Monthly Archives: October 2015

The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Review

Video Game Reviews

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You read the headline right: I am just now getting around to reviewing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. It’s not that the game went under my radar. I actually went against my “never pre-order” rule to support GOG.com, which is completely DRM-free and handed out discounts to anybody who owned previous Witcher titles. So I’ve had The Witcher 3 since its release on May 19th, and yet I just finished it. My final gametime clocked in at exactly 100 hours, and I still had a couple of treasure hunts left unfinished.

Given the above, I don’t have to elaborate on how much time you can sink into The Witcher 3. But just because a game is lengthy doesn’t mean that the time you spend within it is worthwhile. I have 200 hours logged in Destiny, yet the vast majority of that time was spent re-playing the same old missions ad-infinitum. Similarly, I spent almost 80 hours in Metal Gear Solid V, but the majority of that was in Side Missions, which re-use environments that are already present in the main game. Even in other huge-scale RPGs, like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Bethesda’s RPGs (Elder Scrolls, Fallout), a handful of quests are interesting and memorable and the majority are fetch quests or “go here and kill this monster” missions.

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Anomalisa Review

Movie Reviews

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(Anomalisa is unreleased and does not yet have an official release date. Therefore, this review will remain light on story details and spoilers)

Anomalisa, the first film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman since Synecdoche, New York seven years ago, is a brilliant and wholly unique piece of work. Co-directed by Moral Orel animator Duke Johnson, Anomalisa tells the story of Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a businessman who suffers from a mental disorder which makes him see everybody else outside of himself as the same person. The rarely-mentioned illness gives a narrative reason for the movie’s presentation, in which all men and women share the same face and voice.

However, the framework also serves to visualize the feeling of boredom and over-familiarity that tends to come with age. As the film progresses and we follow Michael through beautifully detailed yet somehow depressing locations and witness the repetition of various thoughts and ideas (including some hilarious asides about the Minneapolis Zoo, which is apparently “zoo-sized”), we empathize with him, sharing the feeling that everything and everyplace is inherently the same. When he begins seeking out somebody special, whether it be an ex or a local fling, we understand what he’s striving for on a human level.

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The Martian Review

Movie Reviews

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The most exciting thing about The Martian is how confident it is about NOT being exciting. Despite kicking off the story with a literally otherworldly sandstorm, screenwriter Drew Goddard and director Ridley Scott spend the majority of the film’s 2 hour and 22 minute runtime focusing on several very smart individuals trying to solve a problem. And yet, The Martian is consistently engaging throughout, one of the most entertaining films of the year. It’s been making a killing at the box office, and should be the popular choice for “Best Picture” come Oscar season.

Part of the film’s entertainment value comes from the characters. Matt Damon, in particular, is excellent here as astronaut Mark Watney, exuding an every-man charm that makes him likable even to audiences with no scientific predilections. He’s simultaneously self-deprecating and extremely confident, and his excitement at the prospect of technically colonizing Mars, or being a space pirate due to the definition of maritime law, is endearing. The script gives him moments of vulnerability, when the odds of survival are significantly against his favor, but his immediate inclination to tackle problems head-on means that he never comes off as a victim. The audience WANTS to see him survive, which ups the stakes for the whole movie.

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Rick and Morty Season 2 Review

Television Reviews

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(The following review contains spoilers for Rick and Morty, if such things exist)

It’s rare to see a show hit the ground running in quite the way Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty did. While ostensibly a spoof of the Doc-Marty Back of the Future relationship, the series quickly outgrew its premise. Creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon began with a solid proof-of-concept pilot, but delivered a true classic episode of television in their second outing, “Lawnmower Dog.” From there, they grew bolder and bolder, wiping out the entire town and bringing the characters into a parallel universe in “Rick Potion #9.” They further emphasized the existence of infinite universes with “Rixty Minutes,” involving a cable box with channels from alternate realities, and “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind,” in which a whole society of Ricks and Morties from other universes were revealed.

Moving into season two, it was hard to know what to expect. Given the expansion of the mythology as the first season moved on, one could have predicted that season two would delve deeper into the multi-verse, emphasizing a more serialized method of storytelling. But Rick and Morty had never been predictable, and Roiland and Harmon instead stuck to just the primary universe this time around, focusing on developing the Smiths (Morty’s family) into a cohesive family unit and creating conflicts within our own space-time continuum.

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A Deep Dive Into the Story of Metal Gear Solid V

Video Games

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(Earlier this week, I posted a review of Metal Gear Solid V in which I avoided spoilers. Here, I’ll discuss the story and it’s surprises in far more depth. This post will contain significant spoilers for the game, and is recommended only for people who are aware of its secrets)

Metal Gear Solid V’s story is a complete mess of disparate plotlines. Series director Hideo Kojima was likely well-aware that this would be his final Metal Gear title, so he engaged with every major idea he could. The power of language, English as a symbol of assimilation, the formation of private military forces, the origin of the Les Enfants Terrible project (the one that birthed Solid and Liquid Snake), early Metal Gears, the dilemma of what to do with child soldiers, the futility of revenge; all are focuses of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, yet rarely do they cross over into anything coherent.

Cassette tapes try to make sense of how selling remote-triggered nuclear warheads to foreign nations has anything to do with a planned attack on cultural assimilation via a plague of English-language attacking lung parasites, but try as the writers might, they never truly make the ideas come together into a cohesive plan. Nor does Skullface’s existence have anything to do with child soldier Eli, or how he’s a clone of player character Big Boss (or IS he?…more on that below), or the psychokinetic Third Child, or the reanimated fiery corpse of Metal Gear Solid 3 antagonist Volgin, or the ridiculous twist ending.

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