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2022 in Review

On 20th January 2023

So 2022 was the end of the plague. After two years of monotony and drudgery, this was the year that the virus lost its potency, and people gave over caring. The virus is here to stay, joining the other collection of seasonal ailments that fill beds in the wintertime. While many countries have dropped all restrictions altogether, in Germany the regulations have become less transparent, with the occasional strange restriction still in place seemingly for the sake of it. So while masks remain compulsory on public transport, the word compulsory has evolved to mean ‘suggested’.

Joining the yearly round-ups from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, here’s looking back over the final year of the plague, 2022.

Summary

Best PC games: Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons, Gorogoa, Frostpunk, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Slay the Spire, The Witness, Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Worst PC games: As Far As The Eye, Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2

Board games played: 29

Best board games: Concordia, Cross Clues, My City, Paleo, Targi

Worst board games: Ys

Films watched: 30

Best films: The Journey, Knives Out, City Lights, Les parapluies de Cherbourg, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Worst films: Four Horsemen, Independence Day: Resurgence, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

Books read: 34

Best books: The Complete Maus, The Point of Departure, Land of Big Numbers

Worst books: The Whisperer in Darkness, The Possessed, Singularity Sky

A Year in Gaming

This year hasn’t been much of one for solo gaming, at least not in the second half of the year. I polished off the DOOM reboot started last year, a beautiful hi-octane re-envisioning of the granddaddy of FPS titles. Largely mindless, though with some fun shooting mechanics and a rip-roaring soundtrack, it managed to be at once reminiscent of those pixelated 90s environs, whilst delivering the type of gameplay expected of a modern-era title.

Doubling down on finishing off games, I also returned to finish my cerebral punishment in The Witness. After sharing horror stories with a colleague, I fired it up again just curious about how far I still had to go, only to discover that I’d actually already completed enough to take on the final challenge, and only been put off by assuming the entire island needed to be complete before heading for the top of the mountain. Not that the final challenge didn’t also have my brain dribbling out of my eye sockets, but I bow down to Jonathan Blow’s design talents. Genius work, just a bit heavy for an addled brain.

On the lighter end of the puzzle spectrum, Gorogoa is a delicious little adventure in pictures, with a unique system of panels. It’s a game which breaks its own fourth walls, providing just enough of a challenge, with a few tricky sections, but the game doesn’t overstay its welcome and can be completed in a couple of hours.

Sticking with puzzles, perhaps my biggest surprise of the year was an epic Swedish fairytale, Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons. Essentially a solo coop, the game revolves around controlling two brothers simultaneously on their quest to cure their ailing father. I wasn’t overly enamoured with the opening chapter, and even abandoned the game for a while before returning, but gradually the world unfolds to Tolkeinesque proportions, with glorious vistas, memorable set-pieces and a truly moving story, helped along by the fantastic decision to have wordless voiceovers, spoken in the universal language of grunts and sighs.

More from the solo front, according to Steam’s yearly round-up, Slay the Spire was the game which occupied most of my time, making up nearly a quarter of the time played over 55 games. Easy to pick up and play (or perhaps interrupt and drop), it’s an intriguing card game which has depth, without being overly complex, and provides just the right amount of information to offer tactical confrontations gelled with more strategic deckbuilding, whilst being short enough that having ‘just one more go’ can easily eat into your time.

Worst PC games: As Far As The Eye, Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2

On the flip side, there were only a couple of games which disappointed. Whilst visually very appealing, I just couldn’t get into the rather tedious gameplay of As Far As The Eye. Despite being turn-based, it felt like there was a lot of waiting around between doing things, and rather than the sense of exploration and adventure a game like Civilization offers, felt like more of a chore. The interface was somehow unclear, leading to a lot of trial and error, and since every decision was so tight, a few misclicks easily spelt defeat and having to start over. When you can expect to fail even the tutorial, there’s honestly something off with the design in my book.

Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2 meanwhile was a recommendation from a colleague also into his two-player coops. It’s silly over-the-top action, everything it says on the tin, but it just fell rather flat with me.

A Year in Boardgaming

While our boardgaming habits have picked up a little in comparison to last year, we’re still far from the levels of yore, when we could expect to meet up at least once or maybe twice a month on average for an evening.

The worst game of the year has to be one we tried again many years back by the name of Ys. Basically a semi-blind bidding game in which players attempt to place workers to earn goodies, there’s a push-your-luck element to the game, but with four players at least it feels highly random in who comes out victorious in any bidding war, and it’s easy to come out empty-handed on every front and waste an entire turn, or else scoop up lots of unclaimed goodies with no competition.

Concordia was a decent tactical trading-in-the-Mediterranean game, ostensibly quite peaceful, albeit relatively cut-throat at four players. Whilst the flow of the game is fairly straightforward, with actions being played via a deck of cards which needs to be cycled through, and players principally vying for the placement of towns, I’m not too convinced about the final scoring. At least with four players, the game feels like it overstays its welcome, and the scoring at the end is pretty surprising if you haven’t been keeping tabs on what everyone is doing.

In terms of smaller games, two simple grids made a pleasant surprise this year. Targi is basically a classic at this point, a streamlined two-player worker-placementesque game about desert markets or some such. What’s so unique about the game is the way the workers interact with one another and block the other player; where many games of this ilk are virtually solitaire affairs, this game has a much more chess-like feel of trying to predict how your opponent will act to plan your own moves… and watching it all go south when they do the opposite. The other grid-based filler was Cross Clues, a classic word game in the vein of something like Codenames, but one in which the connections are already laid out in front of you, as everyone works together to clear the grid.

A Year in Cinema

One of the stand-out films this year was one I’d never heard of. The Journey is an excuse to imagine how an hour of discussion between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness might have gone. It’s contrived, ahistorical, slow and largely meaningless, but the performances from Spall and Meaney are excellent, which gives this fantasy some credibility.

Another film I didn’t actually plan to watch, Knives Out made me at least reassess my views on Rian Johnson somewhat. I didn’t in the slightest ‘get’ Brick, and thought the sequel Star Wars trilogy was utter garbage, though that isn’t all Johnson’s fault. Nevertheless this little Christie-inspired whodunnit put together a stellar cast in a dysfunctional family, plenty of red herrings, and Daniel Craig with a crazy accent. Pure light-hearted entertainment.

At the weaker end of the projector, one of the films I presumably watched too late, but on the advice of an old friend, was the documentary Four Horsemen. Some clever voices edited together in a vaguely synthetic order to produce various assertions about the way of the world and the economic order. Oh yes, and gold is the panacea. I’ll retire to bedlam.

But at least there was some vague attempt to form a cogent argument in that film. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw surely invites you to leave your brain with the usher. Do they make the CGI first and then write the script afterwards?

2021 in Review

By Fips

On 30th December 2021

In Real Life™, That Was

Another year of the plague behind us, another 365 days of solitude. It’s hardly Marquez, but it certainly feels like life has been chugging along in neutral after so many heady years in first gear. The year was mostly dominated by work, with little in the way of holiday breaks, social activities or other diversions to break up the monotony.

So joining the yearly roundups from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, here’s looking back over the second year of the plague, 2021.

Summary

Best PC games: Return of the Obra Dinn, The Witness, Zombie Army Trilogy, DOOM

Worst PC games: Heaven’s Vault

Board games played: 10

Best board games: Photosynthesis, My City

Worst board games: –

Films watched: 31

Best films: The Three/Four Musketeers, Psycho, Whiplash, One Hour Photo, Four Lions

Worst films: Train of Life, You Were Never Really Here, The Evil Dead

Books read: 34

Best books: The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, Kleiner Mann – was nun?, Julian, Troubles

Worst books: Winnetou 1, The Marshmallow Test

A Year in Gaming

Continuing the theme of working from home and trying to avoid spending too much time in the office, 2021 wasn’t much of one for gaming, although I did upgrade my hardware for the first time in the better part of a decade.

There were a couple of solo adventure games which provided fair diversion. Return of the Obra Dinn definitely stands out as one of the more interesting games I’ve played in recent years. The basic premise for the player is that a ship has entered port in the late eighteenth century, and all the crew and passengers are either missing or dead. Tasked with finding out what happened, you get to see and hear the final moments of every corpse you discover, slowly piecing together bits of the puzzle through deduction, elimination and, certainly in my case, a good dollop of guesswork. I can’t say my efforts were particularly successful, but the unique flavour of the mystery, together with the beautiful pixelated sepia aesthetic, kept me coming back for more.

