Generally I’ve avoided discussing extremely popular things when the iron is hot. I do this gaming YouTube channel in my spare time “for fun.” Trying to keep up with people who do it “professionally” while still maintaining a level of quality that I’m okay with would be utterly exhausting. But I decided to try my hand at chiming in on the discussion surrounding The Last of Us Part II. We’ll see how this goes.
This was maybe the hardest script I’ve ever written for this channel. The game is long, sprawling, and very ambitious. It’s kind of difficult to talk about because there’s so much there and it isn’t laid out in the most straightforward way. I think I managed to make my points in the end but I’m sure I could have done a better job somehow.
This video ended up being a lot longer than I expected or intended and there’s still a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t touch on at all. I barely talk about the gameplay and, really, the gameplay is not why I played the game so it’s not what I ultimately wanted to talk about. The interesting things to me with this game are story structure, pacing, and when it chooses to reveal information to the player.
Going from Animal Crossing to this was a pretty big change of pace. It’s a super bleak game so while putting the video together was a good challenge, it wasn’t nearly as fun. Next up is something I think will be more fun – at least for me.
Is it possible? Two Debug Mode videos in such a short span? Nay, three videos! What new devilry is this? Only the wild year that is 2020 could bring about such unprecedented events!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons one of the biggest game releases of the year and in this video I explain why I quit playing. I do like the game though – especially in the midst of all the insanity this year. It’s extremely well made and very inviting – it’s just got fairly major design issues that push me away.
This is the first video of the kind of new format I’d like to continue exploring – not a comprehensive review, nor a list, but a vehicle for me to talk about just a subset of things about a particular game that I find interesting. Maybe it’s a particular mechanic, the evolution of the series, or an analysis of the story. I have more videos in the works and I’m hoping there will be two more out before the end of the summer which would be a big deal considering the historical upload pace of this channel. Then I’ve got to get back to the Arkham retrospective because there’s probably going to be a new one of those out in the near future.
This is the first single-game review I’ve done in five years (the Arkham Asylum video from last fall was more of a retrospective). I’ve shied away from doing traditional game reviews for a variety of reasons – mostly because I find that uninteresting. My current philosophy with the Debug Mode channel is to do videos on whatever sparks my interest – thus we have this Chimera Squad review/discussion thing.
I really wasn’t sure if I’d like this game. A lot of the changes sounded like love-it-or-hate-it kind of things. I haven’t looked into what the community’s reaction has been. While I’m not a hardcore XCOM player, I do like the series a lot and have been following it ever since Enemy Unknown back in 2012.
Like most of my videos, it took me longer to put this together than I intended. Needless to say, this year hasn’t been what anybody’s wanted so even though there are a billion things more important than video games – especially right now – it’s still worth taking a break and celebrating the medium before we get too much further into the new decade with all that it will bring.
I’m probably going to move away from these sorts of list videos. They’re fun to put together and they allow me to bounce around between all sorts of different games and genres, but they’re also incredibly time consuming. I’ve never done this channel for the views. I’d have stopped a long time ago if that were the case. Even so, I’d like to try my hand at subjects that have a better chance of sparking a conversation – focusing on individual mechanics, games, tends.
I’ve got several irons in the fire right now. My goal is to have more videos out this year than I’ve ever done before. That’s not a high bar, but considering my usual pace for these videos and the number of other things I’m also trying to do… well, I’m trying to push myself in a realistic way.
Another year’s come and gone. There weren’t quite as many games I was really passionate about in 2019 as there have been in the couple years previous – but my top game this year is definitely a special one.
It’s been a while since I covered an individual game on Debug Mode.
After playing Marvel’s Spider-man last year, I was struck by how much it felt like the successor to the Batman: Arkham series. I’m surprised it took that long for someone to crib the style and mechanics for another superhero.
I love the Arkham games but it had been years since I played them and I wanted to know how well they held up. I played them all and have been working through doing an analysis of the whole series. I intend to cover all 4 currently released Batman: Arkham games – and maybe I’ll also do that yet-to-be-revealed Batman game eventually…?
People love Arkham Asylum. A lot of fans claim this is the best of the series. I don’t agree with that, but it sure was a landmark game and it much of it does hold up. Do watch the video if you’re interested. I know this game has gotten a lot of coverage, but hopefully I’ve been able to have at least a few unique insights on it. If nothing else, I think my opinions of the rest of the series will be a little more provocative. I’m excited to get to those games.
