Final Destination may be my favorite Horror Franchise of All Time

As absurd as it is to believe that humans could intuit some sort of grand design, such premises are irresistible in movies, where even stinkers like Nicolas Cage’s Next can be engaging. The Final Destination series has two great premises: A) What if you could cheat Death? and B) What if by cheating Death you merely bought scant time alongside a hefty penalty? In the original Final Destination, Devon Sawa’s Alex is treated to a premonition of his impending demise, which allows him to save himself and a handful of his doomed acquaintances… initially anyway.

You would have a hard time naming many mainstream films that deal with ideas as unsettling as predeterminism—and that’s before you begin to ponder what, exactly, Death is and whether or not there’s an equal and opposite force that wanted Alex and company to live. Perhaps his premonition was merely a supernatural glitch—a bug in the cosmic code. Wisely, the series has yet to ruin its emergent questions with answers, although reports say the next installment will flesh out Tony Todd’s undertaker character, presumably because Hollywood screenwriters are allergic to mystique.

Great premises can only take you so far, but the series exhibits fine execution as well. Whenever Death’s preferred design fails, it devises Rube Goldberg levels of wildly entertaining events to correct its mistakes. The fourth film in the series, idiotically named The Final Destination, is the worst of the bunch with its SyFy levels of production value, but even it features a white supremacist getting dragged down the street by his own vehicle while somehow setting himself on fire in the process. If that’s the worst you have to offer, you’ve got yourself a solid franchise. Incidentally, my favorite Final Destination is the most recent entry despite some rather stupid character decisions, which is notable because there’s no other franchise in horror movie history that manged to save the best for last.

The formula is so novel, it holds up the weight of five films with ease. In the opening reel, our hero must find him or herself dying in a horrible accident that kills dozens if not hundreds of innocent bystanders. Moments later, the hero will wake up to find it was a bonafide premonition of the future, a future which can be changed. Unfortunately, it won’t be long before the large cast of expendable characters learn that Death will come back for them with a vengeance. What’s interesting about the formula is the filmmakers keep tweaking it with new rules that don’t conflict with the old ones.

In the first film, the principal characters learn that Death comes back for them in the order they were originally supposed to die, picking them off one by one like an invisible slasher. The second film reveals that Death, if unable to carry out its hit list forward, will work backwards (this one is the least logical Destination film because its heroine has multiple premonitions for no other reason than it’s convenient to the messy plot, but overall it may very well be the most entertaining). The third outing seems to suggest Death has at least enough consciousness to taunt its victims with photographic clues of their demises. The fourth expands the mythology in no discernible way at all, which is probably for the best considering it’s the least imaginative entry. And the fifth movie introduces the most radical expansion to the rules to date: Death will give you a pass if you willingly take someone else’s life. This leads to a boringly routine climax (a Final Destination movie really didn’t need a shootout scene), but also the most satisfying twist ending ever put to film.

Yeah, I said it. Eat your heart out, Shyamalan.

There’s a lot of silly stuff in these movies, most of it intended, which compliments the heavier implications. Nothing is more thrilling than cheating Death. Unfortunately, Death always wins in the end, it just so rarely does in the movies.

Gruelgo X-Mas 2023! Revenge of the Trees!

Here’s the first few panels of my latest comic… in true Gruelgo fashion, I’ve forgotten to post the holiday themed comic until (checks calendar) four days after Christmas! I’ve included the links where you can read the whole thing. Preferably you’ll be on a desktop computer or large tablet (boomer) and check out the original formatting at Gruelgo.com because that’s the full-page version. Alternatively, all the links below have been formatted to better fit mobile devices for all you near-sighted millennials!

Maven the Death Mage

I’m working on a series of fantasy stories about a death mage named Maven.

Last summer, the mother of all trees fell on my house during the pappy of all storms. During that week of intermittent power and zero internet service, I found myself daydreaming about a monster who crawls out from underneath a fallen tree and terrifies a village. How did the monster get there in the first place? I wondered. More importantly: What kind of hero (or anti-hero) could dispatch it? A day later, I had completed the first draft of a short story called The Fallen Tree.

I’m a simple man. I write what I see.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the death mage and ended up writing two more stories in short order. In the sequel, Master Death Theater (a title that should give you an indication of just how serious the overall tone is), Maven joins a wandering troupe of actors and must use his magic to resurrect their star performer. This one is inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft by way of Stuart Gordon, particularly Re-Animator. Here’s an excerpt:

A caravan of wagons was parked on the beach in a loose circle. A group of performers half-heartedly recited dialogue as they went about washing their clothes in a communal tub.

“Welcome to The Wandering Theatre,” the woman said. “Part of it, anyway. Our fortune teller sleeps during the day and our knife thrower is no doubt lying in an alley somewhere, same as you were.”

