The Human Division isn’t a spoof or a straight-up comedy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be funny. It is set in a future wherein hundreds of technologically similar alien races are fighting each other. Humanity is, in this universe, forever on the brink of extinction.
Read the full review in the Free Press.
Real Monopoly: “. . .[N]o one ever actually reads the rules of Monopoly. Monopoly is something you learn through word-of-mouth in childhood, like riding a bike or tying your shoelaces. . . . So the set of rules we play by is the shared cultural set of rules passed down through the generations, and not the ones written on the booklet inside the box.”
How to design a small rental apartment: Zen and the art of tiny apartment living. Both form and function are critical.
Lately I’ve been all about lists. My day job, the still new experience of “owning” a home (the quotes are a nod to the mortgage which owns me), my decision to take on a second job, and of course, the writing, which I’ve been pretty good about not getting complacent about — all of these make for some time management challenges.
In the last month or two, it’s gotten to be just a bit much to the point where I simply ran out of time to do all the things I planned on doing, and had to start triaging. That meant one or two committed writing assignments made the cut along with all the urgent life stuff and ongoing (but piling up) requirements of my day job. So I’ve had very little output since March.
But for even longer than that, I’ve realized I’m turning into a list person. I’ve never been the dayplanner type, before. I just remember my appointments, my plans for the day, et cetera. But lately it’s been more of a challenge, and sitting down and writing down my tasks for the day, week, or month on a Post-It note has become more of a necessity.
This isn’t a bad thing, in my view. There’s a certain satisfaction in crossing items off that list. It’s helped me manage a busy schedule while ensuring that nothing gets put off indefinitely. It’s great for the day-to-day realities of work and life.
But I also have a particular long-term list of writing tasks, goals for the year, really, which is a little more aspirational and a little less straightforward to work through. It’s not on a Post-It but it’s short enough that I can keep it in the back of my mind. Sell a piece to such-and-such. Break into market X. This is important, too, and I don’t want to get too focused on the day-to-day that I ever stop moving forward with an aspect of my life.
So it’s important, I think, to have that big yearly goals list, that bullet-pointed five-year plan, even the bucket list. I want to be crossing items off all of those, as well.
Haruki Murakami and the Art of Japanese Translations: “The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness—or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. . . . Alternatively, English is often lauded for its specificity. Henry James advised novelists to find the figure in the carpet, implying that details and accuracy were tantamount to literary expression. Is it possible that Japanese and English are two languages so far apart that translators can only reinvent their voices by creating entirely new works?”
15 Ways to Improve Winnipeg: From my first newspaper, U of W’s Uniter, a very well-done and thought-provoking special issue.
The working out of the physics is one of the great joys of this novel. The combination of a microgravity environment that nevertheless contains a breathable atmosphere makes for some fascinating possibilities, and Schroeder takes us through them one by one. But it’s also a rip-roaring story.
I’ll be covering Karl Schroeder’s complete Virga series at AE over the next several months. Read along with me, starting with this one.
How your grammar skills affect your salary: “On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right? Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use “it’s,” then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.” Food for thought.
Explosions and the Meaning of the Boston Marathon: “A New York Marathon shirt means someone got lucky in a race lottery. A Boston Marathon shirt means they’ve run fast. The finish line today was one of the saddest, most terrible athletic scenes ever. But in an ordinary year it’s extraordinary. Well-trained amateurs from all over the world: sweating, straining, slowing, sprinting.”
They’ve been an occasional sci-fi topic since the early days of the genre, and modern bio-technology is making these speculations more relevant, not less. Read my essay on treatments of neanderthals in science fiction at AE.
The long-running Ninja Gaiden series dates back to the eight-bit era, but the franchise’s 3D reboot began in 2004. All three titles in the modern series have been released for both Microsoft and Sony’s platforms, while this most recent title is also available on the WiiU.
I picked up Sigma, the PS3 port of the critically-acclaimed Ninja Gaiden, a number of years ago. Along with the excellent production values, the game brought a number of new innovations to the hack-and-slash genre, and was widely praised for its depth and even its difficulty, forcing the player to really master the controls rather than sleepwalking through the game as in some button-mashers. I remember pushing stubbornly onward, ignoring the game’s helpful queries as to whether, after one more embarrassing defeat, I wouldn’t perhaps like to switch to easy mode.