A technically more imposing puzzle game also worthy of mention is The Witness, written by the author of Braid, a game that had already battered my meagre brain into submission. As with Obra Dinn, I was likewise too stupid to unravel The Witness, and sadly didn’t see it through to the end (Edit: This changed in 2022.), but the mixture of puzzles and secrets, as well as the unique art style around the island itself definitely made the visits worthwhile.

My worst game of the year was unfortunately also the one which should have been most up my street: Heaven’s Vault purports to offer an adventure in which the player must decipher an ancient language. The premise was intriguing, but unfortunately I simply couldn’t get into the story for just how slow the game’s execution is. Everything just trudges along to such an extent that, only a few hours in, I still hadn’t seen more than a few words of the strange language, and haven’t been inclined to return.

Slow is a word which cannot be used to describe the DOOM reboot, which I’m still in the process of playing through, half an hour at a time. In comparison to the last outing in DOOM 3, this feels far more like the hi-octane classics of the 90s, and the developers and designers really put together a solid engine to drive the game forward, putting action right back at the heart of a classic shooter.

On the multiplayer front there wasn’t anything particularly new this year. In the spring we completed the surprise hit from last year, Gunfire Reborn, before heading back down the galaxy’s darkest mines in Deep Rock Galactic. Trying to avoid the cheatathon that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has become, we tried out a few alternatives like Splitgate (Slipgate?!) and Rogue Company, eventually returning to Overwatch as we were often five players. Why does no one make cooperative (or competitive) games for five players? Why do they always cap out at four? There are so many titles out there which just don’t suit our player count.

So perhaps the only positive surprise of the year was returning to the hordes in Zombie Army Trilogy as a two-player escapade, retreading old steps and exploring a few new haunts. The weird combo system they’ve added, which rather punishes the player for trying to use a sniper rifle rather than running around rocking a shotgun or even pistol, made for something of a strange bastard hybrid for a ‘Sniper Elite’ game, especially with the way the two-player game could easily have you shooting at freshly blown up targets and breaking that all important chain.

A Year in Boardgaming

Sadly, this year was about as sparse as it can get when it came to the table. Aside from a couple of coop escape room style games when we had the occasional guest, we managed all of two gaming evenings with our usual partners. We’ve made a promise to at least try to meet up once per month in future, so hopefully that will change for the better in 2022.

The two coop games we got through were both from series we had previously played. The first of these was the set of three Unlock!: Mythic Adventures. These are generally a pretty good series, neatly interweaving cards with a dedicated app which allows for more interesting solutions than mere card-based options (the Exit series in particular suffers at times from generally having to hunt for 3-digit solutions). The three adventures in this set are pretty varied, though the technology did fail us badly on two occasions: one puzzle required us to take photos of cards, which given us playing in poor lightning, meant we were sometimes led down the wrong path by the app not recognising our solution; the other problem was a minigame which should have been straightforward to complete, but actually took us upwards of 15 minutes on multiple devices trying to find one which would finally recognise our inputs. Those glitches aside, the puzzles themselves were fun to solve, fairly logical, with enough variety in difficulty levels.

The second game was 50 Clues: The Fate of Leopold, the conclusion to a three-part adventure which we started back in 2019. Game noire, in terms of mechanics the game doesn’t do anything too special, but the topic is that little bit darker, the solutions that little bit more visceral than any of the other offerings out there. Fairly recommendable purely on that basis.

In terms of bigger titles, there were literally only two to mention. Photosynthesis is a cute abstract about growing trees and harvesting sunlight. Players place seeds in the forest, evolving them from tiny saplings to mighty trees, before harvesting them for points; but the energy needed to do all these things comes from sunlight collected by the trees. It’s an interesting balancing act, and timing actions to maximise the energy harvested as the sun rotates around the board with the concomitant changes in shadows make for something of a brain-burner. Unfortunately the point-scoring seems a bit random, with big scores but small differences if everyone has played a similar game. Plus there’s a fairly counterintuitive way of paying for things which everyone fell for at least once.

The second biggy was Reiner Knizia’s legacy title My City. Basically a board game version of Tetris played over 24 rounds, with changing boards and rules. The basic game wouldn’t hold my attention held for long, but being a legacy-style game means it at least earns points for tickling your curiosity. Nevertheless, it still it feels more of a gimmick that will outstay its welcome before the final envelope.

A Year in Cinema

One series I revisited was the 1970s Musketeers films of Richard Lester. These brought to mind exactly the kind of thing King Solomon’s Mines was presumably aiming at, and which I so panned last year. The Three Musketeers and the simultaneously filmed The Four Musketeers brilliantly tell the well-known story, combining swashbuckling adventure and derring-do, with moments of high drama, and absolutely gallons of humour. It’s definitely towards the comedic end of the scale, but there’s something about that combination of Pythonesque quips from the extras, the roughshod and often slapstick swordfighting, and of course the characters played by the likes of Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, that keeps me revisiting these films. The simple ordinariness of so many of the settings, combined with the brilliant costume work, gives the films a charming authenticity; we’re watching ordinary people, in ordinary seventeenth century France, who are ordinarily funny, ordinarily clumsy, ordinarily charming. Damn good fun!

Continuing with films of an older vintage, one of the gaps I finally managed to plug was watching Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film which lived up to its expectations, despite being so famous and so often referenced, you’ve already seen it even if you haven’t. On the one hand, it reminded me very much of Hitchcock’s own Vertigo, in that the film is very much a film with two distinct acts, where the breathless crescendo of the first leaves you shocked there can even be a second. But it also reminded me of how a simple story can be told so magnificently, which is a failing of so many films which try to lay it on too thick: such as the modern retelling of that other Hitchcock classic Rear Window in Disturbia.

Watched as part of some research for a scriptwriting job, one surprise hit for the year was Whiplash, a film very much in the vein of Black Swan, but one which probably tells the story of an all-consuming passion in pursuit of one’s art even better. The film takes a few wrong turns in my opinion, but the final scene is a breathtaking catharsis for everything which went before, and passes without barely a line of dialogue.

Sticking with the one-man studies, One Hour Photo was probably my surprise treat of the year. A fantastic performance by the late Robin Williams, there’s something so effortlessly natural about this miscentred antihero, a likeable and yet worrisome main character who keeps the scars on his personality visibly hidden. Truly edifying.

Switching to the worst films of the year, there weren’t really any particular stinkers, but a few which were for one reason or another disappointing. The comedic story of a runaway train of Jews escaping the Holocaust, Train of Life was certainly an interesting film, but there are some subjects which simply don’t lend themselves well to satire, and unfortunately this one left something of a foul taste in the mouth. Which is a pity, because one of my absolute favourites of the year was Ianoucci’s The Death of Stalin; despite the very serious subject matter, I think it was the absolutely over-the-top performances and casting which allowed this film to work as well as it did, capturing the absurdity of reality in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The final two stinkers are there for different reasons. You Were Never Really Here ended up being a film I wanted to enjoy, but aside from a few interesting scenes left nothing in my neurons to reflect upon. I think it was a case of false expectations rather than any particularly bad filmcraft. But the final film of note enjoys a reputation beyond its years that frankly, I fail to understand. The Evil Dead is a cheap and drearful horror… comedy, I assume? Low-budget yadda yadda, maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind or the wrong company to enjoy it, but it had none of the visceral horror of Romero’s ilk, few of the real chills a Carpenter might produce, and honestly little in the way of laughs.

A Year in Books

A fairly typical year for books, about on a par with my reading habits for the past few years, there weren’t many titles that really jump out from the stack.

After following him on Twitter and catching the occasional snippet on television, I decided to give The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken a go. For someone not particularly well-versed in what ‘the Law’ really is, it provides a decent summary of how the British system came to be the way it is, and what years of austerity have done to break things. If I had the time, I ought really find a volume comparing that system to others.

Apparently I found more time for reading fiction this year, knocking off some shorter classics like Siddhartha or The Handmaid’s Tale, but there were three in particular which really stood out. Another of Hans Fallada’s oeuvre, Kleiner Mann – was nun? is simply amazing for its prescience, published as it was in 1932 and so poignantly describing the economic and social woes of the depression years on Weimar Germany, the daily grind and struggle to survive and maintain some semblance of dignity.

For slightly different reasons I found myself enchanted by J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, a book set in the brooding revolutionary period of immediate post-WWI Ireland, where the setting sun of the British Empire is epitomised in the form of a crumbling hotel. Humorous and melancholic, it’s interesting that this was written at the start of a fresh set of troubles, being published in 1970.