“What do you do?” Maven asked.

“I’m like a falconer, only my act involves a bat.” The woman gestured at the cloth sack on her shoulder. “Isabell also sleeps during the day. Come, I want you to meet the lead performer of our troupe.”

The bat keeper walked to a wagon which was more ornate than the rest. She pulled a lever and a pair of mechanical steps dropped down below the door. Maven followed the woman inside. The room smelled of alcohol and death, two things which greatly pleased the mage’s nostrils. A rotund man lying on a bed was the source of both odors.

“Ah,” Maven said, unsurprised.

“We’ll begin auditions for his replacement as soon as we can, but we’re obligated to perform in the royal hall tonight. We believe he drowned in his own vomit.”

“Better than someone else’s,” Maven said, picking up a half empty stein from the bedside table. He swallowed its contents and lifted the dead man’s arm to see how much stiffness had set in. “He died shortly before daybreak. His joints need exercised.”

The bat keeper worked the dead man’s appendages, starting with his toes and working her way up. “You can bring him back?”

“As long as you agree I’m not responsible for anything that happens after his resurrection. And it’s important no one tells him he’s dead.”

“That would break the spell?”

“No, it would only ruin his performance—preoccupied mind and all that.” Maven sat on the bed next to the dead man and parted his lips. He breathed into the actor’s mouth and, with a wooden finger, drew the sigil of resurrection in the air. “Come back to us, friend.”
from Master Death Theater

I’m hoping to get the first story out pretty soon. Whether that means posting it here or submitting it to more traditional markets, I don’t know yet. The rest I plan to shop around, so I’ll keep ya updated on how that goes. Now, if you’ll excuse me… I’ve got some more tales to write.

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving

Let this sink in: it’s been sixteen whole years since Grindhouse premiered in theaters. You got two movies for the price of one: Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, garnished with four fake trailers directed by Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth. After the experiment mildly failed at the box office (it released on Easter weekend of all dates), the movies were regrettably split into individual entities for DVD and VOD. The fake trailers were relegated to the special features section and low resolution YouTube videos.

One of those fake trailers absolutely blew the roof off with laughter: Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which was the horror director’s 2-minute ode to pre-Scream slasher flicks. The audience reaction probably could have tipped the Richter scale in the theater I saw it in. Nothing is more cathartic than a group of strangers laughing at things you ought not laugh at in polite society—and here was a mainstream movie doing it. And now, almost twenty years later, Eli Roth expands the two minutes into approximately ninety.

The movie opens on Thanksgiving day, 2022, as a Plymouth electronics store is about to open its doors for an early Black Friday sale. The rabid shoppers are gathered at the front doors, foaming at the mouths, when a misunderstanding sparks a riot that devolves into Final Destination levels of violent mishaps. Throats get slashed, heads get scalped, and people punch each other’s faces in over the limited supply of discounted waffle irons. Exactly one year later, a killer wearing a John Carver mask begins picking off the shoppers and security personnel responsible for the carnage. It’s up to a group of high school seniors to figure out who the killer is.

The killer’s identity doesn’t really matter and the reveal at the end is not particularly shocking. Eli Roth knows this and the audience should intuit this, too. I don’t think anyone was expecting a clever whodunnit when they purchased their tickets. What you should be expecting instead is an old fashioned slasher that just happens to be made in modern times—not to be confused with a “modern slasher,” which in this day and age is typically about as joyless as… well, getting cooked in an oven alive.

I couldn’t help but think of four other movies while watching this one: Pieces, Blood Rage, Deranged, and William Lustig’s Maniac (which I’m surprised to find I’ve never featured on this blog because it’s a doozy). If any or all of those are your cup of tea, then so is Thanksgiving. Otherwise, avoid it all costs because it’s really not intended for polite society. I must say that Eli Roth feels about 5 to 10% tamer in his depiction of gore as he remakes the fake trailer moments with varying levels of success.

Here’s what I’m thankful for this holiday season: Thanksgiving isn’t Cocaine Bear, which mocked the bygone era of exploitation films instead of embracing the genre. This one’s an honest-to-god slasher flick whose performers play it as straight as Leslie Nielsen did in his best comedies. There’s no winking at the camera and no indication the filmmakers think they’re above this kind of material.

The only characteristic Roth doesn’t nail: the acting isn’t bad at all, actually, and I wish the film stock looked more messed up like its Grindhouse counterpart. Other than that, it’s a fine antidote to the usual holiday offerings.

