Meandering Thoughts On The Film Gerry and Non-Narrative Films and etc.

 I don’t think I’m out of line by saying Gus Van Sant has had a really interesting career. Starting out making somewhat controversial films that involved drug addiction, homosexuality, and prostitution, he settled into a pattern for the remainder of the 90s of increasingly mainstream fare—which is to say nothing of their quality, as I don’t think anyone would say Good Will Hunting is a bad movie!

Following the disastrous, masturbatory shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998, Van Sant quickly delivered the above average Finding Forrester, which is mainly known for inspiring the meme-tastic series of websites, YTMND, based on a cheesy line of dialogue shown in trailers that seemed to be everywhere on TV during its release window. The next thing we all knew, he returned in 2002 with Gerry, a film that stands in stark contrast to even his most experimental/unconventional work from the past.

Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to his career outside of movies would not have been as shocked. Starting in the 80s he worked on a few spoken word projects with William S. Burroughs (who had a minor role in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy in 1989). 1997 saw him release the novel Pink, which is widely considered to be his reflections on River Phoenix’s death. The same year saw the release of his self-titled debut album, which I haven’t heard and know nothing about, and a year later, 18 Songs About Golf, which I haven’t heard but possibly know something about, assuming its title is literal.

Soon Van Sant would returned to films exclusively for the remainder of his career, beginning with the “Death Trilogy” of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. Though there is in fact a linear story that progresses in each of these movies, the non-narrative label hangs on them like a proud badge. We are not being shown the true beginning or ending of these stories, and often some likely crucial moments are left out completely—Gerry shows us the two titular leads talking about everyday topics like Wheel Of Fortune rather than the reality of their own predicament. But in not talking about their perilous situation, they actually are if you dig below the surface and see the subsoil, err, subtext. Like the contestant they seem to be mocking for their poor choices/playing of the game show, the two leads have similarly done stupid, arrogant things and gotten themselves in life-threatening trouble. But to acknowledge out loud that this is happening would make it real, instead of ignorable, and therein is the rub I suppose.

I would argue of all 3 of these movies, Last Days has the least going on if you don’t know what it’s inspired by. In fact if memory serves I’m not sure this movie would be anything other than pretty dull if you went in somehow unaware of Kurt Cobain and his suicide (or I suppose his final days?). Meanwhile, though inspired by a true story, Gerry has more of a definite conclusion yet somehow is less narrative. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed Castaway and that’s the odd vibe this movie generates: let’s have loose, improvisational conversations and not “take seriously” the survival situation we’re in.

Gerry was probably one of the first artsy fartsy movies I ever saw, during the fateful era of my late college years to my mid 20s, when I basically watched through every movie my local library had. I remember thinking afterwards that I should have hated the movie, since I spent so much of it thinking to myself, “well, this has to go somewhere, right? There has to be some kind of payoff for any of this?”

You can bluntly label the “Death Trilogy” as mercy killing, murders, and suicide (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, respectively) but in some ways you could argue the 3 films mix these. After all, in Gerry, shortly after ‘mercy killing’ his companion, the sole survivor soon is rescued and we’re left with ambiguous feelings based on the look on his face. Did he intentionally kill his companion and use the “lost in the desert” as a cover story? Is everything we saw really as it happened? Likely, the movie is not trying to get us to ask these questions, but they occurred to me, and that’s the beauty of a non-narrative film: you can fill in the blanks yourself just as readily as you can sit down with those blanks and be comfortable with them. Elephant never seems to ask or answer why the school shooting is happening, and perhaps in its case, that’s not the point, just as Last Days doesn’t ask or answer why the Cobain-doppelganger commits suicide.

As a side note, in the real case that Gerry was loosely inspired by, the surviving person alleged that they had made a death-pact with the companion they “mercy killed” but that they were too weak to kill themselves. Now, there’s other details to the real case that make the mercy killing aspect more questionable, but I’m not sure that’s pertinent to Gerry. Anyway, in some sense suicide as an option hangs over Gerry just as it does Elephant, a film obviously based on the Columbine Massacre, which famously concluded with a murder-suicide on the part of the shooters. Of course Last Days is about the main character committing suicide, though like Elephant this is implied and not shown. But I digress.

Let’s pivot into another discussion while my mind is wandering. Actually, wandering is a good concept to pick up on here, since most of Gerry is two characters wandering. At times there’s shots that evoke the mysterious and decimated landscapes of The Zone in Stalker (the movie, not the game, just to be clear) and here we arrive at the point I want to pick apart: the distinction between art film and non-narrative film. As there’s a huge amount of overlap between the two, let’s focus on what—in my mind, at least—sets them apart. Art films don’t strictly have to be non-narrative, though they often are, or at least obfuscate their narrative; or even negate it by not offering even the hint of one. Meanwhile, non-narrative films are almost always art films, but not always.

Let’s use two examples to illustrate the difference.