Going slightly further back historically, I ploughed through Gore Vidal’s Julian, which in contrast to I, Claudius or Memoirs of Hadrian (both read 2018), takes a look back over Julian’s record in the form of a series of letters between two scholars in how to deal with the matter of Julian’s diaries. Perhaps it was the anti-Christian flavour which attracted me the most.

Turning to the worst books of the year, and there weren’t really any terrible stinkers. Not particularly well known in the English-speaking world, Winnetou is a German institution, a collection of western stories that spawned whole series of films, festivals and an extremely successful spoof. But plodding through Winnetou 1, it was difficult to see how. The basic material of White Man and Indians is obviously fertile ground for any story, but the cardboard characters, plodding exposition and lack of dramatic merit makes you wonder how it became so popular with anyone in long trousers. Though I haven’t read James Fenimore Cooper either, so maybe my expectations are at fault.

Meanwhile, the biggest disappointment of the year was probably The Marshmallow Test. I’d certainly waited long enough to read it, probably having learned the gist of the argument sometime in primary school. But there’s basically nothing in this book that you don’t already know, nothing that isn’t already well trodden or implicit in what the test purports to tell us. Are the implications really that profound? Is the test really an indicator for the future or a reflection of the past?

2020 in Review

By Fips

On 5th January 2021

In Real Life™, That Was

This year has been anything if not interesting. At the start, a lot of people around me seemed to answering the call for change, with numerous friends choosing to up sticks, start new careers, move houses, or meet new partners.

While little changed for me beyond shifting to working from home, one difference was saying goodbye to a forum I’d been running for nearly two decades. As no one had posted anything in nearly twelve months, and its use had been dwindling for some years already, it seemed the time had come to save some computing cycles and lay the bits to rest.

Nevertheless, one tradition I wanted to continue from its pages was an annual post taking stock of a year’s media consumption. I’ve gone through the database dump and scavenged previous summaries from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. So for the first time in another seldom visited corner of the web, here’s looking back on 2020 in all its quarantined glory.

Summary

PC games played: numerous

Best PC games: Gunfire Reborn, Sniper Elite 4, What Remains of Edith Finch, Strange Brigade, Inside, Two Point Hospital, Catastronauts, DOOM 3: BFG Edition, Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide, Pyre

Worst PC games: Californium, Unfortunate Spacemen, Crucible, Jet Set Radio, Killer Is Dead

Board games played: 39 (75 plays)

Best board games: Sail to India, Majesty, Short List, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Piepmatz

Worst board games: Chada & Thorn, Detective Stories: “Gattardo”, 5-Minute Dungeon, DOG Royal

Films watched: 38

Best films: Paddington 2, Blade Runner 2049, Full Metal Jacket, The History Boys, I, Daniel Blake, The Princess Bride, Stand By Me

Worst films: The Detonator, Empire State, King Solomon’s Mines, Mad Max

Books read: 32

Best books: The Last Resort, The Remains of the Day, Eine Frau in Berlin, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Worst books: Ficciones, Lord of Light

A Year in Gaming

It’s actually been an interesting year, multiplayer gaming wise. Over last Christmas enough of my gaming group had finally had enough of the widespread cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Operations that we quit playing it altogether. The search was then on for a title to fill our weekly sessions. For a while, Valorant took the reins, though its extremely slow pace, focus on abilities, and the punishing gameplay for a team with a fairly wide range in skill levels, all meant that we soon tired of it.

In its stead, we shifted to a variety of lighter titles. Catastronauts was an entertaining take on the Overcooked genre, giving four furry astronauts plenty of headaches as they attempt to keep a ship patched and maintained in a series of confrontations in space. Playing the game over Steam’s in-built streaming service meant we could play it as a ‘couch coop’ on a couch several hundred miles long, with only occasional interruptions and lag spikes… the wonders of modern technology!

Later we switched over to the summer’s surprise smash hit Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a digital jelly bean version of ninja warriors. Chaotic, random, frustrating and hilarious, I remain the only bean without a crown and will probably stay in that virgin state until I can take on a stage uncontested. But in the spirit of athletics, it’s the taking part that counts, and it can be just as much fun to fail your run, or spoil someone else’s!

Our latest squeeze is a rogue-lite from Hong Kong entitled Gunfire Reborn. It’s been a challenging endeavour so far, with us gradually getting stronger each week, unlocking new upgrades and weapons. Unfortunately, my current internet connection makes the game virtually unplayable, so not sure if I’ll see any real progress any time soon.

In the solo gaming department, I didn’t tackle any particularly long games. At the beginning of the lockdown, I felt like I should probably use the opportunity to try to work through some of my Steam backlog, finally playing through the DOOM 3: BFG Edition, including the original DOOM I/II. It was fun to explore those grandfathers of the genre some quarter of a century later, and amazing how the layouts of some of the levels were still so clear in my mind. While the basic shooting mechanics were child’s play with a mouse (had I really used arrow keys to turn back then?), one thing that I’d completely forgotten was just how convoluted the map design was, with scores of hidden rooms, secret buttons and special tricks. After completing the original pair, I finally succeeded in completed DOOM 3 at the third attempt, a good fifteen years after it first came out, but baulked at the idea of spending even more time playing through its expansion.

After slogging through the Martian hellholes, I only otherwise took in some shorter titles this year, not wanting to spend as much time in the office as what lockdown was already demanding. One of the titles which stuck out was What Remains of Edith Finch, a beautiful walking simulator exploring the biography of several generations of an eccentric family, with each member’s story told through its own separate vignette. It’s easy to see why the game won a BAFTA. I also ticked off the two Playdead adventures LIMBO and INSIDE, the second in particular being a delightful brain-tickler, a noire puzzle platformer lovingly rendered and brilliantly directed.

There weren’t any really major stinkers this year, though a few disappointments. In the multiplayer department, we tried out Amazon’s very short-lived Crucible on its beta release. While the basic premise and mechanics were sound, we were left feeling distinctly bored by what we’d tasted, and it wasn’t a surprise when the initial closed beta stage was withdrawn. Still, it certainly was a shock to hear some months later that they’d pulled the plug entirely. I guess the competition for free-to-play titles is so great that it was deemed unworthy of further funding, despite it having been in development since 2014.

On the solo front, there were two games which fell a little flat. Californium sounded like a fascinating concept, a small adventure set in a drug-addled and Philip K. Dick inspired multi-layered universe, where the player peels back the real world. I was expecting something in the vein of A Scanner Darkly, but what I got was something more like a hidden object game. Frankly the overarching gameplay is far too simplistic, and the world-bending effect soon gets boring. The second game which didn’t live up to expectations, though through no fault of its own, was Into the Breach. The basic gameplay boils down to an agonising game of 3-piece chess, with the player in full command of the information, barring a few statistical chances. A limited number of moves, yet with tons of different combinations, different pieces, different abilities, taking moves in different orders, and even the option to restart each scenario once, make each encounter a brain-burning conundrum. What’s not to like? For me the major detraction was the fact that the developer’s previous title – FTL – was frankly even more brilliant!

A Year in Boardgaming

It was a somewhat weird year in boardgaming. Overall we didn’t play as much as normal, though we started out the year meeting up with our friends extremely frequently, had a massive hiatus in the middle during the lockdown, and again picked up the pace in the autumn, before dropping it altogether in the winter again.

In terms of new games, the biggest surprise of the year was far and away The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. A simple trick-taking game for four players, what absolutely flabbered my gast is that no one had come up with it before. A pretty standard set of cards, some basic objectives, and a very limited ability to communicate, this game had us entertained for hours on end over a long series of evenings. While I find the Kennerspiel des Jahres category rather ill-defined, it came as no surprise to hear it had won.

On the hunt for some smaller, more family-friendly board/card games, I bought a couple which resonated well. Piepmatz is a set collecting game I picked up after a recommendation from The Spiel podcast. We’ve only ever played it four-player, and I think it’s probably a bit too random for my tastes at that number, but otherwise it’s a cute little diversion which doesn’t overstay its welcome. The other game I found second-hand was Sail to India, which packs a surprising amount of gameplay in a little box (though requires a fairly large table once all spread out).

The only notable ‘larger’ title of the year was Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, earning a place as a very special mashup of two other games, being a semi-cooperative tile-laying game which is something of mix between Carcassonne and 7 Wonders. I’m not sure how much strategy is really involved, though there’s enough decision-making to keep you engaged, and the way that the game is played cooperatively yet competitively at the same time works well with the right group.

