From the Studio and Below: Be A Good Mathematician

I don't think I've ever mentioned this in the context of the blog up until now, but I am, in fact, a musician - by which I mean I've recorded just under ten songs that have been listened to by almost as many people. As such, who could be better than me to give you kids tips on music and the recording thereof? This is the theme we will explore in this exciting new segment.

I am currently in the process of recording a new song by the name of Under the Wheels of Time - always an exciting prospect, and always a lot more frustrating than you would imagine it to be. If you've never been involved in recording music in some way, you have no idea how much effort goes into simple things like making a cymbal hit not sound like someone dropping a wet towel on the floor, or how satisfying it is when you actually manage to do it. I'll talk about mixing another time, though - this time I want to talk about just plain ol' playing the guitar.

The main guitar part I recorded today, a classical guitar riff, goes like this:

Music by Alon Lessel. All Rights Reserved.

It's a simple riff, with essentially the same melody repeated for different root notes - it could easily be split into a bass part and lead guitar part. I played it many times before on electric and acoustic guitars with no difficulty, but when I started recording Wheels, I decided it would sound better on a classical guitar. This is when I ran into a problem: the way I used to play the riff, when I had to fret the F note on the 6th string, I would just reach around the neck with my thumb (giggidy). Things is, at 164cm (that's almost 5'5'' for our USA readers), I'm not a very large person, if you ignore the X-Y plane, and with my classical guitar having a very thick neck, it was all but impossible to properly hold the string down with my thumb - especially when you consider that I need to keep my other fingers well-arched in order for the notes on the 2nd string to ring properly. The only alternative I could think of was to use my index finger for the note on the 6th string, but then the only way to play the C note on the 2nd string would be to barre the 1st fret after playing the B note, which doesn't pack nearly the same punch as regular finger-hammering.

This led to hours of frustration, in which I constantly tried two bad solutions to a simple problem and failed repeatedly to make them sound even passably good. That's when I had a revelation: I don't need to play the part differently - I just need to tune differently. I'm only playing the F note on the 6th string, so my problems would be solved if I could just hold that note in place during the entire part - which, in guitar terms, means tuning the string to an F, i.e., half a step higher than standard tuning. Once I did that, the only challenging part of playing the riff was that I had to shake my instinct of reaching for the 1st fret at the start of the 3rd bar.

This might seem like an embarrassingly simple observation, but there's an important lesson to take out of it. There's a common misconception that the more difficult something is to play, the better; that if you look for a way to make a part easier to play, you're either cheating or you're just just not a very good guitar player. That's not true at all. If it were, then everybody's favorite guitarist would be Michael Angelo Batio, that guy who can play two guitars really fast at the same time and has never made a single good piece of music in his entire life. Oh, don't worry - he'll be the subject of a future post.

Seriously, I dare you to watch this video the whole way through.

The truth is, the best sounding guitar parts are often the ones that are easiest to play. Of course, "easy" is a relative term - newcomers might not necessarily have such an easy time playing a Slash or Angus Young solo. When you break it down, though, there's nothing that technically profound about them. It's the composition and the little touches that make their playing so awe-inspiring. Eruption is a cool song to learn when you pick up your first Floyd Rose guitar, but when I wanna listen to some Van Halen, I'm much more likely to go for Hot For Teacher.

Music isn't the only example where that's true - in fact, I learned this lesson in a completely different context. I've got an M.Sc. in mathematics, but for a while there in high school, I was on the verge of failing math time and time again. That all changed when I got to the 11th grade, where I was assigned to a new math teacher called Galina (forgot her last name, but will change this if I ever find out what it was). Galina was a hi-tech refugee who decided to become a teacher rather than face unemployment, and she quickly became many a student's favorite teacher, myself included. While everyone else we knew at school hated their math teacher, we were so close to Galina that at the end of our senior year, she actually invited us to a party at her home, which is one of the few truly happy memories I have of high school.

Galina had a very simple attitude to mathematics: a good mathematician, she said, is a lazy mathematician. This doesn't mean that a mathematician should be some disinterested MATLAB programmer,* mind you - it means that rather than carrying out the same computations again and again, a good mathematician should seek to save up time whenever possible by recording the basics of a computation or some logical reasoning as a theorem. Rather than use the same reasoning each time to calculate the length of the hypotenuse of a triangle using the lengths of its sides, prove the Pythagorean theorem. "Lazy" here really just means "efficient" - repeating the same argument time and time again, while possibly a good way to impress people with how smart you are, does little to save time and facilitate the study of deeper facets of mathematics. As a former programmer, Galina probably saw this as the math version of avoiding code duplication, the cardinal sin of coding.

*And no hate for MATLAB, either - I'm a big fan!

This lesson doesn't translate directly to music, in which repetition is actually quite important. The periodicity of riffs and chord progressions against a changing melody, combined with the subtle differences in which the same parts are played in different iterations, is a major factor in our enjoyment of music. However, the same basic understanding is still relevant: whether in mathematics, programming or music, or anything else, really - simpler is usually better. Doing these simple things well, though - that's the main challenge we all face, and which we will discuss at length some other time.

Under the Wheels of Time will hopefully be released by next weekend, just in time for that Novy God. I already know who I'll be spending the night with - Solid Snake! So all you losers can just keep all your kissing and sexy times to yourselves. 

Thanks for reading, and in the meanwhile, listen to some of my other songs on SoundCloud.

Hello from the gutter,

Alon

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Not a hero, just an old killer

It's the pain you feel from a once-great franchise that isn't there anymore!