Memento is very much in my mind an art film. It doesn’t offer easy answers to the viewer, and as you experience it for the first time, I strongly suspect most people arrive at the conclusion that it’s actually going backwards chronologically, or anyway, the main layer of the narrative is (people often forget there’s another narrative in black and white exclusively that is in chronological order). Now, you can probably find a fan edit of the film that presents the main narrative in ‘real’ chronological order, but all this does is clarify what the actual order of events is. For the first 20-30 minutes, for some I’m guessing Memento feels like a non-narrative film that soon reveals itself as simply an art film. Though also presented in non-chronological order, Pulp Fiction by contrast is neither an art film nor a non-narrative film. Puzzling out its story order is not essential to understanding and appreciating Pulp Fiction, whereas the revelation is essential to Memento. It’s almost as if at first viewing Memento was edited using the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It is so baked into the very structure and framework of the film as a successful art film so that if you take away this non-narrative structure, it becomes a very different work. Indeed I have to assume if viewed with no narrative puzzle to unlock it would become a mere revenge film with a pretty good twist toward the end. So it would be a M. Night Shyamalan movie, basically.

Meanwhile, Gerry itself can be used to qualify it as a non-narrative film instead of an art film, because it straddles the line of a non-narrative film. By which I mean, the plot isn’t really the point of the movie, though there is in some sense a linear story being told. It’s almost like a hybrid of a dialogue heavy hangout movie, ala Clerks or Dazed and Confused, and a pseudo-real time survival movie ala 127 Hours. Just because a film has a simple narrative does not mean it can’t be non-narrative, or have non-narrative elements. Take something like The Mirror: absolutely an art film, absolutely non-narrative. Yet it does present vignettes of life and memories, which in some sense are story elements of the narrator’s life. What, then, eliminates Gerry from art film status? Well, to me there’s nothing going on beneath the surface. There’s no subtext, there’s no dreamlike imagery or ideas to unpack, there’s no abstraction, there’s no visual symbolism or metaphor, and there’s not truly an open-endedness to the film in terms of the beginning or the ending. Mulholland Drive seems to have a definite beginning, middle, and ending, until you arrive at the actual final moments and it feels like a dream/nightmare that could just keep repeating, a recursive story or Mobius Strip.

Now, all of that said, this is no scientific field, so you’re free to view Gerry as anything if it makes sense to you.

The Sea and Cake- One Bedroom

 Album titles can serve many purposes, including no purpose at all. Some bands barely seem to try at all with titles while others seem to be playing a meta game with their fans to see if they get the reference or intent behind it. Among album title tropes, I tend to be simultaneously the most and least interested in self-titled ones. I say least because it’s…merely the band’s name, and nothing more. Not much to discuss or interpret there. Yet in saying they’re “merely” the band’s name, this is both true and false, because if it’s not their debut album, a band using an eponymous title is often communicating something to their audience. This is why I had just said it’s also the most interesting trope to me.

While we’ll always know it as The White Album, the Beatles seemingly intended it to be self-titled, so you’ll sometimes see it referred to as The Beatles. Now, of course the better known trope associated with The White Album is a band doing a double album to stretch out and do a wider variety of music than normal. At least, when I hear people say a record is a band’s “White Album” I take it to mean that. Yet there’s another trope to the phenomenon of a self-titled album arriving several years into a band’s history, and that’s coming at a point in the band’s career when they’re changing their sound, changing members significantly, or otherwise trying to say “this is who we are as a band. It’s not a concept album or a tone piece or about a certain topic. It’s us.”

I bring all this up to say, despite it neither being a double album nor self-titled, One Bedroom by The Sea and Cake has often felt like it should be self-titled. It’s always been amongst my least favorite records by them, though I’ve come to appreciate (slightly) more its odds-and-sods approach to song variety. I mean, ‘Sound & Vision’ is the one cover, ever, the band has released, and it not only ends the album but it’s a lighthearted and fun moment for a band who, despite being always labelled as mellow/chill/relaxing/airy, have ironically never really felt FUN on any other track they’ve made. The rest of the album adds to this mixed feeling, with tracks either being standouts that are career highs—‘Mr. F’ has a circular chorus that sticks in the memory, and the lengthy jammy intro of ‘Four Corners’ that opens the record is a classic Sea and Cake groove—or they’re missteps that water the album down with what should have been b-sides. In particular the middle of One Bedroom always sags for me, and despite this album being just under 40 minutes it has that same issue Stereolab’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night does where it’s not a bad album by any means, there’s just a couple too many songs and the pacing is fitful. Which gets me to thinking this might have been a better EP than an album.

Given that this record followed Oui after 3 years, and their next record wouldn’t come out for another 4, it’s strange that One Bedroom feels so undercooked and rushed. It’s one of those releases I’ve always wanted to take a crack at changing the track order to see if I can make it either flow better or be more enjoyable. As a result of all of this the record is one that almost punishes close listening; I’m sure you might know what I mean when I say, not in an ambient music kind of way, but certain albums are more agreeable as background noise to another activity instead of listening intently to it. I’ve gone for walks or sat on the porch drinking beer to Oui and it is brilliant and rewards such close listening. One Bedroom, as its name suggests, always sounded best to me when I was doing homework in my bedroom when I was in school or otherwise focused on something else (reading, videogames, petting cats, etc).

Still, let’s consider the actual work. What One Bedroom reminds me of is when you buy a variety pack of beer or chips or something, and you get to the end of the pack and your least favorite things are the only ones left. “Well, I don’t hate this chocolate stout, but I don’t love it…” you think to yourself. That’s One Bedroom: the least good thing in a group of superior things. If Runner is the album for driving through a city, and Oui is for Summer afternoons with the windows open and a nice breeze going, then One Bedroom is for doing homework, certainly literally as I said before, but perhaps figuratively as you separate the wheat from the chaff in its tracklisting.