I’m still doing this Debug Mode video game show thing! In fact, I’ve been working on content for the channel a lot lately. If my plans don’t get too derailed, 2019 should be the biggest year yet (which is to stay I plan on releasing more than 2 videos – hopefully many more than that).
For now, here’s a look back at the games of 2018: the good, the disappointing, and my top 5 favorites. Happy New Year!
Star Trek is ostensibly the kind of thing I should be really into. It’s nerdy, detail-driven science fiction more focused on ideas than action. It presents opportunities for a vast array of plots, characters, settings, and themes to be presented and explored. Reportedly, it has done those things and frequently done a good job.
But I can’t get into it. I’ve never been able to.
Every time I’ve tried to watch a Star Trek TV series I’ve come away with no desire to continue after an episode or two. The shows in actuality seem slow, boring, dumb, and inconsistent.
I like three pieces of Star Trek fiction I have seen: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek (2009), and The Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds.” Everything else has bored me or insulted my intelligence.
But Star Trek is such a mainstay of culture and especially nerd culture that I keep coming back to the idea of trying to watch it. And now, with the return of Star Trek to television (sort of), I figure this is as good a time as any to do a little experiment.
I am going to watch the pilot or first episode of each Star Trek series to see if any grab me this time around. Even if the actual episodes are still boring, comparing the different series of this vast and long running franchise should make for an fascinating trip through some television history.
The Original Series
As the oldest Star Trek show, this one has aged the worst in many ways. The style and culture of the 60s are dripping from it. It’s colorful, boisterous, and self-assured. Despite being incredibly progressive with a diverse cast for its time, there’s still a palpable air of 60s misogyny about it.
Looking at Star Trek with entirely modern sensibilities is probably wildly unfair. Clearly the show is special for its lasting impact and for the strides it did make in being more inclusive of minorities and other nationalities which is particularly notable in the midst of the civil rights movement and the Cold War. Its probably fairly sophisticated for 60s TV as well.
A simple Google search of “1960s TV dramas” returns a list of names that are only vaguely recognizable to this millennial. I’ve heard of Perry Mason, The Avengers (a British spy show, not Marvels superhero team), The Wild Wild West, and Adam-12, but haven’t seen so much as a single clip from any of them. Other shows from the time like Mission Impossible, The Twilight Zone, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. have all had recent reincarnations (or lasting influence on other series in the case of Twilight Zone). But none of those have had the staying power of Star Trek. None of them turned into a massive TV and film franchise on that level.
Finding the “first” or “pilot” episode of The Original Series (TOS) is a bit tricky. Technically “The Cage” is the original pilot of Star Trek. It was rejected for being “too cerebral” which makes me kind of curious to watch it. I’m dubious about what “too cerebral” meant back then.
Even so, “The Cage” is listed on Netflix as the first episode of Star Trek which I have to imagine confuses a lot of people looking to experience the earliest adventures of Kirk and Spock. Kirk does not appear in that episode. The original protagonist of Star Trek was Captain Christopher Pike, but after the rejection of this pilot, the actor who played Pike dropped out.
Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame) who ran the studio where Star Trek was produced liked Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, and convinced the network to give Trek another chance at life. William Shatner came aboard to play Captain James T. Kirk, the new lead character for the series’ second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
I thought about watching that episode instead since it’s the one that got the show greenlit. I actually did watch about 20 minutes before I got sick of the dumb ESP-related plot. Then I decided to view what’s broadly considered to be the “first” episode instead.
“The Man Trap”
People like to point out how Star Trek predicted cell phones. Pssh. Kirk’s got a lame old flip phone there. Get with the times, Jim!
“The Man Trap” was the broadcast debut of Star Trek way back in September of ’66. It features much of what’s iconic about the Original Series: the Enterprise, beaming, expendable crewmen (eventually known as “red shirts”), sick bay, strange aliens, and of course its memorable cast of characters (although Scotty and Chekov were still absent and Sulu wasn’t on the bridge just yet.)
This episode strikes me as pretty typical of the Original Series. There’s a strange, alien happening at the beginning of the episode which the characters gradually unravel through the rest of the runtime concluding with a fistfight or speech or both.