Missing game features is not a feature

Shortly after Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, a recurring topic on GTA message boards was, “Do you think we will be able to swim in the next one?” There was an aggressive group of players who reached for reasons why the ability to swim in a GTA game was “stupid” and “pointless.” (Never mind the franchise was hugely popular in part because it was seen by many as an “everything simulator.”) One side of the debate casually thought that such a mechanic would be cool. The other side took up arms as if such a suggestion was holy blasphemy, presumably because some people are hyper-defensive of anything they like. (Swimming was indeed introduced in San Andreas, and when Grand Theft Auto 5 released, the very first freeroam activity I engaged in was riding a Sea-Doo straight into the ocean and swimming off of it for no other reason than it was fun. Go figure.)

Similarly, the first time I played Perfect Dark Zero and witnessed the NPC combatants jumping over my bullets in the combat simulator, I logged into internet forums to see if the player-character was also capable of the same gymnastics. Perhaps you’ll notice a pattern emerging in one of the responses: “What are you? A circus clown or something? Why the hell would you want to leap around like a [insert expletive here]?” When Halo 2 released, I asked a forum why the sound design of the guns didn’t pack a satisfying punch on my surround sound system. The sole response was “no.”

More recently, I took to the Steam forums to ask those who had played the Mortal Kombat 1 beta to confirm or deny if there were any functions that relied solely on a right thumbstick (such as using Konsumable or navigating the Krypt in previous titles) because I was frustrated by not being able to play a fighting game solely on a fightstick, which has no right thumbstick. It was clear neither of the responses had actually played the beta, much less read my question past its title, but they had opinions nonetheless. One went so far as to suggest the Mortal Kombat moveset was “never really intended for joysticks…” as if I wasn’t there in the 90s when the first batch of games hit the arcade with—you guessed it—two big ol’ American-style joysticks.

Have you ever been frustrated that the latest racing game doesn’t play nice with that expensive steering wheel you purchased? Well, according to the forum geniuses: that game (it doesn’t matter which game it is, there will be fanatics who blindly defend its oversights) is obviously more of an “arcade racer” and “arcade racers are exclusively designed for gamepads, not steering wheels.” Yet almost ever single racing game I’ve ever seen in the arcade has a steering wheel controller. So why does this community accept “arcade racers” that are uncontrollable by a steering wheel? Rather, why does the part of the community that doesn’t own steering wheels feel the need to voice an opinion on the matter at all?

A current hot topic seems to be: “Why does travel in Starfield rely so much on menus and fast traveling?” Those of us who expected space travel to operate more like No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous have been told exactly why we’re absolute morons for wanting that extra step of immersion that many find boring. I get it. Not everyone has dual flightsticks and a penchant for roleplaying deep space isolation. Not everyone lit up upon hearing Sean Murray’s pre-release promise that if you see a star in No Man’s Sky you can visit it. But I certainly did and so did millions of others. It’s now a genre standard that’s eight years old, set by indie game studios. And while there are definitely assholes on my side of this issue (any issue, really), it seems to me that those who are staunchly aligned against such a mechanic are doing the same thing the anti-swimming GTA players did: reaching for any reason why Starfield is absolute perfection.

(For the record, I have close to 50 hours logged in Starfield as of this writing so I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike it. My disappointment in the lack of tooling around a galaxy has more or less melted in lieu of what the game does right. On the other hand, it does plenty wrong, too, and I suspect the chorus of 9/ and 10/10 reviews are very much on a runaway hype train. Compare it to Baldur’s Gate 3 and you will see it is very much not a next generation title… it’s not even as good as Fallout 4, but I digress.)

We can have it both ways, you know. In fact, previous Bethesda games did just that: gave the player the option to fast travel or travel to a destination in “real time.” (Quotations because the term is relative to its science fictional setting.) Obviously players can’t spend the actual time required to travel to a destination that’s lightyears away, but Elite Dangerous and NMS both found clever ways around those limitations that didn’t require the use of an awkwardly placed loading screen. What I find most hilarious is that the people defending Bethesda’s omission are the ones who got their way and they’re still angry.

They (Still) Live

As I can’t imagine anyone reaching this blog without having already seen They Live before, I play fast and loose with spoilers.

I recently saw They Live as part of a 35th anniversary screening put on by Fathom Events. Oddly enough, it’s not the first time I’ve seen it on a big screen in the 21st century—the last time was at a double feature in a friend’s backyard, projected onto an inflatable screen and paired with Roddy Piper’s vastly inferior (but somewhat entertaining) Hell Comes to Frogtown. As real life political corruption and Joe Schmoe stupidity in the United States reaches hilariously depressing extremes, They Live hits harder than ever before. It could be my generation’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying About Inequality and Learned to Idolize the Wealthy.

I rank John Carpenter movies as follows: The Thing is his best, Escape from New York is stylistically his coolest, and They Live would be his most entertaining if not for the stupendously wild Big Trouble in Little China. Part of the reason They Live is so fun is “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, whose theatrical wrestling background translates into an endearing screen presence that’s simultaneously relatable and larger than life. When he initially discovers aliens have infiltrated and control every level of government, he chuckles in defeat. “It figures it’d be something like this.”