On a final note, I don’t give out scores for my reviews anymore, though in this case because my feelings about One Bedroom are difficult to qualify, it may help to quantify them with a number. In the distant past I used a 5 star rating system for my reviews and it always seemed to be the sticking point with the few people who would comment on this blog, so eventually I dropped it entirely, mostly because it seemed unnecessary in the age of streaming and nearly-limitless access to music. By which I mean, you can go listen to this album in multiple places before you consider “spending money” on it, so giving Consumer Reports style ratings feels asinine. Yet One Bedroom sort of perfectly encapsulates what I think of as a 3 star out of 5 album. It is absolutely a 3 out of 5 record, though don’t take this as based on the fact I described the album much earlier in this review as “odds-and-sods.” Not every album that has a handful of weak tracks is automatically either a 3, or even couldn’t achieve a 5. No, One Bedroom would earn this rating because I think fans of the band would probably enjoy this, while at the same time, I would never tell a newcomer to start here.

 

Unedited thoughts on Physical Media Resurgence & Backlogs & Media Access & Self-Control

 I’ve been seeing more and more videos of people younger than me doing self imposed challenges where they don’t use social media for X amount of time, or limit their media consumption to just a few things for a month, or spending a year tackling their backlog of movies/videogames/etc. And it’s interesting seeing people live in the way a lot of people HAD to in the 90s and earlier. I was just thinking recently about how I have more, and more easy access, to videogames than when I was in say 8^th grade, where unless you borrowed a game from someone or rented it, you just had the games you had to play, and nothing else. Same with CDs: I remember when I finally owned more CDs than my 15 disc CD wallet could hold, and how it felt like I had SO MUCH music, whereas now I can open Spotify and have access to thousands upon thousands of albums and songs.

At the same time, I see comments on social media about how people miss videostores and that whole experience. Of course they forget the inconvenience and limited stock and the other downsides that were the reason videostores went away, but perhaps in some way the limited stock is a desirable trait.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking it’s not a black and white issue like it’s portrayed as. When I was in 8^th grade, I would’ve given anything to have access to media like I do now. And this isn’t even a matter of we’ve been spoiled for so long we don’t appreciate what we have; I, at least, always appreciate the convenience of the Internet and nearly-limitless access to information and entertainment. So this whole topic doesn’t to me boil down to “limited media access” vs. “unlimited media access” and which one is better. As with anything, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. Yet ultimately this can be boiled down to self-control. If you can’t stop yourself from endlessly scrolling TikTok all day and checking Reddit every 20 minutes, no amount of self-imposed challenges will permanently alter your behavior. As soon as the week or month or whatever length of time the challenge lasts, I would bet dollars to donuts that most of those people eventually slide back into their old habits. YOU must control your consumption. YOU must learn the balance of mindless content vs. meaningful content you need in your life. YOU must learn to put your phone down and sit down to concentrate on an album or book wholly. But that’s not as simple and sexy as a clickbait title that screams “I lived like someone in the 80s for a week!”

So let’s do a little thought experiment. If you go to your local used media store and buy a DVD boxset of, say, The Office, and this is in your selection of physical media you’re “allowed” to watch during your self-imposed challenge. So on the first day of it, you begin watching season one of The Office on DVD. Outside of the interface and having to physically change the discs as the seasons go on, there is no fundamental difference between the two ways of watching. You could just as easily have used your self-control to say, “I’m going to put my phone down and watch the first 6 episodes of The Office on streaming.”

Ultimately you can use whatever methods or systems proposed by YouTubers and others to enjoy as much media as possible and not waste your life on social media and mindless content churn websites. But you still have to have the self-control to stick with these methods or systems, and this ultimately is what makes them a novelty rather than a paradigm shift: you are ultimately responsible for yourself. It’s always within your power to decrease your social media time and increase time spent reading or watching new TV shows or whatever.

I do think the one valuable thing people are taking from this whole topic is getting back into physical media and as a result having real ownership of media again. While I still maintain there’s a balance to find between being all physical media and all streaming, I can’t deny that with the former the movie studio can’t come into your house and steal your bluray copy of The Princess Bride.

My own system for say music is that I curate a collection of vinyl records of my absolutely favorites and rare releases you can’t always find on streaming, but I also use streaming all the time because of the ease of use and the amount of music you get for that monthly fee. Similarly with movies, I only buy a physical copy of something if I especially love it OR if it’s an obscure movie that might go out of print—it’s been re-released recently, but for a long time you couldn’t watch Dogma on any streaming services and had to track down a DVD copy, for instance.

Now as for backlogs…I think this is also about self-control, but additionally about having honest conversations with yourself. We all know that sometimes we purchase things because we’d like to think of ourselves as the kind of person who casually decides to read One Hundred Years Of Solitude but realistically most of us will stop at the purchase/acquisition. This is why so many people have dozens of games in their Steam library they haven’t touched. You WANT to be the kind of person who plays in-depth strategy games or esoteric RPGs with dense mechanics, so you buy those games, yet you never end up playing them. You can use whatever systems or self-imposed challenges you want, ultimately you have to make yourself accountable and actually play them. I have this thing where, when I’m between videogames, I play an hour or two of a few different games I’ve bought but haven’t played. This gets me to rapidly reassign games in my own ranking: Games I’ll Never Want To Play, Games I Might Want To Play Someday, and Games I Want To Keep Playing After This Is Over.