During the lockdowns, we didn’t get much gaming time in as we hadn’t found ourselves anything interesting for two players, and the only two games we already had around make it onto my list for worst games of the year. The first was Chada & Thorn, a small spin-off from The Legends of Andor series which Steffi had so devoured. It felt rather clunky and lifeless in comparison to its larger brother, with none of the depth of an LCG like Lord of the Rings, nor the interesting discussion a four-player game can bring.

The second flop this year was a rather odd acquisition Steffi found somewhere, actually being a demo for a series, called Detective Stories: Gattardo. We’ve played enough escape room games over the years, and this one relied more on open facts and clues rather than the gimmicks that many others use. However, we completely failed to read the signs in front of us on a number of occasions, eventually coming up with a solution to the case that was wrong in just about every single aspect… probably including even the identity of the victim! Maybe if we’d had some more sensible heads with us, the experience would’ve been less demoralising, but instead it felt like a wasted evening.

A Year in Cinema

Obviously, this year lent itself rather well to watching the box, and once lockdown started we stuck fairly religiously to our weekly film evening. Often overwhelmed with choice, Steffi tried a new tack this year, choosing to work her way through the alphabet of our backlog and what’s available to stream online, so while many of her choices were a far cry from her usual comic-centric tastes, there were as many pleasant as disappointing surprises in the mix!

Perhaps the two immediate stand-out films for me were both sequels. Paddington 2 managed the rather rare feat of actually being better than its predecessor, at least from what I can remember. Where the first was a sweet family film, the second seemed to inject even more humour, with an entertaining plot and the usual slew of jolly actors. Blade Runner 2049 meanwhile was a film I approached with some trepidation, as the original has stood the test of time well enough on its own. But the cinematography is just as delicious for this second outing, Ryan Gosling was perfectly cast as the new blade runner, and the film had a meaningful story of its own to tell, rather than just riding on the coattails of its ancestor. Guess that’s what can happen when Disney isn’t involved.

This year I also managed to plug a few of those gaps for films everyone has seen. Full Metal Jacket was a somewhat surprising war film in how seemingly aimless the script was constructed, although the first and second halves of the film stand fairly well on their own merit, the overarching message was muddy. But despite having never seen the film before, the scenes often felt familiar, having been parodied and quoted that often. The same could be said for The Princess Bride, which I felt like I’d seen vicariously often enough (was there a Simpsons parody?).

The most disappointing film of the year was probably a result of misfiring memories from childhood, but I expected Mad Max to be something more along the lines of a Kevin Costner dystopia, with less melodrama and stupidity. Probably I’m just remembering snippets from its sequels in my mind. However even this disappointment couldn’t beat the hands down the worst film of the year: King Solomon’s Mines. Honestly, how did they get Richard Chamberlain, Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies to star in this mess? It’s like someone had seen the success of Indiana Jones and thought: what this needs is less plot and more slapstick. It wouldn’t have been out of place in the Carry On series.

A Year in Books

I’d expected that in the year of the plague I’d have ploughed through a lot more pages than I managed of the previous 12 months, but I guess not having that daily commute cut a lot of my reading time.

Still, I managed to knock off a few of the books that have been on my wishlist for the longest. The Last Resort, for example, must’ve been on my list since about the time of its publication, being a sometime first-hand narrative about a small white homestead in Zimbabwe, and their attempts to keep going during Mugabe’s descent into populism, as the economy crashed around him and he resorted to whatever means necessary to stay in power. The crisis was broadcast often on British news, but this book brought home what it was like for people on the ground, trying to go about their lives despite the ever-present potential threat to life and limb. At times harrowing, but always a very human account.

In a similar vein I read the anonymously written Eine Frau in Berlin, the accounts of life in occupied Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when life was cheap, food scarce, and rape a daily visitation. Aside from how well written the accounts are, the memories from those two months are honest and matter-of-fact, leaving it to the reader to pass judgement. Only published after the author’s death, nearly 60 years later, the dairy makes for difficult reading, but an important one.

It seems I didn’t pick up much fiction this year, so the standalone favourite was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Beautiful characters, beautiful prose, a subtle tale and extremely believably narrated, this is a slow-burner which is in turn amusing and poignant and arrives where you expected it to.

Two of my worst reads of the year were some which had also been in my to-read pile for the longest. I’d read about Borges somewhen and heard about these magical constructions and thought experiments all encapsulated into tiny vignettes, and figured they would be right up my street. Unfortunately I found plodding through Ficciones to be utterly mind-numbing, a style akin to reading a textbook on metaphysics, with pointless asides and deviations about nonsensical figures and oh god get to the bloody point. I see praise wash up on his shores like crates of whiskey after a propitious sinking, but mine is his style not.

The other disappointment from the to-read pile was Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, though I feel I was rather more to blame for it failing to land. The entire premise of the book was interesting enough for me to keep reading to the end, but too much of the content was lost on me for a lack of knowledge of Indian deities.

The final book which I’d have to say I really regret reading was the programming book Head First Design Patterns. The content is all solid, but the style in which it is presented just isn’t me. Instead of obtuse non-real-world examples it felt like they shoe-horned in some better non-real-world examples and then proceed to lay it on thick. So many asides and cutsey comics and conversations between non-existent people and not enough plain text. I don’t mind a few bullet point summaries and diagrams, but when that’s the main bulk of the text, it makes navigating what’s important to read only more difficult!

2019 in Review

By Fips

On 31st December 2019

In Real Life™, That Was

Another year, and time again to look back over 12 months of consumed media. Following on from 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, here’s another summary of what I’ve been reading, watching and playing over the past year.

Summary

PC games played: numerous

Best PC games: Abzü, Overcooked 1/2, Risk of Rain, Firewatch, Battalion 1944, We Were Here Too, Hard West

Worst PC games: Prison Architect, Lethis – Path of Progress, Rage, A Story About My Uncle, The Last Express

Board games played: 41 (81 plays)

Best board games: Decrypto, In the Year of the Dragon, Unfinished Case of Holmes, Codenames: Duet

Worst board games: Sherlock: Whereabouts Unknown, The Mind

Films watched: 41

Best films: Her, Hunger, Senna, Doubt, Star Wars, Jurassic Park

Worst films: Suicide Squad, Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Books read: 48

Best books: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion , Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, The Comedians, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor, Bad Science, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Battle Cry of Freedom

Worst books: Cybercrime And The Darknet, No Need for Geniuses: Revolutionary Science in the Age of the Guillotine

A Year in Gaming

Another twelve months down the line, and not much has changed on the multiplayer gaming front. Counter-Strike: Global Operations remains our go-to watering hole of a Thursday, despite the incessant wave of cheating accusations that accompanies it. I still play Quake Champions occasionally, though it normally takes me a season to play all my placement matches, and so my rank is only visible for a while before it gets reset. Similarly I play the odd game of Heroes of the Storm, but haven’t done any ranked matches this year as far as I can remember.

Apart from the usual suspect, we played a few weeks of Paladins in recent months, which was a nice distraction and fairly enjoyable. It reminded me a blend of Team Fortress 2 with some extra layers of complexity a là Overwatch, but without the same level of seriousness. Certainly there seemed to be lots of players of dubious skill level on there, so maybe once we reach a ranked level, the matches might be more regularly challenging, rather than alternating between walkovers and walkunders. That is if we ever go back to it!

In the background we’ve been playing some Civ VI in the new PBEM variety, two games in parallel thanks to Benno quitting the first one before it had been set up! With Tesh’s rash exit from the second game, both were soon down to three players, so we’ve been progressing fairly fast, and the new cloud save system is a vast improvement on sending save files around. I have to say, I’m not particularly enjoying the game though, and it reminds me of how things went in our old games of Civ III; an interesting start until you realise what vital resource you’re lacking, a moment of dispair when you realise all the iron is in your neighbour’s back yard, then someone quits and we start again. I’m pretty much just clicking through my turns waiting for the games to end, though it could still take some time. But I’ll probably write something about that separately.

For solo gaming, I did squeeze in a few interesting titles this year. Abzü and Firewarch stand out for being somewhat less ordinary, I suppose basically both of them pure exploratory adventure games, the latter even carrying the moniker of a ’walking simulator’. Relaxing, intriguing, beautiful to behold, both offer a short diversion of a few hours that doesn’t overstay its welcome and definitely places a different slant on what you expect of a computer game. Another game of a similar ilk I tried was A Story About My Uncle, which was however more of a freaky platformer and fell rather flat with me.

