2024 In Review: Media Consumed

One of the things that struck me this year was just how much media I consume at the moment. At any given time I'm watching a few TV shows and movies (based on interest and on feeling like I'm getting my money's worth from the various streaming services I pay for), reading a number of books and comics, listening to music and podcasts, and maybe playing video games. Which all makes it odd when I consider that it doesn't feel like it's been that good of a year for it all, somehow?

In fairness, I have kept up with a number of shows, particularly from Disney Plus. Of those, X-Men 97 was the clear standout, both because it was a good treatment of the characters and because it dovetailed well with the comics I was reading this year. Echo was decent, though maybe not as memorable as Hawkeye, where Maya Lopez originated, and the Acolyte had some promise but didn't necessarily live up to it. Its cancellation feels like capitulation to the toxic review bombers, but I also don't feel like I'll wither and die not knowing what happens next. 

Agatha All Along was another promising one, which did a very nice job of playing a long con on its viewers, at the same time that it was pulling the con on its characters. Its seventh episode, "Death's Hand in Mine", was the standout, but somehow I felt like it whiffed at the end - not in undoing Agatha's death, but rather in failing to really explain her motivations. I liked the fact that the Witches' Road never really existed, though.

That said, there was one other big standout, and that was Shogun. I already wrote about it, so I won't go on at length here, but it was probably the most compelling show I watched all year. Honorable mention also goes to Slow Horses, Fargo and Fallout, while Bel Air remained the most fun cheesiness. I'm expecting Slow Horses and Fallout to get more seasons, but I'm also hoping for more from Fargo and Bel Air.

In terms of movies, I feel like the one standout was Deadpool and Wolverine, which is the only film I watched twice. It held up just as well on the second viewing, on Disney Plus, but I'd have even been happy to catch it in theaters a second time. Dune Part Two was pretty good, though maybe not the visual feast that the first part represented, while the Maxine Minx/Pearl trilogy of horror movies from Ti West was good, trashy fun - particularly the first two movies. The Zone of Interest was so different from the book that it might as well have had a different title, but it was a fascinating, harrowing watch. And for ongoing comfort watching, I started the year with Fox's X-Men series and continued with a new MCU rewatch, which let me re-evaluate a couple of films and confirmed my opinions of the others.

Turning to books, the one that was most influential was Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels, which has brought me into the world of critical analysis of American superhero comics. It led me to The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz's review of how postwar comics informed progressive activism and imagery, and vice versa, as well as Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History, which I picked up because of its references to music but was pleased to see that it talked about other cultural aspects of Englishness.

I also read a lot of Richard Osman and Mick Herron, and I'm debating picking up Osman's latest, even though it's not in the Thursday Murder Club series. Other than that, history was a big part of my reading, particularly the Shortest History series, as I took in the volumes on Italy, Japan and India.

For comics, I mostly read X-Men related books, though Wolk's book convinced me to try The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which turned out to be a great read. A friend lent me Image's W0rldtr33, and that was a nice change from the superhero stuff. I'm still debating whether or not to get the DC Universe Infinite app, but somehow the pile of physical comics beside my bed isn't diminishing fast enough for me to go ahead with that one.

For podcasts, I finally finished Revolutions, which I started in 2022, just as it was ending. Ironically, just as I was finishing its final series on the Russian Revolution, Mike Duncan started it up again, but this time with a speculative story about a possible Martian Revolution. I don't know if I'll check it out, but it might have to wait until it's done - somehow I found it harder to retain information from the Revolutions format than I did from Duncan's History of Rome.

Keeping the X-Men theme going, however, the standout podcast for me this year was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I've mostly been listening in order from when they started, so I'm only up to the episodes from 2016, when they were covering Inferno, though I made sure to listen to their more recent review of X-Men 97 and their interview with Lenore Zann, who played Rogue. Their show's given me a taste for more comics-related podcasts, so I've started exploring Wolk's Voice of Latveria, and at some point soon I'll be checking out the Cerebrocast for more X-related goodies.

And finally, my video gaming has been limited primarily to various Kingdom Rush tower defense games on my iPad. I've been playing them off and on for about a decade, but my interest really took off when the Youtuber Voduke published his magisterial ranking of all the heroes in the series. That led me to buy a few heroes and towers across the various games of the series, including the DLC levels for the fourth installment, Vengeance. 

