The Xbox One was not made for you. Let’s just rip that Band-Aid off right now. You are reading an analysis of the announcement of a new console on a video game website that’s not called GameSpot or Joystiq, which means that the followup product to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is not made for you. You, undoubtedly, are more than a passing hobbyist in the field and probably use your 360 and PS3 and Wii to play video games. That’s not surprising, I’m sure, but you have to understand that there are tons of people out there that own these devices and use them solely to watch Netflix or Blu-rays. This is who the Xbox One is aimed at.

Granted, it still is a more-than-capable gaming console what with 15 unannounced (but confirmed) exclusive titles that we’ll probably be seeing much more of at E3. And with a new controller that seems to address the biggest complaint—the lack of a properly functional D-pad—and integrates some new technology to push the peripheral forward, it is still very much a video game-playing thing. But yesterday was proof enough that Microsoft wants more than just gamers. So let’s get into it.

The Name

I actually kind of like the name, even if we’ve yet to settle on an acceptable abbreviation; the current leaders are the X1, which could be confused with the Sharp X1, and the Xbone, which has obvious, tumescent problems. It definitely reflects the emerging philosophy from Redmond that this new Xbox will be the entirety of your home entertainment setup. It will handle movies, TV, games, music, and whatever else you want. The “one” means what they’re striving for: to be your one utility for fun. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I jive with all of that, but I do like the name.

The question, of course, is the future, which can be broken down more simply into two further inquiries. First off, why not go the Apple route and just call it the Xbox? People cracking jokes about database problems obviously don’t know how databases work, but it makes sense for this to be a distillation and unification of everything the 360 wanted to be but couldn’t. Second, having such a definitive name with some serious finale subtext implies (and corroborates some things floating around out there) that this could be the last piece of Xbox hardware to come out for a long time. It could ostensibly just be firmware updates that keep it fresh, a notion that raises the point of if Microsoft has already bought into the idea that this will be the last console generation.

The Specs

The gist of it is this: an AMD Jaguar-based 8-core CPU, a DirectX 11-compatible AMD GPU, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, 500 GB of internal storage, USB 3.0, HDMI in, HDMI out, and a Blu-ray drive. Wired got an exclusive look at the Xbox One and revealed that it uses a system on a chip (SoC) design that is actually quite similar to what the PS4 will be using. And the 5 billion transistor count is likely to be the total between the CPU and GPU since, as Game Front so astutely points out, “AMD’s FX-8350 eight-core desktop CPU has roughly 1.2 billion transistors, and the AMD Radeon 7970 desktop GPU has about 4.3 billion transistors.”

What’s more interesting is the RAM. You’ll notice that the 8GB matches the PS4′s 8GB, but it is DDR3 instead of DDR5. DDR5 runs at a lower voltage and higher speeds (a simplification: it’s how the GPU and CPU utilize the 32-bit memory controllers per channel) but DDR3 is way cheaper. This will likely lead to both a price and performance discrepancy between the Xbox One and the PS4 with the former being more affordable and the latter being more capable.

The Xbox One runs purely on HDMI display output, an obvious advantage over the PS4. This is because games developed for Sony’s device will have to account for the fact that some players may not be having an HD experience and UI must be adjusted accordingly. With an all-digital setup on the Xbox One, developers can count on the fact that their players will be able to consume a baseline of quality so text doesn’t have to be blown up and the like.

Also, you know what the Blu-ray drive makes me think of? HD DVDs. You know what thinking about HD DVDs makes me do? Laugh. Heartily. Forever.

The Peripherals

There’s the new controller, which looks pretty good. Mostly. There’s some part of me that really likes the jellybean-like face buttons of the 360′s controller as these feel a bit too…industrial. But from what I hear, the sticks are great and the D-pad actually works like a D-pad now, not to mention it feels much more like a solid product, which is great because the original Xbox and the 360′s controllers always felt a bit too plastic-y to me. The triggers also look way different. They’re much less like triggers and more akin to the pedal-like shoulder buttons of the DualShock 3. They do, however, have rumble, which sounds interesting. If it can be applied to how you press the triggers, it could have fantastic implications on input design.

What we don’t know, though, is what those two extra buttons do. They are most likely just what they’ve always been—Back and Start—but the iconography suggests that they have deeper, system-wide utility that goes beyond showing scores in Call of Duty and pausing a game. Also, notice that they moved the guide button to the top. This is probably in response to the thousands of people each day that accidentally pop up the dashboard when they just want to skip a cutscene.

And then there’s the Kinect 2. It is, without a doubt, an upgrade over the first Kinect device. It features a 1080p camera (an incredible bump up from the current generation’s 640×480 RGB camera) and, probably, a nicer IR camera. I say probably because it is doing things that the first Kinect just wasn’t capable of doing like discerning a heartbeat and generating a night vision mode to facilitate low-light environments. It’s much more able to track fingers, facial expressions, and throngs (six) of people. From the demos shown at the announcement that include seeing actuated musculature, weight distribution, and a wider, taller view with better depth of field to accommodate closer ranges and bigger players, this seems to be the Kinect they wanted to make the first time around.

It is, however, massive. It looks like a slightly longer mishmash of a Jimmy John’s sandwich and a Subway sub. It’s big. And it’s required. And that just kind of goes along with the general oversized look of the Xbox One itself which, as shown in this video from Kotaku, is somewhat of a beast, too. And you’ll notice that it has a two-prong power connection which means a likely sizable power brick having to be tucked away in your otherwise elegant-looking entertainment system setup.

The Services

Remember when I said that the Xbox One wasn’t being made for you? This is why. If you want to get super cynical about it, here’s a handy recap video:

It’s a bit mean, but it’s also funny because it’s true. The focus is on television and sports—or at least this particular presentation was—which are both very mainstream ideals. That is not to say, however, that this stuff isn’t handy or neat. Being able to go instantly between watching TV and doing anything else on the console is pretty fantastic, though I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of that.

