Media Consumption Blog | 10/20/17

Derek

Even though I think I’m mere minutes away from finishing it, I finally had to it put down The Evil Within and focus on games for videos. So my week has been mainly comprised of lots of Silent Hill 2 and enough Wolfenstein 3D ports to make my head spin. But since my thoughts about those games are going into finished videos, I’ll have to talk about something else.

Alien Isolation

Earlier this year I knocked this one off my bucket list. It had the rotten luck of following-up the disastrous Alien Colonial Marines, but it was up to the task of delivering a great Alien experience even if you weren’t a super fan. I like to think of Isolation as a simple concept, “what if Clock Tower was an Alien game?” Instead of Scissorman, your foil is a giant Xenomorph (aka the Alien). It is extremely swift, able to travel through ceiling air ducts, is drawn to loud noises, cannot be killed itself, but can kill you instantly. There are brief moments where it’s off doing other things (or for the first hour or so, not around yet), but otherwise firing a gun, striking a wall with your wrench, or even just running for too long will summon your buddy to your immediate area. But it then needs to still actually find you, and this is where Isolation embraces its contrived “video-game” mentality in a really refreshing way. Because while the Alien is deadly, it’s also predictable and manipulatable, inviting you to create all kinds of chaos. 

The Alien isn’t the only variable in the equation. Also struggling for survival are other humans with serious trust issues, naturally, but the Alien will happily kill them as well. The space station is also crawling with malfunctioning androids called Working Joes, who are essentially more resilient humans that the Alien will ignore. You are given a few guns throughout the campaign as well as also tools like flashbangs, noise makers and pipe bombs fashioned from scraps collected around the space station. Weapons can be used to dispatch humans and Working Joes alike but since one-on-one confrontation is often noisy (and dangerous in its own right), the game encourages you to get creative.

There are moments of real tension, at its core Isolation is a stealth game, but death at the hands of the Alien usually resulted in me saying “ok, fair enough, I should’ve known better”. You die often from instant-death strikes from the Alien, but the circumstances for each death vary enough to keep things from getting (too) frustrating. That noisemaker you threw did summon the Alien to kill all the humans, but you hopped out from the locker you were hiding in a little too early. You shot and killed those troublesome Working Joes but the Alien somehow didn’t see you and jumped back in the ceiling and now you have no idea where it is. Unlike similar moments in The Evil Within, the instant-death in Isolation feels organic, like they are actually your fault. The best moments are when a plan goes exactly as planned or horribly wrong but you still manage to somehow escape. It’s all very mechanical and contrived in a nakedly “video gamey” way, but it works.

It’s a shame that despite a great set-up, the story doesn’t really go anywhere (terrible, TERRIBLE ending) and the whole thing was maybe three or four chapters too long, but as the one person on earth who thinks both the Alien & Aliens films are just fine, I had an absolutely great time with Alien Isolation.

Grace

This week I’ve been pouring a lot of myself into schoolwork while doing some SSFF in my freetime. I haven’t had a ton of spare moments for media this week (though I plan to be done with The Good Place by the next blog!), so I thought I’d talk a little bit about Pinball. A side-effect of one of my recent school assignments has had me exploring Pinball around the city.

The Champion Pub

This week I’ve been taking a deep-dive into Seattle’s pinball scene. It’s been interesting, especially since my background in arcades has been video-game centric. It’s crazy to play these games and learn the tricks of each one. Most of the people I have met talk about pinball like they’re stand-up comedians, telling me “you have to do it for 5 years before you get good”. Yeesh, it’s just pinball, right?

Championship Pub is my favorite game I’ve encountered in the last week. (Here’s gameplay if you’re interested!) I like it because it takes pinball and makes it into more of a story experience. You are The Kid, and the game puts you through the rigamarole of training for a boxing match. This means jump rope and punching bag mini games, along with what you’d expect to do in pinball (Like ramps. Oh lord, it’s almost all ramps). After you fulfill a certain number of criteria, the large punching bag in the center of the board flips around and you go to town on the very hairy, yet immaculately groomed, champion boxer/mascot. 

There is absolutely more nuance to this game than I’ve described, but honestly, I don’t fully understand it yet. Playing pinball is wholly different than playing video games and I haven’t quite picked up the particulars yet. However, I’m starting to get all the buzz. And with many bars in Seattle picking up machines, I think I’ll be checking it out more.