Resident Evil Village

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After I played the demos, I was left wondering what direction Resident Evil Village (aka Resident Evil 8 or RE8) would take the series in: a revival of Resident Evil 4’s frenetic “action survival”? A continuation of Resident Evil 7’s horror emphasis? A retread of the over the top Hollywood nonsense that got the franchise into trouble with Resident Evil 5 and 6? Or something entirely new?

As it turns out, the answer is: “Yes.” RE8 isn’t so much the next Resident Evil as it is all of Resident Evil, past, present, and future, offered up in a selection box of bite-size chunks that taste great separately but don’t always sit well together.

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My thoughts on the Resident Evil Village demos

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Note: I’m going dark for the entire month of May while I undergo some fairly heavy treatment for my migraines. Blogging will resume some time in June.

This is going to need a bit of explanation for my non-gamer readers.

In 2017 Resident Evil VII: Biohazard (which I’m going to refer to from this point on as simply Resident Evil 7 or RE7) came out and restored the venerable Resident Evil franchise to something approaching its former glory. Having established the modern survival horror genre back on the Playstation 1 and then reaching a second apotheosis with the “action survival” reinvention of Resident Evil 4, the series started to go downhill with Resident Evil 5, which took things even further in the action direction; while a fun romp, especially in co-op, it pretty much completely abandoned all pretense of horror. Then the series went totally off the rails with Resident Evil 6, a ridiculous Micheal Bay-esque spectacle that’s more or less universally reviled. Throw in a glut of spin-offs that received mixed-to-negative reception, and you’ve got a franchise in trouble.

Capcom needed to do something drastic to right the ship, and that something was RE7, a return to the series’ horror roots that was critically acclaimed in general and won over most of the hardcore fans after some initial skepticism. It also, helpfully, sold like gangbusters. Resident Evil is back, baby! It’s good again!

I am primarily a fan of Resident Evil 7, not of the franchise as a whole. I played RE3, 4 and 5 when they came out, as well as some of the beloved Gamecube remake of the first game, and while I liked them well enough, I never got infected with the Resident Evil virus the way a lot of people did. Silent Hill was always my horror gaming jam.

Until RE7. I absolutely love RE7. I think it’s the best horror game of the modern era. That’s why I’ve been a bit nervous about the upcoming sequel.

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Books I Didn't Finish: 11/22/63

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That’s right, it’s time once again to revisit the Fountain Of Easy Blog Content, AKA the bibliography of America’s spookiest grandpa.

11/22/63 is apparently a polarizing novel, with some calling it King’s best modern work and others despising it. Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess how I reacted to it. King is usually very readable even at his worst, so why did I give up on 11/22/63 so quickly when I tried to read it last year?

Mainly because it’s boring as shit, but read on for the specifics.

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Games I Didn't Finish: Breathedge

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At some point I’ll have to do a blog about my love of Subnautica, an underwater exploration/survival/crafting/base building game. I think it’s one of my favourite games of all time, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for developers to look at its popularity (not to mention financial success) and start copying it. There are many craft-and-survive games out there, but most take place in randomly-generated environments that can’t match Subnautica’s meticulously hand-crafted alien ocean.

This is all a preamble to explain both why I was really looking forward to Breathedge--described by many as “Subnautica in space”--and why I ended up dropping the game in disappointment very quickly.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Utopia Avenue

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Note: I’m afraid I’m once again going to have to take a blog break while I get some health issues under control. I had this post mostly completed before my current round of brain problems kicked off, but I wasn’t able to finish it, so I’m throwing it up incomplete.

Presented for your enjoyment: the thrilling story of why I bailed on a book 85% of the way through.

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Trash TV: Wandavision

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Well folks, it finally happened.

After more than a decade, I’ve been forced to discard my snooty disdain for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I managed to maintain my sense of pop-cultural superiority despite quite liking Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel, and really liking Avengers: Infinity War a whole lot. My disappointment with Endgame allowed me to resist the temptation of going full MCU Stan even as the movies diversified in form and scope and generally became more varied and interesting.

But now, they’ve done it. They got me with Wandavision. And all it took was almost completely leaving the superhero stuff behind and transitioning into another genre entirely.

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The City & The City

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China Mieville feels like an author whose time has kind of passed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the man’s still putting out books. It’s just that after helping to start the whole “New Weird” thing during the early 2000s with the Bas-Lag trilogy, he’s moved on to less fantastical genres and non-fiction, neither of which have gotten quite the same amount of attention as his earlier work.

My first exposure to Mieville was Perdido Street Station, partially because the first edition had a sick-ass cover and partially because I was still young enough that the idea of reading really long novels still felt mature and intellectual (these same factors led me to reading The War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams several years earlier, a mistake I have still not entirely recovered from). Like a lot of people who read Perdido Street Station, I never finished it.

As a fantasy author, Mieville is seemingly more interested in settings than stories, and long-time readers of This Blog will know how I feel about fantasy world-building. With a Mieville book you’re at least getting really strange, original world building, but at the end of the day that’s still not enough to carry a fantasy brick on its own.

Several years later I read The City & The City and also didn’t finish it, for basically the same reasons plus a few news ones, but I recently discovered that there was a BBC adaptation and it piqued my interest enough to go back and give it another shot. Can I turn a Book I Didn’t Finish into a Book I Did Finish?

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The Themes and Imagery of Little Nightmares

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I somehow failed to notice that Little Nightmares II, a game I’ve been quite looking forward to, is releasing tomorrow. After realizing this, I decided to slap out a quick blog about some issues I had with the themes and imagery of the first game, which is something I’ve been meaning to write about but hadn’t gotten around to yet.

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Books I Didn't Finish: A Curse So Dark And Lonely (aka That Time I Got Reincarnated As A YA Heroine)

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I have a confession to make. I love portal fantasies, or whatever you want to call them. Stories about people (preferably kids or teens) getting whisked off from our world into a fantasy setting is something I’ve always had an affinity for. It’s one of the hokiest, most played-out tropes in all of fiction, and for some reason I can’t get enough of it.

So when I found out that one of the more prominent recent YA releases is an example of the genre, and that it was on sale in the Kindle store, I demolished that purchase button and eagerly started to read.

Why did I not finish it? Let’s find out!

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Ghost In The Shell (1995) vs Ghost In The Shell (2017)

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If you’re any sort of sci-fi fan at all, and especially if you’re into the cyberpunk corner of the genre, then you’ve almost certainly heard of Ghost In The Shell. I saw the movie for the first time when I was around thirteen or fourteen, in hindsight way too young to either be entertained by it or to understand it, so I recently decided to re-visit it along with the American live-action remake that came out a few years ago.

Which one is better? Well, I obviously went in expecting that the Japanese original would be vastly superior to the watered-down American remake. So imagine my surprise when I watched them both back to back and discovered, to my absolute astonishment, that the remake is even more of a huge waste of time than I thought it was going to be.

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Tenet

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I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan. In fact I’m not really a fanatical devotee of any directors, even ones that I like, but then I’m not an Internet Movie Guy, so I’m not contractually obliged to be.

Nolan has made some very impressive and enjoyable films, but he also has a lot of bad habits that he’s attracted too much clout and prestige to be prevented from indulging in, and he’s responsible for the most overrated movie in recent film history. I’m not going to say which one I’m talking about, I’m just going to leave that statement hanging.

Actually I lied, it’s The Dark Knight.

For this reason, I wasn’t really looking forward to Tenet, like, at all. The trailers looked cool and it took on a weird cultural relevance back at the start of the pandemic since Nolan threw a big tantrum and insisted that it just had to be released in la cinéma, global crisis be damned. But overall, not really hyped about this one.

So when I say that it still didn’t come anywhere close to meeting those already-low expectations...yeah, this is a total dud.

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Ready Player Two

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Ready Player One was a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which became a brief nerd culture sensation before most people decided it was actually bad. I thought it was bad the first time I read it, although on subsequent attempts to revisit it I realized it’s actually far worse than I remembered; the plot in the first half is actually pretty exciting, which masks the poor writing and annoying retro pop culture references on an initial read.

A few years later Ernest Cline wrote Armada, which everyone hated, and then he vanished for a while until the Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ready Player One came out and was fairly popular. I can’t prove that Ready Player Two was knocked out in a hurry to capitalize on the movie’s release, but I’m going to argue that that was probably the case.

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Bad Writing Masterclass: A Discovery of Witches

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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but we’re living in the golden age of witch-fic. Books about witches are inundating the fantasy and YA shelves; you can’t swing a black cat without hitting four novels with crystals and pentagrams on their covers. This has come alongside a trend of literary novels infused with the earthy scent of pagan-influenced folk horror, as seen in books like Max Porter’s Lanny.

I don't know whether all of these books are chasing a big trend-setter or if a bunch of authors have decided to become wiccans or what, but this is all extremely My Aesthetic so I’m on board with it. Last week Deborah Harkness’ entire All Souls Trilogy popped up in the Kindle daily deal for less than a euro (including the intruiging “All Souls real-time reading companion”, whatever that is), and since I suspect that those books may be part of the impetus behind the trend, I heartily smashed that purchase button (because the last time I impulse-bought something from the Kindle daily deal, it went very well). Can the first book in the trilogy provide the witchy content I crave?

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Books I didn't finish: Q

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You may not have noticed this, but I like reading bad books. When a novel lets me down, my immediate reaction isn’t to cast its author out of my Kindle wishlist for all time; it’s to take a keen interest in whatever they write next.

In that vein, today we’re looking at Q, Christina Dalcher’s followup to 2017’s Vox, which I didn’t really like at all.

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Post Election Purgatory Chat

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Well...at least Trump lost. Eventually.

Having made the incredibly foolish decision to stay glued to the election results as they came in, I got to experience the turbulent roller coaster ride that was watching Biden’s odds flip back and forth on a seemingly hourly basis. In the end he just about managed to win, but the victory is far from the sweeping landslide that many had hoped for. The Senate is still up for grabs by a two-seat margin, the Democrats lost seats in the House, and to top it all off human/snapping turtle hybrid Mitch McConnell not only won reelection, but has yet to be vaporized by a bolt of lightning.

The mood on the biggest mainstream political opinion stage in the world--by which I mean my twitter feed--has been mixed these last few days. This is the outcome people were hoping for, but there’s a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction. To be honest, I think some people would have preferred a Trump win to what we got, because we at least know what that would look like. Right now, the future is a lot more uncertain.

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