Alien: Fate of the Nostromo - Board Game Review

Whenever someone tries to make a board game out of one of my favorite IP's I pray that they've managed to recreate and capture some of the magic from experiencing that IP.

Well, do you like the Alien movie and enjoy playing board games? Then look no further, as I can present to you one of the best board games based on a movie that I have ever had the pleasure to try.

Let's boil down the boxes that this game has to check - the Alien movie, released in 1979, is one of my all-time favorites and manages to build up an atmosphere and create a world building in its confined spaces rarely outdone before or since. The slow build up of realization among the crew and understanding just how much they are in over their heads is a master piece that I return to often. I am a big fan of all the first four Alien movies as they come in very distinct flavors, and the flavor of the first Alien movie is "what even is this and how do I survive it?". Sheer panic from the moment the baby alien rears its ugly-cute head until the very last scene.

How do you recreate that feeling in a board game, when the people playing it are sitting comfortably around their own table with friends and absolutely nowhere near the silence of space? I don't know how they did it, but probably with a lot of love for the source material. It hits you as soon as you open the box, but since I don't want to spoil it I am not going to reveal more than that. Let's just say that little touches of Easter eggs here and there give you the impression that this is not some cash grab trying to exploit a name, but a genuine attempt at bringing the full Alien experience into your own hands.

In Alien: Fate of the Nostromo you and friends step into the shoes of the crew of Nostromo at the moment when the Alien has just become fully grown and is stalking you through the corridors. You get a chance to rewrite history, because unlike in the movie (spoiler alert), you can make it so that more than just Ripley makes it out alive.

Each of the five characters, Ripley, Brett, Dallas, Lambert and Parker, are distinct from each other and depending on which setup you play with your tactics will have to accommodate the skills of your crew. This is a cooperative game, where you all try to beat the odds and survive the last few moments on the Nostromo. Each game you draw a certain amount of objectives you need to complete before you can move on to the final objective, which is also randomly drawn out of a pool of possibles. This means that the variables from one game to the next can change quite considerably, but one thing stays the same - the sheer panic of trying to navigate through the ship without being jumped by the Alien.

The game has a set of mechanics that allow the Alien to move around or randomly attack you from a vent. Because of this, each move has to be carefully calculated and risk-reward is always highly present. The ratio between the knowledge that the players have, and the randomness of certain events is very carefully balanced so that you never feel truly safe in a choice but also rarely feel completely cornered. Let me stress though, this is not an easy game - the odds definitely feel stacked against you but that just means success tastes that much sweeter.

Each character has a certain amount of actions they can take each turn, for instance moving about, picking up/dropping/crafting or using items. The items are useful, even necessary in many ways as they allow you to avoid or move the Alien which becomes extremely handy. The Alien is never far away on Nostromo and seems to constantly drool down your neck. Everything is designed faithfully around the original movie, the tools you can use are incinerators, flashlights or electric prods to mention a few and even Jonesy the cat plays an important role. 

The board itself is a beautiful replication of the Nostromo with little details from the movie. You have to move about to complete the objectives, but every move you make also brings the Alien closer. After each players turn the Alien gets a turn, in which it can move about the ship - always moving to the nearest player. Because of this it almost felt like the game got more difficult the more players you added, because each extra player gives the Alien another shot at moving in on someone.

Because the players control the Alien they're free to make the tactic choice if two players are equally close to the Alien. It is hard not to make choices for the Alien that benefit the group, but in the end it rarely matters. The Alien has the upper hand and every single game I have played so far we have made it out at the skin of our teeth.

You can choose to make it even harder on yourself by introducing Hard Mode, also known as the Ash character. Ash is another hostile force on the ship that moves around according to set rules, where he just messes up your plans in general. We have yet to try this mode since we find the game is difficult enough without him!

Because you play the game cooperatively, there is a lot of room for younger players, or players with less experience in board games, to join in on the fun. I can see how my son (12 yrs) loves being an integral part of the success of the group and he contributes with a lot of tactical ideas that allows us to beat the game. For my daughter (8 yrs) the game is too stressful however and she takes each set back (as in, being attacked by the Alien) very personal. Whenever the Alien catches one of your crew you lose morale and have to run away. Lose enough morale and the game is over. But set backs are definitely a part of the tactics in Alien FotN, some times you will end up in situations where throwing yourself against the Alien is part of one of those calculated risks I mentioned earlier. 