This pessimism comes shortly after he delivers a “I believe in America” speech that would seem contradictory to his character if you don’t detect the indifference in his tone. His only pal, a laid-off steel worker played by Keith David, openly berates the idea of the American dream—he hasn’t seen his family in months because he has to go wherever the scant opportunity to work takes him. The character points out that when the steel companies were in trouble, the workers pulled through for them, but when the workers were in trouble, the executives gave themselves bonuses. “The Golden Rule,” he says, “is he who has the gold makes the rules.” David is easily the most skilled and believable actor in the entire production, at times delivering reams of dialog while Piper mostly plays the silent type.

Midway through the movie, when you would normally expect a boringly routine love interest to be introduced, Carpenter instead pairs his hero with Meg Foster. Foster plays an oddly detached woman who immediately knocks his ass out of a tall window in an attempt to kill him. Later, she shows up to apologize in what appears to be a meet-cute moment. Here’s a detail I’ve never noticed before now: during their reunion, one of the background characters is instructing members of the resistance to attempt to befriend and gain the trust of their enemies as a means of infiltration… which is exactly what Foster is doing to Piper. It reminds me of that part in The Sixth Sense when the boy is explaining that some dead people don’t even realize they’re dead while the camera lingers on Bruce Willis’s face. Another detail my girlfriend pointed out: Meg Foster is the one who led the police to the resistance’s hideout in the first place.

I believe the famous five-minute fight in the alleyway still holds the cinematic record for the longest of its kind. I’ve always thought of it as a welcome indulgence of little import, but this time I reconsidered Carpenter’s intentions. Consider how many lower class men and women are in David’s shoes, helplessly preoccupied with their own struggles to make an honest living in a system they know is rigged. People like that know that hard work isn’t all it takes and yet they work hard anyway so as not to lose any ground. Getting them to release their tenuous grip on the status quo that shuns them would very well require a knockdown, drag-out fight of the caliber exhibited here.

Salient details that are easy to miss: not all the cops in Carpenter’s dystopia are aliens in disguise, but they all serve the elite. And not all of the elite are aliens, either, as greedy humans work with the aliens despite knowing that the endgame will result in a planet that’s uninhabitable for their own species. One of the downtrodden drifters (Buck Flower) from the beginning of the movie finds himself sipping champagne by the end, rubbing elbows with the economic overlords who just ordered the police force to bulldoze his homeless encampment. “We all sell out everyday,” he reasons. “Might as well be on the winning team.”

I haven’t even mentioned the iconic sunglasses. Created by scientists in the resistance, the special sunglasses let the wearers see the world in literal black and white. It turns out every form of mass media and all consumer goods are hypnotizing people to continue consuming, reproducing, and not questioning authority. The satire is sharp, but the metaphors are blunt. You can feel Carpenter’s rage against the inevitably destructive corporate machine oozing out of every pore of the screen.

I see a lot of old genre flicks screened for modern audiences. I love watching these movies with a group of strangers, but a lot of the time they laugh at the movie rather than with it. Curiously, They Live is one of the only times I’ve seen a modern audience laugh strictly at all the right parts. That’s some unusual staying power there.

Screenshots sourced from Movie-screencaps.com.

Starfield: 3 Hours In

Let’s get this out of the way quick: Starfield appears to be a great game and I suspect everyone who’s even a little interested in it should probably try it. So far, all of my complaints are nitpicks. Let this post serve as a spoiler-free indicator of what to expect. I’ll either temper your expectations or kick your hype train into overdrive.

I’d heard two reports that the game was more like “Red Dead Redemption 2 in space” rather than a traditional Bethesda title. My brief time in the game conflicts with that statement. The music of the title screen immediately gave me Skyrim vibes. These vibes strengthened as the game faded into a cutscene that had me expecting one of the characters to say, “Hey, you… you’re finally awake!” Soon after coming into contact with the game’s MacGuffin, your character develops temporary amnesia, at which point the character editor is unlocked as you “remember” who you are, Fallout style.

The character editor has one strength: characters look better than they’ve ever looked in a Bethesda game. Unfortunately, the editor has many weaknesses, too. Recent titles like Street Fighter 6 and Diablo IV offered enough options for me to create fairly accurate replications of Brandon Lee’s The Crow (I don’t know why that’s my go-to character lately). Starfield’s character editor isn’t even close to being robust enough for that kind of detail. It offers you around thirty presets, maybe thirty hairstyles, and lets you change the oddly similar (and oddly familiar) faces within some pretty rigid parameters. Instead of having control over ear height, eye separation, etc., you decide if the preset face is round, square, thin, etc… that’s it.

As someone who has countless hours in No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous (not to mention over a hundred games in my Steam library with the “space” tag), I was disappointed the first time I climbed aboard the starter ship to fly to another planet. There’s a short but rousing cutscene as the ship takes off, but then the game clumsily enters a loading screen. The next thing you know, you’re suddenly in space. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have expected an immersive sim from what could very well be the year’s best seller, but as a staunch fan of seamless ground-to-space transitions, this is my biggest disappointment so far.

Speaking of boundaries, on the first planet I visited after leaving the starting planet, I completed a main objective and was told to go back to my ship to continue the story. I decided to ignore said message and started walking to see if I could find any invisible walls. I set my sights on a distant piece of scenery that was so far removed from my landing spot that I was certain I would reach some sort of invisible wall or at least a warning to turn around. Not only did I not find any such boundaries, I saw a point of interest blip on my radar much farther away than my initial destination. I will experiment on this more when I play again, but so far (and I admit my sample size is relatively small) it looks like the explorable areas of planets might be absolutely huge. Though, I must confess my walk was quite boring.

Having recently played the new System Shock, I feel like I’m in familiar territory: so far, Starfield feels less like a next-gen defining game and more like a highly polished next-gen remake of a previous gen-game. So much of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout’s DNA is in this, which is to be expected and even desired, but some of the Bethesda aspects that have started to show signs of their age are present, too.

At any rate, I am absolutely hyped to play again and spend more time in the combat and checking the dialogue out with NPCs.

I’ll post more thoughts as I progress.

System Shock (2023): A Comprehensive Review

I’ve had a lousy run of games since Street Fighter 6. I don’t mean bad games, but games that don’t match my mood or catch my attention. I’ve grown bored of modern game design and the cliches that come with it. Why do all openworld survivalcraft titles start with a plane/spaceship crash? Why do I constantly find myself distracted by oft recycled game mechanics—and thinking about the games which did them better? Why do so many “freedom of choice” games hold the player’s hand so much? Most of all, why do remakes and remasters tend to suck more often than not?

Which brings me to System Shock, a remake which retains the design philosophy of its 1994 predecessor (I was 11 when it came out so I didn’t have a dedicated gaming rig, and I’m a little more familiar with its sequel). Here’s a game that refuses to hold your hand—on the default difficulty, it doesn’t even pin your current objective. Even if you’re paying attention you may not have any clue as to what to do next. It’s a game that manages to feel fresh by remaining old. There’s no regenerating health, no reliable drip of helpful items to keep you alive, no characters telling you exactly what you should do and where to go next via convenient radio communication. It’s less of a hot rod and more of a painstaking restoration of a classic car.

In the interest of transparency, it should be noted that my favorite flavors are probably space themes and cyberpunk. The original System Shock and its sequel no doubt played a large part in my attraction to that wicked combination. It’s not just me—the series also influenced the Deus Ex, Bioshock, Dead Space, Prey (both of ’em), and Cyberpunk 2077. I’d even argue DOOM 3 got a big dose of inspiration from System Shock as well.

Premise

The story takes place in the year 2072. You play a nameless hacker who’s caught remoting into the servers aboard Citadel, a space station owned by the TriOptimum corporation. In true cyberpunk fashion, the evil megacorp has its own military force which takes you to the station in custody. One of the executives cuts you a deal: deactivate the cybernetic guardrails of Shodan, the super-AI which manages every system within Citadel Station, and he’ll give you the fancy cybernetic implant you desperately once. Soon after you begrudgingly agree, everything at the station goes awry and you awaken from cryonic storage after your implant surgery.

With its newfound freedoms, Shodan fashions itself as a god which begins killing the humans aboard Citadel Station with aspirations of destroying Earth itself. It accomplishes its goals by manufacturing robots, drones, human mutants, and biological weapons. You and your new cybernetic enhancements are the only things standing in the AI’s way.

Level Design

Citadel Station is comprised of around ten levels accessible by numerous elevators and trams, none of which can travel more than three floors, most of which only travel between two. Each level is an absolute maze of dead ends, initially locked doors, and crawlspaces. Stationed throughout each level are security cameras and destructible CPU nodes which determine the amount of security Shodan holds over each level. The more of Shodan’s systems you destroy, the safer the level is because fewer enemies can spawn.

When you initially reach a level, many if not most of the rooms will be locked or blocked in some fashion. You’ll either have to find a key card, find a different route, or solve one of the tile puzzles (more on those later). Even when you’ve entirely cleared the fog of war from a level map, it’s still difficult to find your way around. Although no section or level felt particularly copy-and-pasted, it all started to blend in memory anyway. It feels a bit like a Metroidvania in the amount of backtracking involved, how accomplishing things in one section could clear the way to previously inaccessible sections.

