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Review: F.E.A.R. 3
If you title your franchise F.E.A.R., a few frights should be guaranteed.2.5
If you title your franchise F.E.A.R., a few frights should be guaranteed. And if you make a third installment after two reasonably chilling predecessors, and hire legendary horror filmmaker John Carpenter to co-write the script no less, terror is a prerequisite. And if you set your first-person shooter in bloody, dimly lit prison corridors and pepper your action with lots of jolt-scares involving your signature baddie (young stringy-haired J-horror rip-off Alma), one's pulse should race on a consistent basis. So what, pray tell, is the freaking deal with F.E.A.R. 3, a title that begins by setting a suitably ominous mood and then gets sidetracked into generic tactical firefight mayhem from which it never fully recovers? As far as baseline execution goes, Day 1 Studio's sequel is good enough, featuring middle-of-the-road graphics, standard-issue controls (including the saga's trademark "slow-motion" feature), diverting multiplayer, and plenty of lengthy shootouts. Yet who asked for that? The entire reason for the F.E.A.R. series's existence is to meld traditional FPS battles with Resident Evil-style spookiness, so the fact that the game delivers familiar, if nonetheless flawed, combat is almost beside the point. Be scary or be gone.
To be fair, none of the earlier episodes (two full games, as well as two expansion packs) were ever downright traumatizing, but at least in most of those prior cases a serious attempt was made to make one want to play with the lights on. In this instance, however, it's often hard not to mistake scenarios for those found in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or its various ilk, especially during a second level in which you spend most of your time navigating militia-patrolled slums in broad daylight. Things do subsequently take an increased turn for the supernatural, in part because the story—penned by Carpenter and 30 Days of Night scribe Steve Niles—is fundamentally rooted in the psychic bond shared between your proxy Point Man and the malevolent spirit of the evil brother, Paxton Fettel, whom he killed in the first game, as well as both men's relationship to mommy Alma, who's now pregnant. Still, the plot is so complicated and superfluous as to be wholly ignorable, and even worse, it rarely provides anything like a suspenseful set piece to offset the proceedings' general been-here, done-that mechanics and situations.
Just as its visuals are at least two-to-three years behind the times, F.E.A.R. 3's enemy A.I. is woefully outdated and uneven, to the point that countless sequences can be defeated by simply baiting adversaries into walking in front of doorways or around corners so you can pick them off like sitting ducks. And more frustrating is that the action is often difficult enough to practically demand that you engage in this lame strategy, though at least in this shortcoming, there's an excuse—namely, that F.E.A.R. 3 has been designed as more of a co-op than a single-player experience. Yet while there are definitely pluses to playing alongside a teammate (greater strategic maneuvers become available, and since this mode rewards the individual who finishes each stage first, there's also an element of competition as well), it's not enough to make up for the main campaign's conventionality. Better is a reasonably rich point system in which you're rewarded for all sorts of in-mission accomplishments (number of consecutive kills, head shots, time spent in cover, etc.) that eventually lead to new abilities. It's the sole inventive element in this third go-round, which ultimately is scary only in its underwhelming mediocrity.
Developer: Day 1 Studios Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Platform: Xbox 360 Release Date: June 21, 2011 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Strong Language Buy: Game
Review: Castlevania Anniversary Collection Turns Its Back to a Series's History
It's not greed in this day and age to expect publishers to respect and preserve their history. At this point, it's an artistic responsibility.3
The prospect of the widely detested Konami of 2019 turning a jaundiced eye toward the best franchise the beloved Konami of yore produced was, rightfully, a frightening proposition. After all, this is a publisher that's had no qualms about charging $10 for an extra save slot, or canceling entire games, regardless of positive reception or earning potential, based on a grudge against creators. Remember that Konani's last major contribution to the Castlevania series was a pachinko machine. So, it's almost a tiny blessing that the worst thing visited upon the Castlevania Anniversary Collection is a sort of benign neglect.
Out of the series's history, the Anniversary Collection includes the three NES titles (Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse), the first two Gameboy titles (Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge), Super Castlevania IV (originally released on the SNES), Castlevania Bloodlines (originally released on the Sega Genesis and outside the United States and Japan as The New Generation), and the NES port of Kid Dracula, which was only released on Gameboy in the U.S. Want to play Haunted Castle, the obscure arcade game that serves as the mechanical basis for the first NES Castlevania? Or Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, the beautifully ambitious PC Engine CD spinoff? You'll have to purchase those, and a sizable list of other Castlevania titles, separately. Which is a shame, because it only takes about five minutes of playtime apiece to realize that the Gameboy titles are taking up valuable real estate here that could easily have been filled by better and more interesting games in this series. The same can somewhat be said of Kid Dracula, an old-school mascot platformer that's adorable but ultimately expendable.
The big question to be considered with any sort of collection or remaster effort is one of purpose. Is it to bring a game visually or mechanically up to modern standards? Or is it to preserve its code? In recent years, we've seen Sega accomplish both with their Genesis Collections, Capcom with their Anniversary Collections of Street Fighter and Legacy Collections of Mega Man, and SNK with their 40th Anniversary Collection. The list goes on and on. Ultimately, for a collection supposedly celebrating a series's 30th anniversary, the amount of effort put into this release suggests a relationship long dead.
There are countless stories and questions about the creation and advancement of the Castlevania series that remain untold and unanswered—stories you can tell either through the inclusion of the later games that showcase that evolution, or through the inclusion of ancillary materials that tell the story more directly. Many a developer has made that effort in bringing games of this age to modern players. Konami simply doesn't, and it's not for a lack of proof to draw from, given how different latter-day titles in this series became in the PlayStation/Nintendo 64 era. There's an entire thriving genre of video games co-named after this series. That alone is a grand reason to chronicle the how and why of this series's legacy in thorough detail. Yes, putting the effort in to localize Kid Dracula certainly took work, but it's also the least relevant game to said chronicle. This is a collection that feels loveless as a result, as it lacks so much context or respect for the place these games hold in gaming history.
Konami—partnered again with developer M2, a studio renowned for their work on similar compilations for Sega and SNK—takes a similarly haphazard approach to the more restorative aspects of this collection. Aside from a manual Quick Save system, a few perfunctory graphics filters, and screen frames, the games are, well, essentially ROM dumps. The only major concession to posterity at the moment of this review—post-launch content is planned—is a digital book, with rough concept sketches for all the games, and one admittedly excellent interview between famed series composer Michiru Yamane and Adi Shankar, show runner and executive producer of Netflix's fantastic animated Castlevania series.
Even just the small favor of including one or two of the basic graphics-smoothing options that even the most rudimentary emulator can provide would've shown some level of forethought and consideration went into the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. Putting aside that it's being released at a time when archival efforts for gaming are in full swing, this collection feels almost begrudging of the series's existence. Given Konami's current rep among both those who play and develop games, it's not a stretch to consider that that may be the case.
Thankfully, whatever enmity Konami holds toward its glory days as a developer doesn't affect the games whatsoever. The meat of the collection is, of course, the NES, SNES, and Genesis titles, which have all held up extraordinarily well to time. The original Castlevania remains quite difficult, but there's very little in the game that goes beyond "tough but fair" aside from an infuriating fight with the Grim Reaper toward the end. Simon's Quest is the most troublesome of the bunch, in that it's so obtuse in its clues and RPG elements that it's essentially impossible to progress without the aid of a strategy guide. But it's also the most academically fascinating game in the collection. Many of its puzzles, designs, and mechanics are easily decades ahead of their time, even if they're poorly implemented into the game.
Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV, and Bloodlines represent the series hitting a creative stride, the 8-bit Hammer horror trappings of the first two games making way for the series to develop its own identity. Dracula's Curse and Bloodlines both bring a playfulness and mechanical ambition to the fray. The former does this via a grand experiment with branching paths and character swapping, the latter through a series of hardware-pushing special effects and optical illusions. Despite being a first-generation SNES title, Super Castlevania IV remains one of the system's crowning achievements, especially in the sound department. Adventurous beats and melodies give way here to impressive facsimiles of an orchestral experience, featuring haunting choirs, evil organs, and ethereal, synth atmospherics that create a soundscape unlike anything else produced at the time. That, and the game's organic, painterly aesthetic brings a dose of legitimate unsettling terror and dread far beyond the abstract pixels of the NES games or the bloodier but more cartoonish aesthetic of Bloodlines.
It's not greed in this day and age to expect publishers to respect and preserve their history. At this point, it's an artistic responsibility, and for a series as creative and ambitious as Castlevania, simply tossing a few barely touched ROMs at players and calling it a day can't help but feel a little insulting, all the more so because the games presented in this collection make a rock-solid case that they've never been more worthy of the attention.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Hill+Knowlton Strategies.
Developer: Konami, M2 Publisher: Konami Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 16, 2019 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Partial Nudity Buy: Game
Review: Layers of Fear 2, Though Terrifying, Clings Too Tightly to Its Script
The game's first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality.3.5
Bloober Team's latest, Layers of Fear 2, puts you in the shoes of an actor trying to find his or her character, in both the literal and figurative sense of that phrase. From a physical perspective, this means interacting with all sorts of horrific sights aboard a luxury cruise liner's cabins: the dioramic creations of an enigmatic director (voiced by Tony Todd of Candyman fame), each designed to trigger the actor's suppressed childhood memories. And from a psychological perspective, this means losing one's grip on reality, as the line blurs not only between the role the actor has been tasked with playing and the actor's past, but between a film production's props and sets and what the actor becomes convinced he or she is seeing: hedge mazes, pirate coves, industrial cityscapes, and so on.
