I was going to mention how long-time readers of would surely know of my love of all things BioWare, but I guess my Mass Effect: Andromeda post never made it out of my Drafts on the old WordPress site and, aside from talking about Veilguard post last year, I guess I talked about playing KOTOR a little bit back in 2004. So no, I guess you wouldn’t necessarily know that.
I loved Mass Effect. I loved the role-playing in it. I loved that my choices (sort of) mattered. I loved the NPC relationships. But mostly, I loved the idea of it. And I think, in the end, I was always just a bit disappointed with it.
Robin D Laws talks about iconic heroes[^1], and how they differ from dramatic heroes. Iconic heroes encounter a problem in the world and solve it by adhering to their iconic ethos, thereby restoring the status quo. Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries by noticing things and making deductions. Captain Picard stops a war or escapes the space anomaly with meetings and speeches. Doctor Who makes a clever gadget and then talks the Daleks into blowing themselves up. Story after story.
And generally, the stories are procedural. They’re solving a problem. They’re episodic. Every week, the hero encounters the problem and at the end every week, things go back more or less to where they were at the start. The hero doesn’t appreciably change, because they wouldn’t be iconic if they did. They’re a point of stillness in a changing universe.
Is this old-fashioned? Hell yeah. It’s really hard to find these days. Scriptwriters are allergic to it. Everybody needs a dramatic arc.
Commander Shepard is (or ought to be) an iconic hero. The cool thing is, you get to decide her iconic ethos. Are you a Paragon, or are you a Renegade? The game and the story changes (subtly, admittedly) on which way you choose to go. That’s really cool.
What’s frustrating is the original Mass Effect provides a fantastic premise for an episodic procedural. Shepard is the first human Spectre. She’s a special agent who can go anywhere and do whatever it takes to solve problems and investigate mysteries. What an awesome premise! You got a cool spaceship and a bunch of interesting friends with their own abilities, and you could go around making the galaxy a better place, one slightly on rails combat map at a time! Fun space adventures!
Spoilers for decades-old videogames after the cut.
I used to do more bullet posts than just once a year. I put more effort into my laziness. Let’s do this.
We had a bit of a storm a few weeks ago, which took out a couple of willow trees along the stream next to the house.
One of said trees ended up resting on the roof of our garage. Fortunately no damage, except maybe a dent in the eaves trough.
The city showed up after a couple weeks and cleaned up their trees. To some extent. You can see from the photo above, they didn’t go out of their way to make anything pretty. Got a cool time lapse out if it, tho.
After Chorus, I picked up Yar’s Rising, which I mostly enjoyed as a short, fun little metroidvania with old Atari game mini-games. Fun soundtrack, cute premise, goofy story and not anything anyone’s taken too seriously.
And then I went looking for more space games. Everspace 2 came up a bunch of times in comparison to Chorus so I figured I’d give it a shot. I bought Everspace ages ago but got turned off by the rogue-like of it all. Everspace 2 has more of a story, but the difficulty curve proved my undoing, even on “Very Easy” difficulty, I was still getting blown up repeatedly in un-fun ways.
I briefly picked up X4 again having forgotten how much I hate the controls.
Then I decided to finally bite the bullet (as it were) and pick up No Man’s Sky finally. Whereupon I discovered it’s not really a space game but a survival base-building game. Where you grub around for raw materials and somehow magically build shit at a tedious, monotonous pace. Not my favourite genre. But I’ve been meaning to give it a try forever and so far I haven’t put it down yet.
The above probably could’ve been two non-bullet blogs posts.
So I was looking through the YouTube Music recommendations and turns out Billy Strings has a new album. I wouldn’t call myself a Billy Strings fan, but I do occasionally find myself in a bluegrass mood and he’s very good. Anyway, the album wasn’t blowing me away, but then I got to a track entitled I Like Train Songs. And you know? I liked this train song.
Then, over on the blueskies, discourse in my feed turned, as it often does, to how highways suck and the 413 is a stupid idea when Esther Wheaton of local bluegrass band Onion Honeychimed in with their track They’ll Add Another Lane To the 401, which is actually a (delightful, plaintive) train song.
Thus September 2 became Train Song Day, complete with a Mastodon thread and YouTube Music playlist. (I got a little distracted by work and local hurricanes and a willow tree on my roof, so I didn’t quite get this to the level of a Christmas Mixtape, tho I was tempted).
I am happy with how the playlist turned out. The player above will play through it, even though YouTube doesn’t do a good job of embedding YouTube Music. It goes to some interesting places, straying quite a ways from bluegrass, but I feel it holds together pretty well. Give it a try.
