I see the heavy hand of the author. This plot isn’t driven by necessity or reaction; there is explicitly no reason for this plot to exist on a mechanical level, it’s just one character dicking about with another to find out what their motivation is, which makes it the author telling me how to interpret his character and telling me to be wildly impressed by her resolve.
I don’t care for manipulative writing like this outside of a playful comedy. Obviously, it’s predictable, but there are other reasons; for one, I find it needlessly sadistic to one’s characters. If you tell me this character is not a person but just a signifier to bully, I’ll roll with it (Always Sunny and to an extent Futurama operate like this), but if you tell me this character is a person with motivations that I should care about, then you can’t come down as an author and start fucking with their free will. I simply cannot take the consequences of action seriously when there’s someone with their thumb on the scale. Of course the world works that way when you can make it work that way!
I often compare things with other things, and in this case, I can compare “Comes the Inquisitor” to four different episodes of television. The first and most obvious is “Once Upon A Time” of The Prisoner, which this episode must surely be a reference to. In that, the protagonist is subject to surreal torture in order to reveal his motivation, but that is in fact quite an urgent task on the part of his torturer, risking his own death just as much as his target, so even through the surrealism (let alone introspection) of the episode lies a sense of urgency.
The second and third are, oddly, episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The first of these is “Chain of Command”, a two-parter in which Captain Picard is interrogated and tortured by Cardassians. The purpose of this story isn’t to show off how tough and dedicated the characters are, it’s to explore the motivations behind and consequences of torture itself; the torture is eventually revealed to be worthless for interrogation and done entirely out of spiteful cruelty, and famously, Picard admits at the end that it worked in breaking his mind at the end. The second is “Thine Own Self”, in which Troi is subject to a variant on the Kobayashi Maru test, a no-win scenario designed to teach Starfleet officers that not all scenarios are winnable. We have a step up on Troi in knowing that she’s trying to win an unwinnable situation; again, there’s a point to this beyond cruelty to the character in showing the consequences of Troi’s righteous commitment.
The final plot I want to focus on is, in fact, a scene within “Comes the Inquisitor” itself. Vyr is a civil servant for the Centauri Empire, and he steps into an elevator, only to see G’Kar, the main representative of the very species Vyr’s government is currently committing war crimes and genocide against. Vyr has long been established as a weak man with a real sense of decency, and he can’t not apologize to G’Kar for the evil done against his people, to which G’Kar melodramatically and sincerely responds with a reminder of all the blood on his people’s hands.
This is a scene completely devoid of bullshit; raw, honest, driven. Vyr recognizes his place within this system and is honest about it, including about his attempts to prevent it, and G’Kar becomes a physical manifestation of his people. Admittedly, this scene has less effect on the plot than the main story, at least within this episode; I haven’t seen past this episode yet, so I don’t know if Vyr goes on to advocate for the Narn or whatever. But it’s a real moment in which I forget this is a television show with actors in funny makeup; it’s uncomfortable, dangerous, and deeply compelling. This is not someone manipulating events in front of me – this is a logical and painful extension of the basic premises I have agreed to follow. This is a moment of life.
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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Department of
Conversation
The example cited at the end is why I respect people who tell me how good Babylon 5 is. The main story cited here is why I never got into the show.
What did we watch?
I showed a friend who has much more a science/medical inclination the first Knick episode! Still a good pilot, the depiction of the new struggling to be born also dovetails nicely with Soderbergh making such an alien and beautiful looking show, with it’s entirely natural lighting* and austere, gory ruthlessness, amidst tropes starting to become cliches on TV in 2014 (drug addicted doctor, minority characters struggling to find a place in a racist patriarchy, older mentor-younger woman relationships, etc.) Some characters are clear archetypes in a delightful way, the previous mentions less so. I also love that Thack is not bigoted exactly, it’s that he’s (1) so apathetic about anything not related to medicine or drugs that he has no real interest in any other forms of social progress and (2) he knows the hospital is broke and hiring a person many patients will refuse to have operate on them will not help. There’s a brutal logic to this that is unfair and awful and it also makes sense. Welcome to the knick.
