Author Archives: Asmiroth

NMS – Stasis Device

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No Man’s Sky has is an open ended game, where the goals are mostly self-driven. There are certainly crumbs along the path, to give you an indication that something exists to chase, but the decision to do so is mostly yours to make. Now, compared to most MMOs today where the systems are not at all connected (or just dumped at the next expansion), most of the systems in NMS are interconnected. Derelict Freighters, Frigate Missions, Nexus Quests, and Mission Boards all get you to a similar goal – improving your own freighter.

One of the challenges of these open games is that the initial breadcrumbs often lead to a massive gulf of content, before you can find footing for the actual goals. Examples are things like Factorio or Sim City, where you will likely reach a point where you need to undo a lot of what was built in order to move to the next step, as you didn’t fully understand the logistical implications of earlier choices. Minecraft sort of has this, where you have “starter homes” before you get the idea of the larger/complex systems. NMS is more like this, where development is almost always forward. It’s certainly possible to make bad choices, but they are clearly bad choices when made, and you can recover from them quickly. Even your starter base isn’t a bad thing, because you unlock more blueprints, see how the various systems interwork, and rather simply grow it to something larger (though likely, you will want a base on another planet for reasons…)

Along this path is the RNG of loot. There’s a ton of it, and all of it has some use. Either you craft with it, eat it, upgrade with it, or sell it. Some of these items are of a rarer quality than others and are therefore worth more. When you find your first item that’s worth 500,000 credits, you’re going to be extremely happy. On the 5th time, you’ll start wondering how you can more readily acquire said item, and if there’s something beyond. Well, there is a path for both.

NMS Crafting Tree

Currently, there are two “ultimate” crafts – Statis Devices and Fusion Igniters. Each is worth approximately 15m credits. The top row of that image is the base material required to start. With the exception of Mordite, each one can be farmed in raw form, though the pre-requisites to do so varies a tad. The metal & gas items have to be mined, while the plants need to be harvested.

The harvesting part isn’t too bad, you need glass Bio-Domes to harvest 16 plants. You need seeds and some elements to get started, so it will take a few days to get it all sorted out at a single base. No power required, just the glass to build it all (which ideally is bought).

The mining part is less obvious. You need a Survey Device in the multi-tool in order to find gas/mineral hot spots. It’s a hot/cold game to find them, and then fingers crosses it’s the actual material you want. Finding Paraffinium took me way too long. Once you have those 2 elements, then you need to find a power hotspot, giving you 3 points of interest. Finding the center of those, you build a Base Computer, a Portal, and then some Supply Depots. You then branch out from this base, back to the points of interest and build various collectors (harvester, miner, generator) and then connect all that back to the base you built. Repeat for all the base materials you need (3 to 4 bases). Building each base like this also has a cost, mostly in Metal Plates. You’ll also learn how to “extend” your base past the 300u limit up to the 1000u limit (this really feels like there’s a bug preventing the true size).

The table above gives you an idea of the materials required to make 10 Stasis Devices. The first 2 items listed are actually a combination of Oxygen + Carbon/Cobalt. In most of the scenarios, you can expect to wait 24 hours between collection timeframes, assuming you have 50 or so of each plant, 2 harvesters of the elements, and 5 supply depots along with it. Getting the entire production chain ready is a good 10+hours of effort, with a fair chunk of shopping ahead of time to stock up on construction material (metal plates, ferrite dust, chromatic metal and glass most notably).

Once it’s up and running, it’s a rather simple affair to collect the material (<5 mins), process the Carbon/Cobalt (2 mins), and the craft the materials (2 mins). If you time it right, you can queue the processing for the next day, making it even faster. That’s a nice 150m in your pocket per day.

Scaling to MORE than this is a tad more painful, mostly due to the fact that items only stack to 9,999 and you will run out of inventory space. Plus, with perhaps 1 or 2 exceptions, there is no object in the game that costs more than 150m credits. Being a billionaire is more status symbol than much else. Though perhaps it can help seed a massive gold mining farm…

What a Week!

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I’ve been down with the flu/cold for a week now, think I’m going to have the cough for a while sadly.

