Odd Thoughts

Invasion , released on Apple TV in late 2021, is a TV series that I desperately want to like. The premise is great, the "real-time" pacing was something that I found compelling and thought worked to the series' benefit, and I'm just a huge sucker for suspenseful sci-fi stories and high production values. Indeed, there is plenty in Invasion  that I do like. I was especially fond of the British and Japanese subplots, and the wonderfully produced visuals and atmosphere make the show genuinely enjoyable to watch, despite serious flaws. Unfortunately, by the end of the tenth episode I couldn't help feeling like my time had been wasted.  Before I level further criticism, I want to acknowledge that despite its $200 million pricetag, Invasion  without a doubt faced major development and production issues. Filmed through 2020 and into early 2021, the series faced uncertainties throughout the COVID pandemic, an event that I have to imagine forced changes into the show's...

Citizen Sleeper , a stunningly well written game developed by Jump Over the Age, raises an age-old human question - why am I alive? From a purely biological perspective, the answer is easy. Like every other living thing, I am alive to reproduce. To seed my genetic code into the next generation of homo sapiens sapiens. But I know that is not what I am really asking, nor is it a compelling answer for thinking beings who know reproduction is at best a necessity for the continuation of life and cannot be held up as an individual goal for each wildly diverse human individual. Why am I alive? Why do I persist? Why do I suffer? What's the point? Citizen Sleeper wants you to answer those questions on your own, but it offers some compelling theories. In a transhumanist triumph, it offers up a world of beings - including yourself - that are not tied to mortal shells. One needs not suffer. And yet on a decidedly humanist note it suggests that suffering might be the price we all pay for the wa...

Let's get something important out of the way. Moonfall , Roland Emmerich's latest disaster production, is a bad movie. Mystery Science Theater bad. It's paced poorly, cut worse, the acting often seems phoned in at best, and the plot is the worst mish-mash of Independence Day and 2012 that I can imagine. There have been many better 'thing smashes into the world' movies, the most recent of which being Greenland  (2019), which at the time I definitely thought had been directed by Emmerich. All of that said, I still genuinely enjoyed the absolutely off the rails second half, and left the movie wanting to write about it. So let's dig into it. Full spoilers for the best worst disaster movie of the year.  Moonfall  starts with a fairly confusing disaster in space that's been far better done in films like Gravity. The scene serves solely to introduce our two main characters (Astronauts Harper and Fowler), and its main sin is that it makes even less sense as you lear...

  Spiderman PS4 and Spiderman Miles Morales spoilers ahead  While it hasn't yet been officially announced or confirmed, it seems almost beyond a doubt that Playstation players will be receiving another entry in the Spiderman franchise in the near to mid-term future. 2018's Spiderman and 2020's Miles Morales were extremely well received, and both games served as anchors for a company that is still clinging to exclusivity in a much more traditional sense than its competitors. I can't imagine Sony forgoing the opportunity to add another Spiderman to its library of games. That's not to mention the sort of hints that a new game is coming that always pop up on Twitter, nor the mid-credits scenes in both games, which we'll discuss later. Long story short, Spiderman 2 is coming, probably by 2023. So what might it look like? And why do I think it has the potential to be one of the greatest superhero games ever made?  Well, to start, that's partly because Spiderman PS...

There's something about the lone rider on a quest through a beautiful apocalyptic wasteland that just screams video game RPG to me, and also immediately grabs my attention. Raya and the Last Dragon -  Disney's latest work of art - opens with just such a scene before expositing on how its titular character got to that point. It even calls out that lone rider motif in its opening narrative commentary, deliberately drawing attention to it. And it planted a seed in my head that would be watered throughout the entire movie, Raya's narrative is written like an RPG game, in some ways that I don't think are necessarily the case in other animated films.  As in any good RPG, our lone rider quickly picks up companions and the scope of her quest radically expands. At first she only has her animal steed - an armadillo-like creature named Tuk Tuk - and a single magical shard from a broken dragon orb. But soon she discovers another creature, a water dragon named Sisu, last of her kind...

Today, Disney is without a doubt the world's most prolific entertainment company. From ancient China to the MCU to a galaxy far, far away, the company funds and publishes some of the world's most recognizable movie entertainment properties, and it makes a ridiculous amount of money doing so. Current subscribers to Disney+ can find plenty of content, while the game world was recently intrigued by a slate of announcements which essentially boil down to Disney making its way into the AAA video game business (with games based on Avatar, Indy, and Star Wars, the company is poised to have its hands in a ton of new releases over the next few years). Let's give Disney its due, plenty of its recent properties have been extremely well received. Recently, WandaVision and The Mandalorian have brought a certain amount of top-tier respectability to the company's still young streaming service. But not everything has been so popular. Here I'm thinking of Disney's live action re...