*how polluted is New York in 1900? My friend notes that it was so bad, species of lichen died out from the effect.
Cars
I never actually watched this in full before, because even when it came out (when I was fifteen) I thought it looked naff, especially for Pixar – I appreciate a very low stakes plot, but this was predictable and tedious, with only two or three emotional scenes really hitting. Worse, the humor was jarringly juvenile. On the other hand, what do I know, given this was Pixar’s most financially successful franchise for a while there.
The Twilight Zone (Jordan Peele version)
This run I watched here was higher tier for this show. “The Who of You” managed to pull off some classic dramatic plotting; it occurred to me that, for all its problems, this is playing in the same territory as The X-Files but far surpasses season nine, which I’m currently on, and I spent the whole episode wondering where the fuck it could go because the protagonist had painted himself in a corner. “Ovation” was really great, though the final five minutes felt like they stretched out into forever.
Oh, yeah, “The Who of You” is fun, and it does totally feel like an X-Files episode. (A bit like a lower-key, funnier version of “Lazarus.”)
Also, probably of interest to you personally: I’ve found classic Twilight Zone is on The Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-01-e-00-original-pilot
Oh, cool! I’ve never actually seen the original pilot, just the official one, so I’ll have to watch that ASAP.
EDIT: Also, this is great timing, since I just bought tickets to SerlingFest yesterday.
My little sister loved Cars as a toddler and I was fascinated/annoyed by the gaping questions the Cars universe created. Where are the drivers?! How does gasoline get made without humans?! Is this a post-Maximum Overdrive situation?!
Cars, like Bluey, is clearly the work of some sort of chaotic neutral wizard since the world is full of things that only make sense if there are humans. Why do the cars have passenger compartments? Why are there different dog breeds?
Why are there dogs? How is there a court system? On and on it goes, driving you (heh) into Cars madness.
Live Music – really enjoyed a band called Sombre that played here back in February, they were back in town on Friday night and it was another really good set. They have a kinda jangly 80s-y sound that reminds me of the poppier end of the Cure catalogue, maybe? I would not describe them as “sombre” (one of the songs has a dance routine) so I guess the name is ironic. This time around they were on tour with another band (Low Harness) that shared a couple of members and didn’t do as much for me – more straightforward kinda pop-rock I guess, with a slightly darker edge – although they had a couple of really good songs.
Poker Face, “Exit Stage Death” and “Future of the Sport” – two fairly middling (but still solidly entertaining) episodes. More impressive guest casting which is a big part of the appeal for this show, although I guess the prestige-ness of the cast and cinematography etc. makes the flaws more apparent – I’m probably enjoying this more overall than, say, High Potential but it also seems like it should be held to a higher standard because it’s clearly operating at a much higher budget level.
Wooo live music! Demerits for the inaccurate name AND pretentious spelling though.
If they’d used the American spelling I’d have laughed them out of town!
Out of towne?
Yes, Robert passed away just last year.
Wooooo live music with archaic band name spelling!!
I’ll throw in some love for “Exit Stage Death,” mostly because I love the big fake argument as they’re getting everything in place for the murder and the ending where they give the performances of their lives once there’s nothing left to lose.
I didn’t do myself any favours on that one, I started watching when I got in from the live music, fell asleep and had to rewatch the second half the next day. It did have some fun character dynamics, for sure.
Red Sun – East meets Old West! Charles Bronson leads a big pack of bandits to rob a train. A train carrying the first Japanese ambassador to the United States, and a special ceremonial sword to be presented to the president. But Bronson’s second in command Alain Delon steals the sword, kills a samurai bodyguard, and betrays Bronson. Now the outlaw must team with another samurai, Toshiro Mifune, to find the sword and reclaim the honor of the representatives of the Mikado. A product of the times, both in terms of having Eastern themes and of being a spaghetti western with an international cast, it rises on the chemistry between Mifune and Bronson and sinks from a plot that cannot fill two hours and way too many western movie stereotypes. Especially attacks on our cast by Comanches that paint them entirely as wordless savages. Directed fairly well by Terence Young, with a good if insistent score by Maurice Jarre.