Each crew member has a nice looking figurine.

There are situations where you are just at the moment of success and suddenly feel like you've been thrown back to square one by an unlucky draw of a card. It's a frustration that feels fair however, and it never truly ruins the fun of the game. It is easy to want to go "oh, well let's pretend I didn't move this way" when you realize that is where the Alien was hiding all along. There is no one policing your game but yourself, so whether you want an "honest" run or not is up to you.

There is a bit of setting up with this game as you have to start by placing a lot of tokens and drawing things like objectives. But once you're started the game doesn't let up, it absorbs you and it is immensely fun to discuss moves with your friends, trying to find the most efficient way to solve the objectives without getting caught. One runs off in one direction, another tries to lure the Alien in a different direction while a third runs in with an incinerator to burn out the Alien nest. Carefully laid plans come crashing down and you have to scramble to come up with a plan B. It is immensely fun and fascinating to see how well they've captured the feeling of the movie and make you really feel like you are a part of it.

If feeling like you're always on the brink of disaster is not your cup of tea, this game might not be your thing. Otherwise, I can't recommend this game enough because whether you are an Alien fan, a board game fan or both - I can almost guarantee you are going to have a good time.

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995) - Review

I have mentioned this before: When jumping into a game series I haven't tried out before there is always the question as to where to begin. The first game? The reboot game? The best game? With Assassins Creed I just picked one at random (Unity), and that was a mistake. With Saint's Row I picked the one that looked like most fun (IV) and that worked out pretty well. With Star Control I started from the beginning and that ended very quickly...

Here I am, doing it again. I decided it was time to check out X-COM even though I am no big fan of strategy games (except Settlers 2 which I love, and this odd little game I tried ages ago called Steam Marines), but I have heard so many good things about these games that I figured I needed to find out what the fuss was all about. What caught my interest was talk about how you invested in your fighters, always worrying that you would lose them. Then, of course, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle really put X-COM in the forefront as being its inspiration. While I never wanna lay my eyes on a Rabbid ever again, it only further increased my curiosity towards X-COM.

So I looked in my library to see which games I owned and it turned out I had the first five to choose from (skipping First Alien Invasion). The very first one, UFO Defense looked too old-style for me, so I opted for the second oldest - Terror From the Deep, released by MicroProse (famous game developer also known for Sid Meier-games, the Civ-series and MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers to mention a very few) in 1995 for MS DOS.

As I boot it up I am immediately thankful that I can control it using my mouse, and not some odd keyboard combination of keys. Off to a great start, because with these old games from the 90's it really is the wild west when it comes to gameplay controls and I never know what it's going to be like. Unfortunately it can be a big reason that some of the older games are difficult to play. I am greeted by some great, creepy music that sets the tone right from the start. I am a sucker for some good atmospheric tunes and XCOM TftD does it well. There is a threat lurking, somewhere, and I need to root it out.

The game starts me off by asking me to pick where to build my base. It has to be somewhere underwater, which makes sense based on the title of the game. Clicking around in the menus I can access a "Geoscape" which allows me to look around on the surface of the Earth. At first I have no idea why I would want or need to do this, because as will become very clear, the game doesn't explain a single thing to the player. I am assuming this is because it originally came with a thick manual, but unfortunately the version on GoG doesn't (old games on GoG in fact often come with the original manual, but for some reason this one doesn't). 

For that reason I decide to simply learn as I move along. Best case scenario I will learn by doing, worst case scenario I will fail horribly without knowing why. In this Geoscape scene I can choose to "Intercept". It's the first button on the menu so I click it. Apparently I have submarines that I can launch around the globe, so I give it a go. It seems straightforward enough and I can also ask my subs to do things like patrolling, though at this point I have no idea what will happen if I do. The subs need to refuel and do so automatically, it also seems like my base can't run out of fuel. I also discover the time buttons, which allow me to choose at which speed time moves forward. The options are plentiful, I can move at 5 second increments - i.e very slowly - up to1 day increments, which is the fastest. I stick to 5 sec for quite a while before I dare try to move faster, and it's not until I do that things actually start happening, because TftD is a game that values its slow pacing. As soon as something does happen though the time moves automatically back to slow, so that you have plenty of time to make your decisions - a very welcome game mechanic.