But it is indicative of a larger movement in console usage. One of the reasons we like using our smartphones and iPads for everything is that they’re always ready. You don’t turn these things on and off with each use, so now the thinking for the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One is why should consoles be any different? The Xbox One, in particular, will keep everything in a low-power state so that you can just walk into the room and say “Xbox on” and get going. To me, voice controls seem a lot like QR codes (an interesting and potentially effective use case but ultimately too much of a hitch in the usage process to feel organic), so I don’t think I’ll be using that (at least for now), but keeping things in a low-power state seems like a smart move.

Beyond that, everything seems to be related to swappable states of the console. At any point, you can just stop playing and the state of your game will be saved. Or your movie or whatever. Anything you want to pause can be paused and stored for later consumption. This plays into the “magic moments” feature of capture clips of games that can be shared on Xbox Live and YouTube, which may ring PS4 bells in terms of capabilities. In fact, just as you can play as you install games on the PS4, you can do the same on the Xbox One, though the similarities behind their actual functionality remains to be seen.

This is what people talk about when they mean always-on. What they mean when they say always-online, however, is drastically different. Kotaku asked during a press Q&A as to whether or not you could go for weeks without connecting to the Internet. Microsoft vice president Phil Harrison responded with, “I believe it’s 24 hours.” You have to be connected to the Internet with your Xbox One at least once every 24 hours. That much we know, but we don’t know what happens when you hit that threshold. Does the console shut down? Are you locked out? Or can you simply not access installed games and media but can still use discs? There are a lot of questions to be answered.

The interesting thing, though, is that it feels a lot like there are so many questions because Microsoft hasn’t made any concrete decisions yet. Things like the 24-hour limit are settings that can be changed at any time, so it could be turned off completely at some point. It seems that after the SimCity fiasco a while ago that Microsoft wasn’t sure what to do. They wanted to keep things based on the cloud and cloud operations (in fact, some operations and calculations for games can be offloaded for server-side processing), but I guess the question eventually became how to frame it to be palatable to the jaded mainstream.

I live in a major metropolitan area where my Internet connection is stable and reliable. Many people, in fact, live in such areas, but thinking of people who often find themselves in areas with shoddy power or Internet is distressing. What they to do when they have lingering blackouts and can no longer access their games and media? It’s a tough question to answer, but some of the always-online possibilities presented for the Xbox One seem rather intriguing. You can Skype call with people whenever you want and possibly integrate video and voice chat into dashboard and game functionality. Perhaps multiplayer simply because augmented singleplayer with constant, synchronous input from all over the world. The potential is incredible, but the roads that lead there are alienating. It’s a tough spot, for sure.

Any amount of online requirements, though, is still always-online, so make of that what you will.

The Used

So being vague about always-online is understandable, if a bit unfortunate. It can all change at the drop of a hat and probably will be based on reactions to yesterday’s presentation. A little more clarity would have been nice, but I can live with this amount of ambiguity until E3. What’s unacceptable, however, is how they addressed used and shared games.

“We are designing Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games. We’ll have more details to share later.” That’s the official word based on the Q&A. However, things quickly get murky. According to Wired, it will cost a fee to link games to a second account. But then, according to the @XboxSupport Twitter account, “Again, there is no fee to install the game. Your friend will not pay a fee.” So which one is true?

I guess both could be true. Maybe there’s a trial period. Or maybe @XboxSupport was confused. All games are to be installed on the hard drive, and games can be installed without the disc present. So games, obviously, are tied to specific gamer accounts, but how is the content of the disc tied to the game that is connected to the account? You can, based on the no disc requirement, sign into your account on another Xbox One and download and play your own games, so is this the no-fee sharing they’re talking about? And then there’s the whole issue of offline play. How does that affect game-account verification and used/shared games? Albert Penello, senior director of product planning at Microsoft, told Engadget that they do account for “household” sharing so that family members on the same console can play games not necessarily attached to their account.

But how? In fact, how everything? How does it work? While the always-online functionality explanation can be understandably deferred, not addressing how used and shared games work is borderline unacceptable. It’s less than three weeks until E3, but these are pressing questions that demand immediate attention. Always-online is a gradient knob that can be turned. This is a board of switches and no one knows what any of them do.

This, of course, leads into the question of whether you own your games or if you license games. CD keys were an interesting progenitor because they simply were verified via a hashing algorithm put into the game’s bootup process. But then these keys began to require an Internet connection for server-side verification. Now, that has given way to needing to use Steam or Origin or whatever to even access your library, but the consolation in many cases was that once you started playing, you didn’t need the connection.

Diablo III and, of course, SimCity went for a different tack; an Internet connection was required the entire time you played, and now instead of individual games, this connection requirement applies across the board for an entire console. So instead of being able to pop in a disc and play, the entirety of this device’s capabilities are tied to an array of servers that, should they go down, will prevent you from using the Xbox One as anything besides a doorstop. This, of course, has an adverse effect on backwards compatibility: there is none. At least you can still put in a cartridge into your SNES or N64 and go back to play that. But once the servers go down for the Xbox One’s games, you won’t be able to play those ever again.

Licensed. Not owned.

The Presentation

Compared to Sony’s presentation, the Xbox One unveiling was disturbingly anemic. Jason Shreier summed it up pretty well with this tweet:

PS4: indies, streaming, sharing, Killzone, Infamous, Destiny, Watch Dogs, Diablo. Xbox One: CALL OF DUTY HAS DOGS NOW

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 21, 2013

While a bit reductive and not accounting for the fact that Microsoft’s ability to show on a stage wasn’t atrocious, it is a fairly accurate representation of the knee-jerk reaction everyone had to the proceedings. We didn’t see much except for a bunch of pre-rendered footage of sports things that fed into a confusing EA partnership, something involving Remedy Games’ Quantic Break (which no one knows anything about aside from that is Professor Slater from season one of Community), and Call of Duty: Ghosts. For all the seemingly evergreen popularity of the franchise, it also appears as though most people are simply tired of hearing about first-person military shooters even if they aren’t all totally and completely tired of playing them just yet. The dog stuff was fun, but it only made a rather bland presentation at least slightly upbeat.

The Conclusion

So basically we got hardware, a dog, and a lot of questions that go unanswered. It would be disappointing if it wasn’t for the fact that E3 is so soon, where the 15 Xbox One-exclusive games will probably be revealed and more information will be provided regarding used games and always-online requirements. The most interesting thing to note, though, is that the Microsoft press conference is first during E3 and Sony is dead last. Will Microsoft continue this narrative and build up the supporting struts around their push of services or will Sony get the last laugh and walk away from Los Angeles the (ephemeral) champion?