Of all the games due to come out this year, none filled me with as potent a mix of excitement and apprehension as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The first Metal Gear Solid may be my favorite game of all time, and Snake Eater is not far behind. Even Metal Gear Solid 2, easily the worst among the first four main MGS titles, is a great game in its own right.

The last few years, however, have not been so kind to the franchise. The last good Solid game was MGS4 in 2008, and even that had a trainwreck of a second ending which sullied the whole experience. Since then we've had Peace Walker, the "nice try" of the series, and Ground Zeroes, which was almost universally reviled due to it lasting just under two hours, having no plot and, scandalously for a Metal Gear game, no boss fights. The idea of combining these two games in an open-world setting, which nowadays usually means diluting the narrative in favor of a string of boring, rote sidequests, did not seem like one worth looking forward to.

Sadly, The Phantom Pain does not exceed expectations, nor does it fulfill its creators' stated intention of maturing the series. In its rush to distance itself from its predecessors, it forgot to forge an identity of its own. The result is a game that is not only bad at being Metal Gear Solid, but which also fails to be a particularly interesting version of anything else, driven down by a misguided desire to be edgy and an abundance of corporate greed.

Remember, this is a sneaking mission! Nah, just kidding

The Phantom Pain picks up Big Boss' story 9 years after the events of Ground Zeroes, and it wastes no time getting into it. After the obligatory tutorial scene, you face gas-masked soldiers a la the first Half-Life, a floating, psychic, gas-masked child (there's a lot of gas masks in this game for some reason), and a man made of fire. There's fighting, sneaking, car crashes, a chase on horseback - so exciting! So much action! Man, I can't wait to see everything they've thought up for this game!

And then you sneak into a base to rescue a guy. Then you sneak into another base to kidnap a guy. Sneak into a base to get intel. Sneak into a base to maybe kidnap several guys. Maybe you find out that you can't rescue the guy you wanted to rescue. Maybe you thought you snuck into the base but ah, the big bad knew you were there all along, and know he has a speech prepared to read out to you. It's the same same thing repeated ad nauseam until the game finally decides to throw you a bone and show you a cutscene to break up the monotony. It gets even worse later in the game, when you are forced to literally repeat past missions to unlock further parts of the story.

But this repetition is not only bad for the player, as it also serves to expose The Phantom Pain's broken mechanics. The basics are the same as in Ground Zeroes: you can sneak past guards, or if you prefer, take them out silently, either before or after interrogating them. Non-lethal knockouts are possible, but recovering soldiers will alert their buddies to the fact that something is afoot. As usual for MGS, killing enemies is discouraged mostly through score penalties at the end of the mission, but non-lethal is the more enjoyable way to play the game. Another holdover from GZ is reflex mode, where upon being discovered, you enter what is essentially bullet time, giving you a chance to take out an opponent before he alerts the entire base to your presence. I find that it only serves to further dilute the stealth element of the game, but it's harmless enough, for a very simple reason: the stealth in this game is complete nonsense.

Initially, you might be tempted to be very slow and methodical, riding slowly on horseback, hiding from enemies by clinging to the opposite side of the horse (which, admittedly, is a cool mechanic), scanning the base for the best route in and slowly working your way through, memorizing the guards' patrol patterns as you go. The game can be quite challenging when played this way, especially if, like me, you play MGS without killing, knocking out or alerting anyone, and as such, you might find yourself repeating certain sections quite a few times. That's when you start looking for shortcuts, and upon doing that, you realize the enemies in this game are deaf, dumb and blind (dumb as in stupid - they can talk just fine).

In most cases, you can easily run all the way to a base's outer wall undetected. If you run right next to an enemy, they'll hear you, but otherwise, feel free to run around the desert in plain sight of the guards. The enemies' hearing problems get downright creative at times: I once managed to sneak into a prison cell past a guard, but then couldn't find an opening to sneak back out. Luckily, the game allows you to throw empty magazines to draw guards away from their positions. I meant to throw a magazine far past the guard to make him go investigate, but my angle was bad and the magazine instead hit the ceiling and fell down - prompting the guard to go up one floor, thinking that the noise came from up there. This was shortly after I managed to sneak past a guard who was 15 meters away from me - just under 50 feet - by crawling on the ground in broad daylight. Not that the guard didn't see anything: he looked, said "huh?", moved in to check closer, and then determined that he was just seeing things.

Luckily, stealth can be safely ignored, and often should be, seeing as its faults can work against you almost as often as they work for you. With your impressive arsenal of weapons, armed combat is a piece of cake. In fact, even without any weapons, you should be OK. I was once detected by four machine gun-toting soldiers who were quite far apart, and I managed to run up to each one and knock him out with my bare hands. A lot of people complain that MGS4 felt too much like a shooter, but I guarantee you that if you run up to a group of enemies with machine guns in that game, you're dead.

That wouldn't be so bad if TPP wasn't an especially mediocre and uninvolved take on the genre. By the penultimate story mission, you will find yourself marking your enemies with your uncanny ability to forever keep track of anyone you have ever seen, instructing your sniper companion to take down wave after wave of enemy tanks and even calling in full-blown airstrikes, wondering what happened to your Metal Gear Solid and why you're wasting your time on this vapid power fantasy when you could just go play Far Cry 3 or Black Ops II and have a much better time.