She's a beauty, she is.

Continuing my exploration of the menus I find where I can actually go to my base and do some good old base-building. The menu here is pretty self-explanatory and familiar even if you're mostly into more modern games. I can choose to do research and allocate researchers. I can choose to manufacture and allocate technicians. I can expand my base, gear up my team, recruit more people and a bunch of others things that I am not sure of. I am in fact not sure of anything, I just click around and see what happens.

Suddenly I get the message that an alien sub has been spotted. I can send my sub to intercept, which of course I do. I get the mission briefing that I need to neutralize the alien threat and try to find alien technology if possible. I can always choose to abandon the mission if I feel like but I guess that isn't something I should strive for.

Intercepting aliens moves you into an isometric, top-down view of a more classical action strategy style. I've got my squad of marines that are ready to move out and a bar of buttons to order things around. Yet again I have no idea what any of the buttons do, but figuring that none of them are likely to cause me to explode I try them out at random. They do the obvious things, open up inventory (which also lets you pick things off the ground like in many CRPGs, move between characters and between layers of the battle field (layers being height differences). I move my characters simply by clicking on them and then where I want them to go. They both seem to have something similar to action points, dictating how much they can perform within a turn, and something similar to stamina, which I think is affected by the quality of the terrain. It also seems my marines get tired after some fighting (who'd have guessed?!) and start walking extremely slowly. Or maybe they are weighed down? It is anyone's guess.

Underwater, no one can hear you scream.

I frankly love the graphics of this isometric view though, it's for the most part clear what I am looking at and the sprite work is beautiful. All my little marines are named and I can see what gear they are hauling, though I have no idea how useful any of it is. I can without much trouble see that none of them are wearing much more than a pretty basic weapon and what I think are throwing weapons (they all automatically wear what they need to be able to breathe underwater), so no armor. 

I move my characters around the field and notice that if I move a character that is out of screen view, it will teleport into position. It is only when I look at them they go through the full motion of animating their movements. This is also a welcome function since this saves you from just looking at a screen waiting for your marine to get into position. Once all my characters have moved and I end my turn, the aliens get to do their turn, hidden from me. Unless I have spotted them of course. Just like in Heroes of Might and Magic.

The first aliens I encounter are tiny things that I one-shot with trouble. They also aim like Stormtroopers so I make quick work of them. My son suggests I shoot some stuff inside the alien space ship, which makes things blow up and incapacitate two of my marines. Thanks kid. But it is cool that the environment is interactable, I really like that because I am thinking it can probably be just as easily used to my advantage.

Not for the claustrophobic.

Hyped on my easy win over the little aliens and coming back with some alien artefacts to research on I quickly set out to discover more aliens to kick back into space. But then I learn that TftD is not as gentle as I first thought. Wrestling my subs turns out to be tricky, I am unclear whether I have to boat around the oceans and patrol to come across aliens or not. When I do my subs inevitably have to come back to refuel, and that is also inevitably when the aliens show up. The nations of the world who decide on my funding each month aren't happy that my subs sit back in the base refueling instead of coming to the aid of the people of the world. Neither am I! 

Then, when I finally catch up to another alien sub, I come across some other aliens who definitely don't play nice. Maybe they realized that sending their weakest troops didn't do them much good, because whatever they're sending out now can easily one-shot all my marines as soon as I see them. There is just no chance for me to fight them, and so I rather flee than send my troops into an early grave. The tables have turned. So I start to think. My marines clearly need more of everything to fight those guys - armor, better weapons and health packs. So I start researching those things. And maybe I can try to grind some of those weaker mobs when I come across them, for materials, or whatever they drop.