Believe me when I say that I, along with everybody else in the industry, have no fucking idea. But this will be an interesting year.

Bleak. Beautiful. Oppressive. That’s the situation in Metro: Last Light, the latest (read: second) in the Metro series by 4A Games. It is also poignant, resonant, and haunting. It follows the genesis set forth in Metro 2033, allowing the player to once again control Artyom as he sets out to the hostile surface to kill the last surviving Dark One.

Dark Ones are those that were left out in the irradiated world after a nuclear war broke out at the end of 2013. 20 years of mutating and living in an abandoned wasteland has caused them to be more than hostile. In fact, most of the world now is plenty pugnacious seeing as how everything has gone to shit, and it sets up a fantastic world through which you can explore.

Metro 2033 was known for creating an intensely and thoroughly complete world that you can wander and poke around in. Much in the vein of games like Miasmata where diegetic instruments replace things that would normally be a meta HUD element like maps and timers, it was all about steeping you in the atmosphere. If it could be avoided, you would never have to disengage from direct interactions with the virtual world. From what I’ve seen of Metro: Last Light, it seems as though that tradition is being continued.

One key aspect, in fact, has made the trip over on the development gondola: Russian audio. There are plenty of other games out there with different audio tracks you can choose from and different subtitle languages to peruse (most triple-A titles, in fact, are translated and re-recorded for other territories), but Last Light is somewhat special in that its native tongue is not English.

That adds to the atmosphere of Last Light in some very important ways. English, for all its widespread use and massive utility among some literary classics, is a rather clunky language. There’s an entire part of speech (adverbs) that most writers decry as pointless at best and evil at worst. Complex syntax generally precludes intelligibility. But most of all, English just kind of sounds weird.

Russian, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful-sounding languages in the world (its quality as an actual morphological subject is a different topic entirely). It strikes a startling similarity to the beauty presented in the visuals of Last Light. The game puts you in a dire situation—a dying species on a dying planet with joy, food, and water on extremely short supply—but makes it look amazing. I never realized a rock could look so could, especially contrasted with the normal maps and diffuse lighting on this hard place (#jokes).

Even Russian profanity comes out smooth and effortlessly. I suppose it has to do with Russian’s reduction on unstressed vowels so it gives the mouth something to physically hang onto as it maneuvers around the language. But it can also sound overbearing and manically aggressive. Mark Twain once wrote an entire essay about the complications with learning German, but he also stated that it was impossible to come across as angry with the language. Granted, German has changed since his time, but it is in stark contrast with what Russian is able to evoke.

When members of your team or those ornery folk trying to load you up with bullets are yelling at you in Russian, it feels god damn awful. It feels so much sharper and more caustic than the general profane nonsense that comes out of English mouths. Much like how the game itself shifts from scenes of empty but objective, symmetrical beauty, the language of its native setting moves between a facilitated, easy cadence and a shot of aural pain.

Of course, there’s the fact that the Russian voice actors just sound so much better than the Slavic-tinged English of the localized audio. Which I wouldn’t say is necessarily the fault of those Eastern Bloc actors where the English coming out of their mouths feels like a thick porridge being thrown at the wall and more a fault of the conflicting subtleties of the two different languages’ phonemes. It makes the underground world feel more foreign than native, a notion in direct opposition with the established setting of the game. The surface is supposed to be alien and unnerving while the underground should be familiar but dangerous.

And as an added bonus, it becomes a lot harder to recognize when you hear the same NPC bark over and over again.

There is obviously a lot more to Metro: Last Light than a simple little language setting, but for a game so heartily dependent on establishing an atmosphere and setting you loose in its warped terrarium of mutants and gunfights, it’s an important setting. Granted, I don’t speak Russian and I have a soft spot for choosing subtitles over dubs in foreign films, but it’s very obvious 4A Games set out to create a coherent, cogent world and that being in their native language and environment is very important to that world. So play into their vision. It’s a good one, if a little bleak.

There is a Star Trek video game that came out recently. This is not a review of that. Despite looking rather interesting at last year’s E3, it apparently is not very good, but I haven’t played it yet so I won’t give any sort of definitive opinion on it. No, this is a breakdown of my thoughts on the latest Star Trek film from J. J. Abrams. However, much like its video game counterpart, Star Trek Into Darkness follows a similar arc of intrigue and potential giving way to less than stellar results.

Don’t get me wrong; I so dearly liked this followup to 2009′s franchise film reboot. It’s visually engaging, aurally impressive, and packed with some noteworthy performances. But it is also a consistent and gradual reduction in scale and stakes that should generally be avoided in films, especially in the summer blockbuster sort. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s build up to the big stuff.

(This will avoid any explicit spoilers, but there are some smaller but crucial pieces of information the more eagle-eyed or die hard Star Trek fans can extrapolate from the words below, so be careful)

The Sights

Into Darkness is perhaps one of the more visually appealing movies I’ve seen in quite some time. It opens on a tiny little planet called Nibiru that threatens the livelihood of an entire indigenous and severely primitive species due to an active (and rather anxious) volcano. You’ve seen bits of this opener in the trailers when Kirk and Bones jump off that cliff into the ocean. I bring this up because this sets the bar for the rest of the movie in terms of visuals.

The entire planet seems designed specifically to overwhelm your eyes. It is an entirely arresting experience. The entire forest that we see Kirk and Bones run through is comprised of trees that are an ashy white with leaves that are a bright but soft shade of red. The people of the planet are similarly wan but they feature muted yellow highlights. The combined effect is rather stunning, if a bit on-the-nose.

The rest of the movie is a bit more subtle and thus a bit harder to put a finger on in terms of appearances, but Into Darkness does feel like a visual step up from Star Trek. The enemy craft is intimidating without being ridiculous (though it looked cool, I’ll never be able to figure out why Nero’s mining vessel needed to have all those squid-like appendages) and instead of engineering looking like a brewery—because it was one—it looks like an actual engineering bay. I still love the idea that space is so disturbingly clean while the planets and their contents are so tangibly muddied. The warp core is especially magnificent.

