Hey, this is my blog. I am going to try and do weekly compilations of thought pieces of things I have experiences recently. Sometimes I won't say much worthwhile, but by the end of the year I struggle to remember everything that I have done. So I'd like to have something to look back on, and I hope you get something from the journey too.

Games

Control

Over the Christmas break, I had some time to sit there for a couple of days and play through a game. This year has kind of mentally had me out of the loop of modern games, but the premise and visuals of Control had hooked me from first glance of the marketing material. Plus £25 on the Xbox store for the digital version which was very reasonable for how much fun I had with this game.

And I did have an absolute ton of fun, but bear with me on this:

This game made me think about Ratchet and Clank a lot.

The gameplay of Control is a third person action game, where the game opens up movement and has arenas with a couple of routes around to flank enemies. These enemies generally just shoot at you, but you have a few projectile based folks who just like to throw trash at you. In your arsenal, you only have 4 types of your gun; Standard Pistol, Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher and a Sniper. I liked using the Sniper and Machine gun.

I also enjoyed throwing things at the enemy all the time, it got a tad overpowered by the end of the game. But do you remember this slice of 2002 genius (2004 in the case of this specific version):

The entire time I was playing Control, I was trying to play it like a Ratchet and Clank game. Jesse would constantly be running around her environment, searching for the biggest objects to throw at the enemy. Then once I had used up all of my available energy, I'd switch to my ridiculously quick firing machine gun pistol and just blast people in the face. This was my exact same flow of playing R&C in the mid 2000's.

Control is obviously something completely different, but once I had got the flying ability, I spent a bunch of time trying to get to places which Jesse shouldn't be able to. Sometimes the game would reward me for this with hidden areas and ability points. In Ratchet and Clank, it would have given me a golden bolt and eventually the big head mode cheat. I know which I prefer.

If you have a weekend free, pick Control up and give it a go. I think the gameplay is underwhelming, but the story, worldbuilding and aesthetics of that game knock it out of the park at every turn.

Forza Horizon 4

Going forward, Game Pass is how I am probably going to experience most of my games. For the price, they give me a lot of content which I probably wouldn't have purchased or even tried. Everything else I feel like I should buy anyway, just in case one day I stop paying for Game Pass.

Forza Horizon was a game I could have missed incredibly easily. I had played the first Horizon, and thought it was pretty good. It was not the kind of game I would have bothered to buy or play through to the end. So imagine my surprise when I decided to give Forza Horizon 4 a shot on my new Xbox One X and it turned out to be the sequel for Burnout Paradise I had been looking for.

The game has a far more sim-y feel to it compared to Burnout Paradise, but it was most of the way there to providing a game which valued fun and spectacle. You can drive mostly recklessly around, going through walls and hitting the CPU drivers with no consequence. The soundtrack has some proper good songs for racing around the British countryside to. They're no Avril Lavigne, but they get the job done.

As an aside from this, I just wanted to make a quick point about representation in games. I am a white male, so a lot of games have main characters catered towards me. However I have had no issue identifying with any character in any game, and generally have far greater connections to my non-white non-male characters in MMO's. It's just something I feel represents me as a person better anyway.

The fact I could drive around in a place very close to where I live gave me a greater sense of representation in a game than a character ever has, which I can probably attribute to the fact most games feature white male characters, meaning I had never felt under-represented. It was in those moments of ridiculous speeds in the games virtual peak district I understood greater than ever why people strive for representation of their main characters for them. To have something close to me digitised and made into a playground felt good. So I totally understood why in this years Giant Bomb GOTY 2019 Jan spoke about Indivisible with such warm words, highlighting how he was being represented properly in the game.

TV Shows

Mr Robot

In the future there I will probably write some more thoughts about Mr Robot, how it progressed and telling a story which moves your engagement from the world of the show, to by the end of Season 4 a single character, and those who occupy his head.

This little bit is to talk about how hard it must be to market this show, and how I want to thank USA Network for letting this go on for 4 amazing seasons. It's no secret that the show had rated poorly in viewer numbers. By the time the two part finale rolled around just 320,000 odd people were watching. You can compare this to Breaking Bad, which managed to get a monstrous 10,280,000 people watching their finale. They aren't even comparable in viewer numbers, but I think both shows are incredible achievements of the TV form factor, and Mr Robot deserves so much better.

I can't even begin to imagine how you advertise something which you need to watch the previous 3 seasons to even understand what is going on. Here is one of the Promo posters for Season 4:

Compare this to Breaking Bad Season 5:

My understanding of the American timezones is that these shows both aired in the same general timeslot on a Sunday. Breaking bad had also had a lot more viewers over its run, but every episode of Mr Robot almost always had a lower viewer count than the episode previous. An absolute travesty.

What I am trying to say is watch Mr Robot. It is every bit as good, if not more, than those TV shows you always go on about to your friends (I understand the Irony of me harping on about this show). It has amazing acting, top notch cinematography ("eps3.4_runtime-error.r00" is probably my favourite thing put to the medium ever, I wish I had a heart rate on while I watched it), and a really engaging story and world.

Watchmen

Hey, talking of representation earlier, lets talk about Watchmen. I finished this show just before the Christmas festivities began last year. Holy moly I enjoyed the heck out of this. I think it has its problems with it's pacing, and it sort of fumbled the ending, but it told a story which I actually cared about in a world which both looks awful, and reminds you of the awfulness of the world we are in now.

Starting the show with the 1921 Tulsa race riots sequence was bold, and at the start did feel unearned. But I have never seen a show which has then tried to earn their story like Watchmen did, and by the end of Episode 6, they even reframed some of the original comic in meaningful ways. From episode 6 onwards, it doesn't drop a beat either with the aftermath of the Dr Manhattan intervening in Vietnam coming up giving what I think a really good look into believable sequel to the comic.

Above all, I think the show is at its best when showing that can trauma stay with you, and it can scar across generations. Will Reeves was only a small boy when Tulsa happened, but it had ramifications and scars that spread more than just him, even more so after the Nostalgia trip. Wade carries his trauma 34 years since the Incident at the end of the comics, and it can cripple him at points. Bringing human stories to a story which features an incredible inhuman is worth the watch.

This is all rambling anyway, and I really don't want to give anything away to people who haven't watched it. I highly recommend it, it's on Now TV in the UK for like the next 10 days. It's only 9 episodes, and whether you're a fan of the comic (or even the movie) or just want a really tight meaningful story to follow, this is absolutely worth a watch.

Music

Watchmen (again)

I can however talk about the soundtrack pretty spoiler free I think. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed probably my favourite movie soundtrack in the 2010's with the Social Network. It was solid, and I think very forward looking for the feeling of the first half of that decade. The track "In Motion" on that soundtrack could be used in pretty much any TV series I have watched in the last 5 years.

Watchmen has a soundtrack which flows, and enhances the aesthtic the show is going for. Here are 3 songs from the TV show, which occur in a row during the first episode.

Together, these songs total like 6 minutes, but in the show they happen over a 12 minutes or so period. And you never feel that downtime, when the song starts back up it feels like it has been playing the whole time since the first one started.

I'll stop here, but I will just say when the Life on Mars cover started playing I was almost jumping off my sofa. And Lincoln Tunnel may be my favourite OST song across all mediums from last year.