(no subject)

[sideways]

• A belated addition that I left off some earlier round-up post - Terminator: Dark Fate had caught my eye with the promise of a tall buff woman supersoldier wrecking shit in the name of protecting another woman, and I caught it on sale for a doable $3. Happy to say that it did provide the one thing I was there for! It is otherwise a fairly average addition to the Terminator mythos, and while I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it I've done worse things with my time. Just wish Cameron had better resisted the urge to craft a rebootquel that, as is the fashion, completely undermines the in-universe successes of the movies that came before. Our future is evil robots and that's that, apparently.

• And on the theme of buff women wrecking shit, I also watched The Old Guard. The summary of my post-watch discussion with syntheid would be "great characters! some cool concepts and fight scenes! wow that plot hinges entirely on a number of unexplainably bad decisions". Thumbs up on that undeniable gay, though.

• My trashy military series re-read involved me flicking through a few favourites and then jumping ahead to the two new books that had been released since I last paid it any attention. Not going to be new favourites, boo. As much as I like a number of the newer characters, it's becoming gratingly obvious that the series has gone on longer than it needed to and the writer is struggling to find things to do with the remainders of the old cadre. Sudden, gruesome, and unfair deaths are the name of the game, of course, but there's shooting the dog, and then there's shooting the dog so hard it retroactively obliterates entire arcs. On the upside, I had to quirk a smile over how present women are across every echelon of the hierarchy these days, which is a marked change in a series that didn't have a single female character of note until book three. It's still very A Man Wrote This, but good for you, dude. That's growth, or at least a better editor or ghostwriter or something. (Heh. Ghostwriter.)

• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was one of my Steam summer sale purchases, and I wish I liked it more because the aesthetic is choice. It's such an interesting little concept too, putting you in the skeletal shoes of a cursed drifter planting and harvesting stories as part of their pact, and the tales themselves are colourful and inventive. Alas, they forgot a core rule of video gaming, which is that it should be fun to play. WtWTLW just isn't fun enough to demand more than a couple of hours out of the player, and I have a pretty high tolerance for walking simulators. Ah well. At the very least, the music is very enjoyable.

• The Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, was well aware it didn't need to be any longer than it was, and for that I am especially grateful because I struggled terribly with motion sickness throughout. No the game's fault, really; I remember having similar issues with The Stanley Parable, so it must just be something about the engine they use. I liked it overall, and I think I've come to like it more in the lengthy aftermath than in the immediacy of playing it. There were some interesting points made and it was a good choice of medium for them, allowing the writer to explore these ideas without straying into the preachy.

• Still chugging along through A House of Many Doors in the meanwhile, albeit at a less frenzied pace, to collect all my dangling plot threads. I've found the City of Glass, aided a tentacled abomination in romancing a polluted river, fed a god-corpse to the Lord of Crows, become a Poet-Knight, accidentally facilitated two coups and deliberately started another, and no consequence has left me underwhelmed yet.

• Spiritfarer has been released! I'm not allowed to purchase it until I clear a few more off my to-play list, but it looks like such a darling of a game? It's from the same studio as Sundered so has the same gorgeous hand-drawn art style, but seems a far gentler story as you take the role of a ferrymaster to the dead, and any game that has "care for your spirit friends!" as a selling point immediately has my keen interest.

Comments

[singedsun]

I love the idea of The Beginner's Guide, but I also have trouble playing that type of game. The Stanley Parable made me horribly nauseous and I had to stop playing for long periods of time before coming back to it. I didn't buy The Beginner's Guide for that reason and instead watched a Let's Play of it on YouTube.

I also got Where the Water Tastes Like Wine but got so wrapped up in playing The Flame and the Flood that I haven't gotten to it yet.

[sideways]

The worst kind of mutual sympathies on the motion sickness D: It's not as though I can't cope with first person games at all, but something about those ones tweaks it badly! Luckily it was probably a good one for an LP, being pretty linear and short?

Ooo, I haven't heard of The Flame and the Flood. Any good?

[singedsun]

So The Flame and the Flood is a post-apocalyptic game where the world has been mostly flooded, and only these small bits of land remain. You must scavenge supplies, with the help of your dog, and try and make your way down the river. It's frustratingly difficult in the earliest bits when you must abandon potential supplies because you don't have the right tools yet. But you learn more and more as you go about how things can be used most efficiently. But it has really great folkrock/bluegrassy type music. I like it a lot.

[sideways]

Hmm, thank you for the summary! A steep learning curve is easier to deal with when you know it's coming, and I do like bluegrass.

[chocochipbiscuit]

Oof, I'm with you on Where the Water Tastes Like Wine; it's really atmospheric and I love the concept of it, but the actual gameplay is such a slog between locations, especially with limited fast travel options and no in-game ability to refer back to the stories you've collected!

I also fell in love with The Old Guard and must fight you on it!!!! (In a tongue in cheek, playful way if that's not obvious! :P) Yes, it's a shoestring plot and some of these wrap around VERY BAD and silly decisions but I don't watch action movies to think, I watch action movies to *feel the feelings* and to yell about ladies kicking ass on screen!!!! I've always been a sucker for badass found families and this was exactly my kind of catnip.

