You don't catch me in here very often. But I did finish Route 96.
It's an exceptional game that just, by a whisker, fails to stick the landing. For the most part it's brave, confident and has a strong message to put across. It can be goofy, irreverent and childish too. It had a couple of moments that actually made me jump and/or be unsettled (the high point is a protracted scene in a motel, which made me feel genuine panic).
The only issue is that everything feels like it's building to an incredible crescendo. But the end wasn't quite as good as it should've been. It feels a bit like a small team wrestling to get a monster in a cage and running out of time and design space to execute. It was still very powerful and has some of the best moments I've experienced in any game. How nice to have a game have a clear and powerful message against the realities of fascism/extremism - not just machine gunning down nazi soldiers. That the game lets you actually agree with some of the odious characters and politics is very well done. Sometimes you have to, to save your own life. It does really make you think at times.
I'd love to see what the team could do with a big budget.
I went back to Dragon Age afterwards and jut felt immense depression about how shit and similar most modern games are these days (dok'ing it so hard rite now).
Which is why I said the licence elevates it.. Put these mechanics in an off the shelf generic first person game and it would be a competent, slow, methodical, somewhat bland, by-the-numbers videogamey videogame with all the usual eye rolling tropes and design motifs we've seen a billion times. Indiana Jones it up and it's instantly more interesting.
I've played it a bit. It's fine. beautiful environments. I don't have my main PC with me in Ireland and it's running really well on a 3070 equipped laptop (and looking very good).
Clunky as all fuck on mouse and keyboard (I might have to switch to pad). I quite like the voices and I don't think the animations are that bad.
The IP is doing a lot of heavy lifting though - strip Indiana out of this and it's alarmingly bland and average. But that's probably not fair, as that's what the licence is for and it does deliver a rich world off the back of it.
It thinks it's the Goonies. It isn't.
And Andor is a masterpiece. The best bit of SW since Rogue One. The rest of it is a bin fire.
I'm not sure that's true - music and film were democratised by technology. We've spoke about that before - it's the bar for sampling to drop into the hands of everyone that made music essentially expand genres at an unprecedented speed. Vocal manipulation was probably the last area to be cracked by tech (T-Pain onwards) but music has stalled out for years now. When you can manipulate any sound to do anything at an entry bar that nearly anyone can afford then that's pretty much music done.
There aren't unlimited chords/keys/time signatures. There's only so hard you can Jacob Collier before you run out of those too. And with AI now basically autogenerating music, the human limitations of time to crank it out are gone too. Same with filming equipment. Indie movies from 2004, say Primer (made for a few thousand dollars) still stand up. Blair Witch etc. FX in the 90s (e.g. Jurassic Park/T2) looks shit. But then the Matrix happened (and it still looks good today). Like videogame graphics there are improvements, but the uncanny valley is spectacularly wide. I was watching "Plane" a terrible Gerard Butler film the other night. The CGI was technically better than anything you could do 20 years ago but it didn't look real in the slightest. I also disagree on pacing - yes, for movies in the 80s and 90s, but hyper kinetic movie pacing has been a thing for 20 years now. The Bourne films kicked off in 2002. There's more flash cuts in that than a Jake Paul video.
I don't think this is a boomer rant in the sense our parents thought the 50s and 60s were better compared to the 80s and 90s. Things have fundamentally changed - in games, music, film, everything there is cultural convergence through sheer volume, unlike anything ever seen in human history. This isn't a phase in art, there is simply nothing to rebel against any more because there's no progression. Who gives a flying fuck what people wear these days? Flares? No flares? Knock yourself out. Punk? Rocker? Mod? Nobody cares. Watch anything, wear anything, play anything.
It's interesting, for my kids, their passage of time isn't marked in cultural events (albums or films) it's more in a transition of memes/phrases and whatever the hive mind is into at any particular times. Minecraft. Battle royales. A particular creator on Youtube. Punctuated by the pandemic. I'm not even saying it's bad, there's some surprising shifts and I think it's a lot easier in a culturally amorphous pool to find likeminded people and groups because you're not so bound by location or time.
cavalcade