Crypto Stupidity

Reference the prior post.

FTX managed to lose “billions” in what appears to be a clear ponzi scheme that targeted investment firms. See, a ponzi scheme impacting mom and pop won’t make the news all that often, but you take money away from rich people with friends, and it’s a big deal. Crypto, in every single form, continues its amazingly clear path of scam. No different than stock market pump and dump / shorting scams mind you, just a more interesting flavor.

The most “famous” crypto, Bitcoin, has also managed to lose 75% of its value in 12 months. Cue the various pundits claiming that now’s a good time to invest. That’s how these schemes work, right?

Twitter Insanity

This has to be the most epic troll of all time, with the costliest bluff being called. $44bn because he went against someone other than government aid. Wild.

The rumor that he fired half the workforce based on code stacking is just too hard to believe. The best / most important coders are the ones who solve problems with less code, not more. The only reason this rumor seems even viable is the fact that they reached out afterwards to try and hire people back.

The blue checkmark fiasco suffers from hubris. The amount of trolling Musk has done over the years was no match for the interwebs. (Side, that Eli Lilly lost $20bn from 1 fake tweet tells you all you need to know about the value of that company). It has been an absolutely glorious time watching a “genius” continually pour gasoline on his money pile and make a truly concerted effort to push advertiser revenue away for good.

Oh, and Twitter’s fact checking of Musk’s lies is just pure gold.

US Midterms

This is more comeuppance than anything else. It’s been years of people decrying the horrible human being that is Trump, and his disdain for anyone that is not him. Imagine people voting on a platform FOR something, rather than AGAINST something *surprised Pikachu*.

The best part here is how the most ardent supporters are now turning their aims at Trump. Because he’s mean to their teammates. Like, where have you been the past 40 years?

Hopefully, the adults in the room can find some common ground and work for their people. The world could use some rational US thought again, across party lines.

That said, tomorrow is the 15th and Trump has a “big announcement”. The wolf in the henhouse may not be done after all.

Loaded RNG

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No Man’s Sky has both determinate and RNG elements, and they intersect in very interesting ways.

Obviously, in the “near infinite” variety of planets, there needs to be some randomization. Theoretically, there should be enough random to have bubble shooting dragons somewhere in this game. There’s a “pool” of events that can occur given fixed conditions. Every planet has creatures, plants, caves, secrets and so on. The variety of each changes, and the quantity, but they are there. Systems are classed on the star type, which impacts the resources found within. There’s a random element to the major race in a system, and then the type of industry. This also impacts the types of events in a given system, as well as the types of ships you’ll find. What remains random (in general) is the quantity and quality of an object.

NMS has a ranking system for many things, from the lowest (C) to the highest (S). Within each rank is some additional random aspect to stats, so that the best rank A item may be better than the worst rank S item, though the overlap is min-maxing in practical terms. A Gek system, for example, will have 7 shuttle types, 7 Haulers, 3 Fighters, 3 Explorers, and 1 Exotic. These types are randomly selected from a pool, but are fixed for that system – realoading will not change the look of these ships. This also applied to Freighters, which is where I’m going with this.

Freighters are acquired through space battles. These battles only trigger when both the following have occurred: 3 in-game hours have passed, and 5 warp jumps have completed. (They will not occur in an unoccupied system, a black hole system, or an Atlas system.) When you warp into a system, it will be assigned a specific Capital Ship Freighter, which is selected from a given pool. The “largest” of them require you finding the correct – random – system. I wanted a Resurgent Star Destroyer, the largest of the bunch inspired by Star Wars. To find this thing, I needed to ensure I had a save prior to my 5th jump. I created a save point and then made single warps until I found the ship TYPE I wanted. That’s RNG phase 1 down, which took about 30 minutes.

RNG phase 2 is finding the highest rank ship, S. That means reloading the same TYPE until I found the proper RANK. To do this, I entered the battle, went to the nearby star station, and created a restore point. This meant I could enter the freighter, scan it to see the rank, and reload if it was not S. The odds of finding an S aren’t exactly high, reports vary between 2% and 5%, with “better” chances in 3* systems or Outlaw systems. The good news is that the reload doesn’t require a battle, simply flying into the freighter. It took about 90 minutes of reloads to finally get an S class.

Effectively this was save scumming, where I limited the RNG portions to only the ones I could not control. Under normal circumstances, you can only roll the dice every 3 hours for a TYPE and RANK, which is a crazy level of random. All told, it took me just over 2 hours of reloads to get what I wanted, which is over 100 attempts. At regular rate, that would have been closer to 300 hours of gameplay. Yeah, I’m good.

Does this freighter have any practical value over others? There are some minimal stat boosts. The real benefit here is 100% cosmetic.

Next up is finding an exotic starship. The good news is that they always spawn as rank S, though the odds of spawn are relatively low. I think I found a way around this though… while I was hunting my freighter, I noticed that starships landed inside the saved freighter, and there was almost always an exotic within. Now the kicker is figuring what type of exotic I want, spawning a space battle (3 hours + 5 warps) in the proper system, and then entering the freighter to collect. Sounds simple, let’s see how that works out.

Twitter 2.0

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I’ll preface this that I am not in the personality cult of Musk worshippers. Credit where due, but also accountability. Making inefficient processes efficient, I’m game. Filling in a niche, okie doke. I’m still waiting on solar panels and something other than Jules Verne’s version of tunnels (high speed rail is in every respect a better choice). The whole Twitter debacle is hilarious to me, as this is a man who has not experienced any sort of consequences and is an absolutely amazing grifter (SpaceX subsidies would make you shiver).

He ran his mouth, put in an offer for a company with horrible financials, accepted terrible conditions, and tried to back out. Clearly the lawyers were salivating at the prospect. I get that the folks working at Twitter are worried about job cuts – they will get fired and collect severance and the talent gap for those skills means another job (hybrid no doubt) is an option. The change certainly sucks fierce, but there are much worse situations. So he’s now leading a company with staff that have one foot out the door. Culture issues abound and headhunters are at the friggin’ buffet.

As for the actual mechanics of Twitter, this is even better.

Twitter makes all its money on advertisers, which is funded on two core aspects. First is metrics. There needs to be a lot of accounts and volume of activity. Bots be damned, the pump those numbers! Second is message control. Ain’t no company that wants their ads to show up in the middle of racist tweets or death threats – so content moderation is an eternal struggle.

So if bots are removed, metrics go down, advertisements go down. If content moderation is removed, advertisements go down. So that’s 2 plans that won’t make $$$.

Hmm, so let’s see if the content (you) can become the source of income. The absolutely insane thought of negotiating in public with Stephen King has to rank really high in my list of “shit that I never thought I’d see”. Apparently those who want a blue checkmark will pay $8/m to keep it. Which is such an astoundingly dumb idea as these are the people generating the content advertisers want. Freedom of speech has a monthly fee.

And finally, how can anyone in their right mind think that this person can be the CEO of yet another company and actually accomplish anything? If ever there was evidence that tech CEOs don’t actually provide any value, here’s the perfect use case.

This is Bond-level villain stupidity. And I’ve got my popcorn.

Successful Series

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This post is brought to you by the news that Henry Cavill is leaving the Witcher after season 3. Liam Hemsworth will take over. Right.

There are many factors that make a successful series. Casting is a huge part of it, where the actors need to demonstrate both chemistry between the characters and be able to deliver their own character. We’ve seen ample examples of great actors who don’t like the role for a set of reasons. Writing is also a big part, where the larger storyline and then individual components fit together with some sense of logic. Jumping the shark is a real thing. And we can’t forget the overall leadership of the series, where there’s a vision and structure to help tell a storyline. Budget is the last piece – unless you’re looking for a B-movie view, you need to invest in some regard. When all 4 are missing, you get something like Jupiter’s Legacy.

Comic books were next to impossible to adapt until CGI/effects were able to catch up to reality. We’re talking complex and integrated storylines that span decades, a veritable treasure trove of ideas. And over the years we’ve had varying levels of success in these spaces – Teen Titans Go is one of my favorite examples of setting being used for parody. Things like Smallville lead us to Green Arrow and the Flash. Agents of SHIELD is a result of the Avengers movie. Gotham hit some solid notes. The Boys is just an insane series that was already insane in comic book form.

Where that was successful, series based on books has been less so. Books are rarely based on dialogue, and the context is the real driver. For every HBO Dune series, we get something like The Sword of Truth that follows. They are notoriously hard to adapt into a visual format, because they never were visual to start with. I mean, Superman in yellow, with a hat, just doesn’t work. There’s no effective reference point. Heck, the Rings of Power series had to apply Peter Jackson’s visual style because there’s just no other visual reference point. And the stories themselves are told over hundreds if not thousands of pages. A character may only have minor progress in a book, but TV series need something, and they need it NOW.

Game of Thrones is a really good example of this, for a multitude of reasons. The initial launch was based on a solid set of novels, with great casting and writing with direction. When they moved beyond the books, the overall vision was lost, and the ending was clearly rushed, with the actors having stopped caring in the end.

The Witcher is slightly different in that it’s both a series of stories in books AND a video game series. Both have the same foundation and concepts, though there are certainly more liberties taken in the games. Fundamentally, it’s a retelling of Frankenstein, where the real monsters are the humans.

Henry Cavill is a self-avowed geek. He nearly lost out on Superman due to a WoW addiction. He’s built his own gaming PCs. And he’s a HUGE advocate for the Witcher being made in visual form. And it helps that the guy actually looks like Geralt.

As the story goes, he put in a lot of effort to convince execs that a Witcher series could work. The first season was a bit over the map, with Geralt being more of a grunter than a speaker… where in the books/games here’s certainly more talkative. Season 2 was really weird, with some excellent stories and then baffling choices. And during this time Henry was in the media explaining how he was trying to defend the books while ensuring the writing team put out good content. That is a conflict of interest if ever, and certainly can’t make for a good work environment.

So here we are now. The greatest advocate for the series is moving on. With rumors that the disagreements on direction of the series as the cause. And with respect to Liam Hemsworth set to replace, there’s not much hope that this will get past season 4, if that season even comes to pass.

What a strange set of events.

Playing Catch Up

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I truly enjoy coaching hockey. There are dozens of reasons why organized sports are good for childhood development and being able to share in that experience and having even a tiny impact is an amazing reward. Sharing a passion is always fun. The big kicker here is that, by and large, all the people involved are doing so on a voluntary basis. Issues with parents stems from unreasonable expectations and they are almost never a volunteer. Issues with the kids are quite rare, and if they do occur, it’s almost exclusively because of a parent’s involvement. Once you let the kid know there’s no reason for them to stick around if they are not happy, that outcome becomes rather clear.

The theme here is that the kids themselves have a fundamental need and desire to learn. You can break it down into smaller digestible pieces, demonstrate practical examples, and then see results upon which you can build the next lesson. You’re not born a rocket scientist, you are crafted into one, with a LOT of external help.

Adults are not the same. Many of us are set in our ways and the concept of learning as an adult is implicit rather than explicit. If people take any form of training, it’s less for the journey and actually learning, and more about the result – the certificate or such. It doesn’t help that a lot of training is non-practical, and only deals with theory. There are apprenticeship programs where the entire program is based on practical application over years. I’m more in the space of a week/night/end training session where people are provided the high level theory and come away with a piece of paper saying they have all they need to apply the knowledge. I have many books on home repair. No way you’d want me to build a house.

It doesn’t help that as adults, few of us make time to concentrate on learning. It’s often incidental, a happy coincidence that you have experience doing something, not necessarily understanding how it all works. How often have you met someone who claimed to be an expert in your field, demonstrated their work, and you were just plain amazed at how the house of cards hadn’t fallen yet? Adults are prideful and not willing to accept that there is something they may not fully understand.

I’m more than happy to help people along that path. Either through coaching (the how) or mentoring (the why). I’ve done it many times in the past and hope to continue to do so. The “success” in that work is predicated on a single factor – the people wanted to learn. One standout was an individual who was emotionally upset that they had done “all the right things” but had been continually passed over for opportunities. We sat down, reviewed what they thought was “all the right things” and realized there was a noticeable gap between their perception of expectations and reality. Built a plan, coached and feedback throughout, and a year later they got the opportunity they were looking for.

That first session was not a pleasant one. When one thinks they are doing everything right and have never had feedback along the path, it’s a massive strike to the ego when there is critical feedback. Separating the individual from the performance is essential. Clearly the desire was there, it was the approach and tooling that needed work. Someone who is willing to accept feedback and apply it, that’s exactly the type of person people want to have around.

And then we have the other side of the coin, where there are people who are not willing to accept feedback and are part of the team through obligation. There are times where it’s just not possible to find progress with individuals – less a failure of the process than of the relationship. In my entire adult career, I have only ever met 1 person who was purposefully doing a bad job. I’ve met plenty who willfully disregarded the rules, because they thought they knew better. They were being sheltered from the consequences of their actions, and once they were held accountable for the results, the behavior changed quickly. Being able to have a conversation where and individual is respected but understands their tools/approach needs work is a ridiculously exhausting process. Every person is different and merits a different level of tact.

I’m in a spot now where I am coaching 2 sports teams, mentoring a half dozen people at work, and coaching 3 individuals. I am growing conscious of the mental & physical toll this is taking. It’s like a slow leak, and every day I have just a tiny bit less energy to get through the day. I know what needs to be done to address this, and I can’t do that alone… the plan is in place it just needs to come to fruition in the next few weeks.

I’d like to get back to a sense of balance while still being able to help other folks. Fingers crossed.

Rings of Power

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I’ve watched this in fits and spurts over the last while, the last 2 episodes back to back. I will continue to look back at the Peter Jackson trilogy being a near masterpiece, in both the art of filmmaking but in making the material accessible. It’s not possible to read Lord of the Rings once and understand what’s going on, it’s just too dense. The supplementary material to expand the lore is borderline the foundation to all fantasy that has come since.

LotR works because it’s a complex story that starts as a unified adventure, splits in the middle, and ties loose ends back together at the end, with both A and B plots being of near equal weight. This is my main gripe with Stranger Things as compared to The Boys, and ironically, the main issue with the Hobbit trilogy – the storylines are extremely weak and generally circular/meaningless. While not every story needs to have character growth, the A plot certain needs it.

Rings of Power has some big pacing issues, and most stem from a fundamental issue with the fact that elves are immortal. Now immortal is a word that we cannot comprehend in itself, it needs to be compared. In the lore, most of the elves are 10,000 years+ old. Dwarves live around 250 years. Humans rarely exceed 70, unless they are Numenorean (and then it’s weird). A year for us is the equivalent of 1 day for someone that’s 10,000 years old. Now, how many of us have undergone tremendous transformation in a day? It’s like comparing a human to a fruit fly.

Rings of Power focuses almost exclusively on the creation of the 3 rings of elvish power (A), with some setup of Numenor (B) and the first steps of Mordor (C). There’s a D storyline, but if you skipped the entirety of it, you wouldn’t even notice (and may be saner for it). The concept of time is difficult to manage in this storyline. GoT had more than enough example of people zooming across vast distances in hours, where for practical purposes it would be weeks if not months. For those timeframes to make sense, each of the A/B/C storylines has substantially different timeframes. A seemingly takes place over years, B over months, and C over perhaps a week. A never intersects with C, and B is used to bridge the other two.

The challenge here is that A is mostly a meaningless storyline, aside from exposition. The line is pitched as a Moby Dick approach to hunting Sauron, and the final 15 minutes are about that reveal and then completely ignoring it. Wow.

The B storyline also has no real progress or exploration as to why Numenor is the way it is. The books treat it as an Atlantis, where greed of the gods came with punishment. In this story, it’s about xenophobia, without any justification. And then a character turn which makes little sense.

The C storyline is the most interesting, in the elvish oversight of a human settlement in the southlands. There’s a weird love story here that doesn’t really work, but the human resistance and origins of the orcs is relatively well done. This is also the only storyline that has any true character development, where the decisions don’t appear driven by plot. Further than the smaller events that occur at the start are related to the final outcome.

Overall, if you’re a LotR fan, then you’re likely to get something out of the series, if only in the various call outs and interpretations. For the rest of people, I don’t see how this will work long term without some better writing and editing. Which is truly a shame, because this setting is an absolutely fascinating one.

Diablo 3 Design Time Travel

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An interesting article about ex-D3 lead Jay Wilson talking about the original launch of the game. I won’t shy away from thinking he did a poor job and is exceedingly good at deflecting any responsibility from being you know, the actual LEAD.

First in the area of dumb, is that the RMAH was honestly thought to be a good idea to fix the 3rd party market…clearly a solution in search of a problem as 3rd party sites launched at 1/3rd the price of the AH. Duping was fixed with the always online bit, way back in 2012 when cloud computing and dynamic demand management wasn’t yet a thing. The AH was a bad idea from the start, every metric said so, and the gameplay loop clearly pushed people towards it. The truly bonkers reason for keeping the RMAH though… that it was on the box. For fear of being sued and the lawyers needed to confer on this. It took 2 years to remove it. Amazing. I’m all for innovating and taking risks, but you need a back-out plan. Which leads me to…

Jay mentioning that Blizzard’s design approach was iterative perfection, rather than good enough. The old saying of “it’s ready when it’s ready”. Which I think with rose coloured glasses is certainly a valid point and most assuredly delayed a lot of the work on D3. And yet, in that exact same train of thought, the RMAH was therefore “perfected”. Indeed.

Today’s Blizzard is not what once was. The pipeline to delivery is ultra long and their release quality does not indicate perfection. Which I think people are willing to take in stride if the cadence is reasonable, and the corrections doubly so. The last few years of WoW certainly was certainly a head scratcher, where the beta feedback was pretty darn clear about the faults, followed with a “trust us”. And history certainly tells us how that has gone.

It’s a fickle world, where the smallest of soundbytes can be taken out of context. Jay Wilson has spent the last 10 years trying to find every reason why the launch of D3 and its design was someone else’s fault. This older interview with Kevin Martens is a much better take on listening to feedback and an iterative focus on content in Reaper of Souls. Wild how much better than expansion was/is.

Achiever vs Explorer

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No Man’s Sky attempts to hit the Bartle archetypes, to various levels of success. You’d have to put a lot of effort convince me that either the Killer or Social types have much weight here, which dramatically reduces the feeling of competition and FOMO. The Achiever and Explorer types are the main targets.

Achievers are goal setters, where progress for the sake of progress is the main joy. The goals can be self-defined or system driven, but they are there, and the goal is often times worth more than the journey. RPGs tend to scratch a crazy itch for achievers, as there are numerous levels of goals within (quest, levels, stats, items). Games with logistical challenges are also a big hit, be it Valheim, SimCity or Factorio.

Explorer certainly have goals, but the journey is the key driver. Looking under each rock, they take joy for cataloguing the world and see how the pieces fit together. A goal is often just another part of the journey to the next exploration bit. Games with large maps and interconnected systems really resonate here, so things like Minecraft and Skyrim are like crack.

NMS has a lot of content for both types. A practically infinite world to explore (I am the first human discovering some planets in a game that’s 6 years old). A very large swath of procedural tasks to accomplish (on a per-planet basis, this dwarfs most “games”). There’s a substantial amount of “stuff” to find and catalogue – language alone has 700+ words for each of the 3 species. There’s a tiered systems of resources, where complex ones can only be crafted. There’s a “system of trade” that has market forces within (you can “crash” a market by flooding it). And there’s a collection system with an RNG rarity tier on top of it, meaning that there’s usually a carrot of sorts to aim for.

One of the twists here is the interconnectivity of these systems. Valheim forces you to explore in other to achieve, that’s where all the bosses are and by consequence, the ability to use any of the new materials. And exploration is generally gated through achievement, you simply need a better boat to get across the ocean, or armor to avoid squito. NMS is in this vein, where you absolutely need to move between planets and explore them to some level of detail in order to acquire necessary stuff. There are certainly “golden planets”, where you can set up self-sufficient mining operations – I mean it’s a game of odds after all. But you still need to find them, and the only way to catalogue a planet is to land on it.

This effectively placed tiers on NMS’s various systems, in that in order to progress (achieve) you need to find (explore) the necessary components. Some of them are obvious – find copper. Some less so – Vykeen Daggers are randomly dropped from specific events in certain systems.

Where things get a bit tougher to digest is when you apply scale, as with all other logistic games. You will find dozens if not hundreds of systems in your travels – let alone planets. Organizing them is just bonkers. Mining is useful, until it’s not because you have what you need. There’s no automation of this system, just some standalone pieces. Exploration will reach a point where you simply accept the infinite variety of things – which I suppose is a message in itself. Never have I seen a game better reflect the adage of “stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you”.

These are far from complaints. The journey along the path lasts as long as you want it to last. The infinite goals are there as long as you want to achieve them. I’m frankly amazed that this game even exists.

Black Adam

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Or the gap between critics and audiences.

Marvel movies are pure cookie cutter. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you see it start. The recipe has certainly evolved since Iron Man first came about, but it’s a clear and consistent experience. It’s a recipe that works (not withstanding how insanely intertwined the stories are now).

DC is not like that. The Batman Nolan trilogy is I guess the kick-off, but some would argue Man of Steel. Either works. Now think about the movies we’ve seen so far and how different they are. Justice League, Aquaman, Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn, The Batman… all of them share a common universe, but that’s pretty much it. This has produced some very different movies, with some impressive highs (The Batman is a joy) and some terrible lows (Justice League). You never quite know what you’re going to get when you sit down to watch one.

Black Adam is a weird movie, for numerous reasons. Which continues the DCU trend.

Black Adam, as a character, has been positioned as an anti-hero for years. He is fiercely protective of his country, going to extreme means to keep them safe from harm, making him their champion. Think Doctor Doom and Latvia. His methods are anathema to the golden age of superheroes, where the ends justify the means. In his mind, criminals have made their choice and the consequences are severe. In a sense, it’s Superman if he decided to be the arm of justice – ironically, the Injustice series is all about this. DCU has tried multiple times to present nuanced heroes… that has rarely worked out. They come off as goofy rather than gray.

The film also unveils the Justice Society (I know…) with Hawkman, Dr Fate, Cyclone, and Atom Smasher all trying to stop Black Adam for “reasons” and commanded by Waller. I’d like to say that this somehow makes sense, but it truly does not. The film’s entire setup is that Black Adam is a hero, and then this squad comes out of nowhere to attack him. It’s like the important part was edited out. Also, Cyclone and Atom Smasher are woefully underused. Hawkman is solid. Dr Fate is a weird one… but given his comics background understandable. I still think it works.

Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam is just a wall of muscle. Holy cripes. It’s insane how physically dominating he is on screen. As a character, he doesn’t develop in any meaningful sense, but he’s also not just “The Rock in a superhero suit”. I am glad to report that he doesn’t smile and has quite a few sarcastic quips throughout. Minus a few head scratching scenes, his character checks all the boxes and is fun to watch. Like stupidly fun to watch. His throne scene at the end is a nice touch.

I won’t talk about the villain aside to say that it’s really not good. Like Ares not-good.

This won’t be popular, but my largest gripe here is the young actor put in a position to be the heart of the film. He’s meant to be the grounding part, where we can relate to the larger stakes and storyline. It is a critical role and for whatever reason, it just doesn’t work like it should. One scene in particular near the end feels like a B movie, completely un-earned. I am not sure if this is the writing or the editing. Maybe it should have been split between multiple characters, or the character had some vested interest in the stakes. They just end up being a plot device.

The end result is a mechanically challenging film, but a fun popcorn flick. The sum greatly exceeds the parts, and there is no denying the sheer joy of watching a human the size of Dwayne Johnson be a superhero. As much fun here as watching Arnold in Conan. It helps tremendously that the movie slate right now is a hot mess of nothing, giving this film time to make an impact. It’s a fun watch, and right at this moment, I think we can all appreciate that distraction.