I’m not knocking it for its level design. It just abides by different rules from a different time. Overall, I found it equal parts refreshing and frustrating to get around. The greatest part of the level design is how it looks. The environments aren’t necessarily rendered in AAA graphics, but they’re well ahead of the Kickstarter curve and more than sufficient for enhancing the moody atmosphere. I very much like the way the game looks and, though its layouts have more in common with the maze-like level design of early shooters (think Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which came out mere months earlier), it somehow feels like a lived-in world.

Enemies

The enemy AI hasn’t improved much since the 90s. There’s a reason game developers have long favored zombies, robots, and drones: such enemy types can be forgiven for being stupid. Devs can set them on a simple path and program them to attack the player on sight. They won’t flank, they won’t retreat, and they never devise any plans. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by where they appear, but they’ll never outsmart you. (I don’t think I ever encountered one in a crawlspace, either.)

Eventually you’ll encounter macroscopic viruses that would require a Petri dish the size of a trashcan lid to contain. They can disappear into the environment Predator-style and launch snot rockets that infect you with a biological contaminant, all the while soaking up your precious shotgun ammo. I hated these enemies to the point I almost considered quitting the game. At one point I just started turning around every time I saw one, but no enemy in the game can be evaded forever.

Once I found the laser rapier (essentially a lightsaber), I was eager to try it on the stubborn viruses… and then I only encountered ranged drones and other flying enemies which stayed well out of reach of my newfound melee weapon for the rest of the level. Having said that, the laser rapier and the assault rifle make the game a lot more fun the deeper you get into it.

Inventory Management

The inventory system and the mechanics that govern it were just as peculiar in the 90s as they are today. I love the “pick up anything” interactivity of games like this (you can pick up human heads just because) and the clumsiness involved with doing so. It should be clumsy. Otherwise you get the sense your character is lugging around overstuffed cargo pants à la Tommy Wiseau in The Room. It’s a clumsiness I always admired because of the added level of immersion and control.

RPG gamers have a word that I’d like to co-opt: crunchy. The term describes tabletop games that rely heavily on complicated mechanics. That’s a fitting term for System Shock’s inventory system. Choosing what to leave behind and what to take (and when to take it) creates another layer of depth. Early on you’ll come across an assault rifle that’s damaged beyond use. At this point in the game you don’t know if there will be an opportunity to repair it. Do you take it, leave it, or plan to recycle it?

If you take it you’ll have to make room in your inventory, which might mean getting rid of previous acquisitions, or you can temporarily store it in the cargo lift that moves between the levels like a dumbwaiter. And if you do decide to take a cumbersome item that you don’t plan to use, you can save room by vaporizing it (though by what means your character accomplishes this in-game is not made clear) so that you can store the resultant scrap in a single inventory slot combined with other scrap. Unfortunately, if you sell the scrap to the recycler machine, you won’t make as much money as you would have recycling the same item whole.

Logic Puzzles

I found myself stuck on the very first puzzle I discovered mere minutes after the game started. The puzzle (think: Pipe Mania) required me to connect two nodes with an unbroken path of power on a board of rotatable tiles. A port beside the puzzle requires a logic probe to access. I wondered: Do I need a logic probe to complete this puzzle? If so, why am I allowed to interact with the puzzle at all? (The logic probe, as it turns out, lets you skip the puzzle altogether.)

Nothing in the game tells you how to connect the power nodes—it doesn’t even tell you if that’s your goal. There’s also no indication that completing the puzzle will merely unlock a small section of the station that you’re going to unlock eventually anyway. I probably spent an hour figuring out how the different nodes work (“Oh! There are direction indicators!”) before I finally figured it out—and later on I was knocking these puzzles out in minutes, if not seconds. If you decide to cheat the solution by looking it up online, you will find the problems are randomly generated (as are the passcodes to open doors and storage caches), which hearkens back to the era when most people weren’t connected to the internet with all the answers at their fingertips.

Difficulty

Modern game design dictates that a player should know, at all times, what they’re supposed to do and where they’re supposed to go. I’m not knocking games that choose to do that, I’m just saying it becomes repetitive when almost every game chooses this philosophy now. In the 90s, games that allowed you to get stuck were the rule—and that got tired back then. Today, games like System Shock are a welcome exception for those of us who, for whatever reason, kinda miss feeling stupid from time to time. Besides, getting stuck is befitting of a hacker-themed game.

When the game begins, you don’t just choose the overall difficulty, but instead choose to increase or decrease the following parameters: Combat, Mission, Cyber, and Puzzle. The puzzles become easy once you finally understand the aforementioned easy-to-miss indicators on the components. Combat and Cyber can become a real drag because they just aren’t fun enough to justify a harder difficulty. I’ve read that choosing a difficulty of 1 for Mission introduces modern hand-holding, so I’m glad I left that one on the default setting of 2 for authenticity’s sake. Your mileage may vary.

At any rate, consider your difficulty settings carefully. They can’t be changed later without starting a new game.

