Speed is a cheap vulgar thrill. It has none of the tension or innate drama of torque. You cannot savor speed the way you can savor the interaction of traction and mass. Speed wants nothing to do with the earth. It wants to leave it. But torque wants to defeat it, to prevail over it, to wrestle with it and throw it down and then tear loose from it to declare the victory of forward motion. Torque is determined to triumph. Torque is a battle. Torque grapples and struggles. Speed was barely even here.
That’s the premise of Snowrunner, and Mudrunner before it, and Spintires before that, all games about trucks wrestling with bad roads. Videogames have been letting us go fast for as long as they’ve been around. But the unique contribution of the Spintires line, which has its fullest expression in Snowrunner, is its intimacy with the ground. If you’ve ever driven a manual transmission, you know what I’m talking about.
I was done. I was finished with head-to-head card battling. So little has changed since Richard Garfield invented it with Magic: The Gathering back in 1973 or thereabouts. Build up mana, spend it to bring out cards with an attack and defense value, tap the cards to attack, win when you’ve done 20 points of damage to the other guy. All these decades later, so little has changed. Consider Hearthstone, a gleaming nugget of integrated game design and business model, polished nearly to the point of featurelessness.
Sure, there have been variations and even innovation. I’ve recently enjoyed Faeria for how it situates the action on a board built by the players as the match unfolds. Pretty clever. But even that only goes so far. If I’m going to match attack and block values, I need something more. And no game has enough something more to keep me interested.
It’s been an, uh, interesting year for rally games. Dirt 5, which was already kind of superfluous given the amount of content in Dirt 4, took a new direction…and then drove right into a ditch. WRC9 continued that series’ remarkable campaign mode, which shifts the traditional caRPG structure from RP’ing as your favorite car to RP’ing as a rally team that’s not necessarily concerned with any specific car. But what’s been most interesting this year is a joyous and seemingly tiny rally racing game unlike any other.
It would be easy to fire up Code Vein, run around some of the early game areas, and conclude that it’s a Dark Souls soul in an anime body (amply bosomed ladies and androgynous boys with spiky coifs and freakishly large eyes). You wouldn’t be wrong. But to appreciate Code Vein, you have to wrap your head around something that’s initially confusing. Obtuse, even. Certainly not like anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not going to be easy to understand, and before you fully comprehend it, you might have decided to just return to whatever other Dark Souls clone you prefer. Its inscrutability in Code Vein won’t stop you.
But it’s the main reason I’ll be playing this weird little thing long after I would have given up if it were just a Dark Souls clone.
To appreciate Desperados III, you have to understand that videogame time is not linear. Videogame time allows you to rewind and try again. Over and over, if necessary, until you get it right. In most games, I’ve seen this as a failure, on my part and on the part of the design. I already played this bit and it didn’t work out, so why would I want to replay it? Why would I want to replay it over and over?
We’ve already covered the fact that you’re never getting a full-blown single player story expansion for Grand Theft Auto V. The continued popularity and revenue stream in GTA Online is just too lucrative for Rockstar to shift resources away from. The Cayo Perico Heist that launched on December 15th is the closest you’re going to get to a dedicated single player expansion. Unlike most of the content in GTA Online, (including all the other story-heavy heists) the Cayo Perico job can be done by a solo player from start to finish.
Having completed the heist by myself, I can say that it’s an entirely enjoyable escapade that feels like a throwback to the best missions in the base game. There’s a daring infiltration of a private island fortress, a defunct Soviet submarine dive, lots of shooting, and escaping with your loot is an open affair that leaves you to navigate the island’s defenses however you see fit. The only downer might be the stealth bit which is really unforgiving, but every heist in the regular game had a part that wasn’t aces. It’s a neat mission overall. It just needs Trevor messing up your plans to nail the original game’s standard.
With ten days left in 2020, it’s time to count down the top games of the year. I’ll add a new one every day, so drop in as the list builds. Or you can come back on New Year’s Day for a complete top ten!
One of the greatest feats of engineering is holding back oceans. Also the oldest feat of engineering. Check out the first page of the Bible if you don’t believe me. It was the earliest bit of business God had to do before getting around to the stuff in the rest of the pages. This is also the premise of the Creeper World games. Divide the land from the waters. Hold back an ocean. Tame it, in fact.
It’s near Christmas, but you’d never know it in Stardew Valley’s newest additions. Eric Barone has updated the charming farming, relationship, and time management sim with what he says is the biggest content drop in the game’s history. The 1.5 update includes a new Ginger Island territory, a cornucopia of new people to meet and things to unlock, and local split-screen co-op multiplayer.
Outside of the multiplayer feature most of this stuff is for advanced players. For example, the new Beach Farm starting option is mostly sand so it’s going to be a rough beginning for anyone not already used to coaxing crops. Hey, maybe you can get your co-op partner to do all the hard work while you get the accolades in the village?
Did no one explain to Christopher Nolan that the premise for Tenet is absurd? I don’t mean that as a criticism. I’m just being descriptive. Plenty of solid sci-fi works from an absurd premise. And to Nolan’s credit, it’s an exciting premise. When it’s introduced, the undeniable pull of Tenet is “how the heck is he going to make a movie out of this?” It almost sustains the two-and-a-half-hour running time.
But as that running time stretches out and contorts, it becomes increasingly clear that Nolan is taking it all very very seriously. He will not be fooling around. He will not admit there’s a fundamental but fascinating silliness to what he’s doing. Even the carefully practical visuals can be silly. But it’s a silliness in which the guy telling the joke doesn’t know it’s a joke. He gives it no levity, he has no sense for the cadence of a joke, he leaves off the punchline. It dawns on you he doesn’t realize the joke is a joke. He’s telling it as if it were data.