 

Unedited Thoughts on Edward Hopper

Really the most obvious thing that jumps out to one is the sense of loneliness and solitude and contemplation in Hopper’s paintings. Even when there is no human in the paintings, there is a tremendous sense of the artist or the viewer adding something to the room or landscape by viewing it. Hopper’s works often depict lone humans in different situations, and when we’re able to see their facial expressions, they’re never one of outright happiness. We see person after person in environments made by humans—buildings, cities, offices, movie theaters, homesteads, etc.—and what stands out is how lonely and solitary they feel. Anyone who has ever felt utterly, devastatingly alone in a crowded room can relate.

Rather than pick up on how Hopper’s works influenced things like the liminal art/photography movement, I think it’s worth noting that to me his paintings aren’t about the absence of things or being in an in-between zone/state of being of some sort. Rather when there’s humans they seem resistant to their current situation yet resigned to it. They’re still lost in thought or rumination about their life but their look and auras are of one who has accepted, perhaps capitulated to the situation they’re in, whether it’s an unhappy marriage or a new suddenly unhappy job or a moment or realization you know you can’t do anything about. When there are no human figures, we see ourselves in the landscapes; we feel almost invited in to project our own feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Yet in this last point I find there to be a feeling of mutuality and invitation in Hopper’s works. Even if they make you feel lonely, they also make you aware that other people have felt just like you have, even if the details are technically different. I look at a work like Man Seated On Bed (1906) and Summer Interior (1909) and especially Office In A Small City (1953) and I can see flashes of my own life, and/or people I’ve known, in these snapshots in time. With the latter work we see a common technique of Hopper’s during this mid to late era, where we see a human figure but also a bit of a voyeuristic angle were we see the exterior of the building/setting the human figure is in. Perhaps another way to see it is almost like an omnipotent viewer peering into dollhouses at the tiny lives there.

The emptiness of the cityscapes with one human figure in focus really underscores how many people over the years have felt alienated and alone despite ironically living in large urban environments. Curious then that the last painting I’m riffing off of should specify that it’s portraying a SMALL city. Anyway, I imagine the person in this painting has just sat down for their first day of work, and—peering across the cityscape that at first perhaps is scenic and lovely but will soon become ordinary and repetitive—it dawns on them that this is going to be the next however many years of their life. You are just a cog in the machine of society; welcome home.

Interesting to me that some art critics back in the day tried to associated Hopper’s later works with abstract art/surrealism, I think this is just because of the vaguely dreamlike feeling his later human-less landscapes/cityscapes/roomscapes can have. Certainly you can see Rooms By The Sea (1951) and it can look a bit along the lines of a Renè Magritte b-side, but this is another feeling the viewer brings to the work. If you visually engage with this work you can explain away how the perspective makes it seem like the door opens directly onto water, when in actuality this room may be up on a hill overlooking a body of water, with the POV disguising the steps or slop just outside the door. One could interpret this painting quite simply and just as validly as: the open door to nature brings in water and light, crucial elements to (most) life. While the room in the back has sunlight too, it’s less and fainter than the open door to nature.

Much has been commented on, even by the artist himself, with her focus on light and shadows. I feel this is mirrored in the focus on loneliness/solitude and external forces. By which I mean, even in the landscapes with no human figure, the viewer sort of substitutes in and is made to reflect on their own feelings. The landscape can match your mood or you an allow it to suggest one to you. When there are human figures, even more than one, you still get the sense they are inside themselves and looking outward, rather than imagining how they fit “into” the scene they’re in. For instance, the earlier cited work Summer Interior depicts a woman who is in her environment yet given the arrangement and her state of dress and look, she is also a million miles away from her environment focused on something else. Did she just get divorced? Is she depressed and thinking of the past? Or it is even something good that has her so flustered?

 

Return of The Videogame Solipsist

 An Unedited Rant Medley About The Games I've Been Playing

BattleTech

Randomness absolutely ruins this game for me. I guess Front Mission 3 will continue to be my platonic ideal of a game that actually makes you feel empowered fighting using giant robots instead of like they’re worse, more fragile and finicky versions of tanks.

I wanted to love this game so badly. I gave it far more chances and time than I ordinarily would have. But even on the lowest difficulty I constantly found myself getting bad luck and shitstomped by enemies. No matter how carefully I tried to edge forward on maps, I still kept getting surprised and overwhelmed. The enemy always outnumbers you, and depending on RNG this can either mean 8 to 4 or 20 to 4.

It feels like actually running your own mercenary company in the far future,  including all the unfun business meetings and personnel issues and operating budgets nobody should want to have to do.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: your IP is not popular enough for people to want to play what sounds like a soft reboot minus the The that usually accompanies these.

 

BallxPit

This is the sort of game where the first dozen or so hours are constant fun and progress being made, but you start to realize most of the characters you’re unlocking aren’t fun to play as because of their downsides, and you have to level them up from scratch instead of them being the same level as your current characters. Depending on the level, the character(s) you choose, and the luck you get with power-ups, your runs will either be a cakewalk or a miserable slog that ends in failure, which is not player agency and skill but rather gambling.

The town building aspect? Well, it’s not nearly as deep and fun as it wants you to think it is. Shooting workers to bounce around and collect resources is fine, but having to finish building structures by also bouncing them off? That’s not a fun and meaningful mechanic, it just feels like dull busywork.

There’s still a lot for me to unlock in this game yet after almost 36 hours I’m not sure I care anymore. This game is a classic example of one that a decade ago would’ve been a mobile game that purposefully slows your progress to get you to spend money; instead it’s just a game that starts to feel like a checklist or homework because it takes so much time to make any real progress.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: why invoke ballpits if your game gets boring far quicker than ballpits do?

 

Vampire Survivors

Just go play this game if you haven’t already. There’s a reason it’s so beloved and so addictive. Every couple play sessions I kept unlocking new aspects and mechanics, and the drip feed of unlocks and new weapons/items is pitch perfect.

I’ve also been playing quite a bit of co-op with my wife, and that’s a lot of fun, too. You trade off on level up’s, but you occasionally can choose to give both of you a random weapon upgrade.

This game could’ve been used for evil. Designed by a former casino slot machine designer, this could’ve been an addictive and predatory mobile game. Instead it’s all the fun of the first few hours with a mobile game before you hit the wall, but it’s that feeling throughout your time playing it.

I kept telling myself, as I tried the other games I’m talking about in this post, that I was finally done with Vampire Survivors, I was getting bored of the gameplay loop and I was seeing the game when I closed my eyes, yet I kept coming back to it. It’s like cigarettes that don’t kill you.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: ummm is this a reference to how you never fight vampires, so they’re the survivors, or am I surviving vampires by never fighting them?

 

XCom 2

I’m so glad I only paid $5 for this on a Steam sale, because that’s exactly how much fun I got out of it.

I loved the first modern XCom from like 2011(?). There was a younger version of me that could put up with, even enjoy, the constant stressful decision making and feeling like the underdog constantly. The RNG didn’t even bug me that much.

But playing the sequel, I couldn’t shake the feeling, “oh, I’ve done this before, it just looks shinier now.”

I lost my will to continue during one of the terror missions where you have to rescue civilians. I do get that these missions are supposed to be stressful and a big difficulty spike—but even playing on the easiest difficulty, I could not get through them for the life of me. I either was too reckless in trying to protect the civilians and got my soldiers killed, or I didn’t rush enough and lost too many civilians for the “rewards” after the mission to be worth it.

I say this as someone who loves Dark Souls: intentionally making a game difficult is not always fun. I would love to play a XCom game where I feel like I can play well and in a way where I don’t have to constantly feel like there’s no objectively best option to choose, that in getting one cool weapon or soldier I am losing the opportunity for something equally cool at the same time.

Also, fuck RNG. You need to sculpt RNG in games like this so if my soldier is shooting at an alien monstrosity construct nega beast from five fucking feet away they can’t miss. A 90% hit rating should actually feel like it will hit 9 times out of 10, instead of 3 times out of 10.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: XCom? More like hex dumb. Yeah that’s the best I could do.

 

Divinity Original Sin 2

The opening of a game, ideally, should grab you and within an hour show you something fun or cool or interesting that hooks you. This game feels like actually playing a tabletop RPG with friends, and while that may interest a lot of you out there, I would rather just do that in real life instead of with a clunky, slow moving isometric RPG with way too many status effects and a glacial, unexciting combat system. I don’t even dislike turn based RPGs, it’s not that, it’s something about this game and the way it’s presented.

I ended up initiating a fight because some lizard cocksucker insulted me, and then all hell broke loose. I somehow got killed but at the same time triggered the next story event and ended up getting trapped inside the ship because I couldn’t figure out who had the key to open the door to let me outside.

Here’s hoping Baldur’s Gate 3 is better. Baldur’s Gate 1 had a more compelling opening stretch….

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: the only thing original about this game is how fast I stopped playing it.

 

Into The Breach

Oh, look, another turn based strategy game where you control giant robots but you feel disempowered and are always a step behind the enemies in terms of numbers and lethality.

I know a lot of people love this game but it’s not for me. If it was being honest, it would describe itself as a puzzle game more than a turn based strategy game. I always felt like if I was making the exact perfect moves and actions each turn, I was being punished. At that point I’ll just watch someone else play it.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: I’m putting Into The Breach, Out Of My Reach.

 

Skyrim

I am proud to say I’ve only bought this game twice: back on release for the PS3, and on PC this past Fall.

Much like the first time, I put a lot of playtime into it but got nowhere near finishing it other than a couple major sidequests and a couple dozen shorter ones. I killed giants and dragons, I bought a house, and I saved my game and killed everyone in towns  a few times.

What else can you say about this game? It both does and doesn’t hold up, because that’s every important/popular Bethesda release.

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: Yes I know technically it should have The Elder Scrolls but the series name and the item itself both suck and are the least interesting parts.

 

Shadowrun Returns

I apparently bought this game and played about two hours of it. I remember nothing about this experience. I was probably crossfaded, which leads me to believe it’s not a very fun or interesting game because normally I am more forgiving in that state. I think I did one or two fights and they were clunky and boring looking.