The game can feel a bit unfair at times. Just stepping out of my sub I get murdered by something off screen. Good bye Malory, it was nice knowing you. I guess that is the harsh reality of alien warfare, but it is difficult to know what I could've done differently. In another mission I find out the hard way that the weapon I decided to bring only works underwater, which I happen to not be. Well... that sucks. In some missions you are supposed to save civilians which seems like a fairly impossible task, as I hear them getting slaughtered in the distance. 

But otherwise there isn't much I don't enjoy about XCOM TftD, and the things I don't like are because I don't know the mechanic yet. For a game that's over 30 years old it plays surprisingly modern. Nothing is explained, but it's also quite welcoming to just try things around and see what happens. It is also a very slow paced game, which requires you to tinker, add a thing here and there. I was already expecting to have to do a few restarts to get the hang of it, but I have in fact survived longer than I thought I would. Usually money is the first thing that goes out the window but the slow pace semi-tricks me into thinking I am doing ok although only a short amount of time has actually passed in-game. In this it is similar to one of my all-time favorites - Settlers 2 from 1996.

This is how you do it.

Fortunately, nowadays a manual is only a quick AltaVista search away. The manual is actually really instructional, showing how to get through the different parts of the game step-by-step, just like a tutorial. An IKEA manual would be proud. It is to the games credit that I got most of the steps from the manual just by trying things out dynamically in-game.

To modern sensibilities the feedback-loop is probably too slowly tuned on XCOM TftD. Even though there is always a feeling of something to do, the sense of real successes are, at least initially, far in-between and hard-earned. If this sounded like it could be your thing, but maybe want something with a quicker turn-around, I can highly recommend FTL: Faster Than Light. It retains the same feel of tinkering and micro-managing, and high level of failure (in a good way!). But for a game from 1995, X-COM: Terror from the Deep is a banger.

Disco Elysium (2019) - Review

Some times I try to get through things even though I have a niggling thought at the back of my head that keeps telling me that I don't have any idea what is going on. More often than not that thought transforms into the realization that maybe this isn't the kind of experience I want to spend my time on. But some times not understanding what you're doing is actually part of the experience, part of what keeps you moving forward, looking for that one piece of information that will make it all come together...

Disco Elysium has been lauded by pretty much everyone since it was released, and so it wasn't odd that it ended up on my radar. What all those reviews didn't prepare me for though is that it is a novel camouflaging as an RPG with DnD inspirations. If you don't like to read (or listen to a lot of talking), this is not the game for you. Fortunately I love to read, so should be all good, right?

You play as an anonymous drunk, who quickly realizes he is supposed to be a cop trying to solve a case. A murder case no less. Your buddy cop tells you this as you struggle to comprehend where you are, who you are and why life has to be so complicated. It is a little bit comforting that the main character seems to be as lost as I feel most of the time. I literally just run around talking to random people I come across, but that is my job so it works out.

It starts off RPGy enough, you get to create a character by allocating points. This just means that you can't be really smart and really strong, you're either or. Or somewhat half-bad at both. I decided this was the game where I could finally go hard-core smartass, like I've always wanted in the Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gates. Those game tease you with the possibility to roll those kind of characters, without actually making a game that allows you to play that way. But Disco Elysium, surely, would treat my brains differently. I was hoping this was the kind of game where I could talk myself out of a gun fight if needed. 

Mostly this turned out to be true, though my brainy-ness at first just seemed to mean that I talked a lot to myself without actually accomplishing much of anything. Of course, I haven't had a brawny playthrough so I don't know how much more efficient that playstyle is, though I strongly suspect all the talking is unavoidable regardless. The fun consequence of my lack of physical prowess is that I create a character that legitimately seems like he can die if he stubs his toe hard enough. I've heard of people who have rolled DnD characters that ridiculous, but it was an interesting experience to play it myself. It keeps me on my toes (!) because I literally have no idea what will do damage to me. Beside being shot to death at one point, which seems like a predictable albeit unfortunate work hazard when you're a cop, I'm also at one point close to dying because I kick a door to hard. I guess such is the path I chose to wander.