It's awesome when you get that puppy, though

Speaking of the companions, let me be very clear - they're awesome. Each companion in The Phantom Pain is not only immensely likable, but also useful in its own way. D-Horse is good for getting around quickly undetected, D-Walker is good for a speedy getaway with some serious firepower, and D-Dog - well, D-Dog is just the best. I love D-Dog. My best moments in TPP were spent petting D-Dog and looking at how beautifully rendered his fur is. Other than being cute, he can also detect enemies from some distance and distract them, making him the best way to keep the game enjoyable for those who, like me, insist on playing stealthily.

And then, there's the aforementioned sniper, Quiet. Once she's recruited, the game is basically over, because Quiet can take down an entire base before anyone knows what's up. In fact, she's almost a must if you want to take down one of the bosses non-lethally, and then your role reduces to running around to compensate for the time it takes her to reload. She's also one of the most egregious example of sexual objectification I can recall in any media, walking around in what is essentially a bikini, because - get this - she has to breathe through her skin. It's obviously nothing more than an excuse to have her walk around half-naked, never mind the fact that no one questions why, if she needs to have as much skin exposed as possible to breathe, she doesn't just shave her head. That wouldn't be considered all that sexy, I guess. It's a shame, because a more well-rounded and far less exploitative portrayal could have made her into a great character. Instead, we have moments of attempted drama constantly interrupted by childish attempts at titillation.

This is the conflict at the heart of The Phantom Pain's narrative issues, and while sexism is a large part of it, it is by no means its only manifestation. Putting aside the futility of trying to make a mature game in a series where we fight robot ninjas, giant mechs and photosynthetic old men, TPP's main problem is that it tries to act grown up while still retaining all of its childish prejudice. TPP confronts you with shocking image after shocking image, trying so hard to impress you with its po-faced, brooding facade, just to piss away what little atmosphere it managed to build up by having Quiet literally shove her butt in your face the very next moment.

It doesn't help that both the usually witty and likable Snake as well as the over the top, maniacal Ocelot barely say anything in this game, and what little they say is said with as little emotion as possible, because you know - maturity. Add that to the fact that both, along with Miller, affect the same low-end growling voice in all of the many, many useless codec conversations that they partake in, and you get a cast of characters that is not only impossible to like, but mostly hard to even tell apart, a problem that is compounded by the insane amount of datalogs, which contain most of the game's dialogue (and by the way, no, I don't consider datalogs to be plot).

One of the most cringe-worthy moments in the original Metal Gear Solid is when Snake asks Meryl how she managed to sneak a gun past some guards, and she answers that "women have more hiding places than men". When a similar comment is made during the ending of Ground Zeroes, the silly and stupid sexism of the past graduates to full-blown misogyny. There's nothing more juvenile than a child trying to prove its maturity to the world, and The Phantom Pain's hateful exploitation of women is but the final blow to the plot's credibility.

And of course, microtransactions

Not long after The Phantom Pain was released, we learned that an entire act is missing from the game, presumably due to considerations of development time and budget. Don't worry, though: the game does contain a multiplayer mode that absolutely no one asked for, complete with microtransactions that will allow you to build your base up faster and, in an amazingly shameless act, recover soldiers and equipment that enemies make off with - the closest thing to date to a game trying to squeeze protection money from its players.

The outright theft of a third of the game isn't even the worst effect of the multiplayer mode: it is the way the pretense of running a base interferes with the single-player campaign. It makes you grind to get certain types of equipment, wait around for said equipment to be developed, and in general forces upon you an overly-complicated and annoying base management system that stops the game dead at several points. By the time TPP was drawing to an end, I was hoping someone would destroy Mother Base again just so I could be liberated from this trite, aggravating micro-management.

Mired in myopic cynicism and utterly contemptuous of its fan base and legacy, The Phantom Pain feels like a game that knows all too well that it will never have a sequel. It may be popular now, and of course, I am more than happy for the people who enjoy it. However, I do not expect history to see it in quite as positive a light.

Score Calculation: In its own right, The Phantom Pain is a slightly above-average third-person open-world shooter, earning it a score of 6 for being a well-executed version of an extremely worn-out idea. However, with an entire act missing, it is in reality only two-thirds of a game, taking the score down to 4. It gets a point for having the best dog in any video game ever, but I'm gonna have to knock two points for its abuse of the Metal Gear Solid name and for Quiet's starting outfit, leaving us with

Final Score: 3

Verdict: Like Silent Hill 4, the fourth season of Community and the prequel trilogy before it, we sentence The Phantom Pain to be that part of the series that we skip over during marathons. Its name forever to follow the word "except" when mentioning one's love for the franchise during a discussion of favorite video games, TPP typifies what happens when talent fails to match ambition and natural evolution is substituted with caprice, all topped off with healthy dose of AAA-developer cynicism.

Fury Road review

The new Mad Max movie is called Fury Road. The main character (other than Max) is called Furiosa. That’s about as much effort as anyone put into writing this movie. It’s one of those movies that’s monumentally stupid, but at the same time, thinks it’s much smarter than its audience. In one of the first scenes in the movie, main baddie Immortan Joe proclaims that he is going to get gas from Gas Town and bullets from the Bullet Farms. Because where else would you get your gas and bullets? Don’t tell me I’m the only guy who had to schlep down to Video Game City when Witcher 3 came out. Later in the movie, Furiosa tells her comrades that they are being chased by “bullet farmers – they come from the Bullet Farm”. That is where bullet farmers would come from, I suppose.

Sometimes, lines are just repeated over and over: a doctor tells Immortan Joe that were it not for some tragic turn of events, he would’ve had a completely healthy baby boy, “perfect in every way”. Immortan Joe’s son then proceeds to shout to everyone that he was going to have a brother – “perfect in every way”. After Immortan Joe discovers that his wives ran away, one rebellious worker tells him that they are not his property. Shortly afterwards, one of his soldiers tells another that someone stole some of Joe’s “stuff”. “What stuff?” the other soldier asks. “His women!” Did you get that Immortan Joe treats women like property yet?