A few costume quirks kind of land on the negative side of things for me, though. Namely the shirts of Star Fleet members aboard the Enterprise hang rather loose and lose some of that “fit for duty” look. And then the uniforms of the enemy ship look just like of…generic. It looks like someone yelled “SCI-FI!” at a seamstress and this is what she threw back.

And yes, there are still a plethora of lens flares, but I only distinctly remember one or two while the rest are relegated to memories of me reactively squinting at the screen. And Klingons are back, and they feature a new design. It’s a simple but pleasant reveal that builds on whatever anticipation you have for seeing what they look like (and even instills some if you have none). I won’t go any further, but I will say it is a surprisingly tasteful and effective update, much like what you get for the Klingon Birds of Prey cruisers.

I saw the movie twice; once in 3D and once in 2D. While it is most certainly post-conversion, the 3D actually kind of works. You can tell in certain places that involve glass and with characters standing at slightly varying distances from the camera that it isn’t native 3D, but there were points in the movie where I felt like it brought a little something extra. You certainly aren’t missing out from anything revelatory by just watching it in 2D, but the 3D also didn’t hurt the whole experience.

The Sounds

The 3D screening I was at utilized the Dolby Atmos system. For those unfamiliar with it, Dolby Atmos is a sound system that was first debuted with Disney’s Brave back in June of last year that features 128 discrete audio tracks, 64 speaker feeds, 200 speakers, and 13 subwoofers. It is, undoubtedly, ridiculous, but it is also immense.

In the opening and closing moments of the movie, there are scenes involving the Enterprise that very clearly utilize all 200 speakers in simultaneously subtle and overt ways. There are speakers both above you and in a wide array behind and just to the side of the screen and they all work in concert to really drive home how absurdly huge this starship is. You can actually hear all the different places where engines and thrusters are firing and you can almost feel where the water droplets are hitting the hull. If you get the chance, see this movie with Dolby Atmos.

But more generally, the sound design seems to be mostly on par with the previous film, which is to say rather good. I still maintain that the original theme by Alexander Courage is way better than the new one from Michael Giacchino, but few things reach that level of quality, so I’ll let that one go. But the new warp sound definitely has a more noticeable aural impact (as does the accompanying visual effect) and the sound of phasers going off still sounds both otherworldly and very obviously thick metal strings being whacked about, a fantastically appropriate effect for a Star Trek film.

The Acting

Let’s just get this out of the way now: Benedict Cumberbatch is stellar in this film. There is one part where he goes into a bit of a monologue and I would dare say he gets a bit cheesy, but the amount of gravitas he still manages to deliver is incredible. Cumberbatch’s ability to force his low and rumbling voice to carry across a room with distinct and unwavering clarity and command is striking. He is menacing without appearing to be uncontrolled, which results in a calculated evil you rarely see in movies.

The highlight, however, is once again Simon Pegg. Every scene that came up with him in it became my new favorite scene. I’m not sure if it’s a relative contrast of a drab, empty space to Pegg’s immaculate comedic timing, but Into Darkness has further cemented him as one of my favorite actors/people/best friends. And for as little as he is in the movie, Bruce Greenwood as Admiral Pike remains spectacular. He knows how to amicably command a room until he needs to turn nasty. The way he lands on every word as if it is the most important thing ever said but moving between them like an Olympic hurdler runs the track is without equal.

And the returning duo of Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock has taken a step up in terms of delivering portent. Pine no longer relies solely on his roguish charm and Quinto doesn’t lean so much on his preternatural Vulcan looks and instead manage to deliver something much more raw. Quinto’s emotional bits as Spock are truly emotional and Pine manages to actually come across as an actual starship captain. There are times when things fall a bit flat in the middle, but that has more to do with the writing than the acting.

Some of the new faces like Alice Eve as Dr. Carol Marcus and Peter Weller as Admiral Alexander Marcus do well, though Weller better than Eve. Eve does well as Carol, conveying eagerness and sincerity where they could have easily turned into cloying annoyance, but her character doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s disappointing given how often I felt like we were purposefully made to look at her character and her circumstances and wait and wait and wait and nothing happens. Weller similarly manages to turn what could have been a cutout, check-the-boxes character and created something much more interesting. He commands a room just as well as Greenwood, but with a totally different utility: intimidation. It’s striking to say the least.

The Story

Here is where the problems come in. For all the topnotch wrapping and the incredible bow put on top, the present—the actual contents of the pretty paper and heavy stock box—is wholly addled. Before I start into this, I do think that if you can get over caring about character and story development, this is a very fun film. I realize that “fun” in and of itself is a very bland term, but it is that sort of breathless sensation you get when you watch something like a circus performer walk a tightrope or strong men attempt to heave kegs over a 30-foot bar. It’s engrossing, but ultimately intellectually disengaging.

The story ultimately revolves around Kirk and his troubles. He’s brash, all right, but he’s talented, intelligent, and, most importantly, untested, which is a setup rife with possibilities. It’s a chance to address the rapid ascension we witnessed in 2009′s Star Trek where Kirk goes from cadet to captain in the span of a few interplanetary excursions. In Into Darkness, we are almost ridiculed for believing we’d get a proper resolution when we see an even tighter turnaround time that has even less reason and more Kirk being Kirk.

And everything in the movie revolves around Kirk, which wouldn’t be a problem if his story was actually fleshed out more. Spock and Uhura’s relationship ties back to Kirk, Cumberbatch’s character’s motives dovetail with Kirk’s arc, and just about every side character’s B and C stories are simply branches off of the Kirk tree. And Kirk’s story is nothing more than a muddled, confused cocktail of mentor problems, friendship problems, and leadership problems. It starts off so promising with the potential to explore the merit of being a leader versus the ability to lead and then it all gets squandered on a meandering plot.

It meanders for more than just Kirk-related reasons, though. The villains, as great as they are, come across as confused. The twist isn’t really a twist, but I’ll forgo spoiling it anyways, so I’ll just say that at a certain point, the focus shifts from watching our protagonist figuring out what to do and watching him simply react to the multiple villains cross swords. Yes, multiple villains, so for all promises made in the trailers that Cumberbatch’s character will be the focus of the movie, our attention is split between two commensurate villains only to be robbed of any sort of resolution with one and a lingering malaise with the other.

I will say, though, that for all the complaints I’ve seen about plot holes and whatnot, I didn’t find them to be much of a problem. Most of them aren’t even plot holes as they can be explained away by us simply not knowing the reason or methods behind an action, but the bigger problem is when a potential inconsistency arises and the movie very obviously and deliberately provides a device or bit of dialogue to cover it up. It sometimes comes across as if someone made a pass over the script, left some notes, and then was later fixed with a five-second bit of dialogue spackle.

The biggest problem, however, is that the entire story is a downward slope. If you recall in the first Star Trek, we get a nice if bumpy ride upwards to a big and grand finale involving the big bad guy, our favorite good guy, and their two ships mucking about an artificially induced black hole. It was quite the finale in terms of scale and stakes; Earth was about to go the way of Vulcan and the Enterprise might go down. Into Darkness, however, starts out big and gets smaller and smaller and eventually gets into a personal vendetta story that we don’t get impetus for until five minutes beforehand (the impetus is extremely well written and performed, though). We go from everything is at stake to just a few things are at stake to a couple of ships are at risk to just one life is on the line. And all of that is handled in sequence so none of it overlaps and none of our anxieties build on anything prior.

The entire movie does operate very well as a vehicle for fun, though. If you recall how much you loved watching the action-packed bit in the middle of Star Trek where Kirk, Hikaru Sulu, and a red shirt attempt to space jump onto Nero’s drill over Vulcan, you’ll love all the away mission shenanigans that the crew gets up to in Into Darkness. It feels a lot like a more traditional episode of Star Trek but with a multi-million dollar budget and a grade-A director behind the scenes.

The Conclusion

Your enjoyment of Star Trek Into Darkness is really kind of a tossup. Whether you’re a fan of the first J. J. Abrams movie or not, whether you’re a Trekkie through and through, or whether you can get into some dumb summer movie fun all plays into it. The spectacle in terms of the visual and auditory largess is so far one of the highlights of the year, but having to overlook some of the fundamental plot problems is quite the wall to climb. And somehow I managed to make it over and, while I mentally could not engage with the story except in the beginning and in a few fantastic scenes afterwards, thoroughly enjoy my time in the theatre. The question, I guess, is if you can do the same.

+ It is an utterly stupendous movie with regards to the visual aesthetic and sound design
+ Across the board, the acting is great and, in some cases, amazing
+ The beginning asks some interesting questions regarding the very nature of Kirk’s character and his command
- Much of the plot is wasted on two villains more interested in each other than our protagonist, the grounding point for most of the drama
- Many of the side characters are wasted, such as Sulu, Chekov, and Carol

Final Score: 8 out of 10

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In this episode, we talk about Bioshock Infinite, Black Ops 2, the Fuse Demo, the Upcoming Xbox Reveal, Microsoft Killing MS Points, EA Ending Online Passes, Side Effects, Mad Men, the Survivor Finale, the NBA and NHL Playoffs, the 2013 Kate Upton Invitational, We Answer Your Listener Mail and More!

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Just for Fun: Fuse’s Old Overstrike Look

I don’t remember when I heard it first, but someone at some point years ago made the astute observation that as the video game industry matures, we’ll see more and more genre-bending games come out. It was a salient point that became more pertinent as time went on. Nowadays you see RPG elements like experience points and level-restricted gear in your first-person shooters and you see extensive combat systems in your platformers. Puzzles, even, persist through less traditional enigmatic environments, and as a result, it becomes harder and harder to describe games without writing a full treatise on their intended design: third-person point ‘n click action adventure game, real-time strategy Sudoku-inspired MOBA, etc.

Sanctum 2, however, makes it simple. Take one part tower defense and one part first-person shooter and cram them together with a nice sci-fi bow on top (there are aliens that want to destroy your oxygen supplies and you have to stop them. For humanity!). It sounds simple, but the result is much more complex and altogether better for it. It is a marked improvement over the original and manages to create a fast-paced, aggressive game that succeeds in so many more ways than it fails.

You pick from four distinct characters, each with their own expertise and specialized utility (and totally badass 90s anime-style character portrait, a milieu that persists through fantastic-looking but intrigue-lacking comic bookish cutscenes). Haigen Hawkins, for example, carries a shotgun and has above average health, so he’s perfect for getting in close and punishing mobs. SiMo, on the other hand, is a sniper rifle-wielding robot who gets bonus damage for hitting weakspots. These varying attributes combine in four-player online play to create this synergistic dependency that, should people play their parts, is rather fun.

That is should play their parts because it’s not necessary; the character differences are nearly drastic enough to require class-based play. Most of my mob control strategy resulted in getting in as close as possible and dumping ammo like it was British tea in the Boston harbor. No matter how hard I tried to keep in line with what my character was best at (sniping, bashing, fire-based crowd control), it always ended up the same.

That may just be a consequence of some rather smart game design decisions, though. The framework of the game is designed to funnel you into acting fast and shooting faster. For instance, you can only set down a limited number of towers, a fact that produces two design artifacts: 1) you find yourself more inclined to restructuring and refinancing your existing towers to optimize for the next encounter, and 2) you are forced to get down and dirty a lot more often. Enemies can also be lured away from their relentless trek by getting close, which opens up new avenues for crowd control tactics. Then combine that with how your weapons recharge and reload on their own when you switch between firearms. This means that you spend way less time running between cover and open engagements and instead just have to decide on your order of operations of death.

This does take away the old drama of reloading while aliens get uncomfortably close to the core you’re protecting, but it replaces it with the anxiety of wondering if you’re maximized output can fell a foe before it reaches your ward. Enemies like the Soaker (who, predictably, take a lot of damage to kill) seem specifically geared towards poking at this insecurity and this switch-focused design choice as each hit increases the damage take on subsequent shots. This does, however, sometimes result in your having cleared out the smaller, faster fodder enemies and are left with unloading on some slow, trundling creature. That gets kind of boring after 30 seconds of nonstop firing and zero seconds of strategic contemplation.