It strikes me as rather ludicrous to think about the fact that audiences across the world have been intensely tuned into the outer rim adventures of sci fi's most eminent heroes for damn near 50 years, but that's where we're at, and I don't think we're really sick of it yet. Only months after pearl-clutching critics decided Game of Thrones  would be the last 'event TV' show before the streaming era, Disney Plus stormed onto the field with a new show for people all over the world to tweet about simultaneously. Per usual, it took me a year to actually get around to watching it.  The Mandalorian features our titular character, a Beskar-clad super-soldier belonging to an ancient and still mysterious religious creed, as he stumbles upon a series of misadventures in Star Wars' latest major outing. Between the Sequel movies, the Clone Wars animated show, and Fallen Order, I've been consuming a lot of Star Wars media the last couple years. It's cliché, s...

In 2011, Ubisoft Montreal released yet another Assassin's game in a truly commendable effort to keep up with their ridiculous annual release schedule. I can't imagine the kind of crunch that went into releasing an Assassin's Creed game every year from 2009 (Assassin's Creed 2) to 2015 (Assassin's Creed Unity). Revelations continues the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, taking the player from Italy to Anatolia. The main chunk of the story occurs in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), conquered capital of the fallen Byzantine Empire and center of the Ottoman Empire's centuries-long reign over Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and at various times huge portions of the eastern Mediterranean. The game also features brief forays into Cappadocia, where the player explores a creatively imagined cave city which was one of my favorite locations in the game so far, as well as Masyaf Castle at the very beginning and very end of the game. Players of the original game wil...

Released just a year after Assassin's Creed 2, in 2010, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood has been aptly described as Assassin's Creed 2.5 ever since it came out. While that's a fair moniker, keep in mind that this is still a full fledged game. Where I spent 37 hours in Assassin's Creed 2, I spent 31 in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, having finished the main stories and all of the side missions in each game. Brotherhood continues the story of Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, the charismatic assassin who spent the last game avenging the execution of his father and brothers, dismantling a Templar conspiracy, and retrieving the Apple of Eden. At the end of the last game Ezio made a fateful decision not to kill Rodrigo Borgia, the head Templar and also Pope Alexander VI, only besting him physically before taking the apple and entering an ancient temple. This game begins where the last game left off, with Ezio reeling from the odd visions presented to him in the temple and ...

Going back into the archives of large gaming journalism sites, it's evident that I wasn't the only one who wasn't quite impressed by the original Assassin's Creed. Between its clunky controls, repetitive mission structure, and uninspiring main character, it's quite the surprise that the game sold so well. That being said, I pointed out the game left a solid base to iterate upon. And in 2009, Ubisoft Montreal delivered a sequel that improved upon it's precursor in every way imaginable. Assassins Creed 2 follows the life of Ezio Auditore from his birth all the way until about his forties, when the game leaves off, to be picked up by the later titles Brotherhood and Revelations. From minute one the game is more cinematic, tone-conscious, and interesting than virtually anything its 2007 ancestor had to offer. In contrast to the first game's Third Crusade setting, AC 2 places the player in the midst of Renaissance Italy and its warring states, families, and...

I'm several hours into the original Assassin's Creed, and I'm wondering what all the fuss is about. The controls are clunky, the graphics are dated (okay, maybe I can't blame them for that), it's full of annoying little glitches (I encountered a game-breaking glitch in the tutorial and had to restart), and I'm just bored. The side missions are so repetitive that I'm only finishing the ones that I absolutely have to. I like the parkour - even today it feels like something different than anything I've seen before - and obviously informed games like Infamous, Prototype, and Horizon. I've had to traverse the Kingdom a couple times, and completely don't understand why it exists, and I find myself bored to tears during most of the cutscenes. There are some interesting little philosophical tidbits here and there, but overall it feels a bit overbaked. And then, well, I don't know. Something changed. I found that, despite myself, I was enjoying ...

When I finished writing my review on Mort(e), Robert Repino's book about the ant and animal revolution, I lamented lightly that it seemed to lack a certain amount of focus. The book moves swiftly from animal stories before the change through the war against humanity and to the after-war period in which Mort(e) overthrows the Queen. It was good, and even felt well paced, I just missed some of that war period which only had a portion of the book. Culdesac , a novella which someone aptly described as Repino's Book 1.5 in the series (followed by D'Arc, book 2 and the final book so far, which I'll be reading next) addresses that hole in my heart. And coming in at about 110 pages, it took me less than a day to read. Culdesac follows the titular character, a liberated Bobcat who Captains a group of special forces cats who call themselves the Red Sphinx. The Red Sphinx are an irregular group of assassins and soldiers who perform the most dangerous missions in advance of t...

Mort(e)  sounds like one of the most surrealist books you'll ever read. "Former housecat turned war hero, Mort(e) is famous for taking on the most dangerous missions and fighting the dreaded human bio-weapon EMSAH". Did someone slip acid into my catnip? But 30 pages later, I'm all in. Author Robert Repino does a great job, erm, humanizing his characters and establishing his world so as to make everything feel perfectly reasonable. A vengeful ant queen uses chemical signals to cause some kind of awakening in the world's creatures so that they can kill every human alive and build a world based on new principles of animal equality? Sure, I'll buy it. For the first half or so of the book, it reads like a bit of a radical take on animal rights and the way humans treat animals. The story also follows a sort of cliche war story arc, an alienated soldier trying to return home and reconnect with what he's lost. It's chock full of interesting characters an...