That minor plot point is probably why so many people say this movie is feminist, which is funny given that one of the first things we see in this movie is the mostly nameless and quiet female cast hosing each other down in their skimpy white robes. You might as well claim that a strip club is feminist because it exclusively features women, and as I write these words, I sadly realize that there are probably people out there who would subscribe to this logic. No, this movie has women for the same reason it has trucks covered in spikes and guitars that spit out flames: to be awesome for the bros. It has the same target audience as Furious 7, but it takes itself way too seriously to be anywhere near as charming or fun.

As long as we’re on the subject, given that this is a post-apocalyptic world where even basic commodities are hard to come by, is a flame-spitting guitar really the best thing to spend our resources on? I’m just saying, maybe we wouldn’t have such a gas crisis if we didn’t waste gallons of the stuff just trying to look cool.

Potential jokes about government spending aside, this is what the entire movie is like: it spent so much money trying to look cool that it forgot that a movie might need stuff like a story, or relatable characters, although given the reviews it’s getting, everyone else forgot that as well. There’s barely any dialogue in this movie, and even the little dialogue it has is mostly dumb exposition like the lines quoted above. At other times it tries to hint at something of a setting with lines full of unexplained terms like “he’s a smeg who eats schlanger” – did George Lucas write this? – but nothing ever comes of it. Wait though, maybe we’ll find out more about this world in the Mad Max third-person open-world shooting game™ (because we simply don’t have enough of those) coming out September 1^st! I’ll make sure to play that never!

Honestly, if you told me this movie was made just to sell video games to 14-year-old boys, I’d believe you. It’s probably going to work, too. Hell, it sorta worked on me – I couldn’t wait to go back to playing Witcher 3 while I was watching this movie. In the words of Immortan Joe: “Mediocre!”

A Link Between Worlds is the Best Game EVER

Note: I've been getting quite a few angry responses to my Most Overrated Games of 2013 article. People have been making very good points, like: how can you claim that a game is overrated if critics say that it's a great game? Or, how can you claim to be a gamer when you don't like the same games as everyone else? Well, I am nothing if not open to criticism, so I have decided to give a totally honest positive review of a 2013 game that everyone else liked. Because after all, no one reads these articles to get a different opinion, right?

As a longtime Zelda fan and a self-admitted Nintendo fanboy, there was never any question of me not getting the newest game in the franchise, Super Paper Link to the Past. No wait, sorry, the title is Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. I have no idea why I got confused like that.

A Link Between Worlds puts you once again in the role of Link, who once again has to save Hyrule from evil. You once again fight enemies from a top-down perspective, instead of an overly complicated 3D perspective, once again using bombs to open up cave entrances, once again using the hookshot to cross gaps, and once again collecting three pendants, getting the Master Sword, and freeing seven sages. If I repeat the phrase "once again" a lot, it is only to signal my satisfaction with Zelda developers ditching their nasty habit of bringing in new elements into their games and finally just giving us a visual update of one of the oldest games in the series.

The first thing any Zelda fan will notice almost immediately in this game is the tense, fast-paced combat. When you start a fight, you never know if you'll have to mash the B button 3 times or 10 times in order to defeat all of your opponents. Occasionally, you may even need to raise your shield to stop an incoming projectile. This is in stark contrast to the god-awful Skyward Sword, which, with its fluid motion controls, forced you to stop and think about how and when to strike your enemies. Dammit Nintendo, this is a game! We don't want to think about things here!

Where combat really shines is in the boss fights. Other games in the series may have forced you to use strategies and time your attacks in order to defeat bosses, especially in the final boss fights. This meant that there was difficulty to those fights, and that you even had to die occasionally, taking up precious play time. Well, no more. In this game, boss strategies are simple and heavily telegraphed, meaning you can power through all dungeons in the space of a few hours. The one exception is the Gauntlet boss, who requires you to time your attacks well and think about how to dodge incoming attacks. This is an unfortunate deviation from the game's dirt-simple, superb combat systems, but luckily, is a one-time mistake.

Boo, challenging boss! You're getting in the way of me reviewing this game!

Another welcome change from Skyward Sword is the way Link navigates the game-world. Skyward allowed you to explore a vast world full of secrets, using motion controls to rule a flying bird, something which somehow even made exploration enjoyable. However, being confronted with so many options is confusing and hurts my head. Luckily, A Link Between Worlds artificially limits exploration in the beginning of the game by using a strict fast-travel system, with objects like large boulders that you can only move later in the game making sure that you can only reach certain areas exactly when the developers want you to. Another wonderful aspect of this system is Irene, the witch who transports you around the world using her magic broom. She is but one of the many characters you will meet in this world who repeats the same awkward humor in every interaction, making sure the game is at least as full of laughs as a Smurfs movie.

Could these characters bee more funny?

The travel restrictions are somewhat lifted in the second part of the game, as you are given seven dungeons to explore in pretty much any order you want, and the fact that items are rented from a store managed by another HI-LARIOUS character instead of found in dungeons gives a certain sense of freedom. You may even ask yourself: does beating the dungeons in a different order change the ending in some way? Are there a lot of side quests to take up? Do the choices I make affect the game in any meaningful way? Fortuantely, the answer is a resounding no.

