Control

 I'm still not a Viking.

Earlier this month, I finished a months-long, epic playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and was wondering what to play next.  Then I noticed that I had a "free" game still lurking in my library, one given away at no charge by Epic Games for promotional purposes.  It had been there all but ignored for months, but I finally noticed it and decided to give it a spin.

It's a Jurassic Park game, Jurassic Park Evolution to be precise, and I was looking forward to romping through the jungle, driving a safari jeep as dinosaurs chased after me.  I looked forward to playing as one of the children hiding in the kitchen from marauding raptors.  I looked forward to shooting Jeff Goldblum in the face.

Turns out the game featured none of that.  It's not a role-playing game or even a first-, second-, or third-person shooter.  It's more like a Sims game - you design and build a dinosaur-themed amusement park.  Everything's observed from about a 100-foot level as you install a power plant, run electric lines to a DNA incubator lab, and release various dinos into a fenced-in pen.  You then have to add fast-food joints, restrooms, and gift shops for the tourists, as well as set up research facilities and security details. The only real "excitement" in the game is when you overcrowd a dino pen and one breaks out, and you gave to dispatch a helicopter to shoot it with a tranq dart.

Not at all what I was expecting and rather disappointing to say the least - I wasn't looking for lessons in park design and management, I wanted to tango with some ferocious dinosaurs.  I wanted to rescue Laura Dern.  But the funny thing was that there's something compelling about game play and whenever I started the game, I'd wind up going at it for hours and hours on end.  It was hard to motivate myself to start the game up on any given day, but it was even harder to stop playing once I started.  There was always three or four things that needed to be done - feed the dinos in Pen 1, finish spawning a new trike in Incubator 2, repairing a broken fence in Pen 3.  Even though there were no characters or personalities to react to, other than some occasional voice-over narration from cast members of the movies (including Jeff Goldblum), the sheer amount of busy work needed to keep the park up, operating, and profitable kept me going.

Until one day it just no longer seemed worth the bother.  I did manage to get in some 64 or so hours of gameplay before I threw in the towel and found myself back at the drawing board wondering what to play next.

That's when Epic released another freebie, a game I had never heard of called Control.  It looked like it was well designed and developed, so I figured I'd give it a shot.  What did I have to lose? It was a free game.

It turns out it was a highly enjoyable, although challenging, paranormal shooter game.  The whole game takes place inside of one massive office complex, made even more massive because of paranormal space/dimension shifts that allow a broom closet to open into a stadium-size arena.  There were lots of challenging puzzles to solve on how to navigate around the complex, and constant swarms of enemies shooting at you from all directions.  I "died" in game a lot.  But no worries, you just re-spawn again nearby as if nothing happened and resume shooting back at the enemies.

It was one of the more original games I've played, both in terms of visual design and style, actual gameplay, and story line and characters.  I literally had no idea what to expect next at many points in the game.  The office complex is a brilliant example of brutalist architecture, and the game makes excellent use of ray tracing light effects.

I don't want to give anything away with spoilers, but I'm not sure I can give a coherent recap of the plot, anyway.   You play as Jesse, a young woman with a mysterious past searching the agency for your lost brother.  I finally "beat" the  game after some 39 hours, but gameplay was so challenging and intense, I had little motive to start over and play through again.  Maybe someday, but not just . . . now.  But anyway, I do recommend Control, especially if you're becoming burned out on massive, open-world marathons, or shooting space aliens with laser guns, or being a Viking rampaging across the English countryside.

So now, I'm back at that same drawing board wondering what to play next.  And then, lo and behold, Steam just announced the start of their Summer Sale, so I suddenly have lots of new options.  What to choose next?

RIP Jon Hassell

I bought this album, Fourth World Vol.1, Possible Music back in 1980 and it's stayed with me for the rest of my life.  Jon Hassell produced many other great albums over the years, but this, which was actually his third, served as a blueprint for all that preceded and all that followed.  

I remember one night in 1980 or very early '81 when Annie and Rich came over to the apartment I shared with Mary Ellen, and we played this album and got high.  Words and thoughts fell away, and we all just sat there, four chatty friends, transfixed and silent as Side A played all the way through on the phonograph. I made a mental note that this was weapons-grade ambient music, not to be played at parties or other social events.  In 1980, Chemistry sounded like music from some alternative future even while it was grounded in a tribal past, and it still sounds that way to me today.

His sound is so unique, it needs to be stated for the uninitiated that it's a trumpet, albeit treated, that he's playing.

I remember the shock of recognition I felt when I heard his distinctive sound on the Talking Heads' Houses In Motion, or in the soundtrack of The Last Temptation of Christ. Over the years, I've purchased vinyl, cassette, and CD versions of at least eight of his albums. His Wikipedia page lists 18 albums under his name.

And I remember the sadness I felt when I learned that Hassell passed away Saturday at the age of 84.  I never saw him perform live, but held out hope that someday he'd play at Big Ears again (he played the the very first Big Ears festival in its initial 2009 edition, but I missed it). 

I wish Jon a rest in the peace that his music has brought to me for some 40 years.

Claudette

Right on schedule, T.S. Claudette was over my house first thing this morning.  We had 2.33 inches of rain, breaking the record (1.42 inches) for the day set in 1972.  And even though the center of the storm has now passed, more rain is still forecast for the next two days. Flash flood warnings continue.

