Dishonored, a look back before the sequel

Dishonored

Grade: B

Platform: PC, 360, PS3

Genre: Stealth FPS RPG

Price: $29.99 GOTY

Site

Steam

Dishonored is an example of how well executed world building can team up with solid gameplay and make a game memorable despite a paper thin story and cardboard characters.  It's also an excellent example of how limitations can spur creativity. 


The limitation in question is the fact that Dishonored was one of the last games to be designed for the Xbox360 and the PS3.  Despite being released in 2012, a time when most gaming PC's were equipped with at least 8 gig of RAM, it had to run on creekingly antique hardware that had, in the PS3's case, a mere 256 megabytes of RAM (that's about 62 times less RAM than a gaming PC of the day).  The CPU and GPU of the Xbox360 and PS3 were similarly underpowered, being around 16 times less powerful than 2012's processors.

All of which meant that Dishonored should have looked awful by modern standards, built on obviously low poly models and with textures that made everything look either cartoonish or muddy.

In reality, Dishonored was strikingly beautiful and still stands out as one of the better looking recent games.  How?

By taking the limits of the systems to heart and building a visual look that would work well inside those limits and fit the world as presented.  Dishonored abandoned any attempt for photorealism and embraced a style that made it look as if the player had stepped into an old oil painting.  It meshed perfectly with the world they were presenting, and the tone of the story.  Rather than being muddy, Dishonored is muted, rather than being blocky it is simple.  All of which helps to convey the mood of the world, and helps mask the gaping void where an entertaining and well plotted story should have been.

The single best thing about Dishonored is the world building, the setting is lovingly crafted, you get the impression of a world that goes well beyond the borders of the game. Even, or perhaps especially, the minor characters seem to fit and have a story and life larger than their role in the game.  This is helped by mostly above average (and occasionally excellent) voice acting and music.  

The gentle Cthulhuoid monstrosities so casually referred to as "whales", the religion that has been based almost entirely around opposition to what is apparently the only source of genuine magic in the world, the dying city, and the technology which is wholly based on "whale" oil (to say nothing of the torture involved in extracting it), all fit together beautifully and mesh with the hints of the larger world beyond Dunwall with each element reinforcing the mood of the setting and story.  Even the costumes, in so many games largely ignored leaving characters dumped into costumes that either don't fit the setting or are taken straight from history and break immersion, reflect a thoughtful design influenced by, but not bound by, actual historic costumes.

Even better, for the most part the game gets out of your way and allows you to enjoy the world by having a well done interface.  I can't speak for how it played on a console, but on the PC the controls were smooth and didn't intrude into the game beyond the absolute minimum. 

All of which is good, because without such a well developed world,  mood, and interface, the game would have had to rely on the characters and story, and it would have been largely forgotten if it had.

Apparently having expended all of their creative energies on the world, the developers at Arkane seemed to have little left for the main characters and the plot.  The plot is a bog standard revenge tale motivated by the worn out and tired trope of the dead love interest and/or kidnapped love interest.  Arkane decided to go with both: a dead lover and a kidnapped daughter.

Corvo is, say it with me everyone, a grizzled male silent protagonist.  Someone must have spent a full minute or two thinking that one up.  Like all grizzled male silent protagonists, he needs a shave, has a scar or two, and is ruggedly handsome in a brooding sort of way.  Yeah, just like the dozens, if not hundreds, of other grizzled male silent protagonists you've played.  They broke the mold a bit, rather than a buzz or shaved head, he's got tousled dark hair, but eh.

Most of the other major characters slot neatly into well worn tropes.  There's the socially awkward genius engineer, here's the politically ambitious general, and look over there is the corrupt aristocrat complete with the loyal servant.  The open villains are similarly shopworn, and when the inevitable betrayal plot element comes up it is with a long expected inevitability that couldn't have been more blatantly telegraphed if they'd actually telegraphed it.  You have to wonder if perhaps Corvo just isn't all that bright since he apparently didn't see it coming.