As a game critic, one of the things I fear most in games is innovation. After all, adding new elements to a game means that I can't play it in exactly the same way I have been playing other games over the last year. Fortunately, Nintendo listened to the wishes made by people like me and threw innovation completely out the window. Not only is the world map basically the same as in the original game, but also the music, the enemies, and even some bosses are slightly-updated versions of the ones from the original Link to the Past. With this setup, I can happily put as little effort as the developers into this game, thus freeing me up to engage in other activities like watching cartoons or tweeting about how great Dark Souls is.

The opposite of innovation is gimmickry. A gimmick seems to add new depth to the game, while not forcing you or your audience to think too hard about how to use it for exploration or combat. Link's new ability to merge into walls might seem to open a world of possibilities, but luckily for those of us who fear challenge, it opens more of a one-horse town of possibilities, occasionally used to cross gaps (which are only there to force you to use the merge ability) but never much more than that. It is not before the very end of the game that it is used in combat, but don't worry – the game tells you exactly how to use it, so as not to cause a sudden, unfair difficulty spike.

Given the simplicity of the game, you might think that it is too short to be worth your money. Luckily, the developers had the same thought, and added a sidequest to the game in which you help the oh-so-cute giant octopus Mother Maiamai retrieve her 100 children. This may seem like a lot of work, but  while it adds a few hours to the game, it adds nothing in terms of difficulty or substance, as rescuing Maiamai consists of about 5 strategies that are repeated in all instances, with very few exceptions. Chances are, you will find most of them without even trying. You say easy; I say "intuitive". And when a game is this intuitive, how could you argue that it is not the best game of the year 2013?

The dialogue with Mother Miamai is but one example of A Link Between Worlds' masterful writing.

VERDICT

THE GOOD:

• Simplistic, easy-to-get-through combat
• "Nonlinear" structure
• Dialogue does not confront the player with unfamiliar jokes or ideas

THE BAD:

• One boss fight may require more than 30 seconds to beat

FINAL SCORE: 100 (out of 10, not an average)

Most Overrated Games of 2013

2013 may very well go down in history as the year of the overrated game. I haven't seen so much pretentious mediocrity being passed off as a masterpiece since the days of grunge. Don't get me wrong: this year was pretty bad all around in terms of not only video games, but also TV and movies. Still, critical overhype this year seems to have gotten worse than ever before.

And so, a week too late, without anyone asking and in no particular order, here are my five most overrated games of the year.

Gone Home

To paraphrase one Noah Antwiler, there's innovation and then there's putting bacon in milkshake. You will find few better illustrations of this distinction than this game. Gone Home developers, the Fullbright Company, take pride in their game having no combat or puzzles, but forget that it's not enough for a game not to have things; it should also have other things for you to do in their place. Instead, Gone Home has you trudge around a house, listening to bad 90s music and reading journal entries detailing a story with all the literary merit of an episode of Dawson's Creek (see, I can make 90s references too).

I already wrote a whole article about why Fullbright should be ashamed to take 20$ for this worthless piece of junk, but really, why do I even have to convince you? No one looking for a game would ever think this demo version of an early 90s point and click is a worthwhile investment in terms of time and money. The only reason you might think so is the overwhelmingly positive response the game got from mainstream critics, so next time GameSpot tries to pretend to be more professional and serious than other gaming websites, remind them that they gave this game a 9.5/10. So you know, better than Mass Effect (and the same price on steam, too!).

Speaking of which…

Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Mass Effect 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, second only to Arkham City. It also has an incredibly idiotic ending that made me want to never touch it again when I first beat it. By the time I got over that, my love of the franchise was attacked once more in 2012 by the Leviathan DLC. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but suffice to say, it contains some of the most stupid backstory in any of the games.

Skip to 2013, when BioWare made a third attempt on the life of its most celebrated franchise with the Citadel DLC. What is this thing supposed to be? How high were the writers when they were working on it? Here we have a series famous for its fantastic plot and dialogue, yet BioWare decided to release DLC for it filled with the most awkward banter and lame jokes ever heard, turning our beloved characters into macho douchebags at best and gaffawing jackasses at worst. Usually when I play ME3, I walk around and talk to everyone at every possible opportunity so as not to miss a single line of dialogue; I would pay good money to expunge every piece of dialogue spoken in Citadel from history.

Probably the worst thing about Citadel is what it does to Wrex as a character. When you first meet Wrex, he comes off as just another insufferable meathead (you know, like most ME2 characters were for the entire duration of that game), but the more you talk to him, you realize there's a lot more to this guy. By the end of the game, he becomes one of the most important leaders in the galaxy, uniting most Krogan under the banner of peaceful coexistence with other races. But you can throw all that complexity out the window now, because in this one, Wrex is just the guy who calls enemy soldiers "princess". The one line that almost made me ragequit Citadel is "that's why I love hanging out with you guys: why shoot something once when you can shoot it 46 more times?"

Yeah writers, that's exactly what Mass Effect is like. Bravo.

I could go on for hours about all the things that are terrible about Citadel, and yet, I can't really get mad about it. The ending and Leviathan made me mad because as badly written as they were, they still felt like they were part of this game. They got to me because they tainted the story and universe I grew to love so much. But Citadel? Pfft. Citadel feels so alien, so not Mass Effect, that I really can't say it arouses any emotion in me at all. It's crap, unworthy of your time or money, but after you play it and shake your head at all of its stupidities, you'll probably just forget about it. The idea of Shepard and co. having a party in a fancy apartment and screwing around the Citadel while the Reapers are tearing the galaxy apart is so utterly ridiculous that by the time you get back to the Normandy, it seems like it was all just a very poorly conceived dream.

