October Update: Time Dilation

Hey team! We're deep into November and I owe you last month's update.

There Shall Be (Free)lancing

The freelance gig I told you about last month has stretched well beyond the original expected timeframe. As I said, it was planned as a crunch and now it is not that, so all in all this is good. But it has meant, for the past month, it's been unclear how long I'm going to be working on this thing, and it's taken a fair bit of my attention.

At my behest, last night I and the team had a logistics conversation to work out the new timeline and set some milestones, and we're now planning more of a marathon than a sprint, with a late-January target for delivery. With more reasonable goals, I've been making time for work on the channel, and it's been welcome. I missed doing my own stuff.

An Idea We Have Projected Onto The Past

For the time being, my focus has been on a new project. That's probably not going to last long, as a better use of my time and energy would be putting out a video based on one of my completed scripts. But I wanted to take a little time to work on something fresh and fun, so I've been in research and outlining mode for a video on neo-noir. (It is Noirvember, after all.)

I'm back on my bullshit watching noirs of the classic and neo- persuasion, and reading through the formative essays in The Film Noir Reader. Having watched most of the really good neo-noirs, it feels a little like scraping the barrel, but you never know when you're gonna come across a forgotten gem. (At Close Range, which I watched this morning, for instance, was much better than I expected, even if not quite gemlike.) And I've been fleshing out my notes document with quotes from essays and doing the freewriting from which I will build the outline.

But, as my hope is to get something out before I leave Boston for Christmas, this will probably get tabled in another week and I'll put either the next ARPB or the next Protagony into production. But, for now, it's nice to have a hyperfocus.

Thoughts, Official and Unofficial

For anyone who hasn't seen it, I wrote up my thoughts on Return to Monkey Island (some preliminary thoughts for which were in last month's update) and my thoughts on Life is Strange: True Colors.

Forthwith are some thoughts on other media I've consumed:

The Life is Strange comic: apparently available in its entirety on Hoopla through my library, so I spent, um... an entire Thursday reading it. It's very good! It doesn't quite accomplish the metanarrative ambitions of the original game, but it is, on the whole, probably the most aesthetically cohesive property in the series, managing the headier themes of the Dontnod games with the quality of writing of the Deck Nine ones, and not being any sort of train wreck! It's also just... gay as hell and I love that about it.

Prodeus 1.0: Prodeus has finally come out of early access! What this means for those of us who've been playing a while is basically a few new maps and some tweaks to the overall structure. The new maps are, as ever, excellent; the level design of this series is universally stellar. Its core loop is all a shootgam should be: it feels good as hell, and its level design/enemy placement/ammo availability make for all kinds of unique encounters. My main grievance is it still doesn't feel like a complete game. The overworld-style level select still looks kinda goofy, and it no longer serves a purpose. In earlier builds, there was a location called Ammo Cache that had an upgrade in it, and you had to access it from three directions, two of them only available through secret exits. The Ammo Cache has been removed and now there's just a shop you can access from different places; all but one secret exit have been removed, and the one left doesn't go anywhere, it just ends the level early. And two things are true of the shop: it makes the experience of playing the game better, and also I hate it. You can buy new weapons and upgrades at the shop by collecting ore, and you find ore by looking or secrets in the main levels. I played the alpha and the first early access version of Prodeus three times each, and then the levels of the last mission pack at least twice, and I never looked for secrets as much as I did once I was looking for ore. Before it was just health, ammo, and armor, and that wasn't enough incentive. Obviously the joy of secrets is in finding them, but the player has to be coaxed into looking in the first place, and knowing I can buy the quad shotgun when I get enough ore got me to finally do it. So it works, and going back over levels I'd completed to find more ore made them more fun, got me to learn them backwards and forwards. It is, in material terms, good design. This issue is I hate it. I hate that I can just buy the quad shotgun instead of collecting it in a specific level designed to showcase it. I hate that I got it earlier than usual without really trying, and how it broke the game's difficulty. I hate that the later unlocks - the Mammonth, Auto Shotgun, and Swarmer - require so much ore you won't get them til late in the game so nothing is designed with them in mind, so they are fun to use but mostly just make other parts of your arsenal (Arc Rail, Shotgun, and Rocket Launcher respectively) obsolete. And the final boss is... fine, but feels like a miniboss, not a campaign ender. This still feels like a platform for good levels and the campaign is just the batch of levels made by the devs. It's not designed as a complete experience, with mounting difficulty and a crescendo; you just kinda beat it, then dig around til you've unlocked as much extra stuff as you care to get, and mess around til you get bored and move on. By making it more playable, they've made it less satisfying. (All that said it's still a killer core loop and I'm sure there are more campaigns coming, so it's worth the purchase.)

A'ight, talk to you again in a few weeks. Cheers!

-I