For the most part, the beautifully realized and executed world, the tight gameplay, and the pacing of the game help to keep you sufficiently distracted that you don't (much) notice how the plot is so well worn that you knew it by heart from the first scene, or that the characters are all made of cardboard.

There are a few exceptions, Emily doesn't fit easily into any established princess trope, for example.  And despite being a bit unoriginal, the Outsider is just too awesome not to love.

If the plot and characters had been given even a tenth of the attention that was given to the setting, the game as a whole could have been so much better.  

There's a degree of improvement in the DLC.  Daud gets a bit more fleshed out, though he's still rather shallow, but Billie Lurk is actually a good character, and while Delilah Copperspoon isn't all that original, nor is her plot, she's got a bit of zip and manages to avoid the worst of the femme fatale tropes that could have caged her in and made her more boring.

So here's to hoping that in Dishonored 2 they spend a bit more time on plot and character, and have the same attention to detail and world building that went into the first. If Dishonored 2 manages to keep the good stuff from Dishonored and include better characters and plot, it'd be worth an A.

Food blogging: Okonomiyaki, the best way to eat cabbage that exists

Type: Japanese

Difficulty: easy

Non-Standard Ingredients: 2 from any Asian market

Grade: B

Okonomiyaki means "whatever you like fried up", you can put just about anything into okonomiyaki as an extra, but there are some basics that don't change.  It's essentially a savory batter with a bunch of cabbage and green onion mixed in along with your optional ingredients, and then cooked kind of like a pancake with thin strips of pork belly on the bottom.  You top it with a sauce called, boringly enough, okonomiyaki sauce, most people also add mayo.  Its simple and good, and as it says in the title the best way you'll ever find to eat cabbage.

There's two main types of okonomiyaki, I just described Kansai (or Osaka) style, which is the type I like best and the only variety I'd recommend trying to make at home.  Hiroshima style is a lot more complicated to try to make at home and involves layering lots of stuff together rather than mixing it up from the start.  

Despite living in Japan for a semester and knowing more about Meiji Era Japan (1868-1912) than anyone who didn't actually get a degree in East Asian history should, I really don't care for most Japanese food, though there's very little I actively dislike there's also not much that really makes me excited.

There are some Japanese dishes that are excellent, sushi may well be one of the best food inventions ever, and no one ever has anything bad to say about miso soup.  But to me most Japanese cooking is a bit like the less inspiring variety of American midwestern cooking.  It's generally sort of sweetish and bland and boring.  There are several exceptions, Japanese dishes I absolutely love, but for the most part I'm kind of meh about Japanese cooking.  

Okonomiyaki is one of the exceptions.  It is just plain good, and oddly new.  As nearly as anyone can tell, it didn't exist prior to WWII, and may have been invented due to the post-war shortages of rice.

In Japan you mostly encounter it at fairs or restaurants, but it's dead easy to make at home.  Most of the ingredients can be found at any American grocery store, and the stuff you can't find at most American grocery stores can usually be found in even the smallest and less well stocked Asian grocers.

Mind, as long as you're headed to your local Asian grocery anyway, you might as well get some other stuff while you're there because Asian grocers are filled with many amazing, awesome, and delicious things.

This recipe makes either two large servings or three medium servings.

Ingredients From An Asian Market That You MUST Have:

You cannot make okonomiyaki without these two things:

Dashi stock.  HonDashi is usually what you'll find both in your local Asian market and in Japan, it's a powder that looks a bit like baking yeast, a small jar should cost less than $3.  If you really feel like it you can try to make your own from kombu seaweed and bonito flakes, but I've never thought it was really worth it.  Until you know what dashi should taste like, just use the powder.  Dashi is the root of almost all Japanese cookery.

Okonomiyaki sauce.  The brand you'll most likely find is Otafuku, and it is good stuff.  Restaurants in Japan often have their own house secret sauce, but I'm not an okonomiyaki restaurant and neither are you so just buy some from the store.

Optional Extras from an Asian Market:

This stuff is kind of nice to have but not actually necessary.