The stakes are somewhat offset by the fact that you can save and quick save whenever you like. Before long I know to quick save before any conversation or pretty much any choice of consequence. Then I realize I have no idea which choices will end up having major consequences and I just end up quick saving before pretty much any interaction with anything. All the inner voices give you hints towards what dialogue choices are beneficial to go for, and I actually really like the system where the game doesn't necessarily outright tell you which is the "good", "chaotic", "evil" or "neutral" path but just hints at it. Even then you can still mess things up with a misinterpretation or a bad dice roll. It makes for dynamic but confusing dialogues, as much entertaining as they are difficult to try to master.

There is however a disturbing discrepancy between the cleverness of the writing/dialogue/game system and the fact that other parts of the game feel so very... game-y. People will stand in the exact same spot throughout the day and onto the next. That makes sense for the bartender at the inn, even though he is looking at the same broken taxidermied bird for days, but less so for the woman outside the book shop trying to figure out which book she wants to buy. Or pretty much most of the people you interact with. This makes them seem a lot less like people, and a lot more like sign posts, there more to offload information and exposition than to make the world feel like a real place. Maybe this intentional? You do question reality a lot in the game, and the way the game is designed I question the game a lot as well.

It also doesn't help that the people you talk to are such caricatures, it just emphasizes their roles in the game as The Thing That Tells You Where To Go, The Thing That Stands In Your Way, The Thing That Has The Next Answer. They all have their one schtick and they schtick to it, pardon my pun. I don't know if I put my points in the wrong things, but this kind of one-themed conversations is exactly what I wanted to avoid when I went with the brainy guy. While there is options to talk people out of things, threaten them or confuse them (you can even talk a door into opening with enough rhetoric skill), it rarely makes it feel like there is any development in their thought processes. It might be an effect of the somewhat limited scope of the script (I mean in narrative, not depth), you are only there to solve a murder mystery over a handful of days after all, but I've played games like that before that never came close to feeling like talking to robots as much as this does some times (ironically one of them is literally about talking to robots, Primordia).

Disco Elysium unfortunately also ticks one of my biggest no-no's for games, which is that the art design never ever should hamper the playability. It doesn't matter how fancy or artsy your game looks, if it makes it harder to navigate in any way, you have still failed in what is supposed to make a game fun. Disco Elysium looks like it's been painted with an oily aquarell (water painting is apparently the English term for it but I prefer the Swedish one - it sounds posher) in rainy gray and brown colours. Pressing Tab highlights interactable objects around you, and the game would've probably been completely unplayable without it, because even with this feature I frequently struggle to figure out where my character can move to. I even at one point had to look up where to go next because I couldn't identify a passage as walkable from looking at it. As you walk around you can look at certain things that are highlighted, but the information serves no other purpose other than world-building, as if they had to label the things lying around because they're too hard to make out with the eye. "It's a broken window with some dust on it" or "there is some gravel on the ground here". I am making those ones up, but they would fit in the game without trouble.

Most of the game feels like a dream sequence where things only make sense on a surface level. As soon as you start to think about it you realize that none of this can really be for real. I think this is entirely intentional. Just like in a dream things seem to just happen and I rarely get a feeling that I figured something out or was an instrumental part of the world. Time moves on as you move around, and the game just decides it's ready for the next scene to play. Suddenly the game tells me I can quick travel, but not how to do it. I am still wondering. Maybe several play throughs would open up the inner workings of the game for me, right now entire game mechanics make no sense to me - like the "inner thoughts" that you can "research" and appear seemingly at random. I don't know what purpose or benefits they serve, and since they cost ability points to research I entirely opted out of investing in them. 

The voice acting is overall good, though I chose to skip through most spoken dialogue and read the text on my own instead (and I definitely didn't read all of the text because there is so very much of it). That is nothing on the game though, I am simply not a huge fan of spoken dialogue (the Yakuza series being a huge exception!). Otherwise there is some passable music playing in the background and the odd sound effect here and there. Overall the game feels very quiet and you'll mostly hear a lot of talking. It just adds to that weird sensation of everything being unmovable around you.

