Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 19

“You’ve played for 985 hours. Would you recommend this game to other players?”

Um, yeah, I guess so?

Seriously, Though

I picked up No Man’s Sky in spring 2021, long after the disastrous launch, and with several years of improvements to the game. By the time I got around to it, it was really good! (It also overheated my CPU the first time I played. I eventually discovered the heat sink was completely clogged with dust.)

The graphics are amazing. Gameplay switches smoothly between spaceflight, walking and ground vehicles, and between solo and multi-player scenarios. The story is…kinda loose. It’s not so much “story” as it is a collection of lore, which you uncover through the main missions and random exploration.

I soon realized that what I like about No Man’s Sky is that it combines aspects of Minecraft (which I played a lot of during the late 2010s and into 2020) and Wing Commander: Privateer (which I played a LOT of back in the 1990s). Both open-ended, self-directed sandboxes. Like Minecraft, you seek out resources and build equipment and bases. Like Privateer, you fly through space and do different types of missions depending on what you feel like that day.

And the many references to classic works of science-fiction certainly don’t hurt!

Updates and Expeditions

They’ve continued adding to the game, and several times a year they’ll release a major update and run a time-limited expedition focusing on the new/updated elements. Expeditions often force different styles of gameplay, and then convert to a normal game when you finish it (or when the event ends).

• In one, you couldn’t travel between systems using your ship, but had to rely on portals instead.
• In another, you couldn’t set up planet-side bases until the end of the expedition, but you could buy a freighter.
• For a horror-themed one this past Halloween, you had to actively maintain your character’s sanity, while occasionally letting yourself slip out of reality enough to interact with the cosmic horrors, but not enough for them to kill you. It was really interesting, but hard to keep up with.

So I’ve got my original game save that’s been continually updated (with the occasional glitch and one really painful bug), that I’ve been playing on and off for almost 4 years, and other saves that started out with various expeditions.

Cosmic Similarity

The universe of No Man’s Sky is practically infinite, with planets, space stations, system economies, plants, animals and minerals, and of course Sentinels – lots and lots of Sentinels – generated procedurally as players visit them. But each planet is a single biome (like Star Wars), space stations all have the same floorplan per type, same for crashed freighters, and so forth.

After a while you stop noticing the differences between two cold planets, or two radioactive planets. So the maps are different and the plants and animals look different – they’re both cold, and the both have frost crystals. A high-toxin world and a high-temperature world don’t really differ except in which resource you use to recharge your shielding and which resources you find. It’s no longer as fun to fully explore star systems you pass through.

A lot of the gameplay is the same thing you’ve done before, just dressed up differently and with better equipment or more inventory slots.

And yet here I am almost four years later, still firing up the game several times a month, salvaging derelicts, upgrading my ships and freighter, fighting pirates, smuggling, trading, building bases, mining, farming…and yes, exploring.

El Tarasco is a small local Mexican fast food chain in the South Bay area. Their newest location, on Artesia in Redondo Beach, has turned out to be a great spot for takeout, almost on par with El Amigo. (And they’re open later!) I usually get one of their enchiladas. Last time I picked up from there I noticed they have a chile relleno burrito*, which I’m going to have to try next time! (Though I’ll have to ask whether they use peanuts in their mole or something else. I’m sure I can substitute another kind of sauce, though.)

One of these days I’ll actually eat at the restaurant: they built a patio as big as the indoor space, and the entire front wall rolls up when the weather’s good, so even if you’re inside, you might as well be outside. (I pay a lot more attention to ventilation these days than I did before 2020.)

I’ve been to a couple of their other locations. The downtown El Segundo one used to be a go-to spot for work lunches, but I’m rarely in the area these days. The original is a takeout window on the front of a tiny building on Rosecrans in Manhattan Beach that looks like the kind of Minecraft shelter you build the first day in a new world. They also have locations in Hermosa Beach (on Pier, also with a good-sized patio), south Redondo (on PCH), Westchester (on Sepulveda) and Hawthorne (on Imperial Highway somewhere). I thought they had one in Lawndale too, but on looking it up, that restaurant appears to be completely unrelated.

Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg.

All three are solidly in the “here’s a weird idea” vein of science-fiction. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q

Short, bird’s eye view of a “war” fought entirely using remote controlled drones…on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain

This came up in Analee Newitz’ recent book, Stories are Weapons, in part because Smith, under his real name of Paul Linebarger, literally wrote the book on Psychological Warfare. (Yes, Gutenberg has that one too!) Newitz draws a direct connection between the way a science-fiction story shows you the key elements of an alternate world, letting you connect the dots so the ideas feel more natural, and the way psy-ops do the same thing.

The story itself is very much worth reading. The main character is a “scanner,” a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the “pain of space,” a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He’s called up for an emergency meeting while “cranched,” a meeting that calls the scanners’ whole purpose into question. And he’s the only one there who’s in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

I still think “cranch” sounds like an unholy combination of cranberry and ranch dressing, though.

The Game of Rat and Dragon

Not as serious a story as “Scanners…” but fun and still thought-provoking.

There’s something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths – and it’s faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human.

This one starts off being very coy about the “Partners,” but manages to avoid “tomato surprise” territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot. Let’s just say that Smith was a cat person.

The show/exhibit is back this winter, which reminds me I meant to write a review after I went last year!

The South Coast Botanic Garden is already one of my favorite places to go walking in the South Bay/Palos Verdes Peninsula area. For Astra Lumina, they map out a nighttime path through the gardens with a series of different types of light shows that you walk through. Each is set to music and runs in a short loop, and you can stay as long as you like before moving onto the next. There’s a loose story about stars coming down to meet us.

It’s a cool, immersive experience, and I’d definitely recommend seeing it!

Apparently the studio that runs it, Moment Factory, runs the same event in several other US cities as well.

The first time through “Subspace Rhapsody” my reaction was: OK, that was fun. Better than “Immortimas” but not on the level of “Once More With Feeling” or even some of the Magicians musical episodes.

I watched it again after seeing the behind-the-scenes feature, and appreciated it a lot more. Enough that I immediately tracked down and bought the soundtrack.

They did a good job of focusing on the cast members who could sing well. Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh) and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) are the standouts, pouring their hearts into their solos. At the other end they found something more talky for Anson Mount (Pike), and let Babs Olusanmokun (M’Benga) stick with just a couple of lines. “…and I do not sing.”

Every song meant something to the people singing it, too. The classic way to do a musical, if it’s not sung-through, is to have the songs burst from the characters when their emotions are so high that they can’t contain them – when just speaking, or stewing in silence, isn’t enough. And I appreciated that the characters were genre-savvy enough to recognize and harness it!

I find it highly appropriate that Spock, of all people, would be the first one to sing. Because he’s normally the most emotionally self-controlled person on the ship, and he starts singing? Something weird is definitely going on! And the contrast between Chapel’s big song-and-dance number “I’m Ready” and his buttoned-down solo “I’m the X” (using the same melody) makes both songs better. I found myself thinking of what Russell Crowe tried to do as Javert. He and Spock are both very tightly-controlled characters, but Ethan Peck managed to convey Spock’s inner turmoil through the outer layer of control, while I think Crowe was just out of his depth musically.

The finale gets a bit glurge-y in places, but the only song that I thought fell flat was Number One’s song about “Keeping Secrets.” It should have worked better than it did.

“Connect To Your Truth,” OTOH, was absolutely dead-on Rogers and Hammerstein, and the Klingons’ brief pop verse about how they’ll “make your blood scream!” cracks me up every time I hear it.

And Paul Wesley (Kirk) is certainly a better singer than William Shatner. Though I have to admit, Shatner’s cover of “Common People,” is a trip!