In the era of dynamic looking turn based RPGs like Persona 5 and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, there is no excuse for a game to look this boring during fights. It’s literally as visually engaging as the very first Fallout, a game that gets a pass because it’s otherwise a masterpiece, and it came out in 1997. Actually Final Fantasy VII came out then, didn’t it, and that had cool looking attacks and a dynamic camera…

Bonus bitchy response to the game’s title: no thanks, you can go back to being gone.

Lunacid (review)

 

(2024, PC)

Lunacid is the most 8 out of 10 game that is actually a 10 out of 10. It achieves everything it sets out to do, and while not flawless, it’s still a perfect experience if it really clicks with you.

Obviously, it really clicked with me. I love the late 90s high fidelity visuals; I love the soundtrack, which fits the game and its varied areas to a T; I love the occasional silly or fourth wall breaking moments like the various video filters you can choose from or setting the language to be Nyan (which makes all the text in the game and menus Nyan-cat inspired gibberish); I even love the amount of miss-able content and secrets, because I never am trying to 100% a game on first playthrough.

Lunacid is one of those games you want to go in blind, other than maybe watching a trailer or a couple spoiler-free gameplay videos to see if it’s your vibe.

Something familiar about that name...

I will say, the difficulty of the game contributes to its 8 out of 10 rating. By this I do mean the overall difficulty (some enemies are piss easy, some are big difficulty spikes) but also difficult in the sense of knowing what to do next/where to go next. Much like the first Dark Souls, while I also thoroughly enjoyed my initial blind playthrough of, I did have to look up a couple things that weren’t nearly as obvious as the game seemed to think they were. In addition, it’s possible to stumble on secrets or hidden items but have no clue what they do without looking them up online. In one instance I couldn’t figure out how to get any further into newer areas without looking up where to access the next area or two. Whether all of this is a good or bad thing will depend on you and how much you like being “lost.”

I like that this game encourages lateral thinking, looking at your inventory and set of spells and trying to come up with solutions. Though for me the boss fights mainly consisted of spamming my strongest attacks and chugging health potions, I honestly thought this was a fun break from the normal combat of the game, which is more measured and encourages patience.

The spectral effect on certain enemies is super cool

I’ve seen many people say the melee combat is clunky and underpowered, but to me it worked great 99% of the time. Certainly I had the Skyrim issue of whiffing attacks I thought had enough reach to hit the enemy, though I chalk this up to my own ignorance; for 2/3 of my playthrough I didn’t notice different weapons even had different range stats. I always found it fun to switch weapons and spells up, try new things, rather than just minmax by paying attention to elemental weaknesses or weapon stats. That said, there certainly are enemies and areas that feel like a big difficulty spike until you change your weapon/spell and suddenly because you’re hitting their elemental weakness they die like chumps.

The main thing this game nails is atmosphere, a sense of being in an otherworldly place and not fully understanding what is happening. As such, while I inadvertently ended up in the final boss fight before I really wanted to, I decided to roll with it, and this sudden climax and slightly abstract ending sequence have all combined to intrigue me into another playthrough. To add to this, I want to return to this world someday soon. When arriving to each new area, when encountering each new enemy, I was so spellbound, at times even scared of what I was experiencing, that I wanted to just linger and observe. Moreover, Lunacid succeeded multiple times in jumpscaring me (those god damn floating horse heads!) as well as establishing a feeling of dread I only a couple times experienced in Dark Souls.

As someone who never played the Kings Field games, I can safely say this game stands on its own and doesn’t feel like a slavish imitator or mere ancestor of that series. It feels like a modern game, though you can change the settings to customize the experience to be more like that series.

Best Of The Worst, eat your heart out...

My second and final biggest gripe about the game is the lack of a clear indication of what levelling up certain stats does. It took me quite a while to realize why I couldn’t make certain jumps in the game, for instance. It was NOT because I wasn’t supposed to be able to make those jumps, but because I needed to pour points into my Speed and Dexterity to run faster and jump higher/further, respectively. As I was trying for a magic focused build since I started as a Witch, I was putting my upgrades towards that.

In some game design sense, though, my two big gripes seem intertwined with the parts I loved. This is kind of what I mean about it being a 8 out of 10 yet 10 out of 10 game. It’s part of this style of game, this vibe of game even, that you end up figuring it out with a community online. Lunacid is never so difficult that you could theoretically level yourself into a dead end, and the cryptic nature of a few progression points didn’t deter my enjoyment. 

You may have to cover the screen during certain sections.

Indeed this indirect logic seems fitting for the abstract nature of the game’s world and backstory, and it was fun trying to figure out what certain things did, like the spell that brings objects to life or the Headless Horseman boss I stumbled into, which after completing the game I looked up and it turned out to be a seasonal event I lucked into unknowingly, which retrospectively made that a special memory I now cherish from playing it.

Ultimately Lunacid is a 10/10 experience in a 8/10 game. Perhaps a better way of saying that is it’s a subjective 10 and objective 8.

To quote Homer Simpsons, "Brilliant. I have absolutely no idea what's going on."

Phish 2/21/03

 

As we enter the middle of the Winter Tour ’03, we’re arriving into truly unknown territory for me. I’ve never heard any of the shows from this one through 2/25, and that’s exciting! Coming off the last show the band and audience must’ve been pretty exhausted, and the 6ish hour drive to get to Cincinnati from Rosemont may not have helped. Whether these factors will come into play during this show, we’ll see!

 

Set One

Well, you can certainly tell that the band is carrying on the high energy “we’re coming for ya!” energy of the last show with the opening salvo of this one! We get a somewhat predictable placement of Wilson as show opener, but I don’t say that as a bad thing. Mike seems to really be on a mission to get his bass in the foreground this show, turning up his volume and using a bit of overdrive/distortion to give him a stronger tone especially during the first part of set one. After a quick > we immediately head into Frankenstein. For whatever reason my Phish listening habits the past year or so has seen me avoid Phish’s cover of this song, so when this started I was like “oh yeah, that’s right, they do play this, huh?” During Wilson and this song, the band is going absolutely nuts with loops and noise during the break portions of the songs.

There’s about a minute or so pause until Mike starts playing the Down With Disease intro, though it’s not the usual kind he does, more like he’s scraping his pick up and down the fretboard before turning on the usual windy effect. At 1:10 when Trey sings the first set of lyrics, I swear he half-burps during it. This DwD jam starts off in the usual upbeat type I mold, with Trey soloing a bit and then stepping back to let the others play, and then soloing again some more himself. Around 7:00 we start to crest the hill. Trey drops out entirely to play with some loops that never seem to arrive as Mike and Fishman keep the groove going. Page on keyboards now; Trey patiently rhythmically comping in the background. Around 8:30 the band seem to be in a holding pattern, as though no one can think of a way forward. At 10:25 Page gets on the clav as Trey continues to hold back and noodle around in the background. This is one of those rare jams where my attention wanders to Fishman more often than not because not much else is happening. 13:00, Trey keeps threatening to do full 2.0 shoegazer guitar but it mostly results in a loop and some noodley pitch shifter playing. Eventually it seems like Trey realizes this jam isn’t going much of anywhere and tries to bring things back into high energy rocking focus by coming back to life and soloing. Page and Trey both do their best to make this ending high energy and fun but it’s hard for me not to feel like this DwD was a non-starter that reminds me of some of the lesser ’99 jams that mostly stay in the same style for minutes at a time. Anyway, they bring the song to a close so it’s one of those weird/rare DwD’s that is not left unfinished and doesn’t either segue into or out of another song. Very strange.

Lifeboy follows, a quite strong version indeed, with a long guitar solo from Trey—there’s a reason this is a nine minute version! There’s a sort of half-assed > segue into Boogie On Reggae Woman that Mike starts up seemingly out of nowhere. As you might expect, Mike dominates this version from the jump, to the point they even do a stop/start Mike bass solo towards the end. This may not be a lengthy jammed out version but don’t sleep on it, it’s one of those times Mike is basically leading the band and he kills it. As the song peters out you wonder if we’re heading for a segue, but no. There’s a full second or two pause before Trey starts up Run Like An Antelope. I will say that I think this is the best Antelope of 2.0 so far, though it’s somewhat because of Mike and Page pushing Trey to go to a higher peak that he seems to want to. Antelope is sadly one of those songs I agree was universally stronger during 1.0, there’s just an intense precision that Trey needs for the peak that he can’t seem to nail most of the time post-2000. Keyword is Spliff. After this, you would assume the set was over. Instead, we get a well done, albeit oddly placed, I Didn’t Know. I don’t mind vacuum solo songs or Fishman antics, I simply wish this wasn’t a set closer. Just leaves a weird energy in the air. Reverse the order of this and Antelope, this set flows much better.

 

 

Set Two/Encore

Woo, Mike’s Song to start a second set is usually a good sign! Jam starts out in the typical way, with Mike pounding out the bassline while Trey and Page trade riffs. I’ve been on record as saying that, while I appreciate Mike’s Groove and would dig seeing it live, it always feels underwhelming as a segment for jamming. When was the last big type II Mike’s Song or Weekapaug Groove? I always see it on setlists and I’m like “oooh nice” but then I get through it and it’s almost immediately forgotten. This Mike’s Song at least has some excellent playing from Trey around the 7:30 mark. By 10:00, Trey’s tone has gotten swampier and more distorted though not quite to full shoegazer mode. Trey eventually retreats but the typical Mike’s Song jam continues without him. He starts piling on loops towards the end, because if you can’t think of anything interesting to play, just fall back on unearned walls of sound! See, when people say they don’t like 2.0 Oxy jams, this Mike’s Song is the kind of thing they mean. It’s just the band throwing out a bunch of random sounds and textures without much thought or care or interaction with the other members. Fishman seems to want to give up the ghost and stops playing for awhile while Trey’s guitar has a feedback sounding loop going.

Setlists give a -> full segue into Free but this is bullshit. Only Trey’s loop was going and it ends as soon as he starts playing the Free intro, so this is a solid > style segue only. Anyway! The Last Free, from 2/15/03, really surprised me with how commanding Mike was during the jam. Around 4:40 Page starts playing some weird techno sound on a synth or something I’ve not heard before. Mike is still leading the jam like last time, though Page is making a case for letting him do it! Around 5:30 Trey and Page play rhythmic comping and the jam gets even funkier still. Around this point in the jam I was starting to get the feeling we might be taking this Free out for a rare type II spin, but alas, no. That said, it’s almost a tossup for me between this and the 2/15 version. This song is probably never going to become a jam monster but it’s often a pocket of some hot playing with Trey stepping back more often than not. I again deny a segue here, to these ears I don’t even hear a > between this and Waste. It’s interesting if you go and look on Phish.net the times this song was played, starting off very common during 1996/1997 and as the years go on, making less and less frequent appearances. This Waste is really well done, leading me to fear this is going to continue to be one of those weird shows where the ballads are played with more energy and imagination than the jam songs! Page delivers an ace, classy as fuck piano solo in this version; Trey follows with his own solo, albeit the triumphant bliss jam kind of solo.