You've been hired to star in a film being shot aboard the 1930s-style Icarus Transatlantic, but over the course of the game's five linear acts, it becomes clear that something else is happening on the curiously empty ship. Players set out from an increasingly dilapidated dressing room, exploring not just the ship itself—everything from the coal-lined engine rooms to the kitchens and first-class cabins—but a variety of on-board sets that have been built by the director, such as a pirate ship that's surrounded by papier-mâché waves, and a recreation of a private screening room. Such visual touchstones and their recurring motifs are the layers of fear of the game's title, opening themselves up to multiple meanings, like the playing cards that reference Alice in Wonderland but also point to a relative's gambling addiction.
The game's first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality and connection to filmmaking methods and aesthetics. The simple puzzles require you to operate slide projectors until you've found the perfect shot, to use turntables to position your mannequin co-stars, or to follow chalk-drawn blocking notes across the various dioramic film sets. Even though some effects are logically impossible, such as the way flickering projector beams pierce solid walls, so that the ship's cabins sometimes seems as if they're bleeding pinpricks of light, the director's manipulations are so clever that you convince yourself that it's all somehow just a practical effect, or a really good perceptual illusion, as with the various doorways that vanish if you so happen to break your line of sight with them.
As Layers of Fear 2 reaches its conclusion, however, and the protagonist becomes more defined, we become disassociated from what should be the game's most unnerving effects, like red-gel-lit hallways lined with squirming body parts. At times, it feels more like you're watching a scary film from the comfort of your living room than actively participating in one. An early sequence that draws inspiration from Fritz Lang's Metropolis—its giant brass pipes, its columns of steam—is particularly strong for its function as a filter through which the actor processes whatever horrors he or she is actually seeing in the boiler room. But it's not long into the game before it starts to feel as if films are being referenced as a matter of course. Indeed, no narrative purpose is served by the awkward mini-game in which you fly, and in hallucinatory fashion, the rocket ship from Georges Méliès's iconic silent short A Trip to the Moon, or the appearance toward the end by the twins from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
Still, even when these references and recreations fail to connect to the game's grand design, they're at least arrestingly vivid in their aesthetics and often quite unsettling. Layers of Fear 2 doesn't explain or justify these sequences, which makes them all the more striking. You may ask, "What, exactly, have I stumbled upon?" By contrast, the many artifacts and collectibles that you pick up throughout are frustrating for the way they elaborate upon the game's horrors instead of deepening them: Watch as art imitates life, they seem to say to you, specifically the fateful choices made by a brother and sister who once stowed away on a ship very much like the one you're trapped on. These narrative moments provide a safe harbor from whatever else is more immediately going on around you, giving truth to the game's binary choice to either "Lose the character, find yourself" or "Find the character, lose yourself."
Because Layers of Fear 2 is a game about the madness that lies within one's imagination, it's no surprise that the moments that hint at unseen horrors—and the 3D audio is particularly effective on this front—are more unsettling than those that explicitly show them. The sequence in which you're trailed by ogre-like footsteps is infinitely more unnerving than the one in which your pursuer is depicted as a fire-breathing titan, whom you can easily hide from. The more that Layers of Fear 2 offers players a peek behind the curtain, the more it leans on redundant trial-and-error chase sequences, effectively leaving psychological complexity in the rear-view mirror and making it harder for us to get lost in its illusory horrors.
The acting conceit of Layers of Fear 2 presents a compelling psychological dive into what it means to create a character, to truly imagine yourself as someone else. But each time players might be swept away into something truly unsettling, the director's demands snap things back to a comfortable reality. For all its unsightly imagery, the overall arc of the game conforms to a familiar structure (especially in the ineffective New Game+ mode), forgetting that its scariest moments are those unexpected ones between the instructions given to you by the director. Layers of Fear 2 can be terrifying, but only when it stops clinging so tightly to its script.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Evolve PR.
Developer: Bloober Team Publisher: Gun Media Release Date: May 28, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: In Observation, the Ghost in the Shell Is the Player Itself
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.3.5
The setting of Observation is the familiar stuff of science fiction: a space station dotted with airlocks and hatches and run by a voice-activated artificial intelligence. But the lens through which it's viewed is not. You play as S.A.M., the aforementioned AI armed with a battalion of unblinking eyes: the cameras that line every one of the eponymous station's hallways. Despite his constant watch, something has gone wrong aboard the station. The Observation has spun far off course, most of its crew is gone, and neither S.A.M. nor Dr. Emma Fisher, who appears to be the station's only survivor, know what happened.
Besides observing, most of S.A.M.'s functions are doled out piecemeal for the exclusive task of progressing through the guided storyline. He can access things like laptops and terminals. He can open (and close) doors, and he can recite whatever data he's been asked to find by Dr. Fisher to help unravel the mystery behind the station's crisis. Though sci-fi connoisseurs may already have ideas about where the story will end up, Observation is, despite appearances, less a game about refusing to open the pod bay doors than cooperating with Dr. Fisher. S.A.M. isn't one to cause problems so much as help solve them by dutifully performing different tasks.
If Dr. Fisher needs to broadcast a signal, for example, you'll need to call up the ship's map and access cameras in the room housing the astrophysics terminal. From there, you'll use the terminal to look up the coordinates on a black-and-white image, send those coordinates to the communications screen, and then input the numbers manually. It's not glamorous or even particularly challenging work, but neither is being a space station's artificial intelligence; the game's most complex tasks involve things like tracing a schematic for clues or piloting one of the spheres floating around the zero-gravity station to reach camera blind spots.
As rote and mechanical as these operations may be, they sink you deeper into your role as the AI. The game's excellent interface design helps you feel at one with the environment through interactions that feel tactile. Adjusting camera angles is slow and accompanied by a faint hum. Spheres are likely to bump into objects since they're a little unwieldy and don't turn on a dime, and their camera view fizzles accordingly. Various text displays don't look friendly, as a smartphone display might, so much as functional. They're rendered in stark reds, whites, greens, and grays that evoke old technology—the loud clacking of keyboards, of numbers not entered so much as forcibly pressed in. The station isn't exactlys old-fashioned, but its occasionally clunky software feels rooted in a tangible past, as if modernization has yet to erase the vestiges of technology conceived near the turn of the century.
And yet, playing as a computer isn't the same as feeling like one. Engaging with the game means navigating its menus and devices by lumbering through human thought processes, relying on the inefficient motor functions of sausagey fingers mashing on controllers and keyboards. When moving inside a sphere, the labyrinthine station can be confusing to navigate without stopping to check a map, making it easy to float off down the wrong hallway.
To compensate for player awkwardness, Observation specifies that S.A.M. is too damaged to operate at full capacity, but it's not quite enough to maintain the illusion. No machines ask you to interact quickly or skirt around a fail state. While this gentleness keeps the game humming along smoothly without constantly stopping to chastise players, it makes what are ostensibly the routines of a computer feel built to accommodate humans' comparative sluggishness, preventing you from fully inhabiting a believable role. Frantic characters simply stand and stare while they wait for you to complete even the most time-consuming of tasks.
But the player's presence isn't a total loss since it gives the story room for subtlety. The development of S.A.M.'s emotions is understated and even totally peripheral to the central mystery because your personal reactions to characters, the solutions you uncover, and the attachments you develop stand in for what S.A.M. feels. Your emotions are his. As the plot escalates and the suspense grows, the momentum may slow as you fiddle with a door switch, but it never stops to explain character growth because you fill in the blanks yourself. S.A.M.'s development is almost taken for granted, allowed simply to be as a part of a larger story and compelling mystery buoyed by a unique perspective. There's a ghost growing inside S.A.M.'s mechanical shell, and after just a few hours with Observation, it turns out to be you.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Tinsley PR.
Developer: No Code Publisher: Devolver Digital Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 21, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: Rage 2 Brings the Flair, but It Barely Fills Its Open World
It's hard not to be disappointed in how little use the Wasteland has for you when you're not dealing in lead.3
The first Rage was released back in 2011, when it seemed like every game was painted in washed-out browns and grays—a visual shorthand for a world in ruin. Weirder and wilder out of the gate, Rage 2 is certainly more varied in that regard, with lush vegetation and advancements in Wasteland technology bringing modern and bracing fluorescent green and yellow glows to its environment, making for a much more colorful reality, with a striking pink visual motif cutting through almost every scene like a knife.
It's two decades after the events of the first game, and there's been enough peace in the post-asteroid-collision world of tomorrow for the Wasteland to develop something resembling an ecosystem capable of supporting life in the long term. And then General Cross makes his grand, violent return, wiping out the Wasteland's seat of military power and quickly revealing that things haven't changed as much in this world as its people would like to imagine.
There's quite a bit of interesting world-building going on here, with the gruff warlords, scrappy survivors, and crackpot scientists of the first game joined by a motley transhumanist population that's evolved into a slapdash DIY iteration of our modern life. Transgender bartenders and store owners are commonplace. Every human with missing limbs or other body parts seems to have their own personal, customized replacements.
The larger-than-life characters of the upper-classes range from Desdemonia, a Norma Desmond-esque vamp producing a daily televised deathmatch, to simpering scumbags like Klegg Clayton, who's like the unholy cross between Kenny Powers and Guy Fieri. The critical NPCs who hand out the missions that advance the story are simple archetypes—save for one horrifying, Kuato-like living prosthesis—but people under their leadership are anything but.
The world of Rage 2 is a grand place to shoot things, but an even better place to simply people-watch for a spell. Strolling into new settlements and meeting these people is the most engaging part of the game, as the post-apocalyptic society feels very well conceptualized and lived-in. That said, it doesn't take long after actually getting involved with missions and side quests to realize little has changed about Rage's overall gameplay loop. As wonderfully realized as the world is, you only meaningfully interact with it when NPCs have missions to dole out. And those missions almost unilaterally involve driving to a specific place on the map, killing everything that moves, looting the place blind, and moving on.
The killing and looting in and of itself isn't necessarily a detriment. There's a lot of the same ethos going on here that fueled Id's Doom reboot from 2016—a game that, for what it's worth, I've come around to since my initial review. Every gun has a visceral heft and punch to it, bolstered here by a surprisingly vast collection of superpowers and nanomachine-aided combat enhancements. Mechanically, Rage 2 feels more like Crackdown than, well, the Crackdown game we got this year. Missions are rewarding enough where every couple of skirmishes nets you a much-needed upgrade or the materials/currency to purchase or trade for it. It's become pretty clear in recent years how much we all need to treasure games operating at this level that aren't abhorrently stingy with immediate gratification.
Doom, however, is a game content to just let the player plow through hordes of nameless cannon fodder for hours, and little else. It starts with the protagonist literally pushing character motivation and backstory aside so he can get some killing done. The setup is far more involved in Rage 2, and the world so much bigger, but it's one that's littered with distractions from the main quest, and characters whose motivations and problems beg for more nuance than Rage 2 is willing to provide. Roaming from place to place looking for either more things to kill or better, more efficient ways to do it is a huge waste of an interesting world, and if there was any lesson this type of game should have taken from the Fallout series—or, more broadly, from the Mad Max films it's drawing so much inspiration from—it was telling dozens of tiny interpersonal tales using the deep pool of well-drawn characters at its disposal without sacrificing being a gory shootout in a desolate environment.
The actual, spatial waste just compounds the problem. Rage 2 is another in a sad class of open-world games that has trouble filling up that open world, and that's a bigger problem when gameplay doesn't meaningfully vary from "kill everything in sight." There's plenty of driving to be done, and there are races, just like in the first Rage. There's also a tidy collection of armored vehicles to try out beyond the APC you get at the game's start. These are the only activities that significantly stray from the one thing Rage demands from its players.
Still, it cannot be understated how good Rage 2 is at that one thing. It's a game that works wonders in small, appreciable bursts of neon violence, engaging enough to see its comparatively brief story through to its conclusion. When it's all over, however, it's hard not to be disappointed in how little use the Wasteland has for you when you're not dealing in lead.
The game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: Avalanche Studios, id Software Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 14, 2019 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence Buy: Game
Review: A Plague Tale: Innocence Will Make You Squirm But Its Story Comes Up Short
It's unfortunate that A Plague Tale's story falls short of its technical accomplishments.3
French video game developer Asobo Studio's A Plague Tale: Innocence imagines a 14th-century France ravaged by the combined horrors of the Hundred Years' War and the Black Plague. After witnessing the murder of their parents by religious fanatics, Amicia De Rune and her sickly younger brother, Hugo, escape their family's affluent estate, trying to avoid being caught in the machinery of the Inquisition. What follows is a visually impressive third-person adventure game that's focused to an almost stubborn degree on the extent to which these two young children must stealthily evade their foes, not least of which the swarms of flesh-hungry rats that have overrun the country almost as a matter of course.
Light itself is the star of A Plague Tale, as the rats that emerge from the underground will swarm and consume any living being that doesn't remain shrouded in light. Throughout, Amicia can use lit torches to safely walk past the ghoulish critters, but these burn out, as well as draw attention from Inquisition knights. Luckily for her, she also has a slingshot at her disposal. This instrument of destruction—and distraction—is your weapon of choice at the start of the game. With it, you can use rocks to knock lanterns from your enemies' hands, or extinguish their torches, leaving them helpless to the hungry rodents that maddeningly linger in an area. Each scenario is presented as a puzzle where the objective is to figure out how to lure enemies to a certain spot so that they can meet their certain doom.
These sequences are consistently varied, with new tools introduced across the game, such as chemicals that can be used to lure rats away from Amicia and toward your human foes. Likewise, searchlights set up by the Inquisition to provide safe pathways can be moved by the player to plunge enemies into the fatal darkness, and provide new trails for Amicia and her brother to safely traverse. And using these varied gameplay mechanisms in tandem elicits satisfying results, especially when you're trying to overcome the unusually strong AI, which doesn't give up as easily as enemies in similar stealth action games like Metal Gear Solid.
Being spotted by the guards who patrol an area will almost always seal your fate, as the guards will relentlessly give chase, and groups of them will work together and cover escape routes to enclose Amicia, as well as call out your position to long-range enemies, such as archers. It's a dynamic game of cat and mouse, and there's pleasure to be had in trying to figure out how best to take advantage of A Plague Tale's core gameplay in order to ensure your survival.
It's unlikely that players have come across adversaries in a video game as squirm-inducing as A Plague Tale's rodent swarms. Their movements are realistic, and especially horrifying as the rats overpower their prey in a blood-crazed frenzy, their beady little eyes just barely reflecting the light coming from some nearby object. No less detail-rich are the dilapidated castles and plague-ridden villages you come across that conjure a tense atmosphere that rarely lets up throughout the game. Inside abandoned homes, walls are caked with grime and blood, harrowingly evoking the violence that transpired there, while exterior ruins are cloaked in darkness and fog that obscures all sorts of horrors contained within.
Given how believable this plague-ravaged world is, it's unfortunate that A Plague Tale's story falls short of its technical accomplishments. While the plot here is ripe for an examination of the destructive nature of Christian fanaticism, as well as the class divide between the De Rune siblings and the poor, criminal underclass they fall into, the game sidesteps deeper questions about the themes it raises. Even though it casts agents of the Inquisition as its primary antagonists, A Plague Tale is careful not to vilify any kind of faith. In fact, at one point it goes so far as to hastily introduce an archbishop character so that he can conspicuously state that none of the game's evildoers are real Christians, at which point he's quickly ushered out of the narrative. And perhaps as a result of the game refusing to label its villains as Christians, it leans on cartoonish, otherworldly depictions of evil taking root in medieval France. Throughout, clichés of power are carried unto absurdity, with the final boss reveal so ludicrous that you'd think we were back in the Eldritch-nightmare-themed world of Bloodborne.
It doesn't help that A Plague Tale's protagonists are also flimsily characterized, barely inviting the player's emotional investment. A late-game chapter that takes place in Amicia's head lifts more than one sequence from the Silent Hill series's unnerving Nowhere, but it doesn't land with any real effectiveness because the girl's trauma still feels alien to us by that point. Indeed, by the narrative's conclusion, the player will have spent over a dozen hours with the girl but still know little about her as a person. This is especially unfortunate given that Amicia comes across a few potential romantic partners and personal adversaries across her journey. Just as it seems as if A Plague Tale is about to fully open the door on a personal reckoning for the girl, it quickly closes it shut, ensuring that she remains a cipher.
Nothing in A Plague Tale, though, is as ineffective as Hugo's characterization. The child's behavior seems to pivot on a dime, either exhibiting the bearing of a helpless innocent or the wisdom of an old sage. In one scene, he throws a tantrum over the loss of family members; then, not long after, he bemoans how characters lie to him and refuse to trust him with information. Despite being terrifically voice-acted, Amicia and Hugo rarely exhibit the sort of conduct that realistically syncs up with their ages. And after a while, their lack of response to the horrors that befall so many innocent people in their midst comes to feel weirdly aloof. Of course, that flaw might be more accurately understood as the result of programming work that was less devoted to character work than making sure that the sights and sounds of rats tearing into human flesh struck the deepest of nerves.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Evolve PR.
Developer: Asobo Studio Publisher: Focus Home Interactive Platform: Xbox One Release Date: May 14, 2019 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Violence Buy: Game, Soundtrack
Review: BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! Makes the Most of Its Two-Dimensionality
The game is clearly geared toward young players, so expect a lightweight experience.3.5
You might have to think back to your childhood to remember the mystery, even magic, of a plain box, as it seemed anything could be inside of it, or that it could be imagineered into just about anything. This, perhaps, explains the unlikely triumph of the minimalist BoxBoy! series, a hybrid platformer-puzzler from HAL Laboratory that arrives on the Nintendo Switch with the release of BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! If the game's largely black-and-white levels—with a few splashes of color to call out helpful switches or dangerous electrical traps—don't try to awe players with fancy graphics, that's because their gameplay is more than enough. There are over 270 levels here, and it's to the credit of the consistently creative design of BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! that said gameplay, which consists of variations on stacking chains of boxes together so as to traverse obstacles, almost always holds up.