The big news for this year was the launch of Kingdom Rush Alliance, the fifth tower defense game in the series; for the first time I was there from the start, though on some level I found it a little underwhelming - I still haven't been able to figure out if that's because it only offered the main campaign at launch, whereas I discovered all the other games after they'd been out for a while and had released a lot of elite levels. Alliance has its charms, though, so I won't say it's terrible or on the wrong path, but it does feel a little lacking in replayability. I'll have to see how I feel when the next elite levels and its first DLC drop.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm hoping for big things from Marvel's new offerings, particularly the fourth Captain America movie, Brave New World. Having watched the MCU's Infinity Saga again, it's clear that Marvel dropped the ball a bit in the Multiverse Saga by not giving us more glimpses of the core characters - if you think about it, this is the first time we're seeing the new Cap since 2021's Falcon and Winter Soldier, and we're not getting a new Avengers movie until 2026, so it'll be a gap of seven years since Endgame. That means Brave New World will have a lot riding on it, particularly since Marvel had to pivot away from the Kang storyline they were doing.

I'm also hoping for a good new season from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will hopefully make up for the end of Lower Decks next week. I'm sure other, unheralded shows will come up, and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised by them as they launch.

Overall, though, I'm hoping to spend a little less time consuming media and more time... I dunno, doing stuff? I wouldn't say my media diet made me stay home more, but now that I'm not really sequestering myself like I did during Covid, I think I can go out and explore the world more again.

Or maybe we'll be stuck inside again thanks to the new administration? I'll explore some of those concerns in my next blog, which will be a rundown of my 2024. Though I'll spoil the main theme for you here: 2024 sucked, just like the eight years before it, and like the four years that are coming now. But next time I'll explain just how 2024 sucked. Lucky you!

Finally Catching Up with The Last of Us

One of my resolutions every year is to play through some of my backlog of video games that I've acquired since 2014, for various systems. Like most people's resolutions, this one never quite survives past about March, although I'm pleased that I've stuck to the corollary resolution, which is not to buy too many new games (or systems).

The truth is that I'm not great at finishing games. When they had eight levels, simple graphics and gameplay, and didn't feature a lot of cutscenes, I could just about manage it, but at some point I guess I get bored of them and want to see what's going on with another game. With an older game, like the original Megaman series on the NES, if I revisit a game years later then at least it's not such a time investment to just start again at the beginning.

Which brings me to The Last of Us. When I bought it in early 2014, it came as a bundle with my PS3 and it was one of several titles I had my eye on because of the buzz I'd been hearing at the time. Back then, I managed the prologue but never got past the tutorial in the game proper. I moved on, instead, to other games for the system. Some I finished, like Assassin's Creed 2 and Arkham City and the Mass Effect Trilogy, while others I've dipped into again, like Skyrim, or restarted more than once, like Dragon Age Inquisition. And of course, there's also Assassin's Creed 4, which I've never even played (maybe later this year I'll write a blog about how great that one is, but don't bet on it).

The premiere of the TV show on HBO is what impelled me to try the game again. It's co-created by Craig Mazin, who co-hosts the Scriptnotes podcast and who created Chernobyl, also for HBO and one of the best TV shows I've seen in recent years. I actually started a new file of The Last of Us on the weekend the first episode was due to air, and I've managed to stick to playing it a couple of hours per weekend, then watching the show that evening.

What's funny is that those two hours each week have been enough to keep up with the show, at least so far.  The first episode started with the collapse of civilization and ended with Pedro Pascal's character, Joel, killing a soldier in front of Bella Ramsey's Ellie, which was about the point I got to on that Sunday. The following week I saw the ultimate fate of Joel's partner, Tess, and the week after I got to explore Bill's Town in the game, before watching the story of Bill and his husband Frank on TV.

I'm probably not going to be able to keep that cadence, both because of other things I have going on (like a trip to Europe later this month) and because the show is diverging from the game in order to tell its story in ways that are appropriate for TV. But so far it's been a really fun way of following along with both.

As for how I like them, well, the TV show has become a must-watch for me on Sunday nights. The lead actors are a good pairing on their own merits (and it's probably best that I don't have years of playing the game to bias me against them) and the aesthetics of the show are really well thought out, from the abandoned cityscapes to the design of the infected, especially the Clickers.

Meanwhile, the game's grown on me as I've learned how to play it. Certain parts have been frustratingly difficult, but eventually I've gotten through them, helped at times by online walkthroughs. I like the possibilities offered by gathering resources, which lets you upgrade your gear and your character, but the gameplay can be a little frustrating, since the PS3 controller has so many buttons that it's easy to forget which one you're mashing. It's pretty much a given that in a fight with a Clicker, I'll press the button to punch it instead of the button to stab it, and end up getting eaten by the bastard.

Still, it looks good and is entertaining, so what more do I need? My one concern is how I'll play the sequel, The Last of Us Part 2, since it's only on PS4. I've picked up a few mini consoles and the Nintendo Switch since I bought my PS3, but a new PS4 or PS5 feels like an unnecessary purchase if I'm not going to devote time to playing any games for it. But that's a ways off, so in the meantime I can just focus on finishing the game in front of me.

If you haven't played it or watched the show, I'd totally recommend playing them side-by-side, like I'm doing now. It's given me a greater appreciation for the storyline and the design, and it's helped keep my interest in the game (at least until the next time I want to binge a tower defense game on my iPad).

Stuff I Watched, Read, Heard, Etc in 2021

With the continuing pandemic and my own reluctance to go out and get potentially exposed, there's been a lot of time to watch stuff at home. Unfortunately, it's meant that I could only watch what was available at home, so HBO Max came through for me in a big way, while Disney Plus took a little longer to share its cinematic delights. Anyway, without further ado:

Movies

I feel like it was a blah year for movies, for the reason listed above. HBO Max, as I said, came through with a number of new releases at the same time as in theaters, and because everything feeds into some IP or other, it meant my girlfriend and I caught up on a bunch of movie series. For new stuff, the standout is probably Dune, which had a nice mix of action and intellect. That is to say, it's not the kind of introspective SF that marked Interstellar or even Denis Villeneuve's earlier film Arrival, but it's a cut above most tentpole SF blockbusters because the explosions and warfare aren't the point. It was a faithful adaptation in all the best ways, and the casting was mostly good. I'm looking forward to the next one - and maybe I'll even get to see it in theaters!

HBO Max also provided access to a couple of big superhero-related movies: the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, and the Suicide Squad. It was interesting seeing the long-awaited Snyder Cut, since I remember JL being pretty bad; the new version wasn't Citizen Kane, but thinking back on it now, it felt like a different movie and like all the parts fit together in a way that I don't remember the previous version doing. 

Suicide Squad, meanwhile, was a fun romp through the incredibly rich back catalogue of random DC characters. I don't love James Gunn's other superhero work, but it was nice to see Warners give him free rein to tell the story in as violent and sweary a way as he wanted. The result came off like DC's answer to Deadpool, and it looks like the story will continue with the new Peacemaker series.

I also caught up with Warner's Godzilla movies, several of which I'd seen, but they were better on the second go. Kong: Skull Island was particularly fun, and even Godzilla: King of the Monsters held up better than I remembered. Kong vs Godzilla was a little bit sillier than either, but was an okay romp. It was also nice to rewatch the Jurassic Park movies, and some bits of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looked a lot better seen a second time.

The one new series that I caught was the Conjuring movies, again because HBO Max released the latest one and made the rest of the series available. The first was obviously the best, but it was fun seeing how the Nun and the Annabelle movies fit into the overall whole.

Looking at the amount of movies I watched there, it's clear that HBO Max has taken over as the streaming service to get the kinds of movies you'd actually want to watch. Netflix has some good ones, but they're mostly its own originals, as all the content holders take their stuff away to form their own streaming services.

TV

I caught up with a lot of series this year that I'd been watching previously, but the main new thing I discovered was Star Trek: Lower Decks. It took a while to warm to it, because I'm not entirely on board with the frenetic type of humor it mines from Rick and Morty, but the show improved as it based more of its humor on obscure Trek lore. I hold it up in contrast to the Orville, which tries to do the same thing (identifying the absurd parts of Trek while also getting at the meanings, morals and messages), but still got stuck too much on making Family Guy-style jokes about it all. That said, both are the continuations of TNG that I've been wanting, so I'm interested to see how their respective second seasons turn out.

Narcos was another fun one, both the original Colombia show and the Mexico sequel. I saw them out of order, catching Narcos: Mexico first, which perhaps made the original stand out better, even in the third season when the focus moves from Pablo Escobar to the Cali Cartel. Both, however, were entertaining procedurals looking at how the drug war is prosecuted, and the final season of Narcos: Mexico looks promising so far. Though I could watch another few seasons of Wagner Moura as Escobar.

Music & Podcasts

I'd love to separate these into two categories, but even with my British music listening project, it's been hard to find new music to fall in love with. The one exception, though it's not recent, is Echo and the Bunnymen, which sounds like something I'd have loved in high school and college. There's something about the soundscapes that reminds me of the Smiths and the Cure, so it's been fun exploring their back catalogue in its entirety.

In terms of podcasts, I discovered a few good history podcasts, mostly on ancient cultures. The Ancient World, the Ancients and Fall of Civilizations have all been entertaining to listen to, and feel like they could provide some good fodder for fantasy or science fiction story ideas.

Books & Comics

The one new book that I read that really caught my attention this year was Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was a quick, compulsive read, which I found hard to put down and which felt like a spiritual successor to Stephen Baxter's Evolution, and indirectly to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. I'm looking forward to the sequel, Children of Ruin, and to looking at the rest of Tchaikovsky's back catalogue.

Otherwise, I just read more books in series I've been rationing out year to year (like Genevieve Cogman's super-fun Invisible Library series and Marko Kloos's also-fun Frontlines books). I've got the final Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, queued up on my Kindle, which I'll be tackling at some point in the new year, though I don't know what I'll do with myself when I've finished the series. I also read the second and third books of Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, following up his First Law series. Like with Leviathan Falls, I don't quite know what to do with myself now, and while I'll be looking forward to Abercrombie's next book, I hope he revisits this setting sooner rather than later, because I want to know what comes next.

In terms of comics, I stuck with re-reading my whole collection, so I've been revisiting books I haven't read in about 10-20 years, if not more. I've also finally gotten to my Marvel books, and it's been interesting (and sometimes a little infuriating) getting acquainted with the X-Men again. I'm still leaning toward subscribing to DC and Marvel's digital comics services at some point, so that I can read... well... everything. Who knows when I'll find the time for that, of course...

Games

There hasn't been much interesting gaming this year, though I'll have some extra time for it in the coming months. I did manage to get a Switch at the end of last year, and I have a couple of Mario games, as well as FIFA 21 (a stripped down version), to play with. Other than that, I drifted away from Mario Kart Tour on iOS, and drifted into Apple Arcade, which has also led me back to Kingdom Rush - and to the nerdy world of Kingdom Rush fandom on YouTube.

As I keep saying, iOS games like Kingdom Rush are good because they don't require the time and mental investment that the latest blockbuster games for the state of the art consoles require. I've tried picking up Skyrim again recently, but it's been years and I don't exactly know what I'm doing anymore. On the other hand, I can knock out a couple levels of Kingdom Rush without keeping all kinds of backstory straight.

That said, I do sometimes think it'd be nice to grab a new console and game, like God of War or Horizon: Zero Dawn, to be up with what everyone's talking about. I might just try, though I feel like I ought to finish more of the games I already have...

Mario Kart Tour: The Perfect Game for Late Stage Capitalism

I've recently joined my girlfriend in downloading Mario Kart Tour on my iPhone. While the game itself is fun, a nice recreation of certain classic Mario Kart courses and drivers going back to the original Super Nintendo version, it's also a cutthroat world where entrenched privilege allows you to skate over your competitors who have less means with which to compete, hence the title.

It should be noted, by the way, that the competitor with less means in this case is me, because I haven't shelled out the $4.99 per month for the Gold Pass.

Mainly what I mean with that tongue-in-cheek title up there is that, quite apart from the cultural divide between Gold Pass holders and others, the way races play out is a perfect encapsulation of how The Man keeps us all down:

If you draw in front, especially in the lower-speed 50cc and 100cc races, you can actually race fairly undisturbed. Racing at those speeds early on, I got a good sense of how most tracks are laid out and how to maneuver across the track to get coins or bonus points. I was able to do that because I was far enough in front that even if someone hit me with a red shell or a blooper, or even the dreaded spiny shell, I could still limp across the finish line well ahead of my competitors, who in the meantime are locked in a life and death struggle with one another for points.

Naturally, I see this as a metaphor for how in real life the upper classes play on a completely different level economically, while the rest of us fight one another for the scraps they leave. And they can afford to be generous, because we're more likely to tear one another apart than we are them. At least that's how it feels when I'm stuck somewhere around fourth or fifth place and trying to grab as many green tokens for the current Halloween tour as I can.

Then, when you do buy the Gold Pass, you get twice as many goodies from daily rewards as the plebs who just play for free. This entrenches your position even further, because it gives you more coins to buy stuff, more rubies to pay for Pipe Pulls, which give you even more good stuff (unless your pipe is crap) to help you get even further ahead.

Of course it's only five bucks a month (as my girlfriend reminded me literally a moment ago when I told her what I'm writing), and of course the developers deserve to be paid for the work they've put into creating this app. As I mentioned, it's a fun game, and the courses look great, even though I'm heartily sick of Maple Treeway by now (there's a blind curve that I always get wrong).

I'm not saying people shouldn't play it or anything like that. But I do find it notable that the real competition isn't among the top two or three spots in a race, but between second place and eighth, and everyone in between, and they're slowing each other down while the jerk up in first place is sailing blissfully on, not even worried about getting hit by a Bullet Bill (because of course those don't last long enough for the person in eighth place to get farther than fourth).

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to eke out another couple of stars from Maple Treeway.

Does a game have to be fun?

Here's a thing I've discovered about mobile games: they aren't any fun at all.

Here's another thing I've discovered, though: I can't seem to stop playing the damn things.

I recently exerted an impressive amount of willpower and, in a short sequence of time, deleted no less than three games from my iPad. Total War: Kingdoms was the first to go, because it was a complete time- and mind-suck. I'd build a house here, fight off a Viking army there, and pretty soon I'd realize it was 10pm on Sunday night and I hadn't accomplished anything.

Next to go was Kingdom Rush, a tower-defense game that I've had dalliances with in the past. I downloaded last Saturday, played through the entire campaign, and then deleted it that same night, for the same reason as before - my brain had been there, and not on the actual issues occupying my life (for instance writing the proverbial great vampire/fantasy novel, earning enough money to survive in Trump's America, and attempting to find a woman willing to find my dead body 60 years from now and thereby ensure my corpse isn't eaten by a pet or something).

Yesterday, I took the final step, and deleted Star Trek: Timelines. As I was explaining to my dad a couple minutes ago, Timelines isn't what you'd call conventionally fun - you can have space battles, for instance, but you don't actually control the ships, and if your ship is strong enough, you don't actually have to do anything.

And yet I'm now kind of regretting deleting it. I'd built up a pretty strong and eclectic crew (I had Evil Goatee Spock from the classic Mirror Mirror episode of TOS, for example!), and had sunk enough time and effort into leveling them up. And I'd done all this without spending a dime, as Timelines is one of those annoying freemium games where you can pay for a certain type of currency, but can't win that currency in other ways.

As I said, it isn't conventionally fun. But somehow, it triggers some kind of endorphin rush that keeps me clicking on the next mission to win that piece of basic loot that I can use to build the piece of gear that will let my character unlock the next tier of rewards and perhaps, someday, actually win the episode. It's probably the most insidious version of the addictiveness of mobile games I've ever seen, precisely because it's so not fun (reading that last paragraph seems to indicate a number of reasons for my inability to attract a mate, for instance).

I've got a fair amount of experience with this stuff - I've messed about with Angry Birds, Infinity Blade and all three Kingdom Rush games, for instance. I've lost who knows how many productive hours and days on stupid flash games that I found on newgrounds.com. And back in college, I blew a lot of time on a naval battles game that let you set some conditions but didn't actually give you control in battle - someone once asked me if it was fun, and I remember trying to explain that no, it wasn't conventionally fun, but that wasn't the point.

That conversation was at the back of my mind over the past five or six weeks every time I played Timelines, which is what led me to delete the damn thing (that and a Tim Ferriss blog post suggesting I get rid of domino triggers that cause me to ruin all my productive work - for some people it's cookies, but for me it's Star Trek-licensed iPad games). It also got me thinking about why mobile games are like that - engaging but not fun.

The simple answer is that they provide a steady drip of pleasure drugs into your brain from accomplishing stuff. Total War: Kingdoms had this obnoxious thing where everything was on a timer - building a house took ten seconds, building a castle took ten hours, and so forth. But it was all staggered, so as soon as I collected money from one building, my farms were ready to harvest, and then I had to collect stone from my quarries, someone was attacking, and suddenly I'm two hours closer to my cat chomping on my face (this is a notional cat, by the way, as I haven't yet yielded to becoming whatever the male equivalent of lonely cat lady is).

But why's that steady drip of tricking your brain into thinking it's accomplished stuff so important? I'd argue that it's because they can't compete with console or PC games on graphics or gameplay. I'm told Super Mario Run has been super popular since launching on iOS, but I think it's because, by being a lot simpler than the original Super Mario Bros, they've unlocked a thing where you're constantly trying to improve on your performance. Just think Flappy Bird: it's some shitty web game where you're traveling through the same course endlessly, giving the occasional tap to keep from crashing into a pipe or something, but it unaccountably became the biggest gaming phenomenon outside of Pokemon Go, for that precise reason.

All of this is key to understanding why the mobile gaming business has eaten up so much of the traditional gaming business. Nintendo got a lot of praise when it launched the Wii for making gaming accessible to casual gamers, but then promptly lost that entire demographic to smartphones and tablets. Stuff like Angry Birds or Candy Crush provides a lot more endorphin per minute for the fifteen minutes you spend on the bus than cranking FIFA 17 or Dragon Age Inquisition does - in the time it takes to load up your first actual game in a season in FIFA, you could win three stars on the first ten levels of Angry Birds.

Paradoxically, I think it's the increasing sophistication and cinema-aping of console games that's turned casual gamers off the medium (that and shit like GamerGate, of course). You have to purposely sit down and play Skyrim, but Angry Birds can be played for five minutes and then abandoned. And that's why people get sucked into it for hours at a time.

What it all comes down to is understanding how your brain works, and planning accordingly. I'm not an alcoholic, but now that I've deleted Star Trek: Timelines I understand Chris Hardwick's analogy of a million baby birds chirping at you to take a drink. Despite the cellular noise saying that I really should have seen what happened when I leveled my one-star Desert Ezri Dax to level 100, intellectually I understand I'm better off.

And I restarted my campaign on Dragon Age Inquisition yesterday, so at least I don't have to decide on whether to eventually be eaten by my dog or my cat until I finish that, at the bare minimum.

Mass Effect and the Curse of Becoming the New Star Wars

I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy last weekend, amid reports that the next game in the series has finally been given a name (along with almost exactly nothing else). It's fair to say that as I played through Mass Effect 3, it started to consume my life, much like a Reaper consuming a planet's population (now there's an in-joke for you). Also, let me just warn you up top:

It also goes without saying that this is his favorite blog.

To give you an idea, I took the better part of a year to finish Mass Effect 1, as I was doing my usual thing of getting bored and switching out to catch up with other games. I did something similar when I started Mass Effect 2, but only had a single break, after which I powered through the rest of the game and started immediately on part 3, which I played without a single break. Probably the last game I played so single-mindedly was on the NES.

Part of the reason for this fanaticism is clearly the story. Over the three installments you guide your character, Commander Shepard, from life as an ordinary soldier to the person who saves the galaxy from the Reaper threat. At the start you choose how Shepard looks and what his skills and abilities are (I played as a dude, so I'll be referring to Shep as "he" from here on), and then you choose how he reacts to people and situations.

This all involves you more heavily than the so-called sandbox games, like Skyrim or GTA, especially because choices made in one game eventually impact later games - not to the point of keeping you from winning at the end of ME3, but they do affect who's on your team or available to help with the final battle.

One point that Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V Gordon made on their Indoor Kids podcasts relating to Mass Effect is that the combat is actually pretty bad compared to, say, Gears of War, but that the main draw is the story. While I've never played Gears, I can see what they mean - and frankly, the fact that the story's such a big part of the game makes up for it. I don't remember all the times it kept me from diving for cover (possibly because there were so many that they blur together after a while), but I do recall the feelings of WTF when I was forced to send one of two characters to their deaths, or when I found myself choosing whether the Quarians or the Geth should survive.

I believe the Indoor Kids also said something to the effect that Mass Effect was effectively this generation's Star Wars, which I find compelling but not necessarily accurate. I could quibble and say that it's more Babylon 5, but really I just don't think it has the cultural reach of Star Wars or Star Trek. Video games are still a niche pursuit, at least at the level of blockbuster games like Mass Effect - they might make jokes about the ending on shows like HBO's Silicon Valley, but I'd say it's still too left-field for something like the Big Bang Theory.

Yet it does hold up with something like the Hyperion series, by Dan Simmons (as the guest on those Indoor Kids episodes, Nick Ahrens, said). Like any good novel, the Mass Effect games present you with a wider world and the rules under which it operates - you can make certain choices (like who to sacrifice at the end of ME1, or with whom to pursue a relationship), but at the end you've gone through a set number of plot points. And like a novel, there are loads of other, smaller stories spider-webbing out of the main narrative, but here you can choose to pursue or ignore them.

Now, when Kumail and Emily said that Mass Effect was like Star Wars (again, assuming it was them who said it), what I suspect they meant is that the game had the same emotional resonance as when Luke blows up the Death Star or rescues Darth Vader's humanity. I mentioned my WTF feelings when sending people to their deaths - I also found myself heartbroken at plot points like Mordin, my Salarian scientist from ME2, sacrificing his life to propagate the cure for the Krogan genophage in ME3, resolving a giant plot thread from way back in ME1.

Because there was time to range around the ship between missions, you'd get to chat to crewmates, and learn that, for instance, Mordin was fond of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. That's one example, but the point is that Mass Effect went out of its way to flesh its characters out, which I've seen little of in the other games I've been playing lately.

As for the ending, I have to say that I'm not that disappointed. I think the extended endings were better, and Bioware should have added those in from the start, but overall I think they had the concept right. There was a sense that all your choices over three games had led to this point - control the Reapers, destroy them or live with them. As I chose my course, I had the same doubt that assailed me whenever there was a big choice, but I also had the precedent of all my previous choices - in the end I chose destruction, knowing that it would also mean the death of my synthetic crewmate, EDI, who had also powered my ship. And while that was sad, it also felt like I had to be loyal to the Shepard character as I'd developed him - the way others played would likely have led them to other choices, and perhaps that's why the game's ending was so controversial.

In any case, I've given myself a break from all the feels, but I expect that at some point soon I'll be trying again - seeing the effects of different choices and character configurations. Which is another feature of the great SF stories, whatever their medium - wanting to experience them again.

Books vs Video Games: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

One of my discoveries this week is that the Guardian now seems to have a dedicated science fiction column, written by Damien Walter. This is a nice development, as I do think it's nice to have someone talking about SFF literature in a forum that's widely distributed. Hell, I'm happy to have any medium talking about books to a wide audience - this is one of my favorite things about the Daily Show, for instance.

Back in November, Walter wrote a piece talking about how SF writers must battle video games to capture eyeballs. It was kind of interesting, noting that games like Halo are winning pretty easily because they can present the fantastic visually, whereas books have to make do with exposition, description - essentially large blocks of words.

I generally disagree with the thesis, however. Sure, everybody has a finite amount of time to entertain themselves, and there are a lot more options now than there were a century ago. Books, frankly, have no chance - but then, neither do movies or TV or radio. And when the next entertainment medium comes along, video games will find their popularity dropping too.

What I really disagree with is the idea that competition for readers' attention translates to less work for writers. The games I've been playing lately (mainly Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, as well as Dragon Age: Inquisition, Skyrim and Mass Effect 2) are pretty story-heavy, although this means different things in each case.

Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect and Dragon Age are pretty linear and plot-bound, while Skyrim offers a deeper world to explore and interact with. But each of these games relies very heavily on world-building, whether in the form of codex entries (for Mass Effect and Dragon Age), books (for Skyrim) or simply inserting the occult and the paranormal into historical settings (for Assassin's Creed). Walking around the meticulously recreated Renaissance cities of Florence, Venice and Rome, I've been impressed with how much research Ubisoft must have done to get so many details right that my dad can recognize the landmarks I'm climbing.

At the same time, I remember hearing on a podcast recently (I think it was the Indoor Kids) how the developers of Skyrim or Dragon Age basically had a staff of writers who were sitting there writing the history of the world you're meant to play through. And those writers have churned out millions of words on the history of the setting, far in excess even of what George RR Martin or Robert Jordan have managed. It kind of makes me feel bad to skim through the interminable books I keep finding in Skyrim.

My point is, the conflict between videogames and books is more a case of "if you can't beat them, join them" - the two art forms are very similar, as both require active participation by the consumer, much more than movies or music. The difference is that video games are much more collaborative than books - but the point is both are simply trying to immerse consumers into their stories.

While I didn't go through the entire comment section (nobody sane does that on Guardian comment sections), I thought it interesting that nobody, including Walter himself, brought up the idea of writers working on video games. A couple of games recently have tapped writers to help them with the plot (Richard K Morgan is the main one I'm thinking of), and I think that a number of writers would jump at the chance to do the same. It may be a function of age, although from his website Walter doesn't seem too much older than I am.

Still, I'm not too worried about the conflicts between various media - books will always be able to do things that video games can't, and vice versa. Switching between them should let writers tell their stories as completely as possible.

Finally Joining the Ranks of PS3 Gamers

One of my first acts when I moved back to the US a year ago was to buy a TV and Playstation 3. I'd been kind of wanting one for years after it came out, but they were ridiculously expensive (especially in the UK), and because I already had a PS2, it just didn't seem worthwhile. And then, of course, I got to a point where I was expecting to move back soon, so accumulating more stuff that I couldn't bring over didn't seem like a good idea either.

I did briefly toy with the idea of getting a PS4 (or even an Xbox One), but they were too new and the range of games wasn't as good. And while it seemed like it would be nice to be able to play Halo, I decided on the PS3 simply because I've had the Sony consoles for ages and preferred the Playstation-exclusive games, like Gran Turismo.

So over the course of the year I accumulated a few games that have gotten a lot of good critical reviews, or that friends recommended. However, because I try not to play videogames longer than an hour a day on weekends, it's meant I've built up a pretty sizable backlog. Two factors don't help here: I've bought a couple of trilogy sets (Mass Effect and the Assassin's Creed: Ezio Trilogy), and I've also bought some games that take absolute ages to finish (Skyrim).

There's another problem, though: these games are only about 50% fun, and 50% grind. And I'm wondering if that's something wrong with trends in game design, or with reviewers.

To clarify, I'm thinking specifically of Mass Effect 1, Assassin's Creed 2 and Skyrim, which are the games I've played most. AC2 is held up as the high water mark of the series, and visually it's undeniably a masterpiece. As I ran along the rooftops my dad would pass through and recognize landmarks from Florence, where much of the game takes place. The assassinations are also pretty enjoyable, at least at first - locating the target, tailing him, and then dropping onto him from a great height.

The problem is that this is pretty much all there is to the game. As you control Ezio, he maintains a pretty limited set of actions that he can accomplish, so there's little progression in terms of what you can do at the start compared to the end (apart from how confidently you do all that stuff). The final boss fight, where you beard Pope Cesare Borgia in his den, has the exact same mechanics as the very first fight you conduct at the start of the game. And don't get me started on the collection of treasure and feathers.

I've got Brotherhood and Revelations still to go, and because it was cheap and had good reviews I picked up Assassin's Creed 4, but I'm a little concerned based on the above.

Mass Effect 1, on the other hand, came with a warning from the guy at GameStop who sold it to me that I should hold my breath and get through it quickly, so I could reach ME2 quicker. Having now played through ME1, and started a few hours of ME2, I can see what he meant - while the game world you navigate is amazingly detailed (or gives the appearance), the play is actually pretty limited. It might have been because of the difficulty level I was playing, but leveling up didn't seem to have any effect on how well I got through sections of the game. And there was also the annoying BioWare thing, encountered in Dragon Age 2, of standardized cave and base layouts.

Mass Effect 2 seems to have dispensed with a few of these problems, but the RPG elements seem to have become more of a formality, or vestigial tail, if you like. Hunting for resources has also gotten to be an enormous bore, where you have to make multiple trips to supply depots just to deplete even a world with "moderate" resources.

If Mass Effect 1 was limited, I sometimes feel like Skyrim suffers from the opposite problem, of being too expansive. I got to a point soon after I first started it where I had a million quests and miscellaneous tasks, but no idea which one to start with, and I seemed to be too underpowered to accomplish any of them. Eventually I had to go find walkthroughs online, to impose some sort of order on the game, and that's helped me progress (that and crafting a really badass longsword).

Speaking of crafting, I'm wondering what possessed RPG developers in the last decade and a half or so, to add skills like leather-working and metallurgy and cooking (for fuck's sake) into their games. It seems to have plagued MMOs most of all, as I used to watch my old flatmate spend entire Saturdays on World of Warcraft or Aion doing nothing but grinding cooking or leather-working. Skyrim doesn't force you to those kinds of extremes, but what's wrong with how Final Fantasy used to do it, of just running around finding stuff?

That said, Skyrim is entertaining enough that I find it really hard to stick to my one-hour rule, as there's always just that one more door to go through, or that set of equipment to sell or craft, or whatever.

What I'd say is missing from this current generation, though, is something like Resident Evil 4. I feel like, for the most part, that game had the perfect balance. For one thing, playing on higher difficulty levels unlocked more areas of the game, which made it instantly replayable (I probably beat it 3 times). Every boss fight was also different, justifying all the weapons you were carrying around. But the best part, for me, was how it started off terrifying, but as soon as you got comfortable with the controls and difficulty levels, it would throw something else at you that would require a completely new strategy to defeat.

Case in point: by the end, my flatmate at the time was calling me "Jack Bauer", because I could kick down the door to a room toss in a couple of grenades and then mow down the survivors with the uzi, all in a couple of seconds. And then just a moment later they introduced a new bad guy, that you could only kill with a sniper rifle armed with a special scope. The bad guy was super slow, but so was the rifle, so that if you missed (or even if you didn't) you'd quickly find the monster gnawing on your head.

I guess the answer is to get Resident Evil 5, which was based on a similar game engine. But it's annoying that there aren't enough games like Resident Evil 4, at least in the batch I've seen, and what's coming up for PS4 doesn't seem much better either.