A few more worthwhile mentions for the year: Hard West is an XCOM-style tactical shooter set in the American west, with several short campaigns which are interesting enough in their own right, and only consist of a few short missions. An enjoyable game, even if I didn’t get particularly far in it. Risk of Rain was a fun multiplayer roguelike platformer, which had us struggling to beat it the few evenings it appeared on the menu. Quick to pick up and play, with that ’oh just one more try!’ that comes with failure in roguelikes. Battalion 1944 scratches the itch that Day of Defeat left, and is actually a pretty competent shooter in its own right, though it has some very annoying movement mechanics that slightly detract from my enjoyment. We Were Here Too, the sequel to a puzzle game I think I reviewed here some years back, was a pretty straightforward but nevertheless enjoyable escape room relying on asymmetric knowledge, where communication is the key, as well as a bit of lateral thinking. And finally I can’t leave 2019 without mentioning the Overcooked games, which Ric introduced me to in spring, and which Steffi became addicted to and had us spending many an evening finely honing our tactics to unlock an elusive fourth star. It was actually quite impressive how we would barely scrape enough points to clear the three-star requirement, and yet we’d practice and practice until we could jump the four-star hurdle which was twice as high. Certainly helped being able to stream this to the TV in the lounge and play it on a controller.

Didn’t play any particularly terrible games this year, but one vague disappointment was trying to play through The Last Express. It’s one of those overlooked gems from the mid/late 90s, with a unique art style and ambitious gameplay, an adventure with real-time elements and multiple different endings. I imagine if I’d played it at the time, I’d have had the patience (and the boredom!) to explore every nook and cranny, trying to get through every ending, and never give up, but today I’m just too impatient and we couldn’t get into it at all.

A Year in Boardgaming

It hasn’t been a particularly great year for us in boardgaming with only 81 plays, certainly on the lower end for us, and there hasn’t really been very much new in all that. The Exit Games series remains one of Steffi’s favourites, though I have to say I’ve played enough now that I’m not really excited by the prospect of any more. We’ve also played a fair number of other games of a similar ilk, and whilst some of them at least offer slightly different challenges, with many using an app so you have to enter the answers in a more detailed way than you can get with a three-digit code, there are still only so many ways you can hide a solution in a box of bits.

Still, we did see a few new games to the table this year. We had a lot of fun with two party-esque games in Codenames: Duet and Decrypto. The former is just a slight tweak on the earlier version, but I think makes the game more enjoyable overall; instead of playing in two teams against one another, you play in two teams cooperatively, with everyone being responsible for both making and guessing clues. Certainly worked for us. Decrypto on the other hand relies on teams of players communicating codes to one another using a common ’codebook’. But the other team always gets to hear the code too, and must try to intercept the message, so players not only have to come up with ever new clues for their partners, but also work out what the cryptic clues their opponents are giving could mean. It’s fairly easy to put together your own version to try out too!

A short mention to The Quacks of Quedlinburg which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2018. While a fun little push-your-luck game, I’m hard pressed to understand how it was the Kennerspiel, nor really how it won at all. We played it with 4 players and it felt like it wasn’t really designed well for that number, with the starting two players able to capitalise on the cheaper chits and the other players then locked out of certain tactics. Otherwise the game was basically like an elaborate game of Pontoon, each player holding a bag and deciding whether to keep drawing or hold their current scores – twist or stick?!

There wasn’t really anything that I didn’t enjoy playing this year. We had a few lacklustre escape room games, both from Exit games series and others, but they’re generally one-off games which still have some entertainment value and don’t overlast their welcome. One game we’ve started playing as a filler is The Mind, which I really can’t rate and always feel is a bit of a waste of time. Basically 100 cards in total, starting off with each player getting one, then without communicating they have to play them in ascending order; then the round repeats, each player getting two cards etc. There are a few rules with lives and special abilities, but this is a game you could easily play with a pack of regular playing games and is basically a game of "can you all count together in your heads at the same speed?" Yawn.

Another game I have to mention and I’m dead on the fence about is Detective. It’s pushing a bit really to describe it as a game: essentially the players take on the role of detectives and have to solve five cases. Each case has a stack of cards which the team can explore, plus there’s a detailed app database containing extra info on lots of characters and events in the game, and some puzzles even require a bit of Googling to find the answer. You then decide when you think you’ve got enough info to solve the case, and the app takes you through a few questions and tells you your score. Each case is unique, but they are all somehow interconnected, with the same characters and locations reappearing. What’s not to like? Well, for one thing the game comes with a board, different characters, some silly tokens and really a whole load of guff which is just absolutely unnecessary. There’s a board just for the sake of having a board which is supposed to indicate where the investigation team currently is, and moving around costs time, but quite frankly that makes no sense. Sure, it’s important to keep track of time, and I can see that there has to be a ’currency’ of sorts to force players to make decisions about how much to research or what leads to follow, but then each investigator has a certain number of ’special ability’ chips which only they can use at a certain time. But why? It just adds pointless cruft to the game, where all the fun comes from theorising, putting the pieces of the puzzle together, working out the who, what, where and why. Where’s the fun in not being able to read the back of a card because computer specialist John already looked at the back of a different card? The other major criticism is the way the time pressure in the game works: it’s fairly straightforward in principle, you have for example three days to solve the case, each day has 8 hours, and each lead you follow will cost a certain amount of time. But you don’t know how much time, and often the ’story’ has stupid things like traffic jams costing you extra hours all because… reasons! We’ve done three of the cases so far, and while the first felt too easy (maybe a nice introduction?) we completely failed the second two. I hope we return to it, because the actual story is very interesting and feels well constructed, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wholeheartedly recommend it.

A Year in Cinema

Although we haven’t kept it up quite as religiously, Tuesday evening remains film night and we watched about 40 this year. A few films I hadn’t seen before stuck out, as well as a few rewatches.

Her with Joaquin Phoenix was fantastic, and I found it really interesting how the perception of talking to an intelligent AI massively reminded me of the uncorporeal minds of the early internet, back when cyberspace really felt like something distinct and separate from the real world, where other people were faceless intelligences in the void. The main character’s connection to his AI reminded me of some of my early experiences with people on the fledgling internet, people I would never see, never meet, and could only engage with through words.

On a less upbeat note, we watched Hunger about Bobby Sands and the Maze hunger strikes. It’s not a film I’d particularly recommend, decent acting and cinematography notwithstanding, as there isn’t really much substance to it that you don’t already know (if you know about the events). Nevertheless I found it particularly interesting to see how allergically Steffi reacted to the inmates’ decisions, a very visceral inability to see things from their perspective.

One film I enjoyed while Steffi was away one evening was the documentary of Senna. The first thing I ever heard about Senna was probably when he died, and remember the funeral in Brazil being broadcast on TV, probably on news reports, though at that stage I hadn’t really watched any F1 races and had only otherwise heard of Mansell. The film was an interesting look at his life, the controversies, the rivalries and the sport of F1 in general in the late 80s/early 90s.

Another dramatic outing which had some extremely good acting was Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. There isn’t really very much in the way of ’action’, being based on a play, but it is not a surprise that all four main actors were nominated for an Oscar.

A couple of films I rewatched this year, just because they happened to be on telly, but which reminded me of how good they are, were the original Star Wars and Jurassic Park. Yes, Star Wars is relatively cheesy, yes it has some god-awful dialogue and dated cinematics, but the overarching storyline is simply good. The few plot holes can easily be put down to dramatic licence, almost everything in it makes sense within the universe Lucas created, and the result is a solid and enjoyable opener to the saga which stands alone in its own right and remains entirely watchable today. I already ranted about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in another thread, but even trying to judge the films in their own right, which is obviously impossible, I’m not sure A New Hope comes off any worse for its age. I don’t think you could say the same about the moneymaker.

Jurassic Park is a similarly well constructed story. Watching it with a particular eye to the scriptwriting, it’s amazing how effortlessly the characters are introduced. The first few scenes lay the groundwork about who everyone is without any exposition, any uncharacteristic or irrational moments, and sow the seeds which will be harvested by the end of the film. Simplicity like that takes a lot of work, even if you only went to watch the film for the dinosaurs. The special effects are also still decent, I think the film was made just early enough to avoid the early wave of terrible CGI, but late enough that it stands up cinematographically.