Bioshock Infinite

Overrated as it is, I really like this game. Bioshock Infinite is great as a mindless shooter, featuring more large-scale, fast-paced combat than any other shooter I can think of. It even has some tactical depth in terms of using special powers (tears and vigors), and it has some great weapons and enemies, even if it is lacking in terms of variation.

That's the thing, though: Infinite is a great mindless shooter, and nothing more. It's an 80s Schwarzenegger flick, and people are talking about it as if it's The Godfather. Hell, Predator had more solid science than this game. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say, killing a version of a person in one dimension will do exactly nothing to kill the other versions of him in other dimensions. It won't, end of story, no matter how much you'll throw the word "paradox" around.

Most inexplicable is people taking this game as some sophisticated political commentary on racism, but even in terms of racial sensitivity, it loses to Predator – that movie at least had a positive black character. The only thing you can conclude from this game's plot is that racially oppressed people will become a mob of child-murdering, anti-Semitic scum given half a chance. I don't necessarily think that's the point the developers wanted to make: I think that just like with the pseudo-science at the heart of the plot, they didn't care enough to think about their story's implications. And if they didn't bother to think too hard about it, why the hell should we?

The Last of Us

This is another game that I reviewed in the past, and at the time I really liked it, even though I thought it was incredibly overrated. Looking back, my opinion of it today is even lower. Its combat, while still fun, is incredibly simplistic, and to call it a stealth game in a world where Metal Gear Solid exists is a joke.

But forget about all of that. Here's a more important question: do you remember this game? I mean, of course you remember it exists – the single-player DLC rumors are keeping its hype machine alive – but do you remember anything about it? I played it all the way through several times, but I struggle to remember anything noteworthy about it. Ultimately, this game's most grave sin is that it is so goddamn forgettable.

There has to be a variant of the "do not make monuments to the living" rule for works of art. If M. Night Shyamalan were a video game, mainstream critics would give him the Best Director Ever award right before Signs came out. You can't give a game a title like "Best PS3 Game Ever" without putting it to the test of time. My bet is that by the time we reminisce about the good old days of the PS3, The Last of Us will be largely forgotten.

Also, enough with the zombies already. Zombies were played out five years ago. We get it: walking corpses are creepy. Let's move on.

The PS4 and Xbox One

These are technically not games, but no recap of overrated things released in 2013 would be complete without mentioning the currently most overhyped things in gaming - Sony and Microsoft's next-gen consoles. Not because they're bad consoles – apparently they're hilariously buggy at the moment, but that's probably temporary – but because of the comically disproportionate reaction they got from critics and gamers.

Now, I'll be the first to admit to being something of a Nintendo fanboy, but I have nothing against the PS4. I own both a PS1 and PS3, and some of my favorite games of all times are for these platforms (Final Fantasy VII, the Metal Gear Solid Series, Symphony of the Night, etc.). As for Microsoft, well… I do use Windows. But can anyone give me a reason why it's a good idea to buy either one of these new consoles now rather than a Wii U?

Don't get me wrong – there's plenty of reasons to be mad at Nintendo for the Wii U. They made some truly inexplicable design choices, released the console with serious software issues (which have thankfully been fixed by patches since), and still have practically nothing to show for in terms of exclusives. Nintendo seems to have been so concerned with releasing their new console a year before Sony and MS that they just rushed the Wii U out the door, when it should have been released around the same time, if not much later, than the other consoles.

However, when you get down to it, the Wii U has some excellent ports of games like Arkham City, Mass Effect 3 and Ninja Gaiden 3, as well as exclusives like ZombiU and New Super Mario Bros. Not very exciting exclusives, I know, but then, what do the other consoles have to offer? Battlefield 4. Oh, and I hear there's a new Killer Instinct for the Xbone, so you know, yay for that.

I already know I'll get a PS4 the moment Ground Zeroes is released, but spending so much money on the new consoles makes no sense given the nothing that they have going for them at the moment. So have fun playing Knack – I'll stick with Human Revolution Wii U for now.

Honorable Mention: Grand Theft Auto V

Why just an honorable mention? Because I never played GTAV. So why is it here? Because I'm sick of all this adulation for GTA. Even I like the original, but the series has grown to represent everything wrong with gaming: misogyny, escapism, and general pandering to the broskies. GTA is a game for teenage boys to feel like big strong men, and the way so many people take it seriously is nothing short of hilarious. Then again, it's a AAA game by a US developer, so what are you gonna do – not give it a 10? Just ask Carolyn Petit what that'll get you.

That's it for this year. Here's hoping I won't have enough material for a Most Overrated Games of 2014 article. 

Game Review: Gone Home

Gone Home is one of those games that was bound to be divisive. In a gaming world populated almost entirely by open-world shooters - seriously, go check on Wikipedia how many of the best-rated games of recent years are "open world action-adventure" - it's a highly non-standard gaming experience, and the themes (or rather, theme) that it explores are none too popular among mainstream gamers. Despite that, Gone Home seems to have gotten a lot of praise from major gaming websites, which is when you should start getting suspicious.

Before I start the review, let me tell you that I was pretty heavily biased when I started playing this game, although in two different directions. On the one hand, I really wanted to like this game. I want games to be innovative; I want them to help loosen patriarchy's grip on gaming; most of all, I have nothing but the deepest respect for the Fullbright Company, GH's developers, for coming out publicly against some particularly disgusting sexism on the side of the organizers of PAX. On the other hand, I always knew I would end up hating this game. Every single review I've read of it made it clear that you basically do nothing in this game but go around a house and read things, and I hate nothing more than a low-budget movie pretending to be a game.

