The Pirates of the Caribbean Series Review

Posted on November 30, 2023 by JC

Over the last two years much of my entertainment has been focused on pirates. By pirates, I of course mean the famous fictionalised swashbuckling version of them and not the horrible reality of piracy. I re-watched the Pirates of the Caribbean films through twice, I bought a number of books including On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers; which the fourth film is based on. As well as this I picked up Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I also read Robinson Crusoe for the first time — which arguably popularised adventure stories set in the Caribbean much as Treasure Island did for the golden age of piracy specifically, one hundred and fifty years later. In addition to all this I read a history of the Caribbean, the life of Sir Francis Drake and a number of related works. Even video games weren’t excluded as I had a lot of fun playing through the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! last year too. I can’t recall what exactly started this but it preoccupied my increasingly scarce free time for a goodly portion of the last two years and has also bled into seeking out swashbucklers in general.

What makes this the more interesting is the film series is more one I’ve wanted to like than one I’ve genuinely loved. And while I’ve come to appreciate these films a lot more (especially with all the dreck that dominates the cinemas today), I still have some significant criticisms of them. Nonetheless, they are starting to be seen more and more as modern classics and I don’t think this in unreasonable. As the first is now twenty years old this year, it is a good time to look at the series as a whole.

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Do the Game Awards even know their categories?

Posted on November 19, 2023 by JC

This will be three video game related posts in a row but there hasn’t been much else to write about lately and this blog did start out with games as a focus. I hope to resume varied content again soon.

The nominees for this year’s Game Awards were announced last week. This has already been a really great year for releases so it is a bit more interesting than previous years have been. Before moving into the main topic, I want to give the very idea of the Game Award a spray similar to one I’ve already given to the Academy Awards. As I’ve repeated before, I think the very idea of having even a semi-official [Anything] of the Year is stupid and the Game Awards are no exception. This post shouldn’t be seen as me giving legitimacy to the idea of awards shows but they do exist and I am merely commenting on something that exists.

In every form they have appeared, these awards have been little more than three hours of pure cringe. The only genuinely entertaining things have been the unscripted occurrences and the amusing supercuts that appear later. Despite the hilarious ineptness of Angry Joe in his confrontation with Geoff Keighley back in 2010, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about these award shows. I will demonstrate this with a single category this year which is for Best Sim/Strategy Game.

Angry Joe famously embarrassed himself in an interview with Geoff Keighley at the Spike VGAs in 2010.

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The End of Zero Punctuation

Posted on November 12, 2023 by JC

The recent news that at The Escapist had layoffs followed by resignations of a number of other staff members, most notably Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw means the end of Zero Punctuation, the game review video series he had been producing for over sixteen years. As of writing, the site is still running and being updated but the staff who were either sacked or resigned have formed Second Wind. Croshaw does not have the rights to Zero Punctuation but the series will more or less continue as Fully Ramblomatic which is also the title of his personal website dating back before Zero Punctuation. The sardonic video series is undoubtedly behind The Escapist’s success though it also had a number of other worthy writers and features over the years that I don’t wish to belittle. I expect the site will be eventually shutdown permanently as I can’t imagine it recovering after this. Zero Punctuation will now continue more or less with a different name but the ending of the original series is still something like the end of an era that is worth marking.

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A Decade without Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

Posted on November 5, 2023 by JC

2013 was a notable year in gaming for quite a number of reasons. It saw the announcement and launch of both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles following the unusually long seventh console generation. It was the last year the industry experimented with different game award shows before the consistent (but still terrible), “The Game Awards” began the following year. It also saw a number of major releases including games that came to define the decade.

The Tomb Raider reboot, BioShock Infinite, Metro: Last Light, The Last of Us, Rayman Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Pikmin 3 and Super Mario 3D World were all released in 2013. These were all commercially and critically successful and have all seen subsequent re-releases. Grand Theft Auto V has been ported to virtually everything since and gone on to be one of the most successful games ever made. The Last of Us got a remaster the following year and a remake within the decade. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is still one of the more fondly remembered titles in the series and apparently is getting a remake too. This doesn’t come close to mentioning all the notable games that came out in 2013 but it gives a good idea how big the year was.

On the other hand, there were also a few disappointments. Gears of War: Judgement released earlier in the year to a fairly mediocre reception and sales despite being a decent game. There was also Splinter Cell: Blacklist which had a better reception but as of writing, has been the last release in the Splinter Cell series. Blacklist followed the polarising Splinter Cell: Conviction from 2010 — a game that departed significantly from its predecessors. It turned off many fans of the series while bringing few new players — if any. Blacklist tried to tread the fine line of retaining some of the changes made in Conviction while restoring some of what made the series successful.  It had other problems beyond this misguided attempt to please completely different audiences which will be discussed below.

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Robert E. Howard and the Great Game

Posted on October 30, 2023 by JC

This is a continuation of my journey through the literary oeuvre of Robert E. Howard which began with Conan the Cimmerian and has covered Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis and his historical fiction including the Sword Woman, Agnès de Chastillon. Most recently I have returned to (and gone into more depth with) Conan after re-reading all the Howard stories for the second time. I have now finally read the adventures of Xavier Francis Gordon or El Borak (the Swift) as he is known throughout the Levant. As with most of the previous stories, I have been reading the excellent Ballantine publication which includes everything most enthusiasts could want. It is a shame this series doesn’t include everything Howard wrote and isn’t available in a hardcover set as I’d most certainly buy it.

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The Baffling Design of Sonic Frontiers

Posted on October 24, 2023 by JC

Sonic the Hedgehog didn’t have the successful transition into 3D that the Super Mario Bros. series did. While Super Mario 64 set the standard and remains a fun and engaging game to this day, the same can not be said of most of Sonic’s 3D outings. This is not to say they are all terrible, as the original Sonic Adventure and it’s sequel are well-regarded by many. I don’t have a fond opinion of either but they still at least have redeeming qualities. For my part, the best 3D games were Sonic Generations and Sonic Colours which both released around the same time and combined both 3D and 2D platforming in a unique way. Both games also focused on the titular hero and generally stuck to what works with the former being what I consider to be the best 3D Sonic game ever made. As good as Generations was, even it had some irritating design decisions with the odd mechanics introduced with the final boss making for an anticlimactic end to what had until then been a lot of fun.

Sonic Frontiers is the latest attempt at Sonic in the third dimension after the mediocrity that was 2017’s Sonic Forces. The result, like many previous games, is something of mixture of good and bad. There are some clever ideas and fun moments along with the usual frustrations as well as some downright baffling design decisions. If I had to compare it to any of the previous games, it would be Sonic Adventure which seemed to be designed to include as many features as possible without the developers spending enough time polishing any one of them. Though this is the only area of comparison as they otherwise differ in design. Continue reading →

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Peter Hitchens versus Gamma

Posted on October 15, 2023 by JC

I came across this interview that was put into my YouTube feed (I don’t have an account but my viewing habits are still noticed by the infernal algorithm), which was a recent interview with Peter Hitchens. I find Hitchens interesting and have reviewed one of his books here and commented on an appearance he made years ago on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s execrable Q&A program. So having the time and the inclination, I watched (or rather listened while working) to it. It was disappointing in a number of ways but not for the reasons his interviewer states. He described it as a “bizarre experience” and it kind of was but again, not for the reasons he has in mind. 

As I am obviously biased towards Peter Hitchens, I am going to go by what the interviewer Alex O’Connor said and not what Hitchens has said. In contrast to what happens when I usually do this, it won’t require a great length of writing or any fisking — the latter of which would be made tedious without a transcript to copy from.

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No.

Posted on October 8, 2023 by JC

As I write, there is just under a week until the Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia on Saturday the 14th of October. This is the first referendum in over twenty years and the first since I became eligible to vote. If passed, it would be the first to pass in more than forty years. They are infrequent and most fail when put to the public. The question being voted on is:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

Do you approve this proposed alteration?”

According to polls, it seems unlikely it will pass and it may well be less successful than expected as many Australians are terrified of being called racist and so in some cases might avoid sharing their actual voting intentions until the day. I am assuming it will fail but I am still cynical about what will follow either way. Most of the worst people in Australia support the affirmative which alone is enough to be against it. I do not believe they are confident enough to attempt blatant electoral fraud as happened during the 2020 United States Presidential Election but this is still a real possibility. I think electoral fraud is much more likely than a genuine win for the ‘Yes’ vote.

I also know that success for the ‘No’ vote will not be the end of the matter. Though not in the same form, this idea has been around for a while. I first remember the idea of an amendment put to the public by former Prime Minister John Howard as a last desperate attempt to get a fifth term in office in 2007. The old timer has come out against this one as it would have more teeth than simple recognition in the constitution would. If it fails, something similar will still be done somehow through legislation and the same pale aboriginals who would form a successful ‘Voice’ in parliament already have their shrill voices heard by the government on so many issues that the referendum is really only trying to make official what already exists. Still the enthusiasm to get it through suggests there is more at work.

The problem as always with the ‘No’ side is they waste time arguing with the opposite side as if both sides are reasonable. They’ve learned literally nothing from the years of cultural vandalism and the ‘vote until you get it right’ mentality of the opposition. Voting ‘No’ to the Republic did not end the republican movement and this movement has a lot of crossover with this latest call for ‘change’.

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Boomer Music Sucks

Posted on September 29, 2023 by JC

Like many teenagers of my generation, music became a significant part of my identity. I grew up mostly listening to what my parents did and various pop music on the radio but later got into alternative rock and metal — mostly through the influence of friends. I listen to very little of this music now but it included bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Incubus, TOOL, Limp Bizkit, Korn, P.O.D., Linkin Park, Blink-182 and Rammstein. I saw three of these bands live and a lot of others I haven’t listed. My favourite band was The Smashing Pumpkins but I still rarely even listen to their music anymore. There are many more bands beyond this (including a number of Australian bands), that I have not listed. 

People grow. Tastes can change — I can’t believe I used to hate eggs! There is nothing unusual about this though I will say that last I checked, most of these bands are still active recording and performing artists so they must have kept many of their original fans or else attracted more. I will say that I began to see the lyrics and content of many of these bands as dark or crass though there were plenty of more explicitly Satanic bands around at the time and still are. Despite all this, I mostly lost interest in their music. When peer approval and identity mattered less, I found myself interested in other music and bands and as I’ve matured, have begun to enjoy classical music though I couldn’t expound about upon why with any great competence. I just know it is more sophisticated and well… better music.

As my interests were predominantly in various subgenres of rock, I found most of these artists were influenced by earlier bands like Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Pink Floyd. Even if you weren’t into these bands, there was always an implied respect or even reverence for them. Though I tried, I never found any of these bands to be particularly good and maturation has not changed my mind. Yet even some of the original members of these bands are still alive and sometimes even performing. There is still a general respect in the industry for them but I think most of them actually suck.

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Reluctant World Domination

Posted on September 23, 2023 by JC

Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan, Random House, July 28th, 2009

This is a continuation of my journey into the alternative history of World War II which I have covered in a number of posts including two previous books that I reviewed which were The Phony Victory by Peter Hitchens and Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin. The subject of this review is a good few years older than the other two and I had been meaning to read it for a number of years. It has lost none of its relevance today. Continue reading →

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