By in-game day 3 I am starting to feel fatigued. Fatigued by the constant gray, the constant sadness, the constant nothingness. Fatigued by being someone so pathetic everyone seems to laugh behind my back and I have no idea why I am this way. Fatigued by running the same route, trying the same doors and speaking to the same people saying the same things. The sense of achievement is too close to zero at almost any given time and it almost feels like being stuck in a hamster wheel. 

Disco Elysium tries a lot of things and I especially found the exploration of the main characters inners thoughts to be interesting. This is something I haven't seen done in this way before, and a lot of the time it worked well. I liked that enough points in the right skills would allow me to know if someone was telling the truth or even suggest dialogue options for me. Too few points in other skills could result in some hilarious situations like dying from kicking a door frame too hard.

Unfortunately the rest of the game feels like a wet, smelly blanket. The characters leave me uncaring because I understand too little of what is going on or why anyone is motivated to act the way they do. No one feels like an actual person with feelings and thoughts, they all feel like mannequins in what is possibly just a big hallucination. My character and me clearly just go through the motions, trying to pretend for long enough to maybe awaken a feeling of purpose, that just never comes. Everyone says they love Martinaise yet I can't shake the feeling that everyone I talk to would actually rather be somewhere else. And so it turns out, would I.

I will miss Kim though.

Mad Max (2015) - Review

Having a good time in the Mad Max world means you are going to sound like a right lunatic. So when I say things like "throwing a thunderpoon at a war boy to make them explode is so satisfying" and "aw nice, I found some maggots to eat", please don't think that it in any way represent my actual values outside the gaming world.

The world of Mad Max is not a nice place. I actually tried to compare it to some similar post-apocalyptic universes - you've got things like Fallout, The Witcher (not post-apocalyptic per se, but considering you can't set foot outside your bed without being beset by monsters, I still consider it a hell-hole) and Judge Dredd to mention a few off the top of my head. And compared to a lot of them, Mad Max is a pretty bad place. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is a piece of shit. No one tries to do nice things. There is barely any semblance of civilization going on and it's a dog eat dog world at every corner. Add to that, there is nothing but desert as far as the eye can see, so you can't even shack up in some nice meadow somewhere and try to live your life on your own. The Mad Max world just doesn't have nice things. 

The main character, Mad Max himself, is in fact also not a nice guy. The few times he ends up doing nice things, it is almost like he has to pull his own teeth how much he seems to dislike it. The game makes a good job at conveying that Max only ever does something for someone else if he also benefits from it. Altruism is something that is truly dead in this sandscape.

To replicate that in a game then, without making the player just behave like an absolute monster, is no small feat. To be fair, Max doesn't go out of his way to ruin the life of the people he meets, unlike a lot of the people he meets. So there is a starting point for an anti-hero, and we all love our anti-heroes.

To make things harder for themselves, the game developers also make you kill off the final bad guy in a cut scene right at the start of the game. Yeah, no need to warn for spoilers here I think, you are literally offing what should be the final boss in the first few minutes of the game. You as a player are just watching these things unfold, but they also set the stage really nicely for what is to come. They immediately explain what a bad guy Mad Max is and you will realize quickly that there is still much work left to do.

Making a game from an established universe definitely seems to be a double edged sword. On the one hand you have characters, lore and story lines all for free. On the other hand you have an army of loyal fans that are going to nitpick every choice you make. The universe has to feel right, and whatever feels right differs from person to person. But when you get it right it can work so much in your favor. Play your cards right, and part of the reason people will want to spend time in your game is because they can pretend to be part of that universe. 

I noticed the difference when I compared a game like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max. I like the Lord of the Rings movies (and books), but I am by no means a big fan and know little about the universe beyond the abovementioned movies and books. I enjoyed M-E:SoM because it was a well crafted game, not because I was thrilled to be running around in the same world as Frodo and Sauron (not that anyone would be thrilled to hang out with Sauron, but you get my meaning).

With Mad Max I suspect the opposite however. While I am not necessarily a huge Mad Max fan either, I am a huge fan of the Fury Road movie, which this game is clearly heavily inspired by. And while I find the game to have other qualities, which we will get in to hopefully, a huge draw for me is simply being able to run around and pretend to be a little part of the world in that movie.