Frasier, “Good Samaritan”/”Our Parents, Ourselves” – The show really rebounds once Frasier and Roz are back at work, even though these have only a little to do with KACL. Is it because no one needed to think of new ways to write about unemployed Frasier, or because Roz is back at center stage? In the former, Frasier’s efforts to be a good Samaritan keep backfiring on him, leading him to wonder if he should just stop. And it seems like everything has really gone wrong but it turns out to be a thought exercise that leads Frasier to realize he could never look Frederick in the eye if he said we should stop trying to help people. Very cleverly done even if a fakeout. The latter has Frasier and Roz setting up Martin and her mom (Eva Saint Marie), but while Mrs. Doyle likes Martin he cannot stand her. Only Frasier can’t bring himself to tell Roz. A bit of fluff but the introspective ending works well.
MASH, “The Bus” – The four doctors and Radar, returning from a medical conference on an army bus, get lost and also stuck. Plus they end up with a prisoner, wounder KPA solider Soon-Tek Oh. An episode without a laugh track that does not pull punches with how awful Frank can be, and also shows us how BJ and Potter deal with him, the former by trying to be a little more forbearing than Hawkeye and Trapper, the latter by being the sort of commanding officer Frank can’t ignore.
MLB, Blue Jays vs Dodgers – despite the Jays’ allowing a million men on base, with most of those from walks, they held the Dodgers to four runs in what was an exciting in hardly well played game. The Jays’ broadcast team of Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez is a bit repetitive at times but knows the game well.
“The Bus” is a really fun episode – definitely feels a lot more slice-of-life than usual, even for a show that can descend into that at the drop of a hat.
Red Sun’s cast is so good it immediately calls into question the movie’s quality, because surely if it lived up to what its players are capable of it’d be talked about more, right? I’m with you, this drags too much and I found Young’s direction to be part of that. For Western Bronson, Breakheart Pass is far superior.
Live music — back jamming with friends, this time with a drum machine and the decision to record (with a phone) our output! Lots of goofery but also fucking rad, adding heavy distortion to songs is great, who knew.
Good Will Hunting — for some reason after the live music I was very tired and hungover and in need of an easy watch, this fit the bill well. I have come around on what I initially dismissed as corny, if things get wrapped up too neatly (after a weirdly meandering second half) that’s OK. Van Sant really does a good job using his various rooms and spaces (apparently all the interiors were filmed in Canada), setting up environments that influence the mood. Casey Affleck is still hilarious but Ben’s scene with the lawyers and his dress-up cosplay (with those socks!) might be the funniest scene.
Hell yeah heavy distortion and drum machines! That’s a fun combo. I like the idea of getting in from making a racket, ears ringing with guitar fuzz, and deciding it’s time to revisit Good Will Hunting. Sounds like it worked out! I haven’t seen this since it came out but I remember enjoying it at the time.
*head-banging, finger blistering jam session* TIME FOR SOME ELLIOTT SMITH LET’S GOOOOOOOOO
Woooooo live jamming with friends!!
We were so aggressive we made the dogs fight! Play-fighting, which is good, but you like to see the music get a response like that.
Affleck taking all their money is very funny, 10/10 gag.
It makes Damon going back to them for real later in the movie ring sort of false — these guys are that easily duped, how the hell are they the brain factory?
Live Music
Mountain Goats concert on Friday night, with Craig Finn as an opener. Great show: John Darnielle is always funny and charming live, and while I wasn’t familiar with Finn before, he had some great poignant story songs and was funny too. (Bought one of Finn’s books at the merch table, plus a Mountain Goats shirt and incredible sticker sheet.) We got to hear a new song, too, which was a highlight–and in the middle of John Darnielle explaining that he’d appreciate people not filming this part, some guy yelled out a request for a much-older song, and Darnielle said, “That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, sir,” which was also a highlight.