Kewpie brand mayonnaise, has a somewhat different flavor from American mayo

Aonori, ground up seaweed, makes a nice topping for the okonomiyaki and some other dishes

Bonito flakes: super thin shavings of smoked dried fish, traditional topping for okonomiyaki and quite tasty

Miso you're there anyway, miso soup is bloody delicious, might as well grab some and have it too!

Pickled, shredded, ginger, there's two kinds: gari which you get with sushi and comes in pale pink thin slices, and beni shoga which is radioactive neon obviously fake red and comes in julienned shreds.  You want beni shoga for this.  

If you really, really, feel like it you can try to find naga-imo, Japanese mountain yam, if you do you omit the potato starch from the recipe and grind up a couple tablespoons of naga-imo into a sort of slimy sticky stuff that adds extra body to the batter.  I've never found naga-imo at a low enough price I thought it was worth it.

Ingredients From Any Grocery Store:

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons potato starch

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

4 cups chopped cabbage

12 or so green onions, fine sliced on the white end and chopped to about 1/2 inch pieces on the green end

6 strips bacon (or uncured pork belly if you want to be more traditional) cut into 1/2 inch or so strips.

How to cook it:

Measure 2/3 cups of water and add about 3/4 tablespoon of dashi powder, that's a bit strong for soup but perfect for okonomiyaki.  Stir until dissolved.  Congrats, you now have dashi stock.

Mix the flour, potato starch, and baking powder in a large bowl.  Crack in the eggs, and add the dashi stock, and mix with a spoon or whisk until well blended and smooth.  No need for a hand mixer or stand mixer.

Chop your cabbage into somewhat smaller than 1/2 inch pieces, you're looking for bite size here, and mix that into your batter.

Chop the white part of the green onions into very thin slices, and the green part into roughly 1/2 inch long pieces.  Mix that into your batter.

Heat a large pan or skillet over medium heat until it's about right for making pancakes.  Add a touch of cooking spray then put 1/2 or 1/3 of your batter/cabbage/green onion glop.  

Smoosh it flat and round until its only about 1/2 inch thick.  Put bacon pieces on top.

Cover with a lid and let cook for three to four minutes, until the bottom is golden. 

Flip, you may need two spatulas for this step.  Now your bacon is on the bottom and cooking away merrily.  Cover and cook for three to four more minutes.

When the bottom is cooked and your bacon all nice and done, remove from a pan and plate.  Start your next one right away then decorate the first.

Top with stripes of okonomiyaki sauce, mayo, and (if you got it) aonori and bonito flakes.

Eat.

Extras:

That's a very basic okonomiyaki.  You can add whatever you like to the basic batter and cabbage mix.  In Japan you usually see octopus or shrimp, but also chicken, sometimes beef, more pork, tofu, extra veggies (zucchini shredded thin is nice), okonomiyaki is all about what you want to add so add whatever sounds good.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2, the only game you really need, and the world's best hat simulator

Grade: B

Platform: PC, GNU/Linux, Mac

Genre: Team FPS

Price: FREE!

Site

Steam

Released in October of 2007, TF2 is not the oldest game I play and advocate for, but its definitely on the older side of things.  It is, however, still one of the better games that exists and one that a lot of people turn to when they can't decide what to play. It has hats, and fun filled promotional videos. What more could you ask for?

Unlike most competitive games, TF2 has a community that is generally friendly and not made of the sort of tantrum throwing types that make most MOBAs a nightmare to play. Whether this is due to the quick nature of the games, the way the teams are autoscrambled when one side wins too much, or just the age of the game, I'll leave to social scientists to sort out.  Bu the result is a community that typically ranges from pleasant to meh, I honestly can't recall any time on public servers that I encountered someone throwing a tantrum, or even really being much of a jerk beyond the very passive aggressive jerkdom of being AFK during a fight.