Gone Home puts you in the role of Katie, a woman who comes back to her parents' home from a year in Europe and finds the house completely empty. Instead of doing what every other 20-something year-old would do at this point and invite everyone you know for a keg party, Katie decides to explore the house and uncover what happened, reading notes and listening to audio logs (somehow) left by Katie's sister Sam in order to piece together what happened. Basically, take Bioshock Infinite with nothing but voxophones and way worse graphics and you get Gone Home.

I'm not going to have any spoilers in this review, but it already says a lot that there really isn't all that much to spoil. The plot is so unoriginal and predictable that I could call the whole story from 5 minutes into the game. Seriously, after the first 2-3 audio logs, anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of 90s pop culture should immediately know pretty much what the ending is going to be, and this game almsot prides itself on its abuse of 90s pop culture icons, complete with whole cassettes of crappy 90s music spread throughout the house. The predictability of the plot makes trudging around for clues all the more unmotivated, and if I were Katie, I'd seriously be working on that keg party by now.

But seriously, that's it - you go around, reading notes, listening to audio logs and - if you're into that insuffarable alt-rock or wannabe-punk of yesteryear - play cassettes. There's no gameplay and no sophistication. Then I realized that I used to play games like this all the time - back in the 90s, there was a deluge of point-and-click adventure games, and everyone dug the hell out of them. Sure, they were nothing to write home about (get it?), but they were a fun distraction for a few hours, had some cool puzzles and often some very intelligent and funny dialogue and characters. Gone Home is basically a modernization of that genre, except it has no characters, boring as hell dialogue, and 3 of the world's most trivial puzzles. It is a point-and-click in the spirit of the worst, laziest representatives of the genre, which had you basically clicking on everything in sight until somethign happened (e.g. Phantasmagoria 2).

Gone Home received a lot of praise for its attention to detail, and yes, you can pick up and examine almost every item in the house, and it's clear that the developers put a lot of time and effort into making sure that the items you look feel real and distinct. But if anything, I'd say there's way too much attention to detail. It's never clear what's important and what isn't, and when you can pick up and look at every pen, eraser and book in the house, it's just too much. It's a classic rookie mistake in basically every form of art that it's amazing to me that no one has called the game out on this. When you make everything stick out, nothing sticks out, and the whole games becomes a big pile of nothing.

Sam's voice acting is pretty good, though not without its weak moments - at some point, Sam tells about a kiss she had, and then proceeds to unleash the most stereotypically girly giggle I ever heard in my life. It is such a weak moment, especially given how it clashes with Sam's portrayal as a brave girl who, from early on, resisted attempts to peg her into a traditional gender role. Most of all, I am seriously bothered by how meta the concept of the audio logs is. Unlike other games that employ them, there are no physical devices that contain the logs, so all you can conclude is that these are just diary entries by Sam that are being read out. But if Sam is so desperate to hide the full story from Katie -  as the game clearly tells you she is several times - why the hell did she go to such lengths to record it for her and leave clues as to the location of the records? Why make Katie go through all of this reading and exploring? The whole basic concept of the game just smacks of lazy design.

I mentioned that there are a few puzzles in the game. Actually, only one really deserves to be called a puzzle, and even that one only reveals the ending to a subplot - you don't need it to beat the game. The first one was particularly disappointing - you need to find a combination to a drawer lock, and I was looking around for clues, looking for combinations that were mentioned often, and I was so excited to try it on the lock. It didn't work. I decided to go back for it, only to go a bit further and see a combination clearly written on one of the items in the next room - a combination which had nothing to do with anything in the game. And this is one of your three puzzles, mind you - the only times in the game where you, the player, are actually needed.

Also, this is a minor point, but I have to mention this - why are there so many things in the game written in cursive? I mean, I know a lot of native English speakers can read and write in cursive pretty fluently, but even then it's not everyone. Why the hell would you force me to read so much cursive? It's so painful, so straining. The Last of Us had a lot of stuff in cursive, but guess what? You could push a button and get a typed version of the same text, which makes sense given that your character probably knows how to read cursive. Gone Home even does this at one point, but then, for some inexplicable reason, some of the most important documents in the game are this huge page of cursive with no typed version. Seriously, Fullbright, I love you people and all, but screw you with all this cursive.

Don't get me wrong, there are some very nice moments in this game. I really cracked a smile in the part where Sam talks about this kid she hated, but was friends with because "he always had the best Nintendo games". Another good one is when you see Katie and Sam's answers to a school assignment, in which students were given a list of sentences describing menstruation and had to rearrange them in the correct order. Katie just followed the instructions; Sam interspersed them with a story about a woman who rebels against oppressive societal norms and becomes a leader in the Polish in WWII. It really does a great job of building up Sam's character, though like I said, this portrayal is hardly consistent.

Lastly, I can't finish this review without saying anything about the game's price. This game takes at most two and a half hours to finish, and that's if you read everything, do everything, and examine everything. You can probably finish it in under an hour if you power through it. And yet, the developers had the nerve, the outright gall, to ask 20$ for this game. 20$! Do you have any idea what PC games you could get for 20$? You could get both Deus Ex and System Shock 2 on Steam for less than that, and have 30-40 of the best gaming hours of your life (both games, by the way, have better graphics than Gone Home). Hell, you can probably get some of the most awesome 3DS games for 20$, and you'd have a ball without having to get out of bed. 20$ for this non-game with zero replay value? Shame. Shame!