Cyberspace

Hands down, the weakest part of the package is the cyber running. Representing a Mnemonic cyberspace in video games has always been done with mixed results at best. Most games add the cyberspace levels as an afterthought and System Shock is no exception. The idea is awesome, but the execution is whack. These sections feel more like Descent in 1st person view, masking the main engine with a new paint job and enemy types (though not as egregiously as Shadowrun Returns) while giving the player the ability to control altitude and rotate so that they feel like they’re flying through an ethereal dimension. (The VR-exclusive Darknet is probably the best representation of cyberspace hacking I’ve ever seen, but the entire game is cyberspace hacking so maybe it doesn’t count?)

It’s also frustrating that there is no quicksaving in these sections. When you die, you’re kicked out of the access node (minus a significant chunk of health) and have to start over from the beginning of the run. I wouldn’t have minded if the sections weren’t so bland, but later on the difficulty ramps up by merely adding more of the bullet-sponge enemies… you know, the least thoughtful way to make the difficulty harder. Though I set the Cyber difficulty at the same level as my parameters, I found these sections significantly harder than the Combat, but that’s probably just because my heart wasn’t in it. I wish the logic probes could be used to bypass these sections as I found them to be much more annoying than the wall puzzles.

Final Words

The newest iteration of System Shock is indeed a shock to the system. There’s no hint of stockholder appeasement or corporate greed. Nothing feels dumbed down. What you get is a loving remake of the 1994 game, not just a run-of-the-mill modern game with a recognizable name. The game could have safely tried to please everyone, but it’d rather be fully embraced by a dwindling subset of gamers than merely liked by all. That’s not to say it’s not frustrating at times (I rage-quit frequently), but it’s greater than the sum of its aging parts. This is a game primarily for longtime players and anyone else who’s interested in the history of game development.

Summer Movies 2023

I’ll keep this list updated as I see more of the season’s movies… and there are a few placeholders in here so I can remember to watch all this stuff.

Air

Air is the riches to riches story of a little known shoe company called Nike. Despite the fact I have zero love for mega-brands, I thoroughly enjoyed the breezy nature of this flick. (Curiously, I’ve never watched a televised ballgame in its entirely, but I’m quite smitten on ESPN’s 30 for 30.) Matt Damon and Jason Bateman are two of the most likable actors in the business and they play off each other naturally. A good movie to watch on a rainy day.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

Placeholder… it’s taking me a while to get around to this one because I was told you have to see the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special first (you don’t), which I found to be mind-numbingly awful and not just because I hate Christmas movies (I do). I’m no longer a big fan of Chris Pratt fan, either, and I’ve found his character unlikable since Infinity War.

Fast X

This one is admirable in many ways (rich cinematography, beautiful looking people) and embarrassing in a lot of others (forced humor, Vin Diesel). When it’s not being corny, and the CGI cars aren’t flying around like toys, I can kinda see the franchise’s appeal. Jason Momoa is almost great as the villain, but he goes one notch too far. Fast is so phony looking, I can’t be sure any of its actors have ever driven a car in real life, much less stepped foot off a sound stage. Did not finish, but I’m amused that whenever the stakes are high, there’s always time to burn rubber instead of, you know, accelerating efficiently.

The Flash

I don’t care for DCU films. Against all odds, I think I liked this one. The CGI is possibly the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a mega budget movie, but they’re so consistently terrible that I kind of grew used to it? I detest nostalgia bait (and box office returns suggest most moviegoers feel the same way), but I actually liked seeing Michael Keaton in the bat suit again, even though the stuntwork makes him look far more agile than he did when he was half his age. I was also pleasantly surprised by this iteration of Supergirl, but I feel that the marketing team blew their load by spoiling her appearance in the trailers. Like, did they really think Keaton’s Batman wasn’t enough of a draw? At any rate, The Flash isn’t a great movie (far from it, in fact) and it isn’t a smart movie, but it is a fun one.

Asteroid City

Placeholder… Every time I see a Wes Anderson trailer, I think, “Oh, I already know what this is.” So it feels like a chore getting started on a Wes Anderson movie, but most of the time he exceeds my expectations. We’ll see.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Here’s yet another movie churned out of Disney’s artless acquisition of Lucasfilm, but—to no one’s surprise—it’s only the second worst film in Indiana Jones franchise. The disappointment comes early on when a CGI Indy runs across a train top in a sequence that looks only marginally better than the vine scene in Crystal Skull. At the end of the day, this movie would have served Jones’s legacy better by not existing at all, but once you’re past that hump, there is a pleasantly amusing movie here, which includes an absurdly stupid but fun finale. Also: Mads Mikkelsen is one of the most versatile actors, like, ever.