Tenet belongs with someone who understands absurdity. Like the Coen brothers, or Charlie Kaufman, or the latest generation of Spanish language writers and directors. Nolan should have at least let someone explain to him the concept of the absurd, and maybe even humor. I can’t remember a single light-hearted moment in Tenet. It is ponderous with the weight of its seriousness.
Consider the lead actor. John David Washington is ponderous with the weight of his own seriousness. But he doesn’t have his father’s gravitas. Denzel Washington has built a career on the way he holds a gaze. John David Washington has his father’s gaze, but none of its depth. He just reads as blank. Nolan’s movies need the drive of a Heath Ledger or a Matthew McConaughey. They need someone to inject a little passionate chaos into the meticulous plotting. Tenet barely offers the soothing reassurance of Michael Caine. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo that feels like its there out of a sense of obligation (Nolan’s to Caine or Caine’s to Nolan?).
Even the spectacle in Tenet feels too tightly controlled and dispassionate. The airplane doesn’t break, none of the trucks flip ass-over-teakettle, the battle scene declines to bother with enemy soldiers. Honestly, I have no idea who we were fighting during the big battle scene. It’s as if someone started the Call of Duty match before anyone joined the other team. Sure, it’s all spectacular, cinematic, and characteristically bombastic. No one makes me long for an Imax screen like Nolan. I love how cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema captures Nolan’s precise art production, burnished colors, and clean lines. Can cinematography be brutalist? But beyond the usual Nolan spectacle, the only thing on offer in Tenet is a premise that folds in on its own lack of self-awareness.
The two pillars of cyberpunk in popular culture (i.e. you don’t have to read a book or watch anime) are Blade Runner and The Matrix. These hold up and inform everything else. For instance, cyberpunk in recent popular media like Westworld and Altered Carbon. Aside from being set in dystopian futures, what do these all have in common? What makes them cyberpunk? Setting aside the genre’s roots in William Gibson’s spot-on Chandler-esque sci-fi prose, what is cyberpunk all about? I would say identity in the face of advanced technology. What sets apart the human and the virtual. Blade Runner (both the original and the superlative sequel), The Matrix, Westworld, and Altered Carbon all explore the themes of who we are in a world where reality is so readily manipulated, where the digital and the incarnate intersect, where neural implants infiltrate human consciousness and human consciousness infiltrates cyberspace. “What is my consciousness?” cyberpunk asks. “Where is my mind?” it wonders. Ontology and even epistemology. In a secular world, they are the high-tech takes on what used to be theological issues.
We know you’re probably busy in Night City, choosing between penis options and cataloging all the glitches, but every game company that isn’t CD Projekt RED went to The Game Awards 2020 show to watch The Last of Us II win a bunch of categories . Okay, Hades and Among Us nabbed a few awards, but Naughty Dog will probably need to get a new trophy case in their lobby.
Along with the pomp and advertising for Doritos, a lot of upcoming games were previewed. There was a CG teaser to let everyone know that someone is still working on the next Mass Effect game. Perfect Dark is coming back to Xbox in some form or another. Vin Diesel’s digital likeness will star in Ark II. There are robots and monsters in The Callisto Protocol. Crimson Desert, first announced last year, is still in the works. Streaming hit Among Us is getting a new airship map. You will need to shut the Gates of Oblivion in The Elder Scrolls Online. Finally, it wouldn’t be a new year without another Warhammer game, so Warhammer 40K Darktide is coming from Fatshark.
Here are the latest review requests from my Patreon supporters, followed by my counter-recommendations. Think of it as a broad overview of what my Patreon supporters are doing, along with a look at what I’ve been doing as well. Stay tuned for the drawing of the actual winner tomorrow, to be followed by the review within 30 days.
As you’ve gotten used to be told so often in 2020, buckle up!
Rocksteady Games has released two in-game costume skins for Batman: Arkham Knight. Yes, the 2015 game has just been updated for free. The update adds Zur-En-Arrh Batman and Anime Batman for all players. The latter is self-explanatory, but the garish Zur-En-Arrh skin is a deep cut from a 1958 issue of DC Comics’ Batman #113 in which Bruce Wayne is transported to an alien planet and given actual superpowers because that’s the kind of thing that happened in the Silver Age of funny books.
Both Batman skins were previously available only to players that linked their WB Games forum accounts to the game, but the latest version of these costumes come with no such restrictions. They’re just in Batman’s Bat-wardrobe for the Bat-wearing. The free update also removes Denuvo from the Steam version of the game. The Batmobile remains unchanged for better or worse.
Scientists are studying gamers that play with inverted controls. Back in February, The Guardian published an article about the phenomenon and the debate was hot enough to attract the attention of Dr. Jennifer Corbett and Dr. Jaap Munneke of Brunel University’s Visual Perception and Attention Lab. In the follow-up article, the researchers say that their study will measure the speed and accuracy of gamers with inverted and normal controls to better understand how the two kinds of people work differently and how best to cater to the wrong and right folks with their controller needs.
“In a broader context, understanding these sorts of individual differences can help us better predict where to place important information and where to double-check for easily missed information in everything from VR gaming to safety-critical tasks like detecting weapons in baggage scans or tumours in X-rays.”
If you’re between the ages of 18 and 35, (sorry old-timers) and play videogames, the researchers could use you to help with their study. Nothing will help you dirty claw-grippers though.
