Friday 17th May 2019
My partner and I managed to leave work at a sensible time, which meant
that we were able to have dinner out, and then go and see Pokémon:
Detective Pikachu at the cinema. Last week we’d struggled to get to it,
on account of most cinemas only screening the film until early evening;
clearly, though, the powers that be had learned that nostalgic millennials had
a major appetite for the movie, whether they had kids to bring along or not, and
most places were now showing it up until nearly midnight. Our first attempt was
still a false start - the Showcase we favour had only two 2D screenings,
neither at a particularly convenient time for us - so we broke new ground and
visited the ODEON in our town, which happily didn’t let us down.
I had high hopes for
the movie; it was hard not so, since (at the time of writing) it’s the only
video game movie in history to my knowledge to have a Fresh score on
Rotten Tomatoes. I’ll admit, therefore, to being slightly disappointed by the
plot, which was so formulaic that I’d actually guessed most of the significant
twists before we even entered the cinema. Obviously its primary aim is to be
comprehensible to quite little kids, and in fairness I had the same complaint
about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won an Oscar, for
goodness sake; I mainly blame the fact that something in my mind has flipped a
switch in the past couple of years, and now I’m not quite as capable of
enjoying kid-oriented movies as much as I used to be, even in my early-to-mid
twenties.
But, despite that, it’s
still a hugely enjoyable movie if you don’t try to engage your brain too hard:
the quality of the acting is impressive, and hugely helps to sell the script;
and, crucially, the 3D “realistic” animation on the Pokémon characters is
spot-on. The most important thing is that the Pikachu of the title is exactly
as adorable as he ought to be, which is 1,000% proof weapons-grade cuteness, in
case you were wondering. Just seeing him chugging dozens of tiny espressos was
in itself worth the price of admission.
Saturday 18th May 2019
This was a rare weekend in my household: no plans to take us away from
the house; no reason to even go outside if we didn’t want to. (I usually want
to, but in the end the weather took a turn for the dull anyway.) I celebrated
this joyous occasion by getting a migraine that endured on-and-off for six
days, and put something of a dampener on my plans to, quote, “do nothing but
play video games and tidy the house all weekend”.
Luckily my partner
plays games too, and even though I felt pretty crappy I wasn’t too out of it to
enjoy hot-seating the end of Spider-Man on the PS4. I
bought it for him for Christmas, and as it turned out he was actually able to
finish story mode and get the platinum trophy on the Saturday, so
arguably that was time better spent than I would have been able to use anyway.
Then, despite my fangirl urgings to buy The City That Never Sleeps DLC
season pass right away, it was agreed to make a start on Heaven’s Vault,
which was his most-anticipated game of 2019 and in fairness is something else
I’ve been bugging him to play since it came out last month. Helping translate a
fictional dead alien language while suffering from a migraine may not be
everyone’s idea of a relaxing Saturday evening, but I don’t consider myself a
linguistics geek for nothing.
Sunday 19th May 2019
My migraine was actually worse on Sunday, but I was grumpily determined
to salvage something from the weekend, and since my partner had been in full
control of the gaming line-up the day before, it seemed only fair that I take
over that day. I started off easy with the eleventh level of LEGO Marvel
Superheroes 2, which is currently what I default to if I want to play
something I’m “serious” about but that isn’t too challenging. Recently watching
Avengers: Endgame, finishing Season 2 of Runaways, and of course
hot-seating Spider-Man PS4 has got me feeling all the Marvel love at the
moment, and even though I find the plots of the LEGO Marvel Superheroes
games incomprehensible, I enjoy taking the opportunity to spend a while living
vicariously through my favourite characters.
Next up I decided I
wanted to play We Happy Few, which is one of my favourite games from my
in-progress pile, only to realise that the Xbox One as ever needed a
significant update as soon as it was switched on. While I was waiting for that
to download I dug out my copy of LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 on
the Wii; just because I went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
last weekend, and it got me thinking about my old fandom for the first time in
a while. While I knew I hadn’t played it in an age, the last saved game was
from March 2016, which is vaguely ridiculous. On the plus side, after a few
minutes of fumbling around trying to remember the controls, it turned out that
the intervening three years spent widening my video game knowledge had actually
turned me into a slightly better player - which is obviously what you want, but
not what you dare to hope for at my age. Actually, the weirdest part was going
back to the days before LEGO games were fully voiced, and trying to
decode the characters’ mimes was maybe the most challenging thing about picking
it up again. That, and the fact that the graphics in the franchise really have
moved on a good deal in the past nine years, even though the development has
been so gradual that your brain is convinced it looks the same as it always has
until you go back to take a look. It’s fair to say I never got hugely invested
in LEGO Harry Potter, if the fact that I’m still only mid-way through
Year 2 nearly a decade after the game’s release is anything to go by. I would
like to finish it, though, so maybe after I finally clear the LEGO Marvel
trilogy I’ll revisit it more seriously.
After a short break, We
Happy Few was ready to go at last. I suffered another small shock when
I saw that my last saved game was from December 28th last year - only three
days after I received the Deluxe Edition as a Christmas gift - which was
strange to me, as it’s a game I’ve been really enjoying since I started it in
demo mode last August, and has been on my mind a lot ever since. I was vaguely aware that I’d consciously put it aside for a while,
in order to finish a few of the shorter games I’d been midway through for an
unacceptably long time, but nearly five months seemed unreal. Fortunately
- perhaps because it took me a while to master the controls in the first place,
or maybe just because it’s pleasingly intuitive, or a bit of both - I picked
things up again very quickly. I’m still advancing the plot at a snail’s pace -
Arthur has just received his first mission that might involve combat, so I
spent my play-time on Sunday ensuring that he was as buffed and well-armed as
it’s possible to be in the meagre surroundings of the Garden District - but the
freedom to explore at your own pace is one of the joys of a game like We
Happy Few. I also dedicated a fair bit of time to digging around for
environmental storytelling, and was rewarded by the contents of an abandoned
house which was one of the creepiest areas in the game so far, despite containing
no actual threats. I’m starting to uncover more details of the mysterious
disappearance of all the children from Wellington Wells, and it is DARK. AS.
FUCK. I love it.
Monday 20th May 2019
In preparation for the 2020 release of two new Vampire: The
Masquerade and one new Werwolf: The Apocalypse video games, I’ve
committed myself to spending as much of 2019 as possible in the World of
Darkness franchise. Several years back I spent a lot of time acquiring
cheap second-hand copies of the first eighteen or so books in the Vampire:
The Masquerade - Clan Novel series, and with the upcoming sequel
(and spin-offs) to my favourite video game of all time only ten months away
from release, I’ve finally begun the much-anticipated but daunting task of
actually reading them. Beginning with Clan Novel: Toreador, these books
are already looking like refreshingly easy reads in the urban or dark fantasy
genre: far from high literature, but written by many of the creators who worked
on the World of Darkness back during its inception as a tabletop gaming
system, and providing a lot of additional lore and world-building.
Speaking of which,
another Vampire: The Masquerade related activity that I finally got
around to today after months of meaning to: watching the LA by Night
web-series on Geek & Sundry. It’s a webcast of a regular tabletop
session using the 5th edition of V:TM, starring (amongst others) Erika
Ishii, a voice actor from Dream Daddy and Monster Prom whose work
I’ve obviously come to love over the last year or so. The GM and players
clearly know their lore, as characters from the Clan Novel series and
the first Bloodlines game play important roles in the story; and since
it has a contemporary setting, and is at this point popular enough to be
considered at least semi-canonical, it should further serve to bridge the
fifteen-year gap between the stories of Bloodlines and Bloodlines 2.
There was no chance to
actually play any games after work on Monday, as the Game of Thrones
finale dominated our TV for the evening. (So beware a few spoilers below!)
Despite the “game” of the title, I’m feeling quite fortunate that I don’t have
to cover it in any detail here, even though I have long and quite detailed
opinions about the ending (averaging out to a kind of “meh” reaction overall).
One video game related note, though: having played Telltale’s Game of
Thrones episodic adventure game a few years back, I’m sad that - with the
end of the TV show that created the appetite for the game, and the closure of
the studio that made it - I’ll never find out what happened to the surviving
members of House Forrester and their allies in the second season that never
was. Admittedly, Telltale’s Game of Thrones: Season Two was never really
likely to happen, given just how many different endings could leave the main
and minor characters alive or dead depending on the player’s choice. Even
Telltale in its heyday probably lacked the resources to make such a huge
branching story a reality, or at least a profitable one. Still, I can’t keep
from wondering what happened to (in my case) Asher, Mira, Gared, and the others
as their stories played out in parallel to the show from seasons five to eight.
Will I eventually crack and write it all out as fanfiction? Maybe! Though I’m
guessing canonically they all just… sort of died… somewhere in there: Gared (and
the Snow twins?) when the White Walkers attacked the Wildlings who remained North of
the Wall; Asher in one of the many battles Daenerys and Jon led their troops
into; Talia in the attack on the crypts of Winterfell, where she presumably
followed Asher; Mira… probably died in childbirth, or else just straight-up
murdered by her husband. I’d like to think Ryon and Beskha managed to hide
themselves away somewhere safe though: Ryon, as the last of his siblings,
eventually returning to become the young Lord of Ironrath in the
now-independent North, assuming he can keep the Ironwood out of his
brother-in-law Rickard Morgryn’s hands (Queen Sansa will surely back him up);
and Beskha should totally go to the Iron Islands and see if she and Yara have
any chemistry, since they’re apparently the only two lesbians in the world.
Oops, I think I just wrote my fanfic after all...
Tuesday 21st May 2019
Still suffering from the migraine, and also mindful to give my partner
his turn on the controller, Tuesday saw me hot-seating BioShock
for maybe the fifth or sixth time. I’ve never technically played a BioShock
game myself, but I must have hot-seated for my partner on at least a dozen
play-throughs of the franchise in total, with the first one being his all-time
favourite video game and therefore naturally the main focus. This particular
re-play has been prompted by him receiving the HD remastered collection of the
whole trilogy for the PS4 for his birthday earlier this year. Rapture has
certainly benefited from the improved graphics, with the increased draw
distance and crisper images helping the underwater views in particular to look
extra spectacular. I do, however, have a few minor issues with implementation:
some of the one-off environmental puzzles have been removed or done for you;
Sander Cohen’s brief overlapping conversation with Atlas has cut all of the
latter’s lines, which is a huge shame in my opinion, as I’ve always loved that
staticky fade-out as Cohen takes control of your radio for the first time; plus
a few of the more genuine jump-scares in Fort Frolic have either been toned
down or didn’t trigger properly for us. Meanwhile, my partner knows the game
inside-out to the point where, if a single item of health or ammo has been
moved, he knows about it; which isn’t really something I take issue with in
terms of the game design, I’m just weirdly impressed.
Wednesday 22nd May 2019
Wednesday is my day at home, usually spent alone, so for the past few
weeks I’ve been playing through LEGO Marvel Superheroes on Free
Play mode. I’ve been playing it on-and-off since it was released in 2013, and
it was actually my first PS3 game - to the point where I’ve actually played it
all the way through in Story Mode twice, because in my PS2-era naivety I didn’t
know what a PSN account was and did my first play-through on my partner’s
account. (He still has all my trophies from that play-through, which is what I
like to remind myself when I see that I’m still languishing on Level 9 when
he’s a mighty Level 12 now.) So it’s with bittersweet feelings that I ended
Wednesday just one level and three trophies away from 100% completion and
platinuming the game. The final level is a single-stage boss fight that I
currently have zero mastery of, so my concern over the potential frustration is
quite high; although I have been making it much easier on myself by using the
IGN guides for Free Play, because my time is precious enough to me these days
that I don’t want to go groping around blindly for trophies on games I’ve
already completed once (especially considering LEGO’s sometimes opaque HUD
prompts, even with all the assists turned on).
Wednesdays also see me with
full control of the TV at lunchtimes, which is why last week I started
re-watching the Pokémon: Indigo League anime. I initially checked
out a couple of episodes in preparation for seeing Detective Pikachu in
the cinema, but since I’m currently between new and available shows that I’m
cleared to watch on my own, a re-watch of the first 52 episodes of Pokémon (which,
bizarrely, is what Netflix offers, presumably for rights reasons) seems like a
nice slice of easy nostalgia, twenty years on from when I first watched it.
It’s been such a long time that I had actually forgotten the existence of the
Pokérap, which may have been something of a blessing; also that James is very
bishōnen with that ever-present rose* and I almost certainly had a crush on him
in a precocious, “not quite old enough to be consciously bi yet but definitely
intrigued by portrayals of gender fluid people” sort of a way. (2019 me can also see
the definite appeal in Jessie’s whole dominatrix shtick, but c.1999 me wasn’t that
precocious.) Also, it turns out that the Pokémon anime has a plot,
which it seems entirely flew over my head between the ages of 7 and 10, when I
was really into it but mainly for the adorable animals and cute villains.
What’s with the golden phoenix thingy? I have literally no idea - but I sure
hope that storyline is resolved in the next 48 episodes, or I might never find
out!
* Holy shit, is James the inspiration behind Monster Prom’s Interdimensional
Prince? This is why you re-watch childhood favourites, so you don’t miss the
geeky references to things you love but have forgotten in the things you love
now!
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