Darnielle and Finn having some interesting asides about other musicians also got me thinking about how I feel like a key part of creating rich, vivid work as an artist is having a wide range of references and influences to draw on, even if they aren’t directly connected to what you’re doing; you need to love more than the exact kind of thing you’re making.
Weapons
This is structured as a series of interlocking narratives, so first we’re embedded in Character A’s POV, then Character B’s, and so on, sometimes moving back in time a bit but ultimately catching up to the present and pressing forward. This is an incredible structure for a mystery, where it has the implicit feel of gathering testimony and unearthing the truth, in all its complexity, by seeing it from as many angles as possible. But it doesn’t work nearly as well in this kind of horror movie, where it keeps sapping the tension it’s developed in one story to hop over to the next, and it doesn’t work nearly as well when we get huge chunks of story that ultimately never play much of a role in the overall narrative at all. Two entire storylines here only happen, so far as I can tell, so that Cregger can get a couple bodies in place for the finale. I suppose the argument would be that they happen for additional narrative richness–indeed, I quite liked one of them–but the richness also felt disconnected. This isn’t a story that ultimately feels that invested in everybody’s humanity and in fleshing out even background characters (this would’ve made complete sense to me in the Taken miniseries, for example)–if it were, it would’ve used more of its 128-minute runtime to actually wrap up the emotional arcs a little more, instead of being leisurely paced throughout and then dropping off a cliff at the end. So the decisions there just wind up feeling like they were made to impress: both the literary structure and the abrupt ending are fashionable artistic choices, but they don’t go together.
This is all making me feel unduly grumpy. I like every artistic choice discussed here on its own–I like a lot of different approaches to horror, to film, to storytelling–I just don’t think Cregger blends them very well, and the end result feels self-conscious and awkward to me.
That said, this has some good scares and some good gore, and it’s surprisingly funny: there’s some window-smashing near the end that had me howling. I just wish it had put more meaning and feeling into its chosen structure, which goes well with this article, now that I think about it.
Also, don’t bring up this many details of an investigation if you’re going to have the process make this little sense. You can only hand-wave stuff if you don’t talk about it this much!
Liquid Sky
For Movie Club. A weird and oddly miserable fusion of sci-fi and artpunk stylings. It’s incredible to look at all the gorgeous, Day-Glo New Wave clothes and makeup, and that fashion feels like one of the only sources of joy available to the characters, who are ostensibly in a world where they can have whatever sex and drugs they want but are unhappy all the same. (Even the food looks terrible: is that chicken raw?) Margaret, our protagonist, gets sexually assaulted multiple times (and arguably commits assault herself, in the scene with Jimmy), and even when she’s having consensual sex, it’s dubious and dour; it’s a plot point that she doesn’t have an orgasm. All this misery coalesces into something kind of poignant at the end, as Margaret, having spent her whole life trying to find a place for herself, gives up on this world completely and welcomes her new alien overlords, but this was still a bit of a slog for me. Some great highlights of stilted bad acting from the supporting cast, though.
Dirty Work
“You know, what hurts the most is the lack of respect.”
Very fun, funny, and quotable movie, and the above proves that you can in fact tell good, funny jokes about all kinds of subjects, they just have to be, y’know, good and funny and ideally about more than “LOL, this thing exists.” (Here, the joke isn’t the subject itself but the tonal dissonance of Mitch’s scolding response to it.)
Also, Mitch’s tape recorder and the difficulty at him playing the bit he wants to play–instead always first coming up with notes about blow-up dolls, etc.–has to have been an influence on going through the dash-cam footage in the new Naked Gun.
My Winnipeg
Beautifully weird and made with a ton of passion. I love how immersed this is in “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” except it’s actively making the legend into fact and creating new legends as it goes, and doing it all with total commitment and with a great sense of the feeling of the place it’s describing in this mythical, kaleidoscopic way. It’s been years since I first watched this, and my wife and I still occasionally send each other out-of-the-blue, all-caps texts just saying, “WINNIPEG,” to call back to Maddin’s delivery as he circles back yet again. There will now be an uptick in that for a while, obviously.
Favorite bits: the horses, Ledge Man, and Maddin’s fury over the demolished buildings of the Winnipeg he grew up with.
Also, I like that I was looking up a bit of background info about this afterwards and immediately stumbled upon an old Ploughman article.
When I saw Liquid Sky in high school I thought it was pretty cool. But, you know, you can’t step into the same 1980s-smacked-out-NYC scene twice, and, on rewatch, the bad acting was a major problem in trying to show how human pleasure (from sex/drugs) was so powerful that aliens could feed off of it. And in the future, will new-wave music totally rule, or what?
Wooooooo live goats and new songs!!
I don’t remember much about LIQUID SKY story-wise, but I did, back in the day, get into it’s New York punk aesthetic, and was impressed that it was directed with a degree of discipline and point of view, quite in contrast with a lot of punk inspired films of the period. Even then it felt slow, and my guess is, if I could re-watch it, the direction probably tempered the outrageousness that could have made this a classic. You’d probably have to re-think the sexual attitudes, though.
In Movie Club last night, we did talk about the punks vs. posers element of Liquid Sky.
Having grown up in Orange County, my introduction of punk was pretty much limited to white male anti-establishmentarianism. Its broader context for an arts movement blending second hand consumerism, queer aesthetics and aggression, whose modes of expression were often at odds with the audience’s reading of the movement didn’t really hit me until I followed music in college. LIQUID SKY and REPO MAN were, I think, the most prominant examples of the punk arts movement finding voice in the cinema landscape, although BLADERUNNER beat them to it.
Craig Finn’s band The Hold Steady has been a staple of a certain kind of punker/indie rocker for some time now, you’d probably really like their story-songs. Boys & Girls in America and Separation Sunday are 2000’s rock classics.
Definitely checking out The Hold Steady now. (He also got some cheers from fans in the audience by bringing up his old work with Lifter Puller, and he seemed delighted by that.)
I think a lot of people think Boys and Girls in America is their best, but if you stick with The List, you will get to Separation Sunday very, very late.
Just double-checked the top candidates, and I’m excited for that!
I was gonna do another YOTM for it, but I never got around to it and I don’t know that I had too much new to say (other than similarly going into further detail about my personal experiences). Maybe if the band had done a Separation Sunday 20th anniversary tour, I would’ve been inspired to.
Not sure if you’ve listened to the new album but he’s backed by the War on Drugs musicians for it. Which is very different than his usual sound, but it works pretty well.
Wooo live music! Darnielle is a solid dude in general, I think.
I’m not really into zombies, but I watched 28 Years Later and I’m still not really into zombies but this one had some memorable images that have stuck with me: The tower of skulls, the round zombies that crawl through the woods eating worms (and sometimes people), the father and son running from a zombie across a half-submerged causeway.
I didn’t find out until later that the whole thing was shot on iPhones.
King of the Hill , revival, eps 1-4. First of all, the animation is
much cheaper looking. The new voice for Dale has big shoes too fill, and he is not filling them. Dale is simply less funny when he’s the majority of the Republican party, though that does pay off with a nice character moment for hank during a visit to the George W Bush presidential library.
But it’s still king of the hill. It’s nice to see mature bobby. There are some very solid jokes.
KPop demon hunters. There’s a group of girls and they fight evil which they overcome through the power of friendship and song. The songs are very catchy, the animation is fluid and full of well-choreographed fights (and also just actual choreography). It’s nothing ground breaking but very competent, much like kpop itself.
It did send me down a rabbit hole about various cultural details, like the traditional horse hair hats and the traditional minwha paintings of the tiger and the magpie, where the tiger, representing the nobility, is painted to look very stupid. See, eg,
https://images.app.goo.gl/SWjzH3hU4buNDJ6u9
https://images.app.goo.gl/fgSXyoQovRDWVwrP6
Johnny Hardwick is still voicing Dale in those episodes.