After the song ends we enter into a minute and a half or so of between-song ambience into 2001 including Trey quoting Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring with Page eventually following along. This intro as a result is drawn out but not in the expected space funk way we’ve become accustomed to. Around 1:20 on the official LivePhish version you can hear Trey talking to someone on stage, with some possible yelling from an audience member or one of the band yelling just outside of the mic’s full ability to pick it up. This 2001 intro is noodley and unfocused, as though the band are giving each other ample time to try out whatever they want to do. Trey treats us to some lightly distorted, chunky comping before Page drops the organ melody and Trey instantly starts the main riff. Around 5:30 Trey is playing some dissonant feedback sound off and on but quickly stops. Mike and Page take this one over; around 6:08 even more stage banter that the mics are barely picking up, sounds like maybe Fishman and Trey? I don’t really know how better to explain it, this 2001 is simply all over the place in a frustrating way. If you had this on in the background you’d still enjoy it, sure, but as a jam to listen intently to, it’s too many ideas that are introduced and dropped quickly. 8:35ish we get a half-hearted attempt at a Stash quote from Trey, who soon gives up and brings this odd duck of a 2001 back around for another run through of the main riff.

Ironically I might give them a -> for this segue into Harry Hood, because I didn’t see it coming and it sounded somewhat fluid to me. Trey is very noodley in this Hood intro, but will this version be as bizarre and type II leaning as the 2/15 one? Well, Trey sure loves playing with his loops and this intro is bordering on a normal 2001 for how they take their time jamming around before the proper main riff/chorus comes in. Those who wish Hood had some variance would do well to seek out Winter Tour ’03 Hoods, apparently! We’re in full on Weird Hood territory again, folks. Well, at least in this intro part. Once the normal Hood kicks back in, we get a well done but standard bliss jam Hood buildup ending. Until about 13:00, that is, when the bottom drops out and we start to build back up again. Not sure if Trey was trying to see if Mike and Page would go in a different direction or what. Anyway, Hood ends and we’re into a quiet, uncommitted ambient jam that peters out completely. You can faintly hear Trey(?) call out for All Of These Dreams, and that’s what we get. While I love this song, this is already the third I’ve heard in 2.0 and so could’ve done with a different ballad. Trey is really straining to sing this time out, it sounds, well, bad. Again, the solos from Page and Trey are excellent and well considered, but that’s not the kind of playing I fell in love with Phish over, y’know?

Sensing, perhaps, that this second set wasn’t turning out any big jams or otherwise interesting moments, they kick into Possum as a late second set pick-me-up. What can you say about Possum other than it’s a consistent high energy showcase for all of the band’s chops? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a truly great Possum because I’ve never heard one that struck me as half-baked or average! It’ll always remind me of my first show, and how even though it was the final song of the encore, people dug deep and were dancing their asses off all over the place. Much like the first set, you’d assume Possum was the set closer, but instead we get a > into Cavern. Another song that always delivers but rarely is anything special. Trey’s vocals sound strained and tired, and he drags behind the beat a couple times. Almost feels like Page steps in to help him through, too. Big fuckoff ending with tons of loops and sounds and noises; where was this kind of stuff during the jams, boys? We get a Wading In The Velvet Sea encore, which isn’t the worst choice for an encore but as the ONLY encore song is really leaves the show off on an energy level that is the opposite of how it started. As most of this show was high energy but lacking deep jams, I’d have preferred they saved Cavern for coming after Wading.

 

 

Overall

Looking back over my notes for this show, and what I wrote above, I almost feel like I’m simultaneously being too easy and too hard on this show. Set one has good playing throughout but the only real jam, outside of a mostly good but standard Antelope, was Down With Disease, which I thought was listless and never found a direction to go in that produced anything memorable. Set two would go on to be a real letdown in my book. Other than a directionless, standard Mike’s Song jam and a reappearance of Weird Hood, where’s the improvisation? You might look at this show’s setlist and think I must be crazy, but I think regardless of the high energy playing in the first set, consistently great soloing during the ballads, and another excellent Free in the second set, there’s literally nothing about this show that excites me to listen to it again. It’s the sort of show I’m sure people had a great time with in-person, but if they bothered to listen back to it at home with more objective ears, I don’t think anyone could credibly argue any song from this show is even a top 30 version.

2/21/03 is the first time that I haven’t added one song to my 2.0 highlights playlist, and while that doesn’t mean it’s a 1 out of 5 automatically as a result, it’s without a doubt the weakest show I’ve gotten to thus far. I can’t in good faith proceed in this retrospective review series if I don’t give this one a 2 out of 5.

 

[Highlights]

Set One: High energy playing throughout

Set Two/Encore: Free, Weird Hood reappears