One thing that’s extremely out of step with modern television is a lack of setup. “The Man Trap” doesn’t do anything special to introduce us to the characters or the concept of the show. The only explanation we’re given is the famous opening monologue that was present in every episode.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Though I am no Trekkie, I could have written that from memory. It’s another iconic piece of the show.
No matter how dorky the show might be, the Enterprise is still a cool spaceship
In this episode, Kirk, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, and the obligatory expendable crewman beam down to a planet to conduct a routine medical checkup of researchers Nancy and Robert Crater. Bones has a special interest in this mission as he used to be romantically involved with Nancy.
The mission goes awry when the crewman ends up dead. Kirk, Spock, and Bones launch an investigation. They eventually discover that a shapeshifting alien disguised itself as Nancy and then several Enterprise crew members in a fight for survival. The creature is the last of its kind, but eventually they are forced to kill it after it threatens the lives of several crew members and Kirk himself.
The plot itself is relatively uninteresting. I think it could have been more compelling to watch if the show had been directed differently. The audience knows far more than the characters know. We’re shown early on that the alien presents itself differently to Bones, Kirk, and the doomed crewman so we know something’s up. We aren’t solving a mystery with our characters, we’re waiting for them to catch up to what we already know. The director’s already showed us the answer.
That’s a recipe for suspense rather than mystery, but I don’t think the suspense works for a modern audience. It’s hard to be truly concerned about the fate of any of these characters. We know Kirk, Bones, and Spock are all going to be fine though I supposed the original audience wouldn’t have the same assurance. It’s also become a well-known cliche that Star Trek would kill off otherwise unimportant crew members to heighten the stakes. Knowing this does a lot to dispel the illusion of danger. You can see the scriptwriter pulling the strings all too clearly.
Regardless, the first half of the episode mostly works. It’s a decent setup and there’s ample opportunity for the leads to interact and show off their character traits.
Kirk is a confident, charismatic leader who’s much less brash than pop culture’s collective memory has lead to me believe (granted, this is a tiny sample size). Bones is a soft-hearted, down-to-earth kind of guy. Spock demonstrates his perceptive intelligence and, of course, lack of overt emotion.
The episode falls apart in the second half, however.
There’s a hamfisted “moral” to the story. After being questioned, Robert Crater reveals that he’s known about the alien creature. It killed the real Nancy years ago, but since it was the last of its kind, he spared its life. He was content to let the creature play the part of Nancy as the next best thing. That’s super weird and creepy. Fortunately we aren’t given much time to think about that before Crater draws an absurd parallel between the creature and the buffalo.
This is really funny now. The concept of species extinction must not have been commonly known because the word “extinct” is never used. The show literally has to explain it to the audience and thus to the “enlightened” 23rd century crew. You’d think explorers might understand that already.
It doesn’t work as a parallel either. Buffalo (by which they mean American bison) aren’t extinct although it’s true that they were nearly hunted to extinction. It’s a touchpoint for the show’s audience, not for the show’s characters.
This is just like the buffalo
I guess there’s supposed to be a message about conservation or something in there? It feels incredibly tacked on. Still, this was an example of how Star Trek would at least attempt to highlight social, political, and environmental concerns even if it didn’t always work.
It’s also frustrating to watch our lead characters slowly catch on to what we already know. There’s a good scene where the ship’s officers are discussing what to do about the creature onboard and how they can find it. The creature is present at the meeting disguised as Bones. The real McCoy (ha!) was lured to sleep earlier by the alien in disguise as Nancy. I thought Kirk was catching on to fake Dr. McCoy in this scene. They kept cutting to his and Spock’s faces like they might know what’s up and I thought he was baiting the creature into revealing itself which would have been really clever.
Actually, Kirk behaves rather stupidly in the end. Spock is assaulted by the creature. He tells Kirk that the alien was disguised as Bones. Kirk rushes to Dr. McCoy’s quarters knowing that he’s likely to find the creature there. Like a moron, he goes with no backup (not even a red shirt) and he nearly gets killed because of it. He only lives because Spock conveniently shows up at the last second.
There are plenty of other silly details too. While it makes sense for a starship captain to lead the away team on diplomatic missions, it’s pretty silly that Kirk beams down with Bones and the crewman at the beginning for this “routine” medical mission. It would set a precedent for things to come – high-ranking officers regularly getting involved in mundane tasks that would spin out into larger adventures.