My buddy I went out and about with Saturday came by the house afterward, and through our conversation (starting with the topic of the new Naked Gun) it turned out he’d never seen MacGruber, so we watched that.
Having given it out multiple times at Movie Gifts (hey, whatever happened to those?), obviously you know what I think about it. It remains very funny; every time I think there’s going to be a stretch where it slows down, it swerves into another ridiculous joke. (Even the act-two setup into act three, when things seem to be at their lowest point, goes from MacGruber telling Piper his history with Cunth to using Piper as a human shield to Vicki removing the bullet from MacGruber to MacGruber and Vicki having sex to MacGruber and Casey’s ghost having sex to MacGruber encountering the KFBR392 car again.)
Oh, I guess I saw a bunch of live music at my small town’s little festival, too, although it was all cover bands. Our local The Police cover band is still probably my favorite, though the disco tribute act was a blast too, and CCR was mostly a lot of fun until the part where the mics went out for a couple of songs.
Superb breakdown here. Delenn is a strong character and Furlan is perhaps too good of an actor, because her commitment is the other side of the author’s heavy hand here — you never believe she will not be resolute and not make the right choice, at least not in this situation. I think this is also a problem whenever those Council of Grey morons show up — this is supposed to present conflict for Delenn but they are clearly dipshits so there’s no sense of her losing anything to disagree with them. You’re better off without them, Delenn! I think there is a way to use that righteousness toward difficult and conflicting ends and perhaps the show will get there, but this whole premise is a huge whiff. But Vyr and G’Kar rule.
Thanks! I think the episode does pull one moment out of Delenn and Furlan, where she lashes out at Sebastian and accuses him of being cruel to cover up his own insecurities and self-loathing, and it’s great because it’s a moment of weakness that thinks it’s strength. But of course, even Sebastian won’t follow up on that – The Shield would have an easier time with this with Claudette in the third season.
A lot of the reason Vyr and G’Kar rule here, I think, is because in a way, both get to reveal their dignity. We talked about character change vs character revelation, and I think Vyr really is the guy who has changed the most as he’s found his resolve and impatience. Meanwhile, G’Kar gets to find his strength and power again, after being denied it for so many episodes for a while. It’s a moment of real awe.
The show turns what could be a weakness (all of the potential Andor-y stuff involving the Narn on the ground is only talked about) into a strength by focusing on G’Kar’s limitations in being stuck on Babylon 5, and what he can do in that realm. This is going to a very weird place right now in Season 3!
What Did We Play?
Wheel World – tried out this open world cycle race game that friends were raving about but I didn’t get a lot out of it. Sometimes I feel like my gamer friends basically just enjoy everything. This is a pleasant enough game with a decent vibe / soundtrack but the gameplay is basically just “ride somewhere – get challenged to a race – win the race – buy some better bike parts – ride somewhere else” and I didn’t find the racing or the writing particularly interesting so I think I’ll ditch it.
Also played a bit of the Tony Hawk 3+4 remaster, I played both of the originals quite a bit although they’re not engraved on my brain like 1+2 are. Still fun stringing long combos together and they’ve added a bunch of new stuff to the soundtracks which is quite fun.
We had a very odd session of Strahd as the DM and the players kept not playing and getting lost in some really strange tangents. (My DM has dealt with some weird stuff in her life.) But when we got moving, we arrived at a place called Yesterhill, and the next session promises to be intense.
Detention
Side-scrolling Taiwanese horror game set during the White Terror. This has atmosphere to burn, which is crucial in any non-action horror game, and the eerie art–the characters look a bit like cut-out photographs of themselves moving like paper dolls–helps with that and takes several great turns; this starts out at an emptied-out school, and those same surroundings turn more openly unsettling, haunted, decayed, and outright surreal as the game goes on. Some nightmarish imagery, too (those dice that turn into teeth! The ghosts sniffing your hair!). Like a lot of ghost stories, this is about old sins and guilts, and unlike a lot of other video games on those subjects, this feels real and difficult rather than manipulative. The situation you gradually unearth stems from a believable clusterfuck of bad decisions, vulnerability, and outsized teenage emotions, and the political and historical situation means that this can snowball into a tragedy that wrecks everyone it touches. Brutal stuff.