A major tree fell on a woman in a car a few miles from here, crushing the vehicle but fortunately sparing the life of the driver.  The tree, however, blocked the road and traffic for several hours.

Rainy nights in Georgia . . . 

 

Juneteenth

 

I posted this photo about a year ago, back when the "second wave" of the covids was just starting to swell in Georgia, Trump was still president, America was in the midst of sometimes peaceful, sometimes not, protests over police violence and extra-judicial murders, and no one seemed to really know how long any of this would last or how it would all resolve. This picture of near-empty Atlanta streets seems to me to capture the loneliness and sense of despair of that harrowing moment in history.

If you had told me then that a year later, we would have an official toll of more than 600,000 deaths, but also a new president who enabled us all to get vaccinated, and that we would be celebrating a new federal holiday, the Juneteenth Day of Observance, that honors American freedom on the anniversary of the day in 1865 that enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free, I would not have dared to hope you were telling the truth.

And yet, here we are. 

As Heather Cox Richardson notes (this post is modeled after one of hers), it feels like we have lived a whole century in the past year.

Here We Go Again

 

Breaking News

 

Trees

It was a lovely summer afternoon, and then . . . 

Let me start that again.  Yesterday featured a lovely early summer afternoon, warm but not yet too hot, more humid than one might want but not nearly as bad as things can get in the Georgia summer. I was outside, reading, ignoring the occasional gnat that wanted to annoy me.  No breeze, calm air.  I could hear my neighbors playing with their toddler son next door - the sounds of a child's laughter and some music that sounded like it might have been Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones (but wasn't).  A nice, post-covid afternoon in the neighborhood.

Then I heard another sound, a cracking, chopping kind of sound.  Then a loud snap, followed by what sounded like a string of firecrackers.  Someone in the neighborhood is getting ready for July Fourth, I thought.  And then I heard that distinctive sound of a tree falling, that simultaneous rush of leaves and splitting of wood. A sound I've come to know all too well and realized another tree had just fallen in the 'hood.

It didn't fall on me, and from the sound it seemed that it had fallen on the other side of the woods that separates my street from the next.  I went inside to see if I still had electricity or if the tree had managed to hit power lines, and was relieved to see the lights (and AC) were still on.

I walked around the block and saw that the top half of one tree in that wooded park had fallen over (see above), and part of the tree was still dangling from the main trunk.  Something else to fall the next time we have a storm. Great.  No one was hurt and no property damage.  In fact, judging from the absence of anyone else out investigating the treefall, no one other than myself had even noticed.  My next-door neighbor was still delighting his son in his backyard to the same music I had heard before.

But it was a grim reminder to me of the inevitability of falling trees, even on a day without heavy winds, falling rain, or other severe weather. As random a moment as one could guess.  I'm still somewhat PTSD'd from the tree that fell on my house late last October when Hurricane Eta passed through, and I felt that Mother Nature was warning me. "Don't relax, buddy boy.  I still have tons and tons of timber up 20, 30, and more feet over your head, which I can drop at any time.  What goes up, must come down."

I went back indoors for the rest of the day.

Koyaanisqatsi, Hopi for "life out of balance," or more specifically, "man out of balance with nature." I want to love and cherish trees, to care for them and appreciate then, and they in turn to protect and nourish me, but instead I feel threatened by them and want to cut them down.  I worry about them every time it rains.  And they fall with shocking frequency around here, taking out electrical power, damaging cars and houses, and even killing the occasional unfortunate.  Yesterday, they reminded me that they didn't even need a hurricane to get me if that's what they wanted to do.  

This was Creek country, not Hopi, but I doubt the indigenous here would have been any more approving of my attitude toward trees.  

 

I'm Not A Viking Anymore

It's over.  After some 257 hours of gameplay, I've finally completed Assassins Creed: Valhalla. 

If 257 hours sounds like a lot to you, well, it is.  Especially for one play through.  Most games can be completed in anywhere from 40 to 60 hours, and some very complex games can take as long as 90 hours.

Valhalla took so long to complete both because of the long main story line, which has you completing "story arcs" in 21 different territories, and because of all the side quests and exploration possible.  I'm nothing if not a completionist in these games, and I wasn't about to finish until I found every last treasure chest and solved every puzzle and riddle in each on the 21 territories.

Thrift:  I purchased the game back in March for $60, after spending some 458 hours with Cyberpunk 2077 (three full playthroughs and then some partial games).  At 257 hours for one playthrough of Valhalla, that comes to $0.23/hour - less than one quarter dollar per hour.

The last two days, I've played the Murder on Eridonos DLC update to The Outer Worlds.  Wrapped that up in two days and less than 10 hours - a mere triffling compared to my recent game experiences (I've been playing nothing but Cyberpunk and Valhalla since December 10, 2020).  Seemed barely worth the download time.

So what to play next?  I never finished Red Dead Redemption II or Grand Theft Auto V -  should I go back and finish either of those games?  Since I first played them, both Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky have gone through significant and reportedly game-changing revisions - should I give either of those a second shot? I already own all those games, so there would be no additional cost.

Or should I splurge a little bit and go with the next installment of the Hitman franchise and purchase Hitman 3?   Or is there some new game out there I should purchase?  Death Stranding?  Days Gone? Dying Light 2? 

I'm open to suggestions.