Even if you don't like anything else about this game, you have got to hand it to them - they've really succeeded in building up the Mad Max atmosphere and just crazy stuff that goes on in those movies. People are suitably disgusting, both morally and literally, and the world is fifty shades of sand. But it works, it works so well that I absolutely love running around punching Scrotus' hordes in the face and setting things on fire in fifteen different ways.

Mechanically it works too. They've put focus on the two things that need to feel good - the melee and the driving. You'd think I'd steer clear of a game that takes place 90% inside a car, but ripping through sand dunes and throttling yourself off a cliff never gets dull. I am endlessly impressed that they've managed to build a world where a car can go completely mad and you never feel stuck or lost. There are of course loads of different vehicles to unlock, that all handle differently. Since I am no particular fan of driving I quickly opted to perfect the feel of one vehicle and stick with that. That worked well for me throughout the entire game, but there are many options if you prefer to tinker around. Now, I've never driven like a mad man through a desert with five other vehicles filled with maniacs on my rear hellbent on blowing me up, but I would dare to guess that Mad Max makes a pretty good simulation of how that would feel. 

Some more words about the punching then. Maybe it's telling that it took me about 15 hours of gameplay before I realized I could upgrade Max's melee abilities. Up to that point I still had had all the fun in the world. And yes, that probably also means that the game is a bit on the easy side - especially since it doesn't take long to figure out how to outsmart most creatures you come across, though that still feels suitable to the lore of the universe.

Max's punching has weight to it and you will swing yourself through hordes with some easy button presses. It takes some timing to get it right, but I rarely felt like I took a punch to the face unfairly. Upgrading Max means you can add some tricks to the mix which requires you to keep out for other cues. Yeah it's basically QTE, but it feels chunky and satisfying. It's straight forward, there is no sneaking about here. Max can attack from different vantage points, but there is definitely going to be battle. The shotgun and knives at his belt do a good job too, everything feels deliberate and useful. 

Some things took some getting used to for me, though I'll say they are actually good design decisions. To interact with most things you need to press and hold your interact-key (E on PC), which took me hours to get right. But it makes sense, this way Max won't accidentally interact with things because I accidentally press E. Also, I actually had to search the internet how to get through certain sections because it turns out Max has a jump button, it's just a weird one - Left Ctrl. Max will roll on Space, and it makes a lot more sense in the game because jumping is almost never used whereas rolling is used a lot.

If you don't want to follow the main story you get a whole world to explore or more importantly, purify from the hordes of Scrotus. The world is littered with enemy camps to destroy, races to win, mine fields to clear out and scrap to collect. The scrap allows you to improve your own vehicle but also the main hub friendly camps that you come across. Upgrade the friendly camps enough and they will also allow you to regain water, health, ammo and fuel. I use the word "friendly" in the loosest of ways here. The camps are lead by people who only decide not to shoot Max in the face immediately, because they recognize that he can be useful to them. People like Jeet, Pink Eye and Gutgash are definitely not nice people. They are just slightly less horrible than the terrible bottom-feeders that inhabit most of the wasteland.

You'll come across a lot of interesting characters, for sure. But none as interesting and easy to love as Chumbucket. Chumbucket sets you on your path from the start of the game and comes with you on every mission in the car. He won't fight, but he will fix the car and the car will need a lot of fixing. Chumbucket is a great character and the MVP of this game besides Max himself. Max tolerates him, but Chumbucket basically reveres Max as a prophet at the altar of the gasoline and even calls him "Saint". He will comment on things that happen around you and I never got tired of him hanging around. Chumbucket wants you to help complete his lives work of building the Angel - the best car the wasteland has ever seen. Honestly I had so much fun driving around doing all sorts of things besides the main story, I sort of didn't pay attention to what that was all about. The main story gives you a reason to explore more areas of the game, but playing around in the world felt like the main draw.

The villains will have lovely names like Stank Gum, Gut Noose and Stump Grinder. Encountering them is overall quite forgettable affairs, a lot of them are even re-skins of each other. A bit of a lost opportunity there, but a minor gripe in a game otherwise filled with both character and characters.

