Need For Speed: Most Wanted (Criterion/EA, 2012)
Need For Speed (Ghost/EA, 2015)

Driving games are my abnegation (or "brain off", for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of aesthetics of gameplay - Extra Credits on this topic (video)) activity. That might seem weird to some people who regard them as tricky fast-reactions stuff, but to me it's a simple thing to relax into the rhythm of racing lines and see how fast I can get a bunch of polygons from A to B (and then usually around to A again).

 

(I'm less good in the real world, I've found; I enjoy karting, but I don't judge braking points as well as people who do it more often. I should do it more often, but it's less fun without other people.) 

 

So it was fairly inevitable that I'd end up going through the NFS games in the Origin vault. The series, for those who aren't familiar, has a few features in common - an open world design, an underground street racing circuit which you're part of (meaning that as well as racing against other competitors the police will show up and try to arrest you, which generally means "ram you off the road"), a large number of different cars which one can drive and the opportunity to upgrade these cars.

 

 

( Detail on each game )

 

 

So I'm not recommending either of these games, but I did have fun playing them!

Orwell (Osmotic / Fellow Traveller, 2016)

Orwell: Ignorance is Strength (Osmotic / Fellow Traveller, 2018)

 

 

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Overall these games are kind of fun, but they're defnitely nowhere near as thought-provoking as they were trying to be.

Electronic Arts are, as most people who take an interest in the medium of computer games are more or less aware, generally considered to be bad for the industry/art form/whatever it is, in the sense that their marketing division have apparently been beaten about the head regularly with a large blunt object, and their approach to making profits appears to be "buy up smaller development houses and ruin them". For this reason there are some people who decline to give EA any money; I'm not much for absolutes, though. In particular, EA's subscription service is a very rare sign of them doing something fairly new and getting it right - for a £20 annual fee it works out as access to a lot of EA's back catalogue, and various other games, including a lot of indies and the odd AA publisher (there's a lot of Paradox games there, for example) they've licensed for it. It works great, particularly since I wasn't really interested in, say, Bioware's archive to want to buy the games individually, but £20 for access to Andromeda, all the Dragon Age games and Jade Empire is clearly worth it (whether or not I renew this next year is another matter entirely). So now I have 150 or so games I'm trying out from time to time, and I find writing reviews fun, so here we go again...

This is by way of introduction to a series of "things what I played on Origin Access" review posts.

Mass Effect: Andromeda (Bioware/EA, 2016)

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So there you have it - perfectly playable, some of the subplots and missions are even quite compelling, but your enjoyment of the game will be spoiled by a) the fact that you've got to spend a distressingly long amount of time driving a vehicle around a not-particularly-featureful landscape and b) the inability to prevent yourself from realising how dumb it all is while playing it.

The penultimate prompt is "a song you remember from your childhood", which can really only be one thing. My mother used to sing me to sleep with this; I can't remember not knowing the words:



( The List )

Today prompt, "A song that breaks your heart", is the last of the difficult ones - I already know what my responses for days 28, 29 and 30 are. I think my answer for this is going to be a copout, because the my best answer, Tall Ships (which I've already mentioned once, I think), is a medley of several songs and therefore probably disallowed.

So what I'm going for here is a song that mostly breaks my heart because of its associations:



In Evita, Another Suitcase in Another Hall is sung by Juan Peron's previous mistress, upon being displaced ("unemployed", according to the libretto) by the title character. It's a song of rejection, and that's the role it plays for me as well; it gets added to my mental playlist when something has just gone horribly wrong. So since I'm sort of used to listening to it when I'm desperately unhappy anyway, listening to it the rest of the time tends to make me feel down (I'm going to stop now). The song I really ought to find heartbreaking from Evita is A Waltz for Eva and Che, especially since I can't really disagree with its depressing fatalism, but for some reason it's never really resonated with me, possibly because the use of Ché Guevara in framing just seems weird.