In terms of stinkers, we sadly watched quite a few this year. Two comic book films stood out as being particularly awful, with Suicide Squad quite possibly winning my award for most pointless comic book film I’m seen to date. No drama, no character development, too many minor characters who had no purpose, exposition slapped on like it was directed at retards, there was nothing to like about this film beyond Harley Quinn (who was admittedly excellent). Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t quite as awful, but had absolutely none of the drama of Nolan’s Batman films, none of the positivity of Reeve’s Superman, and Batman beat Superman (FFS!)

A Year in Books

I managed to smash previous records with more than 15,000 pages read this year and nearly a book a week. Maybe I should actually make that a target for 2020?

Among the hits for this year was an interesting work on psychology and morality entitled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Not sure where I got the recommendation, but it’s a really fascinating look at how we consider questions of morality, how certain aspects can be measured on different axes, and where for example people on the right and left of the political spectrum differ is generally in how these axes are weighted and/or how they are interpreted, but a lot more binds the two together than separates them. Indeed, two things become clear from his thesis: that most decisions we make of a moral nature are first made, then justified (i.e. we feel something is wrong, and only later when asked to justify it do we come up with reasons, which generally don’t make any sense – cup of Brexit anyone?), and that today’s politically divided societies have more to do with people not talking to one another, than with actual radical differencies, i.e. things feel more polarised today because of social media echo chambers, rather than our views becoming radically different.

On a more upbeat and positivistic note, I finally got around to reading Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, a look at how computer games successfully manage to do what we in society really need to learn from. Some of what the book covers is a bit wayward and comes from her research work, but a lot of the core message is sound and has very interesting implications for everyday life. Nothing much of it is new, but the book summarises it fairly succinctly: gaming succeeds because it rewards achievement, binds people together, creates a sense of accomplishment, teaches new skills, etc. A bit dated now, but worth a perusal (or reading a summary) nevertheless.

On the history front, I continued my Roman history trip with SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. I understand she’s something of a TV personality as well? The book is a brief overview of Roman society, rather than a blow-by-blow look at events, and I found it to be very balanced, despite many decrying too much conjecture.

Another history gap I tried to fill this year was in reading two books I’ve had on my list probably since Dublin – i.e. for more than a decade! – those being Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Battle Cry of Freedom. The first is an amazingly sad history of what can only really be called the genocide of the native American tribes, showing how different tribes reacted in different ways, and the result in each and every instance was expropriation, exploitation, maltreatment and/or eradication. A very depressing chapter of history, from which no lessons have really been learned as far as I can see. The second is a detailed account of the American Civil War, which I knew pretty much nothing about beyond a few western films. Aside from the course of the war itself, it’s fascinating to look at how the issue of slavery was at once the cause of the war, and its ultimate end, without ever actually being the casus belli. Similarly mindblowing how the Democratic Party remained officially opposed to the 13th Amendment even after the war as "unwise, impolitic, cruel and unworthy of the support of civilized people". Such an enlightened heritage!

A couple of books with a slightly sciency/political bent tickled me this year. This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor is more amusing than enlightening, but it certainly had some eye-opening passages about how health care is actually delivered in the UK, as opposed to how it is perceived. At once hilarious and terrifying. Bad Science on the other hand is a more engaging and sober look mostly at how science is portrayed in the media, and the concomitant problems that brings. Ben Goldacre wrote (writes?) a column for the Guardian and a blog of the same name, usually highlighting badly reported findings and the like, and this book is just a more in-depth exposition of a few of those topics. Pretty much nothing unexpected in there, but it’s still maddening when you see the kinds of rigorous argument that can be arrayed against the most insidious of lies, and yet still fail to land in the minds of the converted. It reminded me of both The Righteous Mind (above) and Thinking Fast and Slow (also highly recommended) which I read some years back. Goldacre’s ultimate message seemt all the more realistic/pessimistic for it.

I didn’t seem to read too much fiction this year, at least not much I could unreservedly recommend. The longest book of the year was the nearly 1000-page Der Schwarm by Franz Schätzing, which while certainly interesting, read too much like a silly Roland Emmerich film and overstayed its welcome a bit. The best on my list was probably The Comedians, just another classic from probably my favourite author. So much depth in so little material, truly refined, his books are only short but pack so much of the human experience into so far words. I also read his England Made Me this year, and it goes to show how much he developed as an author over the years. The lack of plot in the latter book was no different to the former, but the characters were soulless in comparison.

Two books get my stinker of the year award. The first is No Need for Geniuses: Revolutionary Science in the Age of the Guillotine by Steve Jones, who normally writes pretty interesting popular science books. But I couldn’t really see any purpose to this book, it’s just a collection of small vignettes which may or may not have some relation to the French revolution, but generally didn’t. Jones isn’t a historian and it clearly isn’t his suit.

But hands down the worst book of the year goes to Cybercrime and the Darknet. One of those books my dad picked up on the cheap somewhere, he read it first, probably learned a few things, and sent it to me thinking I’d be interested. And oh my god, what a badly hashed together mess! I don’t wanna go hating on the author, she generally writes books for kids which I’m sure are perfectly fit to purpose, and maybe if you know absolutely nothing about the internet, then you could learn a few things from this book. But otherwise, everything about it was pathetic, and worse. It was like an undergraduate essay, written with an eye on the word count, trying to squeeze in footnotes which aren’t required (and missing ones which are absolutely vital). It was journalistic to the point of maddening, always looking at individual instances and extrapolating to general rules, with whole chapters dedicated to theorising about things that may/may not have happened and showing how that is the way of the internet… unless it isn’t. She peppers the text with statistics that bear only a passing relation to the subject matter at hand, no explanation, no interrogation, they’re just left hanging in the air as if self-evidently supporting her thesis (Goldacre would’ve torn her a new one). I don’t think I’ve ever facepalmed so many times in 150 pages. If she’d been an undergrad, I’d have given it back and had her re-write it. But she already has a degree – from Cambridge no less! – and works at a fucking university. I’ll retire to Bedlam.

2018 in Review

By Fips

On 31st December 2018

In Real Life™, That Was

To keep up an ancient tradition, I figured I’ll keep up my review of the past twelve months in consumed media goods. So following on from 2015, 2016 and 2017, the first wrap-up on the new forums! (I normally draught these things and write them over a series of days, but since this software doesn’t seem to offer draughts, I’ve penned this in one sitting and it’s probably riddled with typos. 🙂 )

Summary

PC games played: numerous

Best PC games: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, HELLDIVERS, Transistor, Quake Champions, Bomber Crew

Worst PC games: Stardew Valley, any Battle Royale title

Board games played: 88 plays (48 games)

Best board games: Exit (series), Azul, Goa, Magic Maze, Terraforming Mars

Worst board games: T.I.M.E. Stories, Naufragos, Sebastian Fitzek Safehouse

Films watched: 47

Best films: Shaun the Sheep: The Movie, A Man for All Seasons, Trainspotting/Requiem for a Dream, Zodiac, They Live, Frost/Nixon

Worst films: Four Brothers, Total Recall,

Books read: 45

Best books: The Selfish Gene, I, Claudius, Memoirs of Hadrian, Master and Commander, Wesley: The Remarkable Story of an Owl

Worst books: The Infinities, JavaScript in Ten Minutes, The Shortest History of Germany

Countries visited: UK, Austria

A Year in Gaming

Just re-reading my round-up from last year and it all sounds very familiar. While I keep meaning to play through some of the many titles littering my Steam list, most of my gaming time involves returning to those few favoured watering holes of old. Or new! This winter I decided to try out the ranked games in Heroes of the Storm and am actually rather enjoying it. Apart from my very first placement match, where I was presumably thrown in with all manner of pillock, the games have been pretty relaxed and now I feel like I’m definitely in the right league for my skill level, the games are fair and rarely snowball, and the draught is usually where the weaknesses show.

Quake Champions has obviously been another highlight these past months. For a few weeks I was fair addicted to it, there’s something about the instant gratification and low downtime that I really enjoy, particularly standard deathmatch or instagib. It was also nice to see my stats improving a little as time went on, gradually my average deaths dropped and my damage increased slightly, though sadly that didn’t actually help my victory stats. I think I had multiple DM games where I’d top the scoreboard in damage, alive time, accuracy and K:D ratio, and still come 7th of 8 players! However I seem to have broken the addiction now, not having played for about a month. I’m sure I’ll return to it to try out CTF, but I dunno if it’ll have the same relish as a few weeks back.