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1

This is my second favorite action movie of the year (#1 is John Wick 4, which was the first movie that ever exhausted me in a positive way). I’m tempted to name Dead Reckoning my favorite Mission: Impossible movie, but AI-related plots are already feeling a little old hat and there weren’t enough high-tech gadgets or farfetched break-ins for my liking. Sure, they use plenty of masks and Tom Cruise parachutes onto a runaway train, but I miss the clever use of building hacking seen in previous entries. (Remember when they used an eye-scanner and a projector to break into the Kremlin? Huh-huh, that was cool.)

Talk to Me

This is the freshest urban legend vibe since It Follows and The Babadook. So many horror movies forget to be fun, which is only excusable when they’re really good. Talk to Me is fun and good, and its energetic pace thrilled the hell out of me. The kids in this Australian flick are endearing little pricks, which is evidenced by a wild montage of teens doing what teens do best: meddling with evil entities while laughing like a bunch of jackasses. There isn’t a tired scare-attempt in the entire movie, which isn’t something you can say about 99% of demonic possession flicks. The inevitable sequel will suck so embrace this one.

Barbie

Okay, this one has Pee-Wee’s Playhouse energy. My biggest problem with movies like this is they tend to establish a great fantasy world and then quickly move the characters to the boring “real world” (Last Action Hero is the worst offender of this trope). Thankfully, Barbie knows better and spends most of its runtime in a fantasy setting. This is the first movie of its kind that focuses more on its star power than the IP and it sure is refreshing. Overall, a very amusing movie and the humor is on point.

Oppenheimer

See my full thoughts here. Probably the best movie of the summer.

Oppenhype

If you’re lucky enough to see a 70mm screening of Oppenheimer, I envy you. You won’t have to sit through twenty minutes of mostly bad trailers because the movie itself is already pushing the limits of the IMAX film size. Pictures of the 11-mile long reel look as if its been jury-rigged to fit existing projectors. Unfortunately, it would have taken my group longer to drive to the nearest 70mm screening of Oppenheimer than it takes to actually watch it, so we settled for the digital IMAX projection even though there is a local theater projecting it on 35mm film.

I’m glad we chose to see it big. I love big movies with big aspect ratios. Oppenheimer is certainly big, but it’s also bold. Director Christopher Nolan famously avoids CGI whenever possible, but the limitations of shooting this way are sometimes obvious in his previous films. Dunkirk features thousands of soldiers when there should be hundreds of thousands. The climactic shootout at the end of Tenet seemed more like a paintball match than a spectacle. What you get here is a three-hour picture that promises a big detonation and only shows it to you in glimpses reminiscent of what it must have been like to see it in person, carefully peeking out from behind cover miles way.

That’s not a complaint, it’s an admirable choice. There’s not a shred of war footage in the entire movie. The only violence we see is the violence in Oppenheimer’s head.

Was the real Oppenheimer capable of such empathy? Early on, we get our first indication that the character is going to be a challenging person to like when he injects cyanide into a professor’s apple over a classroom disagreement. Later, he’s disturbed by what he did and races back to the classroom to retrieve the poisoned apple moments before it unleashes unintended collateral damage. The historical accuracy of the scene is debatable, but I think it’s a peculiar coincidence that Alan Turing, another neurodivergent mastermind of the Allied victory in World War II, chose to kill himself with a cyanide-laced apple.

The film is so quickly paced (and dazzlingly scored) that even the audience with its benefit of hindsight is caught up in the scientists’ enthusiasm to build the mother of all weapons. By the time we remember the terrible implications, it’s too late, and the film abruptly cuts to Oppenheimer watching helplessly as two ominous crates ship out of Los Alamos. Soon after, Oppenheimer meets President Truman in person. Of the two men in this scene, one is portrayed as a tortured man who has a deep understanding of the very branch of science that eluded Einstein’s genius. The other is portrayed by Gary Oldman as a rankled sort with a high school education and the newfound power to cause unimaginable destruction. At the end of the scene, Truman ends up calling Oppenheimer a pussy when he doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the lives lost.

Famous actors with bit roles wander in and out of the movie at every other scene: Casey Affleck, Raimi Malek, Olivia Thirlby, James Remar, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine to name only a few of these supporting-supporting actors. Josh Hartnett proves to be a surprisingly complex and capable actor. Macon Blair, the Jeremy Saulnier favorite who’s reportedly directing the Hollywood remake of The Toxic Avenger, levels up in this movie in a most impressive way as well. I’ve held Florence Pugh at arms length for some time now, but now I’m eager to reexamine her previous roles with a different eye. Saying the star power in this one is huge is an understatement.

Cillian Murphy deserves to be nominated for this movie, but my gut feeling is the Academy will overlook him as well as Emily Blunt. Robert Downey Jr. is just as deserving and I think he’ll probably win. I hope so. He’s never been better.