You can fill that time, though, with thinking about tower management, which can get quite deep. Instead of discrete upgrades, you can slowly build up towards more powerful towers one coin at a time. And then you can buy the lump-sum upgrades to drastically alter how your tower functions, like turning it into a rapid fire death node. This is especially exciting in the beginning when you are also constructing the maze that the hordes will walk through so you have to decide what is important first and where it would be not only most effective later but where it can mitigate your lack of walls now.

In between levels, you pop out to where you can view your unlocked perks and weapons and build your loadout. It’s fun to see some tangible rewards for earnest progress, but everything you choose actually has a very impact on your next encounter. You choose what weapons and towers to bring with you (yes, towers, so pick wisely because those airborne enemies can get troublesome) but also combine perks to further specialize your class. You can increase your weakspot damage or boost your movement speed. These are choices that actively change the way you experience any given level. The most trivial choice you make is perhaps your weapon loadout and even that is critical.

Which actually causes some trouble down the line. With such a dependence on pre-gaming the game, you find yourself locked in trial-and-error loops more often than you’d like and thus more frustrated than you’d want. And playing online can be fun, but a commensurate amount of effort has to be directed towards effective communication since resources are a free-for-all and one idiot can ruin the entire operation for everyone.

And while it’s understandable that the towers are rather standard tower defense fare, it’s rather disappointing that the player armaments are relegated to the standard shotgun, assault, and rifle classes. The enemies, too, find themselves disappointingly uniform, like when the larger baddies are simply, well, larger versions of the regular infantry.

Sanctum 2 has a generally rough feeling around the fringes, but the core is substantial and surprisingly refined. There are niggling problems of difficulty, occasionally game-ending glitches, and frumpy aesthetics, but the actual act of playing the game is so manic and strategic and wholly a fantastic combination of things you rarely experience together that it’s easy to look past all the small stuff. Sanctum 2 takes two simple concepts and turns them into a product greater than the sum of its parts. It just forgot to sand down the edges.

+ Creating loadouts of weapons, perks, and towers have real, tangible impact on your effectiveness
+ Combat flow is refined to allow for a much more manic pace yet strategic feel
+ Crafting the mazes that affect horde movement by hand requires thought and careful consideration of the future and the present
- You occasionally find yourself stuck testing and revising strategies that result in you pointlessly replaying levels
- For all its genre-mashing innovation, a lot of the forward-facing portions feel very generic

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Game Review: Sanctum 2
Release: May 15, 2013
Genre: First-person tower defense shooter
Developer: Coffee Stain Studios
Available Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Players: 1-4
MSRP: $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points)
ESRB Rating: T
Website: http://www.coffeestainstudios.com/games/sanctum-2

Wolfire Games is more than an indie darling. It’s probably more accurate to just call them an oddity. Consider that Lugaru: The Rabbit’s Foot, their first commercial game, is about a giant anthropomorphic rabbit named Turner with rather advanced combat training under his belt. It’s ridiculous and strange and funny and, actually, quite good, especially considering it was made almost entirely by Wolfire’s founder David Rosen.

Perhaps what is most endearing about Wolfire is that they’re so open. Now four-person studio, they regularly put up videos on their YouTube channel detailing design decisions, art assets, development progress, and even songs from game soundtracks. And with most of these uploads, narration accompanies the visuals and offers fascinating insight. For example, one video discussing combat changes to Overgrowth shows how the AI predicts your movement and how that influences player combat.

What’s Overgrowth? Well, it’s a “spiritual successor” to Lugaru, though it seems to be directly following the events prior with Turner’s lingering anarchistic maneuvers, but whatever. It looks pretty neat and somehow improves on a game no one thought they wanted until they played it, but what’s more interesting is a game attached to it called Low Light Combat.

To be perfectly clear, LLC isn’t a part of Overgrowth, but it is free with a preorder, though you could also buy it for five dollars. It was created as part of the Mojam 2 charity drive, so 100% of the money they make off of it will go to either Camphill California, a residential care facility for adults with developmental disabilities, or Blender, an open-source piece of 3D modeling software.

LLC is back in the first-person perspective, a reminder of their last game Receiver. But whereas Receiver was about delving as deep as possible into the mechanics of operating an actual firearm and using it within a traditional (if minimalistic) video game environment, LLC is about exploring the relationship between power and vulnerability.

In LLC, you play as a ninja, and in keeping with the game jam theme of endless nuclear war, you are powered by nuclear energy. You have 60 seconds of power available to you, but you can earn more time and power by killing other ninjas (the point being that you are fighting to determine what the Illuminati will do next). The problem is that to kill other ninjas, you have to either fire off your laser shotgun thing or use your sword, the former costing you 15 seconds of time and the latter only being able to be used while running which drains your energy four times as quickly.

The biggest issue, though, beyond the constantly ticking timer on your screen of your imminent death is that you can’t see much of anything. True to its name, LLC takes place in some rather low light and ninjas, apparently, are constructed almost entirely out of shadows. So the only time you can really catch a glimpse of your enemies is when they attack or turn on their flashlight.

Make no mistake; LLC is about stealth, but it is fast and reckless stealth. The games move as quick as a Counter-Strike game but with a lot more breathless stalking and swords swinging. The brilliance of this whole setup is the timer. Competitive stealth (or even non-competitive or single-player stealth experiences) is often about lingering. You wait and you wait and you wait until your moment arrives. The Assassin’s Creed multiplayer is a fine example of this. You spend most of your time biding it, trying to see if an opportunity presents itself before you expose yourself. There is less a literal timer and more a race between the mining of opportunities.

A discrete timing mechanism, though, tickles a very fundamental portion of our human brains. In Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, it ticks up, and you immediately want to stop it from doing so. The only way to do that, however, is to finish the level, so your stealth is an active measure of avoidance rather than hiding, usually in the form of running and screaming like a child. In LLC, the timer goes the other way and ticks down, counting your remaining steps until inescapable death. Now, the slightly advanced mental actuation of considering the reduction of time turns into the extremely simplistic notion of beating the time. It is one abstracted layer less and one more notch towards a primal instinct of competition.

And on such a low level of operation within your mind, the impulse is native and trumps the superficial desire to hide in the shadows. The immediacy of the risk-reward analysis is simple and lives as a little nugget deep at the core of your brain: choosing to fire or run or simply wait in the dark is as simple as breathing. This allows higher level functions to determine how to go about it rather than if.

Of course, on some level, that still persists across all mental calculations, regardless of complexity or residency in the brain. But rather than being filtered through additional gates of considered causality and risk aversion, the idea that a timer has to be beat and maintained shutters every hurdle and hits the NOS.

It’s not necessarily an increased impetus or a push against reason. It’s more like a direct line access to being “in the zone.” And that’s how you can determine the good players among the sea of bad and average fodder. When your instincts are finely honed enough to match your slower, more deliberate and thoughtful actions, you are a notch above. It’s like the difference between someone who can intuit if they’ve fired off every round from their revolver or someone who just kind of thinks they might be out. It’s a learned but deeply ingrained type of knowledge that separates the professionals from the hobbyists, the chefs from the Food Network fans.

It’s when you know you have to make a move rather than taking the time to calculate run and gun utility costs and estimate your chances of success. It’s more just thinking that this is an opportunity and more knowing it is going to be yours. It’s an impressive feat to construct a design so human and fundamental over the course of a 78-hour game jam, to so easily tap into what many other games attempt and desire to do. Or maybe it’s less impressive and more odd. This is, after all, Wolfire Games we’re talking about, and this is Low Light Combat.

I’ve never been to space, but I’ve died there a lot. Actually, I’ve died a lot between the ground and space, too. Most of those deaths, in fact, take place somewhere between zero and 100 meters off the ground. If you stacked all of my virtual corpses up on top of each other, it wouldn’t be hard to see how I finally achieved orbit. It’s a bit like an adorably green pyramid of terror, creating a thick base of stupidly failed launches, a mezzanine of admirable attempts, and a cherry or two of inexplicable success.

I’m talking about, of course, playing Kerbal Space Program, or KSP as the kids like to call it. Playable since mid-2011, KSP is still technically an “incomplete” game (it’s at version 0.19.1 and being constantly updated) but my god is it fascinating. Breathing deep, it’s an intoxicating aromatic blend of flight simulator, space exploration, and feeling simultaneously like a genius and the world’s luckiest idiot.

The goal of the game is to build various shuttles and pods and launch them into space with a few Kerbals—the inhabiting sentient species of the pseudo Earth you launch from—stowed away in the command capsule. Your homeworld is where you build everything as you take up more and more space inside your hangar with your increasingly ambitious and dangerously untested machinations, but there’s a whole galaxy beyond that. You can orbit the planet, land on the Mün (bonus points for the umlaut), or float off into the deep unknown.

The driving force behind it all is a significant and reliable physics engine. It still tends to suffer from the usual problems, which is to say that closely aligned parts will often wobble and shake to the point where you think you’ve better start to lay off the peyote, but it is amazingly robust. Everything from the mass of the fuel in your tanks affecting your efficiency to the gravitational interplay of adjacent celestial bodies to weight displacement impacting your alignment momentum is all simulated here, so when something fails, you never feel cheated. You just feel like a certifiable dumdum who just got a free lesson in physics.

What really makes this work, though, is the persistence of the entire world. The game’s name is severely and tragically appropriate because you are effectively building up the Kerbal Space Program. All of your mistakes and successes linger about in the world and remind you of things to do, things to avoid, and to not let your fingers absentmindedly hover over the keyboard lest you accidentally engage your stage two rockets 10 meters off the launch pad. If you crash land and some of your Kerbals survive, you will see them puttering about the planet, trying to find their way back to the base. If you leave some sort of rocket or strut in orbit, it will be waiting for you to crash into it on your next launch.

Of course, this also means pods and utilities you purposefully leave up in space will still be there as well. If you plan on building a Mün base, you can definitely do that. You just need to plan your landing trajectories accordingly so that you don’t have some sprawling mess on that cheesy surface or so you don’t crash into your one other successful landing. Or if you want to recreate the International Space Station, you can do that, too.

In fact, if you want to reenact the recent emergency spacewalk that took place a few days ago (and was streamed live to the Internet), you can do that, too. Your Kerbals are able to pop out at any time and rocket boost around with their limited fuel supply, latch onto ladders, and switch to other space vehicles. But once you lose one Kerbal to an impossibly strong gravitational well or to a fuel tank that wasn’t as full as you thought, it becomes a nerve-racking ordeal. You can see your lonely astronaut floating off into nothingness with no hope to be rescued or to achieve any elegant death (Kerbals don’t need food and seem perpetually terrified, excited, and confused). Floating off for more than a couple dozen meters is an anxiety ridden affair and only makes you want to hove close to the outer ladder so you can grab on. It is at point, however, necessary. Necessary and scary.

Most of what you do, actually, is terrifying simply because of the aforementioned persistence. With constant reminders of how easy it is to fail floating all around you, it’s impossible not to be scared of even attempting something beyond your grasp of knowledge and capabilities. The phrase is your reach exceeding your grasp, but in KSP‘s case, both are beyond your Kerbal’s tiny, lime green hands.

But that is also what makes your successes so god damn exhilarating. The mechanics are so simple and the data surfaced to you make it seem so straightforward (click, add maneuver, wait), but when everything requires precision and you are single-handedly operating what takes Captain Picard an entire bridge of people to do, it’s rare you feel anything approaching confidence. So when you finally achieve planetary orbit, you feel like cheering as if you just landed NASA’s Mars Rover on that dusty red planet. When you manage to land—land, not crash—on the Mün, it feels like you pulled off Armageddon’s asteroid landing 20 times in a row with a blindfold on from within a barrel going over Niagara Falls.

What I’m saying is that KSP succeeds at making the impossible possible but not by holding your hand. It simplifies the radically overwhelming realities of designing, launching, and controlling spacecrafts, but not to the point where it is a point-and-go system. It never lets your forget how many times you’ve tried, how many times you should have given up, and how many times you actually did walk away with a handful of Kerbals’ lives on the line.

And when it reminds you of all that (as well as how futile it is to even try with your horribly misaligned college degree and hazy memories of Bill Nye music videos), it very much makes you feel like you’re winning just be trying. You are Frodo in the middle of Mordor where everything is casually oppressive and wholly distressing and yet you still climb. You are Rudy, standing a foot shorter than everyone around you, a constant physical reminder of your diminutive worth, and yet you still play. It’s every underdog story you’ve ever heard and seen and subsequently loved. The only difference now is that you’re in control, and you’re the underdog. And you’re cheering yourself on.

There’s a point of escalation to where it doesn’t even feel like you’re going up anymore. Once the space elevator gets built, I’m sure it will prove this notion; somewhere around the 200^th mile or so and the thrill of traveling up a ribbon of carbon nanotubes up into the thermosphere becomes the same droll of any other elevator. But until then, think of it like a roller coaster. On that main ascent, what are the most exciting parts of it?

The two answers easily offered up are the beginning and the end. What of the middle? Well, what about it? The middle is a homogenized slog of indifference. It is a necessary step for a top or turning point to exist and nothing more. When you first start out and the cars shake and rattle as the chain catches the underside, you are filled with pure excitement, pure elation. All you can think about how fun this is going to be, your bones rattling in that very particular way old timey roller coasters rattle bones.

As you begin to crest the first and largest of the hills, the genesis of the rest of the ride, anxiety builds. It’s a certain nervousness of fear and rationalization that there’s nothing to fear. These things are, after all, pretty safe.

And then there’s the drop and the loops and the dragons and whatever: the payoff for the wait and that hot little turnip of nerves all that contemplating of your own mortality has turned you into. But what about the parts of the ascent that don’t involve turning towards the heavens or down towards an earthly tomb? That part, to an extent, doesn’t matter. Past a sufficient height, it all becomes a single note in an operatic trill held too long. Worse than that, you lose the relative scope of it all and that buildup of anticipation fades away and turns into boredom.

This, if you’ll take it, is a metaphor for stories in video games. This is a parable for the direction that many narratives in our digital entertainment have gone. But it is also merely a symptom for a root cause that many have identified but few have fixed.

If I could boil it all down to a single statement, it would be that our virtual storytellers are confusing meaning with scope, that bigger stakes are better stakes. They want to build the world’s tallest roller coaster but not the best roller coaster. Even though the best may also be the tallest in the world, they don’t forget the small stakes: a vertical corkscrew ascent that results in a mirrored descent, a sharp 90-degree twist after a four-second, 0-to-120mph drop, and an 85-degree plunge back down to Earth.

But those crafting the stories we revel in through our tablets and our controllers seem content at keeping you up at those stratospheric heights, failing to utilize all of that potential energy we just spent nearly half of the ride gaining. Though not purely an indictment of blockbuster hits, many triple-A games seem emblematic of this problem, that we turn the knob up to 11 and leave it there.

This was actually a lingering critique of many (all?) post-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare entries into the storied first-person franchise. Where do you go after you threaten the world with nukes? What about after you actually blow one up? Two nukes? Twenty nukes? It’s a rising escalation that has lost its footing, to where you lose the relative scale of the implications of these actions.

That bar keeps getting raised, but now there seems to be less space at the top. Mass Effect was a trilogy built on the premise of saving the entire known universe. Halo went from saving our little rinky-dink planet Earth to also saving the whole universe. Assassin’s Creed went from Desmond Miles trying to learn about his family to, once again, preventing the mass eradication of everything everywhere. You can only save the world so many times from certain annihilation at the hands of Locusts or Necromorphs or Helghast or Chimera before you just become numb to the whole “being a hero” thing.

Of course, being a hero doesn’t necessarily have to mean preventing humanity’s extinction, nor is this a put-down or categorical admonition of the entire triple-A gaming sector, but it does make you consider where that switch flips from quantity to quality, so to speak. There is no minimum size for these stakes.

There is a game that a lot of people have been talking about lately called Papers Please. Described as a “dystopian document thriller,” it’s a game made by Lucas Pope that requires you to play the role of an immigration inspector at a border town in the middle of a raging war. You, however, take no part in this war between Arstotzka and Kolechia and instead just stamp passports. You’ll check names, look up rules, interrogate people, and try to earn money so your family doesn’t die. It reminds me an awful lot of Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life except with a lot more of that hot stamping action.

And just like the recent IGF winner in Cart Life, Papers Please specializes in those small scale dramas. My actions, for the most part, have no direct impact on the war, let alone the rest of the world. I am not a single superpowered soldier that will solely determine the outcome of the galaxy; I am just a man trying to make a living. And when my son gets sick, I worry. When I have to reject a mother trying to see her son for having late papers, my heart breaks. Every little thing is so small and means so little to everyone else, but they are the only things that exist in my world.

It’s this economy of scale that is important, not the actual size of your measuring stick. Not only can I relate to trying to do a good job and failing, but it is all this character has and he is failing at it. In Cart Life, getting custody of my daughter may not mean anything to anyone else, but showing up late to pick her up from school is more devastating that if a hundred nukes go off in the next Call of Duty.

Pope actually seems to specialize in these sorts of games, these singular experiences where he maximizes his component utilities. 6 Degrees of Sabotage is about determining the network of ne’er-do-wells surrounding a bomb that went off an hour ago. The bomb has already detonated, the damage has been done, and you are simply figuring out a mystery. If Modern Warfare covers the action-packed attempt to prevent the bomb from going off, 6 Degrees of Sabotage is about the aftermath where you review security tapes, and it is gripping.

Pope’s The Republia Times has you as an editor-in-chief trying to steer public opinions of your nation with your editorial oversight, and it, too, is gripping (if a bit rudimentary). There are plenty of these smaller games that are diminutive in both production and narrative scope. You aren’t preventing the destruction of any planets or ensuring the longevity of the human race, but you are doing things that matter wholly and completely to the character at hand, and that is what is important.

Getting the right amount of homogenization is important. Riding that space elevator will be a technological achievement and insanely useful, but it won’t be much fun on your fourth day of your trip up. There’s a new roller coaster opening up this month at Alton Towers in the United Kingdom called The Smiler. It features not one or two but fourteen loops. It is nothing but after a paltry 98-foot drop reaching 52 MPH. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth loop, I’m guessing you won’t but much into loops anymore. And after the fourth or fifth time you save the world, you get kind of numb to the idea of being humanity’s last chance.

So who’s up for some grilling?