To those who've played any of the prior BoxBoy! titles, the first third of BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! is a little repetitive. In these early, solo levels, players are reintroduced to the way in which Qbby (or his be-ribboned pal Qucy) can break the rules regarding the conservation of mass energy. Qbby can generate up to six additional Qbby-sized boxes, which he can then carry or throw so as to create bridges, staircases, ladders, and so on. The obstacles he needs to contend with are also largely familiar: moving platforms, switches that need to be pressed, lasers that have be to blocked. Gradually, however, Qbby's moveset expands, past the returning Up Hook (by which Qbby can retract through his boxchain so as to slither from point A to point B), to new skills, like being able to butt-slam stacks of blocks down through solid objects, or sliding your shapes from wall to wall, as if playing a horizontal game of Tetris.
These skills are further tested by the co-op campaign—the series's first. As in BoxBoxBoy!, this allows for two distinct sets of boxes to be placed simultaneously (if one character tries to generate a second chain, the first disappears). More so, it allows characters to use one another as boxes, or to carry one another, jumping in tandem to reach new heights. (Rest assured, too, that this mode isn't boxed off from solo puzzlers; it just requires players to do a lot of manual swapping between roles.) As a further bonus, the game also includes a third full campaign featuring a rectangular box, Qudy, who can generate either 2×1 blocks or 1×2 blocks, depending on whether he's standing upright or bowed at a 90-degree angle.
That said, BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! is clearly geared toward young players, so expect a lightweight experience. That fact is readily apparent from the goofy four-panel comics that you can unlock with the medals you earn from clearing levels. Checkpoints are generous, and as no puzzle takes longer than 30 seconds to complete (once you know what you're doing), there are none of the gauntlet-like dexterity tests so often found in other platformers. You can even use in-game currency to purchase visual hints in the middle of a puzzle, or to pick up assist items that allow you to move faster, jump higher, generate extra boxes, or become invincible. Though laudable that HAL Laboratory has ensured that anyone can beat the game, it's frustrating that there are few ways in which to increase the challenge, beyond collecting optional crowns. You can also optimize the number of boxes used and try to cut down on the time spent clearing an area, but these are just additional hoops, not harder content.
This relative lack of challenge is compounded by the way the game's difficulty is designed to reset with each new world. World 13, which introduces drill blocks that can be snagged by your own boxchain, gets increasingly complex across its seven levels, but it's no harder than World 9, which offers seven levels focused on an exclusive warp portal gimmick. It's not until the appropriately titled "The Last World" that you get to combine various mechanics, and even then, only two at a time. HAL Laboratory is leaving a slew of underutilized concepts on the table, and BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! is crying out for a Super Mario Maker-like level designer that would allow players to pick up those boxes and run wild with creativity.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Golin.
Developer: HAL Laboratory Publisher: Nintendo Platform: Switch Release Date: April 26, 2019 ESRB: E ESRB Descriptions: Mild Fantasy Violence Buy: Game
Review: Mortal Kombat 11 Is Well-Executed, But It's a Hell of a Grind
The game is at its most entertaining and gleeful when it is, indeed, just Mortal Kombat.3
At the heart of Mortal Kombat 11 is a great fighting game—one from a studio, NetherRealm, that clearly learned all the right lessons from not just Mortal Kombat X but Injustice 2. By and large, the studio has divined the winning formula for thoughtful, tactical, and satisfyingly brutal gameplay. Which makes it all the more baffling that much of the game seems to begrudge players their enjoyment of it.
That's even more bewildering considering no Mortal Kombat game has ever been this comprehensive about teaching you how to actually play it. There's an exhaustively dense tutorial that teaches you literally everything there is to know about the game's mechanics, from the numerous strategic escape and counter moves you can perform, to the game's Fatal Blow system, a simple two-button ultimate move that functions like a hyperviolent counterpart to Super Moves from the Injustice games. There's even a section that explains attack frames, generously opening up a bridge for casual players who hope to one day hang tough with the pros. Most useful, however, are the character tutorials that offer a basic primer on each character's specific moveset. It's rare and truly heartening to see a game that doesn't have Arc System Works's name on it be so thorough about preparing its players for battle.
The game is also rather good at giving players just the right amount of context for each fight, via its Story Mode. Here, the game leans hard, and in winking fashion, into its Saturday-afternoon B-movie trappings. The game picks up directly after its predecessor, with the thunder god Raiden now a megalomaniac, corrupted by coming in contact with fallen Elder God Shinnok's amulet. Seeing as this is a direct result of Raiden screwing around with the fabric of time in Mortal Kombat 9, the goddess of time herself, Kronika, steps in to correct the problem in the extreme: She decides to merge the original Mortal Kombat timeline—which covers the first game through the eighth, Mortal Kombat Armageddon—with the current one in hopes of breaking the entire space-time continuum and starting anew.
Plenty of multiverse shenanigans ensue, with old Mortal Kombat characters meeting their changed counterparts and dead villains returning to wreak havoc. The game's story is a wild, freewheeling kung-fu/sci-fi mashup that knows better than to stop and get too bogged down in the gritty minutiae of time travel when just letting Johnny Cage quip or Scorpion and Sub-Zero beat up robot ninjas is so much more engaging.
More than anything, the Story mode provides context for the game's bread-and-butter single-player and online Versus modes, especially with the tiny character interactions that occur before and during matches. Combine that with the expected cherry on top—a slew of brand-new creative, surreal, and horrifying Fatalities—and we could have had a Mortal Kombat 11 that was a gloriously bloody and deep fighting game that builds impressively on the gameplay principles of its forebears. But NetherRealm then proceeds to drown that game in a collection of appallingly unfriendly and unrewarding mechanics that begin to sour the entire package.
New to Mortal Kombat 11 is the ability to fully customize every character to each player's liking, from their special move loadout, to their weaponry, to their costumes, to their intro and win poses. Theoretically, it's a wonderful idea, and there's a plethora of options in each category to allow for some truly unique builds. The problem is that you earn most of these customization options through the Towers of Time and the Krypt.
The Towers of Time are a series of four to eight consecutive matches, not unlike the old-school Arcade modes in prior Mortal Kombat games. The caveat is that each opponent may possess randomized buffs and each stage may have various debilitating hazards. You can use buffs and magic and assist items, earned through the course of gameplay in the Towers, but the game is stingy with it all, and few are as utterly devastating as what the CPU can use. So many of the hazards and buffs that your quite aggressive CPU opponents can utilize are literally unavoidable, and, unfortunately, completing the full gauntlet of Towers for specific characters is the only definitive way to unlock the vast majority of a specific character's arsenal.
For everything else, there's the Krypt. What was traditionally just a spooky treasure-laden grid strictly for unlocking bonus content is now a third-person, fully explorable recreation of Shang Tsung's island from the first game, with a motion-captured Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa performing some grandiose, scenery-chewing fanservice, reprising his role from the now-cult-classic Mortal Kombat film from 1995. That's delightful, again, in theory. In reality, aside from a few exceptions locked to specific locations, the Krypt's content is randomized, as are the prices for opening each treasure trove within. The game is also grudging with that currency, of which there are four different kinds. If that's appalling enough in a game like Destiny, it's unfathomable why that's the case for a Mortal Kombat title's bonus area, especially since there isn't even a guaranteed way of getting exactly what you want for a character in the Krypt.
It'd be infuriating but understandable if this was all to funnel players to spending real money in the game's store to unlock everything, but a revolving door of salable items means you can't even cherry pick from there either. The end goal of all this seems to be to keep players trapped grinding for currency in the fervent hope that they will unlock something they want, but the needless grind is likely to tire players long before they actually get to unlock everything. It's the gaming equivalent of a cable company that offers excellent internet but uses every shady tactic in the book to offer you the landline telephone package. The sole saving grace is that the game's beating heart—its combat—is so well-executed. Mortal Kombat 11 is at its most entertaining and gleeful when it is, indeed, just Mortal Kombat. It's at its most utterly repellent when it's trying to be Mortal Kombat Mobile.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: NetherRealm Studios Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: April 23, 2019 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language Buy: Game
Review: Days Gone Demands Your Submission to the Content Treadmill
The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.1.5
The second big zombie game of the year, Days Gone, is also the total inverse of the first, Resident Evil 2. Its zombies don't shamble, and its resources aren't doled out in a tense drip feed while you creep between cramped rooms and corridors. In Days Gone, the zombies run—namely, in vast hordes across the vast wilderness of a post-apocalyptic Oregonian open world that you navigate by foot and motorcycle. Enough time has passed to foster new societies yet not enough to uproot memories of the fall. Where Capcom's game relied on understated linearity, the latest from developer SIE Bend Studio opts for excess, in the process clarifying the worst parts of our fascination with the sandbox fantasy.
Days Gone is, in every possible sense, a capital-M modern video game. Its world is littered with crafting materials and tasks to complete, which feed the player experience points to unlock parts of a skill tree. As you progress through the game and build up trust in different wilderness encampments, you gain access to more weapons, more skills, more parts for your motorcycle. Days Gone replicates the excruciatingly basic stealth elements of so many other games, where violent takedowns are easy and throwing distraction objects is key. You're totally invisible if you duck into any of the conveniently placed bushes, which comes in handy when capturing outposts full of non-zombie marauders. The cruel, cliché-riddled story is of little consequence, perhaps best summarized by the fact that the game's (initially) bearded protagonist, Deacon St. John, has the name of the woman he's mourning tattooed on his neck. He wears a backward baseball cap and is meant to be a serious character.
Very little in Days Gone stands up to close scrutiny. Something like the crafting at first seems like a natural function of post-apocalyptic survivalist fantasy, yet the system imparts no desperation or need for resource management because every location practically leaks crafting materials out the ears. Carrying capacity is so low (and the increase for it so far down the skill tree) that there's hardly any point to scavenging, because upgrades are only found at the checkpoints specifically marked on the map. Missions may task you with shooting and stealthing your way through zombies or humans amid various arrangements of chest-high walls, yet there's no need to prepare; the item wheel slows the action of these encounters to an accommodating crawl, allowing you to quickly and comfortably craft anything on the spot. It's no problem at all to repair a weapon or cobble together a Molotov cocktail while fleeing a flesh-eating horde of zombies, which, in the regrettable parlance of this new world, are referred to exclusively as "freaks" and "freakers." A heavily zombie-infested area is called a "freakshow," and the land outside safe encampments is called "the shit."
Likewise, the game contrives a reason for Deacon to start over from scratch when upgrading his motorcycle but offers no explanation for why this expert survivalist has accumulated just about no weapons whatsoever in his personal gated outpost, or why his skill tree is full of things like basic shooting accuracy when he's ostensibly been killing zombies for years. Why must he seek out gasoline so often when it's found lying around everywhere in containers, as one of the many red objects you can shoot to blow up? "You know, we're gonna run out of this someday," one character alleges when you buy gas, though it's certainly not any time soon.
The various systems of Days Gone aren't in service to a coherent whole so much as the vague idea of an open-world video game, where everything is arbitrarily gated off as an Unlockable simply to impart a sense of progress. Of getting better. Of winning. This is world where a young girl character exists only to suffer and, in the process, affirm Deacon's humanity—a world where there are droves of self-mutilating human cultists who are okay to slaughter because they're "lunatics" high on PCP. You can permanently clear camps of marauders and burn zombie nests to make the map safer because this dour, violent post-apocalypse is built to be conveniently managed and maintained by the player's hand.
These inconsistencies lay Days Gone bare as a vapid content treadmill, an "immersive" fantasy nevertheless carefully modulated to accommodate the player's thirst for dominance. Many of the systems seem included mostly just because they're expected of an open-world game, if not to weave the absolute thinnest of illusions that this is a hard, unforgiving existence. The game provides some pushback through enemies and resource management but not so much of it that the player might actually feel anything beyond all-encompassing authority in the shoes of the cool, tatted-up, backward-baseball-capped bikerman; running low on materials only ever requires a momentary search of your surroundings.
Even character moments are set aside as designated content. If you visit a man on his sickbed when you're not on a mission that specifically takes you to him, you can't interact with him at all beyond picking up whatever he's crafted in his spare time and left in the box by the door; you visit him at your convenience, to pick up items for your trouble.
Of course, enough time, enough money, and above all enough effort has been poured into Days Gone so that it looks nice and, once you've upgraded beyond the absurd limitations that pad the early game, it controls okay. The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience. Even the outlandishly long Red Dead Redemption 2 felt like its occasionally cumbersome elements were meant to be in service of something, regardless of how successful that game ended up being.
Days Gone is the apotheosis of the more-is-more philosophy: more bars to fill, more gates to progress, more hours of playtime, more zombies per square inch because "more" is supposed to fill the hole where some semblance of meaning ought to be, bridging the gap between one mind-numbing mission template and the next. It's the purest example yet of the video game as mere content to be consumed, down to the very fact that each storyline you're supposed to be emotionally invested in is marked with a completion percentage. Days Gone is a void.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Developer: SIE Bend Studio Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: April 26, 2019 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language Buy: Game
Review: God's Trigger Deliriously Gratifies the Player's Thirst for Schlock
The game takes delight in its over-the-top violence, cheesy monologues, and nonsensical plot.3.5
Some games don't aspire to be sprawling epics, like Witcher 3: The Hunt and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as they have a different idea of greatness, if not pleasure. Take, for instance, Journey and David O'Reilly's Mountain, which suggest miniature art-house films for the way they lean heavily on atmosphere or aesthetics above all else to stoke our curiosity. Others are unabashedly joyful aberrations, evoking the feverish intensity of a B movie—content with just being offbeat. They revel in schlock for its own sake, not unlike God's Trigger, a top-down action game that's closer in spirit to the campiness of the violent House of the Dead than the more thoughtful, neo-noir cool of Hotline Miami.
Mechanically, the game still functions more like Hotline Miami, where most of the action—planning, looking, and slaughtering—is viewed from an overhead perspective. As a fallen Angel and a banished Demon—both of whom go by the amusingly mundane names of Harry and Judy—players have to save the world from certain annihilation at the hands of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence. True to the threadbare plot of most B movies, Harry and Judy's grand plan to cancel the apocalypse is brutal and straightforward: Rampage through the highest heavens, the bowels of hell, and everywhere else in between, and pulverize every corrupted being standing in your way. But whereas Hotline Miami sets out to make a statement about violence, God's Trigger dispenses with such pretenses, wanting above all else for you to savor that endorphin rush that comes from fighting violence with bigger, badder forms of it—a spectacle that's often capped with the cheesiest of one-liners, like "I never thought I'll be fighting alongside a demon like her."
God's Trigger can be played as single-player or co-operatively, and if you chose to storm through the campaign by your lonesome, that means having to switch between Harry and Judy at opportune moments. Conversely, the game's co-op mode not only shows more relish as you exact unholy justice against your enemies, it channels the most cliché of tropes from your average buddy-cop film along the way. For one, Harry and Judy are prone to trading barbed quips like "Am I doing this alone?!" in the midst of near-death scenarios.
The game is exceptionally good at empowering you with the means to enact such violence, and in a satisfying variety of ways. On one side we have Harry the melee warrior, armed with a celestial blade and an aura of righteous anger that grants him the strength to storm through crumbling walls. On the other we have Judy and her infernal chain-whip, which allows her to attack grunts from afar; she can also teleport a fixed distance between rooms that are separated by prison bars, incinerating her opponents when she re-materializes. Between levels, you're awarded experience points, letting you fine-tune these skills and unlock even more techniques for bludgeoning your way through mobs of foes.
Given its emphasis on teamwork, God's Trigger is a far more gratifying experience as a co-op shooter. The protagonists' abilities are highly complementary; one is a close-combat fighter, while the other is a ranged hunter. Beyond that, the puzzles strewn across the levels often require players to coordinate and strategize with one another, such as having Harry and Judy pull two levers at the same time in order to open up a new route through a level. And at more challenging levels, they even have to keep their movements perfectly in sync, so as to avoid triggering deadly traps like spiked floors. Meanwhile, synchronizing Harry and Judy's kills rewards players with additional experience points and perks, such as a bullet-time effect.
Coordinating and strategizing with a second player is so rewarding that the single-player feels beside the point, lacking as it does the thrilling unpredictability and momentum that the co-op mode delivers in spades. The solo approach, which requires overthinking one's moves or taking a stealthy approach, flies in the face of the riotous fun found in the co-op mode.
In the vein of so many B movies that seek to provide the campiest of thrills, God's Trigger takes delight in its over-the-top violence, cheesy monologues, and nonsensical plot. It's what makes the game so memorable, even if that means it never defies genre expectations. God's Trigger is no rousing masterpiece, nor does it want to be. Only time will tell if it will land in the pantheon of B movie-inspired gaming classics. Until then, sit back and enjoy how much fun and violence it lets you extract from obliterating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: One More Level Publisher: Techland Publishing Platform: PC ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Violence, Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Partial Nudity, Strong Language Buy: Game
Review: Ghost Giant Is Adorable in Small Doses but Clumsy with the Big Stuff
This VR title boasts an endearingly goofy premise, but it's one that's executed in bumpy fashion.2.5
In Ghost Giant, players take on the role of an enormous and comforting specter that's been accidentally summoned by the tears of an 11-year-old kitten named Louis. Unfortunately, this spirit is as clumsy as the boy turned superhero from Shazam, and in trying to calm the understandably frightened cat down, almost ends up killing him. It's an endearingly goofy premise, though one that's executed in bumpy fashion by this VR title, as using the PlayStation Move controllers to lift and poke physical objects rarely goes as planned.
The game's unwieldy control scheme should come as no surprise to those who've played previous titles from developer Zoink!, such as Flipping Death, in which players fumble around as a spirit possessing living creatures, and Stick It to the Man, where the human protagonist comes equipped with a wacky spaghetti-like third arm. But Ghost Giant also suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, in that it can't quite decide whether it wants to be an adorable, low-stakes exploration game or if it wants to be about capital-B big issues.
The game looks like Night in the Woods and plays a bit like Beyond: Two Souls but lacks the gravitas of either. Louis's mom is suffering from severe depression, and Louis is rightfully terrified that if he can't hide her ailment from the neighbors and cheer her up, she might be taken away. But that's as far as the game goes in addressing mental illness; for the majority of the game, it's just a puzzle to be overcome. Ghost Giant understands that not all problems can be solved by, say, baking Mom's favorite apple pie and restoring her beloved cello, but it doesn't respect us enough to acknowledge that most problems require hard work to resolve.
If Ghost Giant avoids similar issues of insincerity or exploitation with the other villagers in the game's French-inspired Sancourt, it's only because these characters lack any sort of interiority at all. They're all plagued with low-stakes problems, all directly solved. A melancholy bird, for instance, isn't depressed so much as it simply refuses to sing—that is, until its favorite hat is returned. And that bird's owner doesn't have some deep-seated issue preventing her from writing; she just misses the bird's song. Satisfying these needs can be humorous, as when you—an actual but sadly invisible spirit—must create a bedsheet poltergeist that you can dangle in front of a ghost-hunting photographer. And some of the tasks make clever use of your size: After pulling wilted sunflowers out of the ground and reseeding a farm, you have to reach up and grab two clouds and squeeze them together to make it rain. What these literally odd jobs don't provide is room for growth, either in the characters or in the gameplay.
That's a shame, because it's so obvious that more vivid, elaborate stories could have been told using these anthropomorphic denizens, like the goat landlord who's desperate to catch some shut-eye, the avian scuba diver who dredges up trash, or the confidence-lacking lion who sets out to become a confectioner. These are well-designed characters, and they're nicely voice-acted, which make it all the more frustrating that the player's interactions with them are largely limited to single scenes, entirely within the context of puzzles. The same goes for the districts of this model-sized town, which don't feel lived in so much as designed around cheap and often repetitive gimmicks, from using a magnet to fish through a creepy, cemetery-adjacent junkyard, to operating a crane in a sunny, seaside harbor.
Ghost Giant's puzzles are as precise as the clockwork machinery around Sancourt that's used to rotate and raise some of the varied buildings. Creative or brute-force solutions are restricted, as players are allowed only to manipulate copper objects (though you can carry and throw just about any loose inanimate object) and can only rotate around a fixed point. Why allow players to be a giant freaking ghost and give them the wider range of movement offered by VR if you're just going to restrict that freedom? (I wish I could say this was an intentional manifestation of Louis's mother's depression.) There's only one way to accomplish each task, so when players are asked to clear a bird out of a pedestrian's path, you'll have to lean in and physically blow on it, because nothing else is designed to frighten the bird. In another nonsensical situation, you're required to paint a picture to get a crowd's attention, as if slathering paint on these individuals wouldn't make them move.
The game's most enjoyable aspect is how you get to pull apart the walls and ceilings of miniature homes, so as to get a better look inside them. But it's baffling that so few fixtures are detachable, and that they hold only meaningless, disparate collectibles like hats, insects, basketballs, and pinwheels. In the moment, you feel the thrill of spying on some hidden interior world, but then you're just clumsily activating what are essentially animatronic displays. However impressive some of these dioramas and mechanisms may be on the surface, like so much of Giant Giant, they're ultimately lifeless.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Thunderful Games.
Developer: Zoink! Publisher: Thunderful Games Platform: PSVR Release Date: April 16, 2019 Buy: Game
Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, "The Iron Throne"
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Jessy Lanza has been quite busy lately. Not only has she just finished up a tour with Cut Copy, she's about to embark on an even longer headlining tour of the US and Canada along with some festival appearances in Europe.
Still riding high from the great reviews she received from her fantastic debut album, Pull My Hair Back released late last year on Hyperdub, I was lucky enough to catch the Canadian singer perform last week at the Hollywood Palladium. Playing most of her new record, she entranced the early arrivals with her unique electro-R&B tinged sound that had the crowd swaying during her hypnotic set. Her beautiful, breathy voice matched with her catchy beats really strikes a nice balance that once you let in, you can't help but to let it move you as the growing Cut Copy audience displayed during her set.
Jessy will be heading back on the road at the end of the month playing some Canadian dates, as well as some US dates before she heads to Europe. Any fans of electro-pop or R&B should make it a point to see her incredible live performance. Check out her video for Kathy Lee and grab tickets here for one of her upcoming shows.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Recreation Manager will be spearheading the full spectrum of indoor and outdoor sports and recreational activities of the Resort.
The functional area encompasses two beaches, 154m large swimming pool, four tennis courts, running and cycling trail, hiking, sea activities such as hobbycats, island tours, etc, a fitness center and yoga lessons
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PARADISE ISLAND, Bahamas (AP) Luke Hancock scored 19 points and Russ Smith had 18 points and six steals and No. 2 Louisville looked more like itself with an 84-61 victory over No. 13 Missouri on Friday night in the semifinals of the Battle 4 Atlantis.
The Cardinals had a rougher-than-expected opening-round game, a 51-46 victory over Northern Iowa, and coach Rick Pitino looked and sounded upset after the game.
Louisville was back to being one of the better defensive teams in the nation against the Tigers, forcing 23 turnovers that the Cardinals turned into 31 points. Missouri's Phil Pressey, considered one of the better point guards in the country, had eight turnovers.
Missouri's shooting percentage (46.0) looked better than it was considering the Tigers were able to get off 50 shots, 13 less than Louisville which shot 49.2 percent.
The Cardinals (5-0) will face No. 5 Duke in Saturday night's championship game. The Blue Devils beat VCU 67-58.


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Policy 080.00
Awarding of Honorary Degrees
Originator: Provost
Subject: Guidelines and Procedures for the Awarding of UMUC Honorary Degrees and the President's Medal, and the Selection of Commencement Speakers
- Introduction
- In accordance with Board of Regents Policy III – 3.00 Policy on Awarding of Honorary Degrees, approved on July 13, 2001, UMUC may recognize members of the external community for their significant contributions to their professions, the greater community, or UMUC through the award of honorary degrees and the president's medal. Honorary degrees and the president's medal will normally be awarded at UMUC's commencement ceremonies. UMUC will also invite notable guests to participate in the commencement ceremonies as keynote speakers.
- These guidelines and procedures are established to insure that the identification, approval and invitation processes for all honorary degree recipients, president's medal recipients, and commencement speakers are consistent with University System of Maryland (USM) policies. Other considerations in the selection of recipients include the timeliness of scheduling, sensitivity to the significance of these honors, the status of the recipients, and the overall planning for commencement and other events.
- Honorary Degree Recipients
- UMUC may award honorary degrees to outstanding individuals who have:
- Made major contributions in intellectual, scholarly, or creative areas; or
- Risen to a position of eminence in their chosen field or acquired a national or international reputation in a selected field of endeavor; or
- Compiled a record of distinguished public service.
- Normally, honorary degrees may not be conferred on currently serving faculty, staff, members of the Board of Regents, or current holders of political office. Exceptions may be made only by a two–thirds vote of the Board of Regents.
- An individual may receive only one honorary degree from the University. The honorary degree recipient may also serve as the commencement speaker at a ceremony; however, being chosen as a speaker does not necessarily equate to selection for an honorary degree. Paid commencement speakers will not receive honorary degrees. The University will be judicious in the recommendation of degree recipients and will seek to recognize only individuals who meet the above criteria and who will, if selected, bring credit and recognition to the University.
- President's Medal
The President's medal is awarded by the President on behalf of the University to recognize distinguished, extraordinary, and extensive service on behalf of, and in support of, UMUC or service to the larger community. The recipient of the president's medal will also have a record of professional or civic accomplishment, a reputation of high integrity, and a commitment to the advancement of lifelong learning.
- Commencement Speakers
UMUC will invite distinguished members of the academic, business, technology, or civic communities to serve as the keynote speaker for each of its commencement ceremonies worldwide. Speakers will be selected on the basis of their professional and personal reputation, effectiveness as a public speaker, and ability to communicate an appropriate message to the graduates. The commencement keynote address is an integral part of the commencement ceremony; the commencement speaker contributes to the recognition of the accomplishments of the graduates and advancement of the reputation of UMUC.
- Process for Selection and Timeline
- The Provost will establish and chair a University Distinguished Awards Committee (UDAC). The UDAC will consist of the Assistant Vice President for Government, State and Community Relations, the Vice President for Institutional Advancement, the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, the Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies, a Shared Governance representative of the University Advisory Council, the Vice President UMUC-Europe, the Vice President UMUC-Asia, and the Senior Executive Assistant to the President (staff to the committee.)
- The UDAC will insure that there is an appropriate and timely slate of nominations to recommend for receipt of the honorary degree, the President's Medal, and keynote speaker roles. to the President. The UDAC will solicit and review nominations and present a final list of recommendations to the President according to the following schedule:
- September 15—The Provost announces worldwide "Call for Nominations" for candidates for honorary degrees, the president's medal, and commencement speakers for all UMUC ceremonies worldwide.
- October 15—Deadline for nominations of commencement speakers. The Provost convenes the UDAC. The UDAC reviews nominations, screens and determines availability as well as appropriateness for a University honor.
- October 31—The UDAC forwards speaker recommendations to President for approval. Invitations extended to speakers.
- November 1—Deadline for all degree and medal nominations to the UDAC.
- December 1—The UDAC forwards recommendations to President. The Senior Executive Assistant to the President reviews the historical worldwide list of honorary degree recipients candidates that the Board of Regents had previously approved.
- December 15—The President submits the list of recommended candidates (and supporting documentation) for honorary degrees to the Chancellor, USM, who will forward them to the Board of Regents. The written recommendation to the USM will include the following information for each proposed honorary degree recipient:
- type of honorary degree to be awarded (Doctor of Humane Letters, Doctor of Laws, Doctor of Public Service, Doctor of Sciences);
- biographical sketch of the recipient;
- justification for the awarding of the degree; and
- probable date of award.
- February—The Board of Regents votes on the nominations for honorary degrees.
- May 30—The Senior Executive Assistant to the President updates the roster of UMUC honorary degree recipients.
- Confidentiality
In accordance with standard practice at American institutions of higher learning, care should be taken to ensure strict confidentiality at all stages of the honorary degree process. In particular, there should be no communication with prospective degree recipients regarding a likely degree until after the Board of Regents has approved the award. After approval, the President may begin to arrange for the awarding of the degree. Approvals will remain confidential until the candidate is notified of his/her selection. Degrees may be conferred at any time within five years of approval, unless withdrawn by the Board of Regents for cause.
|Current Policy
|Prior Policy
|Policy Number


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There is a day of the year in which an MVP is "expiring" and in that day he hopes to receive the renewal notification email for this important professional recognition. The MVP Award Program is the way used by Microsoft to say "Thanks for your commitment"… thanks for sharing your technical knowledge with others, thanks for helping others in the worldwide technical communities.
Today is the expiration day of my MVP Award, but is also the renewal day because I have received the long awaited email "Congratulations 2013 Microsoft MVP!" I begin in this way my fourth year in the MVP Award Program for SQL Server. It is an honor for me to be part of this magic group of people that every day share their technical knowledge with others, with passion!
In the past, someone asked me "How can I becoming an MVP?" or "What did you do for becoming an MVP?" My answer was: "Learn a technology very well and keep the pace because it will change quickly; help others about using this technology, not for money but only for a Thanks and put passion in all of this!". This is my point of view of the page Becoming an MVP.
Thanks very much to all of you; I will do my best to bring in a responsible way this great recognition!
Congrats to new MVPs and to all MVPs renewed:


text:
The XI, 76 Eleventh Avenue, PH32A - Chelsea, New York
Penthouse 32A is a magnificent half floor five bedroom at No. I, one of the two Bjarke Ingels architectural masterpieces rising in vibrant West Chelsea, spanning a full city block above the Hudson River and the High Line. The unique twisting travertine towers the tallest ever in the neighborhood at - afford breathtaking views through oversized bronze windows. This new landmark in West Chelsea offers no two floor plans precisely alike. The XI will also feature the new Six Senses New York - recently named Travel + Leisure's #1 hotel brand, and the best in class for 5 star hospitality, sustainability, and wellness - breaking the archetype of luxury living to provide a rare and special lifestyle unmatched in New York City and the world.
This listing courtesy of Douglas Elliman


text:
What makes a great actor? An actor must be convincing in his role and accurately portray elements such as time and emotion to the audience. To be a successful in front of the camera or on stage, one must possess certain skills.
This list names just 10 of the qualities needed to be a great actor:
- Is Captivating: A great actor is so convincing in a role that he can hold an audience captive and make them feel as if there is nothing but the story at hand.
- Has a True Commitment: A great actor is committed to becoming the best actor he can be, as well as to working hard and preserving through rejection to find the best roles.
- Shows Confidence: A great actor is confident in his work and portrays that confidence both during a performance as well as in public to help create a rapport with the public.
- Has Insight: A great actor has keen insight into human behavior and can effectively convey the emotion that influences one's actions.
- Is Able to Use His/Her Intelligence for Role Creation: A great actor uses intelligence to research roles and impart that knowledge into their acting to develop more convincing attributes of the character. Great actors generally also have excellent reading and interpretation skills.
- Possesses Good Physical Skills: A great actor has skill in physical movement and is able to portray the movements of a variety of characters. Many actors also perform stunt work and complicated physical work.
- Shows a High Degree of Professionalism: A great actor works with a wide variety of people and is highly professional in all situations. A great actor shows tremendous respect to the craft, script, writers, directors, and all other key personnel involved in a production.
- Has an Innate Talent: A great actor has a natural talent for performing and entertaining.
- Is Willing to Work on Performance Techniques: A great actor has a perfected technique for his acting and is able to successfully bring believable characters to life.
- Has Some Sense of Vanity: A great actor has at least some degree of vanity that drives them to continue to improve and excel at the craft.


text:
NOTE: There are technical issues when using older browsers or if "compatibility mode" is turned on. This eBook works best with the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Interact with this brochure.
Here's how.
Turn pages
Just grab and drag a lower corner, or click the arrows.
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Zoom in, bookmark, or print the brochure.
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text:
|General Discussion General discussion forum for all drum related topics. Use this forum to exchange ideas and information with your fellow drummers.
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|Search this Thread
The metaphor that we like to use is that of a dinner party. Bernhard Castiglioni, the founder of DrummerWorld, is throwing a party and you are welcome to join, as long as you are a polite guest. The forum Moderators are the doormen. We work for Bernhard and we enforce the house rules. There is nothing personal about what we do. If you are a good guest then you will have the opportunity to converse with not only many other people with similar interests and varying degrees of skill, experience, and knowledge, but also more than a dozen top professional drummers who stop by on a regular basis. If, on the other hand, you show us that you cannot follow the rules or behave in a polite fashion, then you will be shown to the door. There are no temporary bans, and there is no further discussion.
And now, on to the rules.
1) Absolute Respect and Zero Tolerance
There is no trolling, flaming, or insulting of others allowed. Do not make comments that are sexist, racist, pejorative, obscene, inflammatory, spiteful, abusive, threatening, or in any way insulting or disrespectful to any individual or group of people. Do not allow disagreements to become personal. Attacking or insulting another forum member rather than disagreeing with their point of view will not be tolerated. If you do disagree with someone else's opinion, show your intelligence by arguing your position calmly and respectfully. Please do not start a new thread to discuss how much you don't like someone or something. If you have a chip on your shoulder or an ax to grind, this is not the place for you.
If you are a regularly contributing member here, try to help those who are new. If you feel that it would help, politely suggest that someone read the topic descriptions, use the search function, or review the rules. Mocking or otherwise disrespecting a "newbie" is much less welcome than an innocent mistake by someone who might not know better.
2) Common Internet Etiquette
Do not post in all capital letters, do not use large fonts and annoying colors, and please, no animated "smilies." Do not post the same thing in multiple topics. Do not "bump" a thread to bring it back to the top of the page. Do not create multiple accounts. Do not quote posts that are in obvious violation of the rules and therefore likely to be deleted. Do not post multiple times about the same point or issue. Do not post personal information or contact information, regardless of how easy it may be to find elsewhere.
Please use a subject for a new thread that explains the point of the thread. "Hey, check this out" or "What do you think" or "????" does not offer any information and isn't likely to get the response that you wish, and vague or misleading titles will be modified. If you are not familiar with the existing threads, please use the search function before starting a new one. Reply to a thread only if you have something to add to the discussion. Read the topic descriptions and post in the appropriate area, and post in the "General Discussion" if your post really doesn't belong anywhere else.
If you see a post that breaks the rules, please click on the "Report Post" icon within that post; this will report the post to the Moderators. Spammers will be immediately banned (we define spam as advertising a product not related to drumming and/or any unsolicited advertising).
3) Appropriate Language
This forum is visited by all kinds of people: pro drummers who have been in the business for decades, 10-year-old kids, moms and dads looking for help purchasing their child's first kit, teachers, amateurs, hobbyists, and hard working drummers who post here only when they aren't practicing or gigging. Communicate your thoughts in a way that is helpful and respectful without embarrassing anyone, including yourself. Don't use insulting or crude slang words, even if it is language that you use commonly with your peers. Do not substitute asterisks or other symbols for letters in words when it is obvious what you are actually saying. Try to keep language and subject matter as clean as possible. If you cannot express yourself without mentioning body parts, excretory functions, or reproductive behavior, we ask that you practice your conversational skills elsewhere before utilizing them here.
Do not post words or images that are sexually or violently graphic in nature, do not discuss drug use or any illegal activities, and do not post links to such images or discussions. If you choose a user name, avatar, or signature that violates any of these rules it will be deleted, and if we deem it appropriate you will be banned with no warning other than what you are reading here.
If it seems that you have made an honest mistake in judgment, your post will be edited or deleted and a Personal Message (PM) from a Moderator will be sent to you. Please do not respond by defending your words or arguing.
4) You Are a Guest
This forum is a small part of the main DrummerWorld website, and together the two are provided free-of-charge to the great drumming community. Bernhard Castiglioni maintains the main website, and the Moderators have complete say over what transpires on the forum. If a post or thread is moved, edited, locked, or deleted, we are doing our job using discretion and our best judgment. Please do not argue with us or question our actions or decisions, and do not discuss deleted posts, banned members, or the moderation of the forum in your posts.
If a member is banned, it is most likely that either they egregiously violated the rules, they continued to break the rules after being warned, or they sent us an an argumentative or offensive PM. In any case it is likely that there was more going on behind the scenes than you were aware of. Our decisions on these matters are never personal, and taking sides in such disputes is silly and pointless. Please remember that no forum member is indispensable, and your post count or the number of your friends does not give you a pass to break the rules.
5) Rules That Are Particular To DrummerWorld
Using the Classifieds thread
We realize that many drummers wish to do business with each other when it comes to buying, selling, or trading equipment. While we ban spammers immediately, we provide the Classifieds thread as a service to our regular members. If a post appears to be from a business venture or is the first post made by someone who has just joined our community, it is likely that we will see this as an abuse of our goodwill and the post in question will be deleted.
Using the Drummers Sub-Forum
The purpose of the Drummers section is to discuss well-known drummers such as the drummers profiled on the DrummerWorld website. It is not to discuss your drum teacher, or the drummer who plays at the pub down the street, or this guy you know who is really good. If the drummer that you wish to discuss is profiled on DrummerWorld, there is a good chance that they already have a thread about them started, so please use the search function before posting here. Be respectful in your posts. It is not unusual for drummers to read their pages on DrummerWorld and then come to the forum to read or join the discussion about themselves. We're not asking that you "suck up" to anyone, but what's the point of joining a conversation just to say how much you dislike someone?
Using the Off Topic Lounge
The original purpose of the Off Topic forum was to discuss subjects that were musical in nature but not necessarily drum-related. We have allowed a bit of leeway with this definition, but we have discovered through trial and error what fits here and what doesn't. Please do not discuss extremely trivial matters. Do not post jokes or poetry. Do not discuss politics or religion. Do not post links to "hilarious" videos of stupid people doing stupid things. If you, in your best judgment, create a post or thread that is deleted from this or any other forum topic, understand that we have the final say regarding what is appropriate and what is not. Unfortunately more posts are deleted from this topic than all others combined, and more members are banned based on their actions in this sub-forum. For these reasons, please do not abuse this area of the forum, and save us all the hassle involved in settling disputes that could easily have been avoided in the first place.
A Note About Deleted Posts
Realize that you will be held responsible for your own words. If your post is deleted for inappropriate language, please do not PM the Moderators telling us that we should have just edited your post. It is not unusual for us to have hundreds of visitors online at any given time, and editing everyone's posts is simply impractical, to say the least. If you spend 45 minutes writing a post and can't be bothered avoiding language that is not allowed here, you will have no one to blame but yourself when that post disappears.
Sometimes posts are deleted simply because, in our estimation, there is no place for them here. Again, we have the final say over the content of this forum.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As may be inferred from the subject line of this post, by using this forum it will be assumed that you have read and agree to the rules enumerated herein. It is our sincere hope that you will enjoy your stay here and use this forum to further your education and to help others along the perpetual path to percussive perfection, but we completely understand if these rules are not to your liking and we wish you the best of luck in your search for a home on the Internet where you will feel more comfortable. Keep in mind, however, that there is a very good reason why so many pro drummers use this forum, and why so many clinicians, educators, and industry leaders recommend us on a regular basis. The DrummerWorld forum is the best of its kind and we are very proud of what we have created. Stick around, contribute in the way that only you can, and most importantly have fun.
My kit: Pacific wood, Evans oil, Zildjian bronze
Last edited by DogBreath; 02-05-2008 at 05:53 PM.
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Next: Conventions, Previous: Activation, Up: Introduction
If you find problems with Org, or if you have questions, remarks, or ideas about it, please mail to the Org mailing list firstname.lastname@example.com. You can subscribe to the list on this web page. If you are not a member of the mailing list, your mail will be passed to the list after a moderator has approved it1.
For bug reports, please first try to reproduce the bug with the latest version of Org available—if you are running an outdated version, it is quite possible that the bug has been fixed already. If the bug persists, prepare a report and provide as much information as possible, including the version information of Emacs (M-x emacs-version <RET>) and Org (M-x org-version <RET>), as well as the Org related setup in the Emacs init file. The easiest way to do this is to use the command
M-x org-submit-bug-report <RET>
which will put all this information into an Emacs mail buffer so that you only need to add your description. If you are not sending the Email from within Emacs, please copy and paste the content into your Email program.
Sometimes you might face a problem due to an error in your Emacs or Org mode setup. Before reporting a bug, it is very helpful to start Emacs with minimal customizations and reproduce the problem. Doing so often helps you determine if the problem is with your customization or with Org mode itself. You can start a typical minimal session with a command like the example below.
$ emacs -Q -l /path/to/minimal-org.el
However if you are using Org mode as distributed with Emacs, a minimal setup
is not necessary. In that case it is sufficient to start Emacs as
emacs -Q. The
minimal-org.el setup file can have contents as
shown below.
;;; Minimal setup to load latest 'org-mode' ;; activate debugging (setq debug-on-error t debug-on-signal nil debug-on-quit nil) ;; add latest org-mode to load path (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/org-mode/lisp") (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/org-mode/contrib/lisp" t)
If an error occurs, a backtrace can be very useful (see below on how to create one). Often a small example file helps, along with clear information about:
If working with Org produces an error with a message you don't understand, you may have hit a bug. The best way to report this is by providing, in addition to what was mentioned above, a backtrace. This is information from the built-in debugger about where and how the error occurred. Here is how to produce a useful backtrace:
C-u M-x org-reload <RET>
or select
Org -> Refresh/Reload -> Reload Org uncompiled from the
Options menu and select
Enter Debugger on Error.
[1] Please consider subscribing to the mailing list, in order to minimize the work the mailing list moderators have to do.


text:
Madigan Warns Illinois Residents of Email Scam
Attorney General Lisa Madigan is warning Illinois residents that someone is using her office's name to scam people via email.
In a statement Tuesday, Madigan says the emails falsely threaten prosecution for supposed debts. The messages appear to be sent by someone from her office and include a letter with an official-looking seal and the words "final warning."
But Madigan says the email "is an outright scam."
She says anyone who receives such an email shouldn't respond. Madigan says they should call her office's consumer fraud bureau.
People who have applied for loans online may be at higher risk to receive the emails. Madigan says that's because they've provided their personal information to companies that may sell it to lenders or "illegal fraudsters."


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Locked and loaded? The Knights of Columbus v. HHS
I have already pointed out my concern that the bishops' religious liberty campaign is in danger of appearing to be "anti-Obama," a concern shared by at least one bishop willing to go on the record.
Now the Knights of Columbus are taking it up a notch with their May issue of Columbia magazine, which prominently features a mounted cowboy-looking guy holding a rifle and wearing a crucifix around his neck. As Stephen Schneck notes, Columbia is invoking the 1920s Cristero rebellion against Mexico's violently anti-clerical government--while also promoting a new movie about the uprising.
Right in the center of the magazine is the U.S. bishops' "Our First, Most Cherished LIberty," along with its "concrete examples" our how religious liberty is under attack. Not to be missed is a dramatic photo of a 1925 Ku Klux Klan march through Washington, D.C.; the KKK offered to send its 4 million members to aid Mexico's government if any foreign power intervened against Mexico's Calles regime.
So what inference are we to draw from the entire issue devoted to a civil war in Mexico that included the summary execution of priests and religous--along with a U.S. bishops' statement about religious freedom right in the middle? Are the editors of Columbia suggesting that if employees at Catholic-affiliated hospitals, universities, and social service agencies are able to obtain contraceptives or sterilization through their insurance plan, U.S. soldiers will soon be executing priests and the KKK will once again march openly in our nation's capital?
Like Father Jonathan Morris' outrageous and offensive claim of "rape" against the First Amendment, I think Supreme Knight Carl Anderson and the leadership of the KofC have overplayed the persecution card (to put it mildly). To be blunt, I think such rhetoric is irresponsible, deliberately inflammatory, and ought to be publicly and roundly rejected for what it is: a blatant attack against a sitting president during an election year in the name of Catholicism. it also diminishes the suffering of people who have actually suffered for their faith--including the Cristeros.
While loud conservative voices--telegenic archbishops, pundits with internet connections, andfraternal organizations with incredibly deep pockets--wrap themselves in the papal flag and garner the attention of controversy hungry media, the complex reality of Catholic tradition that could be applied to our current political and economic situation is being completely drowned out. And that's because some strident types have frightened more moderate and--I'll say it--intelligent and prudent voices from speaking up, lest they be labeled Obama-loving, baby-killing, Catholic-in-name-only socialists. Some of those voices belong to bishops, and I sure wish they'd speak up, even if it means offending the guys with miters and megaphones.
What's worse, boiling Catholicism down to the HHS mandate or the teaching on birth control diminishes the real contribution that Catholic tradition could make in this election season. We should be criticizing the president for his escalation of drone warfare with its collateral innocent victims and his perpetuation of a cruel and family-destroying deportation policy. We should be challenging Mitt Romney to explain how he will treat immigrants any differently or how he will confront the millions of Americans mired in poverty.
But why should anyone listen to Catholics about how the poor are being abandoned in favor of military spending while we play the martyr--literally--over the technical matter of whether and how some people access medical means of family planning that Catholic teaching judges to be immoral?
Unless you don't want to have those other conversations. But if you don't, you can't claim to represent the fullness of Catholic teaching.


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Former Chiefs G.M. Scott Pioli has launched a media career with multiple outlets, including NBC Sports Network. On Wednesday, he appeared on SiriusXM NFL Radio to discuss that trade that his former team has made for a quarterback.
And Pioli offered a caveat — the deal may not be completely finished.
"The one thing I have heard talking to some good sources is this thing has not been completely finalized yet," Pioli said. "I think they are still working through some of the absolute details of what the compensation is. Because I think what happens in these trades, if you give up a pick for something or if you're going to give up two picks, what's been a new trend in the NFL is people generally kick picks back. Because teams don't like to see their, even if they are going to give up a higher pick they want to get something later in the draft so they at least have a volume of picks to have more opportunities."
In other words, if the Chiefs are giving up a second-round pick to the 49ers, they could be getting a seventh-round pick back from the 49ers.
Even if a deal is finalized, nothing is official until both teams call in the trade to the league office. And that can't even happen until after 4:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 12.