In terms of solo gaming, I did manage to get into a couple of little titles. Bomber Crew was one which showed a lot of promise in the premise, and it definitely scratched an itch which FTL left throbbing all those years ago. Basically you pilot a bomber during the Second World War, taking it out on various types of missions, earning money and slowly gearing up your bird. There are the same kind of calculations to make, with more action stations than crew members, things like fires and broken equipment to repair, ammo to restock, and the same trade-offs in terms of whether you should upgrade the guns or the armour etc. Unfortunately it never got quite as intense as FTL, especially as you could crash your plane and continue with a new one, so progressing through the main storyline ended up becoming a question of grinding repeatable missions to earn enough money so you could afford an all-singing, all-dancing beast on your factory bombing run, and then to hell with the crew after that.

For games with actual storylines, Alan Wake is one I’m still trying to play a bit of but kinda have to force myself to bother. It’s fairly enjoyable in terms of the story – a horror writer with writer’s block ends up living out his nightmares on a holiday retreat, very Steven King – but the game itself just feels a bit dull, gradually bungling through the levels, fighting lack-lustre enemies. In particular I was annoyed that you’re supposed to pick up pages of the novel and discover the story that way, but I’m sure I missed some of them in the levels I’ve played through, and there’s no way I’m going back looking for them. Maybe I’ll carry on at some point, but probably not.

Another I’ve been trying to play recently is Transistor, which is a seriously delicious game from the polish and visuals, but in terms of gameplay just hasn’t really gripped me yet. The skills seem to all chain onto one another, so a bit like Magicka there’s a large number of potential ways to use those abilities, and I’m not really interested in experimenting with them, although I presume that’s a large part of the appeal. The storyline so far has been pretty intriguing though, so maybe I’ll stick at it.

A couple of honourable last mentions: Papers, Please has been on my list for long enough and I finally got around to giving it a run. A couple of hours with it was enough for me, but it’s a superb idea and really well implemented. Sit in your customs booth checking the papers of all people trying to cross the border, gradually ramp up the difficulty, include a few little subplots with certain recurring characters and decisions to make – do you take the bribe and let the criminal through or call security? Brilliant. The only problem I had was that I played it in short bites, half an hour here and there, and since each level adds an extra layer of complexity, I never got proficient enough to feel like I was learning anything. Maybe playing the game in one sitting makes for a more enjoyable experience.

I can’t say that for my final pick, where you definitely feel the improvements as the game continues, and that’s in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes! A really fantastic idea for a game, we played a fair bit over Christmas with Steffi’s parents. Basically only one person can see the screen and has a bomb in front of them with various wires, buttons, batteries, symbols and the rest of it, and the other player(s) in the game have a manual of how that all fits together. The defuser has to explain exactly what they see in front of them, while the others have to work out what the defuser has to do, which wires to cut, which buttons to press etc. At the beginning you’re figuring out how to defuse a single module with loads of time, but gradually you get familiar with how they work and so the time starts ramping up, the number of mistakes you’re allowed is reduced, and we’ve got to the stage now where there are additional elements the defuser has to attend to to stop the thing going off. For a family game it was probably a bit too complex, and certainly gave Steffi’s parents headaches, but it actually helped in a way that the game is only in English, as some of the modules are designed to cause confusion in what information you give, but the homophones and potential misunderstandings are lost when you’re using German pronunciation. I guess Steffi and I will soldier on with the game as a twosome, but I may be roping in you guys to help when it gets really hard!

I didn’t really play any stinkers this year, but the one thing that just doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest is this whole Battle Royale fad. I already wrote about that in another post, but whichever version we’re talking about, whether Fortnite, Blops IV or the shitty CS:GO version, I find the whole concept boring. The scale of those games is nice, the idea of large battles certainly appeals to me (and I always thought it’d be cool to have a big 100 vs 100 on something like Operation Flashpoint), but Battle Royale is more like a big game of hide and loot. I can’t be arsed opening boxes to find guns, especially not opening ten boxes to still have nothing more than a shitty pistol. I don’t get any real sense of achievement for killing someone, in comparison to say vanilla CS or Quake, so there really isn’t much left to appeal. The recent CS:GO version feels like a particular waste of time, we’ve won a few rounds on there and most of the time you’re still sporting a pistol with three bullets at the end. Just not my flavour at all.

Finally, a game which I thought I’d take a look at and almost immediately gave up on for the sheer time-sink factor was Stardew Valley. I thought it might be a nice relaxing "farming sim" of types, but no, it’s an entire microcosm you could probably spend hundreds of hours in and still be none the wiser. I’m sure it’s amazing if you’ve the time to kill, but I don’t.

A Year in Boardgaming

Back to the analogue world and we spent about the same amount of time around the table as usual. Most of our gaming has been relatively light, though we did try out a few heavier games, including some real stinkers.

First up has to be the Exit Games series I mentioned last year. I think we’ve now played all of these, at least all which aren’t ranked ’easy’, going through them with different people. For a short little adventure which takes about an hour to ninety minutes all in one small box, you really can’t knock them. The only couple of criticisms I would have is that you’re supposed to ’destroy’ the contents when you play it, which is totally unnecessary and really just serves to waste paper and force you to buy the game new. In fact we just photocopy the few things you’re supposed to cut up and then pass the games on to friends when we’re finished. The other is that the clues can get fairly samey, which is understandable enough, but even within the same game sometimes they rely too heavily on a certain mechanism.

Another light game, and this year’s Spiel des Jahres, was Azul. Dead simple to play, I’d say fairly similar to Splendor, it’s one you can break out with just about anyone and they’ll soon get a feel for it. I don’t think it’s particularly strategic, particularly with four players there seems to be a lot of randomness to the scoring, but for a quick starter or as a family game, I can’t knock it.

In terms of heavier titles, we got around to playing the two games I bought alongside Caverna last year. One of those was Goa, which felt a bit like a light version Puerto Rico. Instead of trading goods back to the Old World for points, you ship them back to upgrade your skills, and like most games of that ilk you always run out of turns before you can really achieve what you wanted. There’s also a nice auctioning phase at the beginning of each round to add some player interaction which is kinda missing from Puerto Rico.

Another heavy title is one currently ranked very highly at BGG and that’s Terraforming Mars. We only played it once, so we were kinda just getting familiar with the rules after the first playthrough, but I can certainly see the appeal. Most of the game is based around playing out unique cards, similar to something like Seasons, so it’s a lot about maximising your hand to get the most out of your cards, and each player is playing their own game to some extent. But what was particularly cool is that there are some basic parameters for Mars itself which the players can influence through their actions and which affect everyone equally, such as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. In order to play your card, you might need the oxygen content to rise to X, but if that happens, another player won’t be able to play card Y. Obviously that means you need to be familiar with what’s available in the deck to really plan your strategy well, but otherwise that meant it was a nice mix between complex solitaire and interactive strategy title.

I think my favourite new game of the year was a surprising coop game our friends borrowed from the library called Magic Maze. Super simple, four players control four mice, directing them around a maze where they have to collect their weapons and get out of the labyrinth before the time runs out (if memory serves, maybe the goal was described differently). Every player can move every mouse at any time, the trick being however that the players can only move in one direction (e.g. only south, only north) and they cannot communicate! The maze itself is modular, being built up of smaller cards which add on as the mice explore the boundaries. The game then gets more complex as you work your way through the mazes, but that’s all there is to it in principle, and it’s surprisingly challenging and fun at the same time. Since the goal is almost always obvious, you don’t need to communicate (there are a few ’breaks’ where it’s allowed), but because you’re concentrating on four different mice, it’s easy to overlook the fact that everyone is waiting for you to move that one mouse one bastard square north!

Sadly, there were also a few tripe games this year. We went to our local little gaming convention again in winter and got a few things to the table, one being Sebastian Fitzek Safehouse. Having his name on the front (German thriller author) probably doubled the game’s price, because the game itself was pretty awful. It was like a cut-down and weak game of canasta against the clock, ostensibly you’re running through town being chased by a murderer and have to make it back to the safehouse before he does, and… yawn. Totally forgettable.