So, bottom line: don't get this game. It's so not worth your money. It is borderline offensive in asking for so much money for so little game. Just watch the Let's Play on YouTube - you'll get the same experience without getting ripped off. The only possible reason I could think of to buy this game would be to have Fullbright's back given their stand on PAX, but I'd like to believe you can be a progressive and still give people a product worth their money. But that's just me.

Tarantino and Israeli Movies

I'm working on the post I promised to write, but I have to take a break to comment on a story that's probably not going to interest a lot of people, but I feel like I can't just ignore it. I'm talking about Quentin Tarantino endorsing an Israeli movie by the name of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf (מי מפחד מהזאב הרע), which is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

First of all, let me get this out of the way: I despise Tarantino and his movies. I didn't use to have anything against Tarantino himself: honestly, I found Pulp Fiction to be passable at best, and I seriously think that any attempt to make movies like Kill Bill out to be anything other than dimwitted exploitation is just people kidding themselves. But up to that point, it wasn't personal. Everyone is free to like bad movies. Hell, I love How High and the Friday trilogy, so who am I to say anything.

But then Tarantino made two movies that were so offensive to me, I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm talking about Inglorious Bastards and Django Unchained. To be honest with you, I haven't watched either one all the way through: I tried watching IB about 4 times, and could never get through the halfway point, because this movie is SO GODDAMN BORING. Say what you will about Friday, at least you wanted to see how Craig and Smokey are going to get out of trouble. Who could possibly care about Tarantino's cartoon characters?

But that's not the worst part of it. The worst part is that Tarantino, in both cases, was seeking to exploit some of the worst human tragedies in history to make another stupid gore-fest. Like Spike Lee said, Tarantino was trying to make out slavery to be a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. He tried to do basically the same thing to the holocaust in IB.

The thing is, I seriously believe Tarantino is actively trying to offend people at this point. After Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, I guess he realized that critics and pretentious movie snobs will praise basically any movie he puts out, and that's when he started basing all his movies on splattering blood. After a while, he thought "you know, I bet I could poke fun at the holocaust and get away with it too". And how right was he - Israeli Jews were actually stupid enough to invite him over so they could personally kiss his ass. "OK guys", he then said, "I know what I'll do next - make light of slavery!" "Oh no, Quentin, you'll never get away with that." "Oh you just watch me." And the crazy thing? Yeah, he got away with it for the most part.

My dislike of all things Tarantino aside, I hated Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf from the day I watched it, which was probably less than two weeks after it was released here. Israeli film critics were heaping praise on it, claiming that "it doesn't look like an Israeli movie", and they're right, insofar as the production values are actually pretty good for the most part. But that alone doesn't make a good movie. A good movie has to tell a story, has to be somewhat interesting, and it doesn't hurt if it's brave enough to discuss an issue that's somewhat taboo. Unfortunately, Bad Wolf is a cowardly and pointless movie.

Spoilers for the movie follow, although honestly, you're not going to watch it. The movie is about a middle-aged man by the name of Gidi (Tzahi Grad), kidnapping and torturing Dror (Rotem Keinan), who is under suspicion for kidnapping and murdering Gidi's daughter - based, by the way, on a rather ambiguous testimony by one other girl - to get him to confess and tell him where he buried parts of his daughter that were never found (I won't go into the specifics). Now, torture is a rather taboo subject in Israel, much more so than even in the US. Both the army as well as the secret service employ it regularly, and anyone who opposes that practice is widely considered to be a self-hating traitor. I'm actually bound to get a lot of hate mail just for pointing that out, but what the hell, right?

This means that the movie could really have done something brave and interesting by tackling the issue of torture, because Dror spends the entire movie denying he had anything to do with the girl's murder, up to the point where Gidi eventually kills him. But no. No one ever says anything about torture being wrong or ineffective in principle. The only thing that's in question is Dror's guilt, and the movie even manages to demolish that tiny bit of interest by showing us in the last scene that yeah, Dror actually did it. It's as if the directors were such blatant cowards that they had to say "hey, we know those torture scenes were gnarly, but don't worry- the guy deserved it!"

Another factor which makes this movie impossible to like is the presence of Lior Ashkenazi. Now, I have been bashing the movie a lot, but Grad and Keinan actually manage to turn in great performances. They're great actors who do the best that can be done with the god-awful writing (which often feels like someone tried to write something for an American cop show and then used Google translate to put it into this movie), and are unfortunately wasted here. Ashkenazi, on the other hand, is just a terrible actor. Throughout the movie, he has exactly one facial expression - a combination of "I'm a tough guy" and "I'm worried", which is probably an attempt to make it clear to us that his character is some tragic hero. It doesn't work, and for a hero, he sure acts like a scumbag vigilante for most of the movie, who basically leaves Dror to die at the hand of a maniacal torturer.

The funny thing is, the creators seem to be somewhat conscious of what enormous cowards they are, so they have a Palestinian character on screen for a grand total of about 30 seconds, as if to say "hey look, an Arab. You know, because this is a movie about torture." I am willing to bet good money that in one of the earlier drafts, the guy had a much bigger role, and was only left in the movie so that there would be an argument for it not being a complete cop out. 'Cause otherwise, the guy is completely redundant as far as the plot goes.

I could go on about how much this movie sucks and all the ridiculous, pointless things about it. I think you get the message, though. I'll finish with this thought: there's a saying in academia that first-rate people hire first-rate people, while second-rate people hire third-rate people, and third-rate people hire fifth-rate people. Tarantino is a second-rate movie director praising a third-rate movie, and I dread to think what garbage will start receiving praise next.