This latest release was made without the input of director Tomonobu Itagaki, who was behind the previous two titles. The story does follow closely on previous events however, and has much the same feel of the previous games, including defaulting to the kind of difficulty normally reserved for a hard or super-hard mode on a comparable game.
Combat is based on a combination of light and strong attacks, with certain combinations resulting in special moves. There are at least 50 combos for each and every weapon available, some requiring strings of close to a dozen successful button presses. The player can also guard, jump, and dash out of harm’s way.
Carried over from Ninja Gaiden 2 is a dismemberment mechanic. No, it’s not like the zandatsu technique found in Metal Gear Rising. Here, you just wail on an enemy and eventually a limb randomly falls off. At this point the enemy is near death, which means two things: a) you can kill with either a few more hits or an instant kill execution technique, and b) if you fail to do so, they’ll make a crazed suicide attack on you that does heavy damage.
The story involves an end-of-the-world plot and at least one fairly iconic villain that is a highlight of the game for me. The whole game is pretty over-the-top. The story deals with a futuristic world wherein ninja and magicians co-exist uneasily with military and intelligence organizations. Here, Master Ryu finds himself on black-op missions, slicing through armoured helicopters and wizards and cloned tyrannosaurs with his magic sword.
Technology and mysticism are both accepted at face value, in a universe that reminds me of another Japanese game franchise, Strider, as much as the classic American animated television series, Gargoyles. I kinda like this world. I like that a villain can appear from nowhere slinging Slavic curses and investigating the genetics of dead gods. In this reality, it would be rather surprising if the odd nut-job didn’t manage to become a supervillain.
In fact, I have no issues with the story, whatever. It is fun even when it’s forgettable. But this is a 100-percent action game, with the levels being so linear they’re practically on rails, and nothing to do but fight through wave after wave of enemies. And the practically unvaried gameplay quickly grows tedious.
Bosses provide a welcome break in the routine, with unique battle patterns that tend to require near-perfect executions to outmatch them, but it’s easy to lose patience. Defeating the T-Rex requires the player dodge and attack, dodge and attack, for what feels like 50 repetitions without a mistake. Cheap deaths from a damage box that doesn’t quite match up properly is the icing on the cake.
I managed to make it about halfway through the game before switching to easy mode simply for the sake of getting it over with.
To be fair, I didn’t spend any time practicing the enormous list of specialized combo attacks, partly because so many can’t be executed without an average enemy dying or blocking before they’re complete, and partly because there’s no in-game pressure or assistance to do so. Maybe if I’d gone out of my way to better engage with some of the more advanced attacks, I would have found the gameplay more interesting. But with the combat already feeling clunky, repetitive, and outdated, I suspect few players will be inclined to play around with 13-step combos.
Additionally, I would have liked to see Team Ninja acknowledge some of the innovations made in the genre over the last 10 years. Consider the Metal Gear Solid and Devil May Cry series, the latter for its fluid battle-mechanics and combo system, and the former for its stealth action (Tenchu: Stealth Assassins might make an even better point of comparison). Ninja Gaiden 3 actually does introduce stealth kills, in the very first level, then abandons it, almost never letting the player do it again.
The rapid-fire button combinations used for customized actions during boss fights, utilized heavily in God of War and borrowed by everybody else since (including Metal Gear Rising), are fitted in here. However, they’re done in such a pointless and half-assed way I again wonder at the point. It rarely goes beyond rapidly tapping the square button for two seconds.
Ryu can wall-climb and ninja jump up narrow crevices. This is a cursory exercise of pressing the jump button a few times. Platforming is out; free-roaming environments are out. I think of the fact that we have an actual ninja running through cities and leaping from building to building and how it’s no different than pressing X to open a door and it seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Have the developers never heard of Mirror’s Edge? Or Prince of Persia? They give Ryu a wall run ability, but it’s pointless since the level design isn’t there to make it needed. The odd impossible-to-screw-up jump seems like lip-service to the platforming other games have done so well, and it basically amounts to a tease. Add it to the list of half-implemented ideas done better elsewhere.
Team Ninja’s error is not Icarus’ — they have not reached too high only to plummet. Quite the opposite, this game suggests a profound lack of ambition. The result is a decent weekend distraction and nothing more.
Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: Ninja Gaiden 3: The Razor’s Edge on Blogcritics.
I’ve started writing for a very cool Canadian Prairies-centred news magazine, called the Spectator Tribune. My first article is up, entitled “Is offline gaming going the way of the landline?” By the way, it’s a start up, so check it out, and share your favourite stories far and wide.