Given that this was a TV show, I’m impressed by the effects for the time. Just two years later, 2001: A Space Odyssey would blow away everything that had come before it in terms of convincing space travel special effects. But TV has a much more constrained budget than feature films – especially features by high-profile directors like Stanley Kubrick.
2001: A Space Odyssey came out two years after Star Trek’s premier featuring special effects that would not be eclipsed for decades
I hesitate to call the acting outright bad. It’s certainly dated. Sure, some of it seems outright poor. But acting sensibilities have changed a lot. Dramatic acting today tends to be a lot more naturalistic and subtle. I don’t think they were going for that back then.
Nevertheless, I like the lead actors in their roles. Nimoy is great and judging by this episode, he was great as Spock from the very start. DeForest Kelley is charming as Dr. McCoy which goes a long way for a character that seemed to provide so much of the show’s soul and humanity.
Whether William Shatner can act is somewhat controversial. I’ll simply say that he seems well cast and comes off as capable, and charismatic apart from the dumb decisions at the end of the episode. I like him in the role.
The Verdict
If nothing else, the characters are iconic for a reason
According to contemporary retrospectives, “The Man Trap” is one of the worst episodes of The Original Series. Dull and pointless as it was, I can still see why Star Trek became beloved. The Kirk/Spock/Bones dynamic really does work and, like I said at the outset, the concept of the show allows for all kinds of plots, characters, and themes to be explored.
If it’s true that most of TOS is better than this, I may give select episodes a watch, but I have no intention of going front-to-back through the show.
Unlike later series, TOS doesn’t have a ton of continuity to keep up with. I think its more episodic approach will allow me to pop in and out of the series at virtually any point and not be lost.
The episodic approach is a double-edged sword. On one hand, shows that don’t leverage continuity can feel weightless without significant consequences from one episode to the next or one season to the next. On the other hand, the serial approach necessitates viewers wade through most, if not all the previous canon, to get the most out of the show. That’s a high barrier to entry. We’ll talk about that next time.
Dunkirk is a $150 million experimental film in the guise of a blockbuster.
Dunkirk features horrifying events stunningly photographed and set to a concussive soundtrack
Writer/director Christopher Nolan has made a career out of crafting smarter-than-average crowd-pleasing movies that function as puzzles as well as dramatic stories.
But Dunkirk is something different when it comes to subject matter. It’s not a sci-fi, mind-bending adventure like Interstellar or Inception. It’s not a grounded take on a superhero like his Batman films. It’s not a non-linear character-driven drama like Memento or The Prestige (my personal favorite).
Nolan has historically locked down his film sets tight in an effort to prevent spoilers from leaking out. But with Dunkirk, a film based on the evacuation of nearly 400,000 British soldiers from France at the beginning of World War II, the story is already known – at least by the history books. It’s a story engrained in the British psyche.
Had the evacuation at Dunkirk failed, World War II would have gone very differently. Nolan’s film only gives hints of that greater context. It’s not much of a history lesson. You won’t learn a lot about what actually happened not because the movie is inaccurate, but because it’s focused on the psychological experience.
Nintendo Switch? Didn’t that come out like two months ago? Aren’t you a little late to the reviewing game?
Yes, yes, and probably. Honestly I intended to get this review done a month ago but a number of things prevented that. On the other hand, I think anybody who did a “review” after only a couple days or even a couple weeks is being kind of disingenuous. That’s not long enough to seriously evaluate a games console especially when the launch lineup is so limited. The games that have come out since launch have provided a clearer idea of how the Switch might fare in the coming months and years in a practical sense.
I wasn’t even going to call this a “review” but that’s the search term I have to use if I want anybody to watch this thing. But two months is at least a somewhat feasible amount of time to evaluate a console. I feel like I have a much better handle on it than if I had tried to rush a review out early.
This video was a little different for me. I actually got to/had to use my camera equipment for once which was fun, but stressful at the same time. I haven’t done product videography before and it shows, but I did the best I could shooting almost everything by myself. I’m fairly happy with the results and I learned a lot.
E3 is less than a month away now. Nintendo will almost certainly have a lot of big announcements regarding games, services, and software updates. At least they’d better. Switches are still sold out a lot of places, but to keep strong sales they’re gonna have to bring the noise. Fingers crossed for a new Metroid. A real one.
mattgoldammer.com 