TF2 is a game that is balanced by being unbalanced.  There are nine classes, and each has a blend of strengths and weaknesses that keeps any from being OP.  A team needs at least one of each class just to make up for the deficiencies each class has, and there's ways for even less skilled players to contribute.  There's always a shortage of medics, its a fairly easy class to play (though you will die often, because medics are always a top target), and while following around a Heavy or Pyro you can learn the map.  

I would recommend looking at the wiki for at least an overview of a how a class works and what the expectations are for that class, that way when you're playing Pyro you'll know that you need to spy check.

There are a variety of game modes, the classic King of the Hill and Capture the Flag (ahem, sorry, "intelligence") are there, but the busy people at Valve have been steadily adding content, the most recent released only a couple of weeks ago, including new play modes which keep things fresh, though for my money the Payload game is still the most fun.  Though there is something to be said for loading beer into an alien UFO to make it crash before the enemy team can do the same.

The only downside to TF2 is that all nine classes are men, and other than the announcer women basically don't exist except as the pinup girls in the locker rooms.  But the erasure of women is, regrettably, not something that really makes TF2 stand out, so I'm willing to count it as a good game despite that.

Since TF2 is an older game, it can run on older or less expensive hardware with a nice silky smooth framerate. And, despite being older, it doesn't show its age much, I'd say in large part due to the cartoonish graphics that don't try for photorealism.

More to the point, TF2 is simply fun.  It isn't grimdark, it isn't hyper competitive, its just a good time, and one that doesn't take a huge time commitment.  But despite a shallow learning curve, there is a fair amount of complexity to the game, but you don't actually have to know the details of when and why you might want to use the Axtinguisher instead of the Frying Pan.  

You can load up TF2, hop into a game, and play for several hours, or just a few minutes, and it'll be fun either way, and it is that casual aspect that keeps players coming back when they look at their giant library in Steam and can't decide what to play.  For that reason alone, "screw it, I'll play some Team Fortress" may as well be the unofficial motto of PC gamers everywhere.

There are also hats.

Factorio, or why I may never see my family again

Factorio
Grade: B
Platform: PC, Mac, GNU/Linux
Genre: Building, supply chain management, resource management, sim
Price: 20€
Site
Steam

Odds are good that when you saw the genre entry for this review, you had one of two reactions: puzzlement, or joy.  For the puzzled among you while its true that many (if not all) games have an aspect of resource management some games are more focused on that part of the game than others.  Factorio is really nothing but resource management.

You have to mine iron to make iron plates.  But you have to mine coal to fuel your smelters which turn raw iron ore into iron plates.  You have to use factories to turn iron plates into iron gearwheels.  You have to use iron gearwheels and iron plates to make conveyor belt segments.  You have to use conveyor belt segments to......

If your eyes glazed over there, then Factorio is probably not for you.  Try the demo anyway, its free and you might find you harbor a previously unknown love of supply chain management.  If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who really started loving Dwarf Fortress when you discovered how detailed the game was when it came to making goods, then Factorio is right up your street.

Factorio is about building a factory complex, shuffling the raw materials around to make finished goods, and shuffling the finished goods around to make even more complex finished goods.  For a game of this sort it has a startlingly small number of resources: copper ore, iron ore, wood, water, coal, and oil.  That's it.  But they're combined, refined, reprocessed, and produce a plethora of goods and intermediate products, and every single thing needs to be moved from where it was produced to where it is needed.

You'll discover that to avoid making a factory as tangled as a plate of spaghetti, and one that's nearly impossible to expand, you'll have to make your factory sprawl.

There's alien bugs who hate pollution and will attack, but they're mostly included just to add more challenge and to force you to expend resources defending your factory.  Combat is meh at best, in the traditional sense, but it fits the theme rather well since the whole point of the game is automation so it makes sense that the focus of combat is on automatic turrets (so far I've found the easiest way to beat the bugs is to "walk" turrets to their hive).

The problem with games of this nature is that their appeal largely rests in the learning curve.  Figuring out how to make a factory work is the challenge and once you have it cracked you either go completely obsessive and refine everything to the utmost, start trying to see if you can build a Turing Machine in game (you can), and otherwise really get into it, or you lose interest and wait until the next game comes along and can consume you until you've learned all its secrets as well.