There is plenty more to mention, like Griffa, a mysterious stranger who will blow dust in your face and allow you to improve certain skills while musing about your future and your past. Or that the map is great and I never got lost even though pretty much everything looks the same. Or that there are sandstorms that are terrifying and last literal minutes unless you take cover? Or that the soundtrack uses a mouth harp, one of the most underrated instruments ever?

All in all, there is a lot to see and do in Mad Max. I've spent over 44 hours on it, and I am not done yet. I was a bit surprised and sad to read that it wasn't all too well received though it seems to have since gained more recognition. Maybe your mileage will vary, I am sure an interest in the world of Mad Max will increase your enjoyment. There are repetitive parts, for sure. But mostly the game oozes respect for the source material and an eye for detail. In the end, there is a very competent and fun game underneath all that sand and oil.

Field Report #32 - I Am A Fan of KPop Now

 Having kids is, as anyone with kids knows by now, a pretty life-altering experience. In some tiring ways, in some difficult ways, mostly in some awesome ways. What I didn't expect however was that my kids would bring me into whole new hobbies.

Usually it is the other way around, or so I thought. As an adult you already have your hobbies, and you will do your darndest to make sure your kids love your things too. I am no different, I have tried to get my kids to love things like Pokémon (that wasn't so difficult), board games (that hasn't really worked so far) and hiking (they are converts). But it turns out my kids are their own people, with their own interests.

So it is that when my son turned out to be interested in birds, I started to get interested in them too. Now we regularly go on bird-watching events together, and I might even be more into birds than he is. 

My daughter has turned out to be into singing and dancing, which I don't mind doing every now and then either. But then we ended up watching a movie called KPop Demon Hunters (KDH), I am sure you have heard about it by now. It seems impossible to have missed it, it has been a complete (K)pop culture phenomenon and a huge success for Netflix and the Kpop community.

Prior to KDH I had heard of Kpop, of course. I had even listened (a lot) to Psy, and of course the awesome Bar Bar Bar by Crayon Pop, so I wasn't completely unknowing about what it was about. I knew there was a band called... BTS? I had never heard any of their songs, knowingly, and overall I didn't think most Kpop was my thing.

But the songs in KDH got me bopping my head. And normally I would've probably just seen the movie, thought it was better than I had expected and moved on. But my kid didn't allow me to let it leave my headspace, constantly singing and listening to the songs from the movie.

Eventually my brain gave in and I thought to myself - ok, let's find out a little bit more about this Kpop stuff, there must be something out there worth listening to, something similar to KDH.

So I looked up videos on Youtube listing "best Kpop songs of year so-and-so" or "top 100 Kpop songs".

Almost none of them appealed to me. Out of all the songs I listened to I ended up adding only two to my regular playlist - Very Nice by Seventeen and Mirotic by TVXQ. They are... ok. Slightly above the rest, but nothing special.

Then a new song with a new band popped up in my feed. Ready 2 Rumble with All (H)ours. I clicked it, as one does and... I liked it. I liked pretty much everything about it. The song was good, the energy from the group was great, the dance routine was awesome. This group had piqued my interest. Next time they showed up in my feed, with another song, I decided I wanted to listen to that too, Gimme Gimme Gimme. And that was even better, in almost every way. Ok, they were 2 for 2. Then I found another song, Shock, better again.

My daughter loved them too, so it became a thing we could listen to together. We love pretty much every song they've released in their short 2 year existence. And maybe I get it now. I never used to be a fan about much when I was a kid or a teenager. I had Legolas as my desktop picture and I used to swoon over Vincent Valentine in FFVII, but I had no idols or stars on posters on my walls. I sort of skipped that phase, and definitely didn't think I would find a new thing to fan about at the age of 40. But now I can see it through the eyes of my kid and it is quite enjoyable. 

Long story short, you should go out and watch birds and definitely listen to All (H)ours while doing it.

Other must listens by All (H)ours;

Livin La Vida Loca
Good Job
Graffiti
Psycho Mantra
Bout That Issue
Blah Blah
Wao Wao
Racer