Another which was disappointing but for other reasons was the other game I’d bought together with Caverna, called Naufragos (or Castaways). Basically it sounded like a neat coop survival game, the premise being similar to Robinson Crusoe et al, where you’re stranded on a desert island and have to work together to escape. Fair idea for a game, but the execution was just terrible. First of all, the rules were so badly written my copy came with a second revamped versiom, and even they were so incoherent I had watch a video online to work out how to set the damn game up. But I could overlook that if at least the game mechanics had been solid. The game was basically divided into two halves, one part was kinda organising, the second part adventuring. The large island was divided into three parts, and the idea was that by adventuring through the deck, you would progress from the beach, through the interior, to the uplands from where you could spot ships or planes and get rescued, something along those lines. But the adventure cards were 90% of the time either ’X happens to you’, or ’roll a dice, if you get a 6 X happens to you’. There was no way to actually plan ahead or make proper decisions, and sometimes you’d just find yourself rolling over and over again just to survive. And that was the ’exciting’ bit of the game! The bookkeeping part sounded all well and good, placing workers on the board to harvest food, build shelters, chop wood, tend to the campfire, all things which made sense for the theme and should’ve been fleshed out more. Unfortunately it basically meant that one/two people simply spent their entire time moving wood from the forest to the basket and from the basket to the building site/campfire, while the other players rolled their way through a deck of cards. Yay. Given the fact that I couldn’t follow the rules, I couldn’t even recommend it as a light family game, it was way too dense for that, yet far too boring for adults.

But the most pathetic game of the year goes hands down to T.I.M.E. Stories! I am seriously at a loss as to how this game can be currently ranked 60th on BGG. We’d seen the name a few times and heard a few things about it, so when a colleague at work sold his copy, I thought it’d be worth a whirl. I suppose you could call the game a ’system’, where each mission is a deck of cards which uses the basic components of the game. There is no real board per se, but rather you travel back in time, taking on the bodies of four ’hosts’ in the past, each with their own special abilities/traits, and then explore a location to find whatever it is you’re supposed to fix. In the mission in the main game, you’re back in a French asylum in the early twentieth century investigating the disappearance of some patients. We’d read the one major criticism, that you generally fail on your first attempt(s) and have to start again and go through the same steps, but that didn’t sound that bad until we actually had to do it ourselves. Honestly, the entire concept of the game seems to be that you’re to work your way through each location through trial and error, finding out what you’re supposed to do in what order. That’s it. There’s no logic to your choices, no way of knowing or even guessing beforehand whether what you’re doing is correct, you just plough on through and find out which cards you need to look at, which rooms to visit and what to ignore. Boring as sin! There was one fairly decent puzzle in our mission, but even that we failed to crack because we just didn’t expect there to be anything like that as the rest of the game had been so asinine. And at full price it would’ve cost something like €50 for ONE adventure! Each expansion costs another €25 or something daft, so in comparison to one of those Exit games mentioned above, it just doesn’t bear even the slightest comparison. Obviously a lot of people have found something enjoyable about this title, or it wouldn’t be ranked so highly, but for me it felt like a waste of time and money, and I’m only glad I didn’t pay full price for it!

A Year in Cinema

After last year’s pitiful 16 films, this year’s haul of 47 films looks very healthy indeed. Steffi and I have made Tuesdays our film night, and we take turns choosing a title to watch. She’s a big Marvel fan, so we’ve gobbled up most of that series so far.

Just to pick some of the highlights, we saw Frost/Nixon earlier in the year, about the interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon following his resignation and withdrawal from public life. Obviously a pretty slow film, and with a fair amount of dramatic leniency, it was still really interesting to watch and the two main actors did an awesome job, especially in trying to mimic their ways of speaking.

We had a bit of a drug-themed season with both Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting, both really cool films for different reasons. Requiem is pretty hard-hitting, but beautifully put together cinematographically, its acts divided into different seasons with a chilling soundtrack, I loved how it explored the nature of drug abuse and addiction from different perspectives. Trainspotting is obviously an entirely different kettle of fish. I saw it years ago, and it scores high on the nostalgia points for the fantastic soundtrack, but it has a much more up-beat vibe than Requiem while still being a pretty dire portrayal of the dangers of addiction.

Sticking on the serious side, I watched Zodiac for research purposes, the Fincher film about the Zodiac killer in California, one of those uncaught serial murderers of which America has so many. The fact that the resolution to this story is known from the outset is what made it interesting to watch from my perspective, how to build suspense and tension when the information is already out in the open. I only felt the film was a bit on the long side, since it covers the case from three different perspectives over a period of several decades.

A Man for All Seasons is a 60s film which has I think been on my "to watch" list since Dr Holland mentioned it in an English class. Basically about Thomas More and his inability to accept Henry VIII’s divorce on account of his religious conviction, it’s an excellent period drama with some awesome performances, showing its clear theatrical origins. A slow watch, but very enjoyable.

Slightly more tongue-in-cheek, we also watched They Live this year, an 80s Carpenter sci-fi thriller about aliens who have infiltrated society and the down-and-out hobo who saves the world. It’s suitably cliched to be something of a bubble-gum film, but there are a few scenes which really make the film memorably stand out. Definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before.

The major disappointment of the year was hands down the 2012 Total Recall remake. I’m a big fan of the original, and I have nothing against a remake adding a new twist to the story or bringing something fresh, or even just a straight remake of the original movie with a few fresh ideas. But no, they managed none of the above. They rewrote the story but placed it in a world even more absurd than the original, taking the over-the-top characters and trying to play them seriously, and yet somehow even less convincingly. It’s not really Total Recall, and it doesn’t try hard enough to be something new either, so about the only moments in the film which end up being enjoyable are those which directly cite the original (e.g. three-breasted prostitutes and exploding head masks).

But Total Recall gets points for at least trying. Scraping the bottom of the barrel was Four Brothers, a film which had me muttering "fucking Americans" under my breath for about two hours. Loud, stupid, unrealistic, violent, vigilantist bullshit. Somewhat akin to Pain & Gain, I guess this is one Benno would enjoy!

A Year in Books

I managed to munch through another 45 books this year, roughly on a par with previous years for number of pages. One theme recently seems to be an interest in Roman history, with two of my favourites being I, Claudius and Memoirs of Hadrian, two extremely well researched and fascinating books written from the perspectives of the two emperors, the first as a kind of history of the Julio-Claudians, the second in the form of a letter to Marcus Aurelius. Both are fairly dense to read, not exactly page-turners, but very rewarding.

Slightly more exciting perhaps was Master and Commander, the first book in Patrick O’Briain’s nautical series which was turned into the film with Russel Crowe. It’s often compared to the Sharpe series in terms of being a series of multiple books on an English hero in the Napoleonic Wars, but judging from this first volume that’s pretty much where the comparison ends. Based on historical events, the book goes into some nauseating detail about ship’s rigging and the like, which leaves your head spinning if you’re trying to follow along, but otherwise it was a highly enjoyable read and is probably a rewarding series.

In terms of non-fiction, I’ve read a fairly eclectic mix again, though a couple are worth mentioning. The Selfish Gene is one of those classics of evolution which seems just as important to read today as on its publication in 1976, looking at evolution from the perspective of the gene rather than the organism. It’s the kind of thing that is barely even touched on in schools but really deserves more consideration. I’m currently reading The Righteous Mind which is more about moral psychology, but interestingly covers some of the same topics from the angle of the group.

Another random read, but one which pleasantly surprised me, was Wesley: The Story of a Remarkable Owl, recommended to me I believe because I read Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? last year. Basically this short memoir is the story of an owl taken in by the author, and their relationship together over the course of nearly two decades. The author turns from surrogate mother to life partner for the owl, and becomes a mass murderer of mice for good measure in the process. While not scientifically written, there are tons of fascinating titbits and anecdotes, along with touching observational insights.

A weird book I read this year was The Shortest History of Germany. One of Steffi’s colleagues leant it to her to hear her opinion, but she didn’t have any time so I gobbled it down one weekend. While there’s nothing particularly surprising about what you’d find in there, it’s seriously amazing how twisted the agenda is inside. Basically he puts forward the theory that any time Germany’s east gets the upper hand, things go awry. Everything west of the Elbe is okay, between Elbe and Rhine suitably westernised under Roman influence, but everything else is danger zone. That’s where the Prussians came from, the Nazis, the Stasi and now the AfD. Maybe an interesting gedankenexperiment for some folks, but it seems odd coming in a book with such an innocuous title. Maybe the author’s just a raging Catholic, I can’t tell.

My worst book of the year however has to go to The Infinities. Not sure where I got the recommendation, but I wish I knew so I could block them in future! The plot sounded interesting enough – a man lies at death’s door when his family flock around him, as do the Greek gods, the perfect setup for some antics and mischief – but basically nothing at all happens of any consequence. I ploughed through it because it’s short enough my frustration was never bigger than my ambition for finishing it, but the taste in my mouth never got any sweeter. I guess Banville is one of those writers who are praised for their elegant prose by other thumb-sucking navel-gazers but who remain beyond comprehension for ordinary folks. And to be honest I didn’t even find his writing worthy of a letter home.