[sideways]

THE TRAVEL IS SO SLOW D: And no, "teehee play this tedious minigame to increase your speed slightly" is not charming.

I won't fight back when it comes to The Old Guard; it's not with real dislike that I snort over the plot, and if anything it is just being true to the action comic genre! That I want to lean in and ask two characters why on earth they pursued their goals in the silliest ways possible does not detract from the extremely good Andy-and-Nile sparring on a plane scene.

[chocochipbiscuit]

ANDY AND NILE SPARRING ON THE PLANE made me lean forward in my seat and go "YEEEAAAAAHH!!!" and then I collapsed afterward with a big sigh of satisfaction because it just!!! CATNIP, MY FRIEND.

Also, I'll tell you my votes for silliest two characters if you tell me your votes for silliest two characters. :P

Copley and Booker: Really, both of you claim to want to improve humanity (because wah, my wife died! Studying you immortals can save lives!) or see how to end this long lonely existence (because wah, I am alone and my son died hating me for not being able to share my immortality!) are both emotionally compelling things and that motivation is what keeps you from being cast as the outright villains here but ON WHAT EARTH DID JOINING FORCES WITH AN UNSCRUPULOUS PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY TO DETAIN THESE DEADLY IMMORTALS AGAINST THEIR WILL seem like the most logical step there????

(I will also say that Merrick and his main doctor are like cartoonishly terrible villains and cut-outs of unscrupulous scientific endeavor but at I'm willing to turn off my brain and roll with it for the sake of a movie.)

Also, in general, Andy's whole MO being 'we're immortals trying to do good, let's hire ourselves out as freelance mercenaries to whatever job seems like it has a good heart' is remarkably shortsighted but HEY, cool action movie at least!

[sideways]

Oh I am ENTIRELY taking aim at Copley and Booker, oh my goodness. Sir, you're a former intelligence agent with enough skill to put together the actively repressed story of a tiny handful of immortals, but you can't spend 20 seconds on an employer review website to figure out that the CEO who honestly puts the bare minimum effort into pretending he's not a sadistic power-hungry lunatic might not be your best sponsor? You can hunt down the five pictures of these people that exist in the world, but you can't find the dark web YouTube video of Merrick drunkenly abusing a kitten? Come on.

And Booker! Booker!!! If you hate being alive so much then you do you, but WHY on EARTH would you involuntarily rope your immortal bffs into literally their worst nightmare?

AND YES! As much as the grand rescue and smooth synced teamwork was an absolute joy, I kind of wish Nile had been allowed to like... stick with the good points she made about not wanting to spend her immortality being a raging murder machine? And wanting to get the time she could have with her family? Because that was honestly fair. Andy's like "everything is depressing and we just make things worse" well shit, have you tried devoting some of your unending lifespan to being a firefighter or building knowledge repositories or gardening instead? I'm just saying. Maybe some more creative rather than destructive hobbies would help.

[chocochipbiscuit]

IN ANDY'S DEFENSE...! I think we've seen that most of the immortals, even before they became immortal, were warriors or soldiers of varying types. And over the centuries they've lived, they really haven't advanced in terms of their thinking. Heck, even modern technology is a relatively recent blip for them (and lulz but even though they're shown to be competent with it, I would have loved one scene of any of the immortals awkwardly keyboard pecking at a computer) and we see how despite their proficiency with guns, Andy's favorite weapon appears to be her battleax.

Like, at one point, I think it probably WOULD have felt easier for them to just go around the countryside rescuing people, slaying dragons, etc, but the world has changed around them. And they never truly changed their mentality about how to best protect the world; the only thing they've updated is their weaponry.

ANYWAYS. All of this is why I think that Nile Freeman is such a good addition to their crew, because it's not just about passing on Andy's mantle of mortality, but because she can embrace a new way of thinking. IIRC, it was even her idea to make Copley work with them to better screen their clients and where they could do the most good.

...but man....I'm showing my current fixations here, but I just finished reading Archaeology from Space and I'm thinking that secrecy aside, so many historians and cultural researchers would like. Maybe not kill, but possibly maim for just an hour of Q&A with any of the immortals.

[sideways]

Ohhh that's a really good point actually. It is hard to put things on an immortal timescale, and perhaps unfair to expect that much adaptability from them in that context. In which case yes, hope Nile is able to be a good influence and bridge into the modern world and all its possibilities!

There's also that hint at a higher guiding hand deliberately picking warrior types, so it can't be discounted that the deck's been stacked in favour of people who think hitting bad guys in the face with large weapons is the surest path to a better world.

Lol, yes. Whether or not their biology can provide any medicinal clues, their lived experience alone is invaluable. Though I've only been alive a handful of decades and have forgotten like nine-tenths of it, so that could potentially be hilarious. If I can barely remember people I went to high school with, they could feasibly just shrug awkwardly when asked about a Major Historical Figure who was ultimately just some guy to them.

[chocochipbiscuit]

"You met William the Conqueror??? Please, tell me! What was he like?"

"...uh, it was just once. And the only thing I really remember is that he had a piece of meat stuck between his teeth? Like I couldn't really concentrate on what he was saying, I kept staring at it...."

(honestly I would take an entire fic of these shenanigans)

[sideways]

GOD. Please.