Factorio hopes to avoid that by encouraging a vibrant modding community, as a result the game is very mod friendly and has a nice interface and lots of modding support.  So far the mods are looking good.

All of which is doubly amazing since technically Factorio is still in pre-release and the developers don't think its anywhere near finished.  Despite having been available through factorio.com for quite a while, it is only very recently available on Steam and that only through the early access program there.

However, unlike most early access games, which often seem like varying degrees of scam, Factorio is polished enough it could be called a finished product right this second.  There's lots more the developers intend to add, but if they were all hit by the hypothetical bus tomorrow Factorio would still be well worth the price.

Man of Steel (2013)

Man of Steel

Grade: B
Genre: Action, Alien Invasion, Comic Book

When I first saw Man of Steel, back at its release, I was underwhelmed.  I hadn't intended to bother watching it again, but my son has been on a Superman kick and since its really bloody easy to rent a movie on Google Play, I loaded it up for him.

And I found that on rewatching it was a much better movie than I'd thought the first time I saw it.  Zack Snyder did good.

There were bad parts, the Kryptonian costumes looked uncomfortable and like costumes rather than like clothes people actually wore.  Only Lara Lor-Van (Supes' mom) looked like she was wearing clothes that a person would wear in the real world.

Plus the absurdity that Jor-El, a man bred for science and presumably not trained as a soldier, was able to be billy badass and defeat not just Zod's mooks, but Zod himself.

But leaving that aside, the movie worked well.  Flashing back and forth in Clark's timeline worked as a good way to establish his character and history while not dragging things out too much as all origin stories will if the director isn't extremely careful.

I did wind up positively hating the character of Johnathan Kent.  The problem wasn't Kevin Costner's acting, he did an excellent job.  The problem was that as written Johnathan Kent was not really a nice or good person.  He instilled fear and doubt in his son at every turn, worked actively to undermine Clark's natural desire to do good and help others, and generally was the closest to a villain I've ever seen Johnathan Kent portrayed.  By comparison, Diane Lane's Martha Kent was wonderfully done, and quite refreshing after the American Gothic cypher that she was turned into for the 1978 Superman.

But the best and most interesting thing about Man of Steel was the fact that Snyder, for a first in Superman movies, really looked at Kal-El through the lens of him being an alien.  That shift in viewpoint changed the whole tone of the movie in a positive and interesting way.

I'm also not sure whether it was a deliberate choice, or simply a remnant of Snyder's love of action sequences done by fast forwarding then ultra slow motion for the arrival of the punch or sword or what have you, but this time around I noticed that the first major power Zod and his soldiers really exploited and used was super speed.  Kal-El, by comparison, first developed his senses, his strength, and his flight.  But any good soldier knows that mobility is the key to victory, and so it really made sense that the first power Faora-Ul and the others would develop would be their newfound speed.

At heart, Man of Steel is a story of aliens visiting and invading the Earth, and Snyder managed to capture the awe at the arrival of aliens, and the fear at them being hostile perfectly.  Its more in the family with Independence Day, and The Day the Earth Stood Still than it is with the first series of Superman movies, or even with Superman Returns.  By choosing that approach to the movie, Snyder manages to instill a sense of awe and wonder at parts of the Superman story that I'd have thought were mostly worn out.  I'd been of the increasing opinion that retelling the origin of the more famous superheroes needs to end.  We know how Spidey gets his powers.  We know that Clark is the last survivor of a doomed world.  We know the Fantastic Four got their powers through irresponsible science.

But by changing not the content, but the viewpoint, of Clark's origin, Snyder developed something new and well worth watching.  Yes, we know Clark is the last survivor of a doomed world and most people who do Superman stories gloss over that part.  But for all that he grew up in Kansas that makes him an alien.  And that aspect of his origin turned out to be well worth exploring.

On rewatching Man of Steel, I find that I intend to watch Batman vs. Superman which I'd previously not intended to do.  Overall, it was a fine movie.