This also makes some excellent use of gameplay, using the interactivity and the conventions of gaming to get emotions and effects you couldn’t have in any other medium. There’s one item you pick up that changes to something else as you touch it and take it into your inventory, and it’s a fantastic literalization of metaphor and responsibility that hits hard as both horror and tragedy. But my favorite example may be gathering a bowl of blood. Usually, interacting with the environment just means you drag and drop an item from your inventory onto whatever you’re trying to use it on, and then voila, thing done. But when it comes time to use a box cutter to slit a dead boy’s throat, you have to physically drag the box cutter icon across his neck, opening it up as you go. The game doesn’t do it for you.
Next up: Devotion, by the same developers.
Putting this in the correct place this time.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Demo) on Nintendo Switch
Finished the demo, which consists of the first level of the game. The action is very close to the original games, especially Shinobi III, but far more flexible and nimble, making it easier to move around and to combo your attacks against multiple enemies. Which is quite crucial since the first level here has a few areas off the main path that are worth exploring, one even hides a new hookshot ability. I finished the level, then went back to explore some areas I bypassed, and the map shows that I still only got 50% of everything there is to get. That’s a very interesting tease for the main game, and already quite a departure from the more linear games in the original series.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
Played for a while on Sunday, still beating new events. Unlocked one car with the absolute most hideous paint job you’ll ever see. I love it.
pathfinder: wrath of the righteous, a replay. PF:WOTR
takes the Pathfinder system (itself basically DnD 3.5) and copies as much as it can to make it a video game. You have endless options when making new characters and a large number of choices for party composition as well as choices that affect the plot. Having now completed the first chapter on a replay, the replay is more fun. Even knowing it won’t all play out exactly the same as the first play through (and could even go very differently if I somehow am able to stomach playing as either lawful or evil (or both!)), having a rough sense how the choices work makes the choices feel more meaningful. And understanding the PF system makes the encounters more fun, even on a higher difficulty. (One problem with copying the PF system is that difficulty levels are based on a certain number of encounters per day, and since those encounters are ran by talking and rolling dice, they take a long time, so in a video game you will have orders of magnitude more fights, but with the same challenge rating, which is something only the most sadistic and antisocial dungeon master would do.)
Played a bit more Hollow Knight to try to finish up some late quests. I’m getting pretty close to the end now, which is also the point of “How much do I want to keep doing this?” since I’ve done it all already. I guess it depends how much I feel like an actual challenge vs. a relax-and-have-fun playthrough of something. And also whether I can think of a “something” that fits the latter bill.
It is kinda nice to confirm I hadn’t really lost my skills for the game after however many years it’s been, though.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Demo) on Nintendo Switch
Finished the demo, which consists of the first level of the game. The action is very close to the original games, especially Shinobi III, but far more flexible and nimble, making it easier to move around and to combo your attacks against multiple enemies. Which is quite crucial since the first level here has a few areas off the main path that are worth exploring, one even hides a new hookshot ability. I finished the level, then went back to explore some areas I bypassed, and the map shows that I still only got 50% of everything there is to get. That’s a very interesting tease for the main game, and already quite a departure from the more linear games in the original series.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
Played for a while on Sunday, still beating new events. Unlocked one car with the absolute most hideous paint job you’ll ever see. I love it.
Year of the Month update!
This August, we’ll be covering 1959. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 8th: Gillian Nelson: Noah’s Ark
Aug. 15th: Gillian Nelson: I Captured the King of the Leprechauns
Aug. 20th: John Bruni: Shadows
Aug. 22nd: Gillian Nelson: Khrushchev Goes to Disneyland
Aug. 25th: Sam Scott: Imitation of Life
Aug. 27th: Lauren James: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Aug. 28th: Cliffy73: Sleeping Beauty
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
Aug. 31st: Tristan J. Nankervis: North by Northwest
And in September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday