works of wanderlust

Category: reviews

I mostly write about things I like. If I haven’t written about it, maybe I just haven’t seen it… or maybe I didn’t like it.

  • game: civilization seven

    Would you say that I got this game for free?

    I mean, I didn’t pay for it. I ordered it using points. AirMiles(TM). So it wasn’t strictly free because, I mean, those points have a kind of real and tangible value, but they are not money in the sense that I could buy anything but whatever random crap is listed on their catalog on any given day. I didn’t pay for the game, I guess is what I’m saying, and using points made it feel like something I got for free (even though I didn’t really, I suppose) and I mention it because I’m still very torn on how I feel about this latest insallment in the Civilization series inasmuch as I’m feeling pretty smug about not having spent real cash on the game.

    I’ve been playing Civilization VII.

    And shortly before that I had been playing Civilization 6, which was both a mature game which had been tweaked and refined and bug-squashed long since, and which I picked up up for literally a few bucks on a big digital sale lowering the stakes dramatically for what turned out to be an excellent purchase and investment of my gaming time.

    And? Before that I’ve played every other installment of this game going back to the original in the 90s. 

    All this is just me setting the stage and suggesting my bonafides when it comes to a player of this particular game series and type.

    If you’ve never played a “Civ” game let me elaborate as best as I can bring it down: It’s like a big game of Risk on a huge interactive video game map of a randomly generated world—except rather than just rolling dice and moving armies you need to build the cities and grow the economies to raise and support those armies, ensure that they have resources to fight, negotiate diplomacy with other societies, fend off natural disasters, counter religious uprisings, research and build new technologies and so on and on and on into a kind of complexity that is hard to explain in a single paragraph.

    Look up 4X games which stands for eXplore, eXpland, eXploit, and eXterminate, and which in a vague sort of way truly summarizes the core of the gameplay.

    I play Civilization and have played it for pretty much my entire adult gaming life as a kind of slow, serious, strategic gamer’s pursuit. Civilization is like the chess of the video game world: that is to say a lot of people take it serious as f. 

    So it is a big deal when a new installment ships. Civilization VII shipped just a few months ago in early 2025 and generally—well—people hate it, frankly.

    Personally I’m torn.

    Here’s the thing about that. I play it with seriousness, but I am not serious about the game. I just dabble in seriousness, and in saying that my stake in the game is not about the fine-tuned mechanics of a elaborate and complex simulator leveraging the raw strategy of a well-honed plan of tactical gamers pursuit vibes. I’m just playing to go with the flow. I don’t just click and click and click some more. I think about my moves, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that on a scale of hard-core Civ-ness, I’m like a 4 out of 10.

    I’ve played three games of Civilization VII since I got it for not-exactly-free from my reward points, such a middle aged dad thing to do by the way, ordering video games on a physical disc using your airline rewards, and three games in I’m like… hmm… uh… yeah. It’s… okay. I mean, I like the innovative thinking. I like that game companies are trying new things. I like that this is more than just an updated graphics engine smeared over the old engine. It is a new approach, and that is a awesome and we should all celebrate risk taken in the name of advancing new ideas and updates.

    But there is a hitch—and an itch I can’t quite scratch.

    The game is—I dunno—bumbling. 

    There is just something about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s as if the game is simultaneously too complex for its own good and yet insufficiently rigourous in allowing the player to control all that complexity. There is stuff that happens, automatically, behind the curtain, out of sight, that I just simply don’t understand as I’m playing. And I write this not as a good veil-of-war kind of sense where such secrecy promotes strategic play: I say in the sense of it sometimes feels, just feels, like the game is playing itself and that I am reduced to little more than button mashing the turn meter forward. It just bumbles along, tap, tap, tap, bumble, tap, tap, tap, bumble—and I’m left thinking, like, am I playing this or watching it play?  And that is the type of game that leaves you with a kind of vague emptiness when you’ve progressed far enough along.

    It likely doesn’t help that I’m playing this on Playstation, to be honest. On a desktop I assume I’d do more mouse-hovering and poking around the UI to see what I was missing, read the help tips, or something. So is it a UI issue or a game issue or a hand-holding issue or—I don’t even know what is bugging me. But as it stands, I got the PS5 version with points not the other one, so that’s what I have been playing.

    Or should I say watching?

    And even though I write all this I still want it to be good. Maybe I write all this because I want it to be good. This is a beloved franchise. This is a piece of my gaming persona.  This is my chess. 

    I’m just torn on if I like it or not—and actually a little bit glad I didn’t really pay for it, either.

  • book reviews: rainy spring

    Ugh. I didn’t read as much as I should have through the winter, and yet now, maybe only because I’m still riding the high of enjoying my new ebook reader, I have been power walking through a whole collection of books.

    That said, very little planning has gone into my May reads. I have very much been waltzing through the whims of whatever the universe throws at me, in the first case revisiting a book in print that I’d previously listened to, then stumbling into an unlikely girly memoire, and finally elevating a sequel I was pretty sure I was going to put off until autumn.

    But read what you want to read. Read what you feel like reading. Just read.

    And recently I read:

    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

    This was a tough read, but for a strange reason: my first encounter with this book was when I listened to the audiobook version a couple years ago, and the narration and voice acting in that version is beyond top notch, bringing the whole story to life. Reading it as a novel this time through I could still hear the voices and cadedence of Porter’s acting chops. Beyond that, this is a delightfully nerdy romp through a first contact type story and a utopian perspective on why nerds should be in charge of everything. If you enjoyed The Martian, this is a completely different spin on the puzzling out life or death engineering problems in space by the same author, but with a pleasant stylistic overlap that bridges any of the plot differences. I have been making an effort these past couple weeks to avoid checking the star ratings on things (post upcoming in a couple more weeks) but I suspect that if you checked the reviews on this title you’d find no shortage of raves.

    Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Um, so yeah. What the heck am I doing reading a twenty year old quasi-spiritual memoire of a divorced woman traveling and meditating in the quest to clear her soul? I will admit, when The Algorithm recommended this to me, the low friction, low stakes, no cost value proposition of having the library on my ebook reader left me simply figuring that I would read the first chapter or two to quench my decades-long sidelong curiosity about this book which rode the bestseller list for like three years… and then move along. I read the whole damn thing. Maybe it’s a middle age quirk. Maybe I really have honed some previously emotional derelict part of my own soul these past couple years. Maybe there is a kinship between folks farted out the baskside of prim society and left to recreate themselves that bridges space, time, and gender. Who knows for sure. But putting aside my idle skepticism about the author’s spiritual awakenings and the manifesting of prayer and all that drivel, there was a relatable struggle to be found in these pages that has not uniquely been discussed in such books, but was certainly a perspective that I didn’t mind adding to my pondered-upon list.  

    Shift by Hugh Howey

    I lied in my last post. I surmised I might wait a month or six before jumping into the second instalment of Howey’s Silo trilogy. Instead, I had barely let the first volume cool off and I was onto the second. Sequels are always tough, I find. Part twos in a trilogy can be amazing tales of raised stakes (think Empire Strikes Back) or disappointing romps deeper into a story that can’t resolve until the final book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story. Instead what is here is a lot of backstory. Where in book one the mystery is the silo itself, what unravels in book two is a step back to nearly the present day (relatively speaking, at least) and we are introduced to the people and the politics that created the world in which book one exists, the histories of the world outside the silos themselves and the histories of the people who are stuck inside, too. I don’t just want to give a recap, however. Once again Howey is twisting dozens of very human stories together around this dystopic concept. Everyone is a complicated actor, both hero and villain, both struggling for their own survival and yet questioning their own mortality and morality. It is a romp through the psyche of post-apocalyptic humanity that is worth the trip.

  • media review: weird al

    I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

    I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

    Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

    The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

    Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

    It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

    Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.

  • flick: idiocracy

    I jumped on the bandwagon and last night I watched a flick I haven’t seen in almost twenty years: Idocracy.

    And, boy, does that hit differently these days.

    You’ve seen the meme shitposting, no doubt. “Idocracy wasn’t an instruction manual, guys!” At least people are screaming it into the void on my social feeds as kind of the defacto answer to every other news article gurgling out of the fetid swamp of american politics these past couple months.

    I risk devolving into political rants here myself if I’m not careful.

    The crux of the film hinges on the opening sequence where—even before Luke Wilson and an almost unrecognizably vanilla Maya Rudolph (she’s really honed her vibe and her craft so well lately, don’t you agree) are hibernated into the grim and stupid future—two characters named in IMDB as simply “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband” stand in for rational america opting to hold off having kids meanwhile the literal trailer-dwelling mouth-breather characters standing in for stupid america are breeding like its a race to the bottom.  There is no subtly or hinting that director Mike Judge sees some kind of devolution of humanity occuring by raw natural selection at work. Selection of the stupid by sheer overwhelming numbers.

    Jerry Springer eat your heart out (while may you rest in peace.)

    Fresh out of a biology undergrad and back when I first watched the flick back in 2006 or so I probably could have explained the genetics a little better, and maybe even argued against the premise using big science words. I wouldn’t be so lame these days. Satire as this was intended is meant to show us extremes… and extremes we are shown. 

    Spoiler: the dough-brained inhabitants of the remnants of twenty-sixth century america are watering their crops with off-brand gatoraid and wondering why there aint nuthin grownin. Plot ensues.

    Back in the twenty-first century real world we’re not quite living in idocracy, but the government seems to be filled with reality television personalities, irrational “i researched it mu-self” antivaxxers are arguing themselves into letting their own kids die of preventable diseases, and the stock market has become little more than a roulette wheel where the chips are crypto coins (that by the way are generally understood by the average person in a way best summed up by my father-in-law who legit asked me if he needed to download Minecraft to get started in bitcoin.)

    Idocracy is not an instruction manual indeed, guys.

    When it came out I laughed this goofball comedy off as ridiculous absurdist science fiction. Gawd, tho, if it didn’t hit like a sledgehammer smacking a warning gong when I watched it last night. Not an instruction manual, but satire-come-documentary of the moronic twenties perhaps.

  • media review: fallout

    Oh wow, I’m about a year late to the party but nothing says desperate for clicks like binge watching the latest streaming show and pumping out a ham-fisted review fifteen minutes later, huh?

    On the other hand, after my third playthrough of Fallout 4, dusting off the Fallout Shelter mini-game, and pondering if I would ever find anyone to play the Fallout TTRPG game I bought and for which I 3d-printed and painted a milkcrate full of minis, I finally settled into the couch to watch the streaming show starring Purnell and Goggins that debuted nearly a year ago now.

    If I still have to mention I am a bit of a Fallout fan here you haven’t been reading very carefully at all.

    And too, I’ll spare you the plot recap.

    There have been no shortage of universe-extending cross-over flicks and series this past decade or more. It used to be that video games were regarded as something of a culturally broke medium when it came to rich storytelling, so much so that I recall multiple times trying to justify playing them for story and citing the narrative complexity of titles like Final Fantasy VII and—um—maybe that was the only one there for a while. I’m sure there were more, but that was my go to. No, video games can tell complex stories and still be interesting as video games.

    Fallout, I do believe, started as a pretty bog standard franchise back in the first couple iterations, but the nuances of a retro-futuristic world of absurd atomic era fancies and frustrations was embraced with vigorous as more and better titles emerged. And some would argue with the release of Fallout 4 the series hit peak style, locking in a vibe and a backstory and a completeness of universe lore that exceeded even the higher bars for acheivement in this award category.

    I love Fallout. I will admit. The groove that it etches in your mind, a tragically optimistic juxtaposition of economic cynicism and techno-optimism. One is thrust into a world where war and corporate greed have been pushed to their very extremes, and where morality is blurred into a green and bloody smear as a result.

    It was with this sensibility locked into my skull that I pressed play on the television series. It had two jobs: mantain the vibe and tell an interesting story.

    A few minutes after I watched the end credits roll on the last episode of season one, I turned on my Playstation and loaded up Fallout 4. Again. The series had the energy of the game and I wanted to revisit the world, to spend a few more minutes poking around that crazy alternate universe. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of both, I don’t know what is.