( The list )

Day 25's prompt is "A song by an artist no longer living", which was always going to be a rock and roll piece because it's about the only major part of music that I really like I've not dropped in on yet. By "rock and roll" I am referring to the culuturally fusionist blending of boogie-woogie, country, and rhythm and blues which first appeared in the Southern US in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and not the wider genre of music that evolved from it in the 1960s and beyond. The problem is that while I wrote "fusionist" above I could equally well have written "appropriative"; quite a lot of early rock and roll represented the performance of black American music by white artists, sometimes to the extent of being the same pieces of music. Pat Boone pretty much made a career of covering Little Richard (to be fair to Boone, had he not done so, far fewer people would ever have heard of Little Richard or his music; it's a simple fact that music played by a White American could get wider distribution and airplay than that produced by a Black one). That's not to say there weren't "white" elements in rock and roll, because there were, but overall (like a lot of the 1950s) it's a somewhat problematic subgenre. The thing with this is, where do you stop? The music of the Beatles and similar groups which defined the early 1960s comes from a secondary fusion, that of the rock and roll of the late 1950s with the skiffle craze popular in England at the time, and from that starting point it's not particularly difficult to condemn the entire genre of rock music, which seems somewhat unreasonable.

All of which goes some way to explaining why it is I picked a Chuck Berry song out, despite weirdly feeling that Berry (who died in March of this year) is somehow 'less dead' than my original thought of Buddy Holly (who died in a plane crash in 1959...you've heard the song, right?)



( The list )

Today's prompt is "A song you think everybody should listen to". That's a bit pretentious; I'm not sure I think there even is such a thing. Different people like different styles of music and different types of voices; I have fairly demographically predictable tastes and so my list of songs here mostly contains artists who look like I do (or like I do but female). But if we interpret it more broadly as "A song from an artist you think should have a higher profile" then this is clearly an excuse to post more Jess Morgan, and what I'm going for here is this one, primarily for how much fun she's clearly having while playing it:




She clearly loves this song; I saw her play it at Relevant Records a few months back and she was just as obviously having a whale of a time then too. In retrospect, I should probably have asked her about it afterwards but didn't, maybe I'll remember next time I see her. My guess is that it's her repressed rock chick instincts coming out, this being about as rock as she gets.

( The list )

This time I don't have an excuse for missing a day, except that this morning's choice of song is better than last night's would have been. I think everyone who knows a lot about my musical tastes must have expected at least one Jess Morgan song and might be surprised that I've not done one already, so here we are:


I have a bit of a "no repeating artists" policy (if that wasn't obvious by now), but it might get ignored for Jess Morgan at some point, due to her very high levels of amazingness.

( The list )

Today was Folk by the Oak (it was also the Evans Cycles Wimpole Hall cyclo-sportive, and at various points I was wondering if it was even possible to try both, but a side strain contracted by walking into a pillar and then going for a run earlier in the week put paid to that plan). Like most festivals, it was fun but exhausting; I saw Leveret (meh), This is the Kit (excellent), Kitty Macfarlane (excellent), Shake the Chains (this year's Nancy Kerr-based Folk by the Oak-sponsored collaboration, about protest songs - a lot of fun and also thought-provoking), Eric Bibb (blues singer is bluesy. Not my thing), Show of Hands (excellent as always, the highlight of the day), Kate Rusby (I like her, but she's not really festival music), Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys (looking increasingly like worthy successors to Bellowhead), and the Levellers (oddly flat by their standards, but still damn good and you can't really go wrong by closing out with What a Beautiful Day and fireworks).

Given that, it would seem sensible to have today's prompt be filled by something I heard today; the prompt is "A song that makes you think about life". There were a fair few of those, for one reason and another - I'd love to answer the prompt with Shake the Chains' There's More to Building Ships, but I can't, because there's no recording of that song publicly available at the moment (the album comes out in September, it's probably worth a look). Show of Hands opened up with Cuthroats, Crooks and Conmen which did make me think about things somewhat, but not really topics I'd normally put under the heading of "life". So I ended up here, a song about the value of life and the consequences of taking it:



(unlike at Folk by the Oak, in this video Mark Chadwick didn't have to interrupt his song to tell some idiots who were getting into a fight in the front rows to knock it off, a fact I mention due to the sheer irony involved).

( The list )

Day 17's prompt was "A song that you would sing as a duet on karaoke". This is not a thing I have actually done all that much, even if you count playing games like Singstar, but it is a thing which I do find fun so it's certainly not the case that I wouldn't sing anything as a duet on karaoke. It took me a while to think of a duet I might want to sing that would be plausible for karaoke, though (despite my recalling once having commented to atreic about the desirability of Singstar Gilbert & Sullivan, I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon). I'm not sure how much more plausible I'm required to get; does the song have to be from pop or rock music, such that it would actually exist in a karaoke machine somewhere? Assuming for the sake of sleep I'm allowed to create a conceptual karaoke machine which contains a variety of folk music and similar, I'm going for this: