Andor is Really Good (Really)

I’ve been a little down on Star Wars lately.

The Abrams-Johnson-Abrams story hand-off in the sequel movie trilogy still pisses me off. Have a meeting and work your shit out, K? That’s what professionals do.

Mando is fun in a Saturday morning cartoon / western sort of way. I wanted to throw something at my TV at parts of The Book of Bo-bo. Kenobi was at least partially broken in the Editing Bay, though there is a pretty good fan-edit that fixes the pacing and re-assembles it as a movie instead of a clunky serial. So, I was frankly surprised how good Andor is. It is … Empire Strikes Back, good. (Yeah, I was skeptical, too)

I can’t really blame those who have passed on watching Andor considering recent installments out of Mickey’s Star Wars film factory. A TV Series about a not-particularly interesting secondary character from a prequel-one-off that hit theaters 6 years ago.. How could this possibly be any good? If it wasn’t for the persistent praise of friends and reviewers with similar taste, I’d likely have skipped it too.

I’ve heard it said that many of the Disney Plus Star Wars shows are like John Favreau and friends playing with their Star Wars toys; smashing them together and having fun. With Andor, Tony Gilroy puts the toys away and explores the moral perils of a burgeoning rebellion, the inner workings of a galactic bureaucracy, the thin line that separates revolution and terrorism, imperial control and cultural dominance. Don’t get me wrong, there is room and audience for both lanes: The Toy box and the Assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

NSFW The Critical Drinker’s Review of Andor that puts it into perspective better than I can…

Andor is a 12-episode series on Disney Plus that is structured (more or less) into 4 related mini-arcs. It is a dense show and not conducive to play with your phone second-screen shenanigans. The good parts are wrapped with neon arrows and may not be evident until the story develops.

The initial episodes lay groundwork for the conclusion and in the moment, they felt to me like a slow burn. I’ll admit that up through about episode 4 or 5 I wasn’t really getting what the buzz was about. By 6, I was sold and the show just amps up in every way until the final scenes, which pay off the initial setup episodes.

Reprising his role as the (not yet) rebel spy Cassian Andor, Diego Luna provides a stable through-line character for the series. Though much like in Breaking Bad and similar modern anti-hero dramas the supporting characters elevate the overall experience. I don’t want to say Cassian takes a back seat in his own show rather they know how to use him and when to cut away. There is a brief finale after-credit scene that pays off an assumption most astute-viewers will make that tie this series back to Andor’s final moments in Rogue One.

Genevieve O'Reilly reprises her role as Mon Mothma and this time she isn’t relegated to battle briefings. Her subtle character work, poise and grace make for a terrific performance. Her political machinations within the imperial power structure and viewer knowledge of the cost of her choices make for great television. Stellan Skarsgård plays Luthen Rael, a pre-rebellion co-conspirator and art / antiquities dealer. Watching him switch between an art-dealer and bit of a dandy to a menacing revolutionary is quite the spectacle. If you’ve seen Skarsgård in Chernobyl, you know what I‘m talking about. When he switches on the gravitas, his performance (and his ship) are my favorite moments of the series.

About late mid-season, Andy Serkis makes and appearance and without spoiling anything: holy crap, he’s awesome. Really, everyone turned in exceptional performances by any standard much less by Star Wars standards. I’m leaving other characters out in the interest of brevity that frankly deserve discussion but…. maybe later.

The writing and dialog on this show are the best I’ve seen in Star Wars and top contenders across modern drama, television and streaming content. Andor isn’t going to beat Breaking Bad, The Leftovers, The Wire on prestige drama pantheon but it belongs in that category, which is a strange thing to say for the same intellectual property that brought us Tatooine Vespa gangs and Luke milking a space-Walrus.

My Pitch

If you are looking for a more textured and complex story in the Star Wars Universe that is somewhat divorced from dogmatic-preachy Jedi, sniveling Skywalker descendants and Cackling Sith - give this show a try.

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… If you require further evidence, here’s a clever edit from a Luthen speech overlayed from other clips so that it obfuscates spoilers…

God of War Ragnarök: A Perfect Sequel

Bias upfront, I’m fully in the bag for this franchise! (My review of the previous installment, here.)

With the latest installment of God of War, Santa Monica Studios confidently doubled down on what made the last installment such of a success. This game knows exactly what it is, an epic an immersive adventure campaign. It breaks with trend from other game studios to try to emulate large-arena online multiplayer or throw too many modes into a game with too little QA. (cough, Halo Infinite, cough)

The game picks up 3 years after the events of the last installment. Fimbulwinter is in full effect, ostensibly set in motion by the death of Baldur. A realm-hopping adventure ensues with surprising twists and turns; including both familiar faces and well-imagined new characters. It is a father-son adventure. It is a coming of age story. It is an epic throw-down of cosmic proportions. Its just damned fun. Honestly, this game has a better story than most recent Marvel movies. The story is well done, the voice actors are well cast and the gameplay never felt like a grind. Most importantly - they stick the landing.

My son and I played through the campaign over a few days, with him occasionally taking the controls from me in frustration of my old-guy reflexes and persistent stubborn refusal to turn-down the game difficulty. The game doesn’t include an official co-op but it isn’t really a detriment, in my opinion. Having a game where you can hang on the couch and pass the controller back and fourth is such a refreshing change from the high-fps-multiplayer focus of most modern console fighters and battle sims.

Pro-Tip: When the friendly NPCs suggest you take some time to explore, take that hint and use the opportunities to buff the character by completing favors or exploring the realms. These prompts are well-placed throughout the storyline.

Collector’s Edition

I put a not-insignificant amount of time into trying to find the Jötnar Edition but I refuse to buy from scalpers. Eventually, I found a Collector’s Edition (which is a slight step down from the Jötnar Edition) at Best Buy.

Funny, the God of War Ragnarök Collector’s Edition Box is larger than the PS5 box.

I do appreciate that the interior box riffs on the Jötnar shrine motif from the game. That’s a nice touch. The included Mjölnir toy/prop is larger, heavier and nicer than I expected though I suspect it wouldn’t survive a great amount of rambunctious playtime.

I did find it a little strange and disappointing that even the Collector’s Edition failed to come with an actual disc but instead a steel case with placeholders for two discs and download codes.

W.T.F.

Performance Observations

We played on both the PS4 and PS5. While the PS5 edition looks great, the PS4 edition looks great, too and performs surprisingly well. The game-load times aren’t punishing on the older console. I suspect they targeted the lowest common denominator for performance benchmarks and allowed the PS5 GPU to do some basic environmental effects and lighting enhancements through #if-[env] type directives or target-conditional compilation.

In this, I think they found the right balance; especially considering PS5 rollout and inventory challenges. All this to say it looks great but I don’t think it ever actually challenges the PS5 hardware. Our PS4 is on a 4k QLED Samsung and the PS5 is on a 4k OLED. The inky-deep blacks of the OLED/PS5 combo really made some of the scenes pop but if you are rocking an older setup - you will still find some jaw-dropping visual set-pieces.

Video Clips

The video clips below might serve as mild spoilers. You have been warned.

Scope and Scale

It took several multi-hour game-sessions to complete the main storyline while taking time to complete 2-3 side quests per opportunity in order to buff the characters. Figure about 30 hours to complete the main storyline. At conclusion, I found that I’d only completed about 35% of Vanaheim, less than half of Svartalheim and Alfeim. Like the last game you are encouraged to continue playing through a number of side quests and explorations that are also quite fun. My only complaint is that at times you can feel that you are after-the-story because your NPC traveling companions have little to say or are repetitive. The challenge of filling 60+ hours of relevant and entertaining dialog isn’t lost on me.

Modern Star Trek Round Up

TLDR: If you liked older Trek, go watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Something that Modern Star Trek and Modern Star Wars seem to share in common:

Modern takes on these franchises often seem to be poorly received by their fandoms.

I’m not the type of person to crap all over someone else’s art with my opinion. After watching some awful modern attempts at Star Trek, I’ve found myself staring at after-show credits thinking to myself: “That was garbage. How the hell did this get made?”

In the Beginning, There was T.O.S

The Original Series only ran for 3 seasons, between 24 and 29 episodes per season costing about $180k 1966USD’s per episode to produce. Originally considered a failure, Star Trek found its audience through syndication.

The episodic anthology used space exploration as a backdrop to explore geopolitical topics at times and in other times as a setting for silly futuristic adventures. In doing so it sparked the imagination of millions and set off one of humanity’s most iconic entertainment franchises.

TNG Era

Star Trek: Next Generation evolved Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian human future into 7 seasons of 26 Episodes spanning 8 years. With DS9, Voyager, there are Star Trek on ramps for the 90’s and 2000’s kids as well.

Big Screen, Mixed Results

As Star Trek was adapted for the big screen, the box office results were often flat. A few were critical successes (Star Trek: The Motion Picture & Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan) but the rabid fandom failed to translate to large box office earnings. 2002’s Star Trek Nemesis barely eek’d out a profit, eventually - maybe. The Studio decided it was time to make a change.

Production budgets vs Box Office

(Contemporary adjustments for inflation in bold)

Original Series

Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Budget: $46 million — $152.5 million
Gross: $139 million — $460.7 million

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Budget: $11.2 million — $27.9 million
Gross: $97 million — $241.9 million

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
Budget: $16 million — $37 million
Gross: $87 million — $201.5 million

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Budget: $21 million — $46.1 million
Gross: $133 million — $292 million

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Budget: $33 million — $64 million
Gross: $63 million — $122.3 million

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Budget: $27 million — $47.7 million
Gross: $96.9 million — $171.2 million

The Next Generation

Star Trek Generations
Budget: $35 million — $56.8 million
Gross: $118 million — $191.6 million

Star Trek: First Contact
Budget: $45 million — $69 million
Gross: $146 million — $223.9 million

Star Trek: Insurrection
Budget: $58 million — $85.6 million
Gross: $112.6 million — $166.2 million

Star Trek: Nemesis
Budget: $60 million — $80.3 million
Gross: $67.3 million — $90 million

Reboot, the Kelvin Timeline

Star Trek
Budget: $150 million — $168.3 million
Gross: $385.7 million — $432.6 million

Star Trek Into Darkness
Budget: $185 million — $191.1 million
Gross: $467.4 million — $482.8 million

Star Trek Beyond
Budget: $185 million
Gross: $318.1 million (to date)

ref: Reddit Post

Help Me JJ, You’re my Only Hope

(that’s going to piss some people off, lol)

Bad Robot

The Studio flipped the keys of NCC-1701 to JJ Abrams and the result was 2009’s Star Trek and the beginning of the Action Trek era that persists today. The idea was to expand the appeal to the average summer blockbuster moviegoer. The 2009 film was a refresh of TOS, a reimagining…. a.. (ffs) reboot. (Big Sigh) It would borrow from the past but adapt Star Trek to the modern ADHD / Twitter addict sensibilities. Young and sexy actors right off of underwear-model gigs, giga-hours of CGI render time, a soaring music score underpinned with rock-hiphop contemporary staples and lens flares for days.

Modern Trek takes the dramatic pacing of Breaking Bad, mixes two parts Calvin Klein commercial, two parts “pew pew pew pew space lasers!”, one part X-Games and one part canon-breaking technobabble to create the red bull commercial in space that is modern Star Trek.

I know that all sounds negative, so I should put my cards on the table here. I like the new cast and I like the sensational visuals and over-the-top sound design. I just sort of hate that Star Trek on the Big screen usually has: First Act: Long, lingering spaceship-Porn showing the ship docked at some amazing StarBase and Third Act: Same amazing space ship gets exploded or crashed into a planet in a narrative sacrifice. Seriously - Get a new story, already.

The Abrams era Star Trek films appear to have been successful at the Box Office despite some story stuff that does violence to Trek canon. In Abrams Trek, you can bring people back to life with a super blood transfusion; transwarp beaming can send an individual (or bombs) to seemingly anywhere. “Whatever”. Star Trek has always played fast and loose with the rules.

Star Trek Discovery

Star Trek Discovery centers around the hi jinx of Spock’s secret adopted sister. Discovery is a TOS era ship equipped with an experimental spore drive that allows the ship to transport itself through a cosmological mycelial network to nearly anywhere in the known Galaxy. “Black Alert!” Because: magic mushrooms and tardigrades. If it sounds stupid, well: that’s because it is.

That aside Star Trek Disco is sort of a mixed bag. Michael Burnham (Spock’s secret sister) has this space Jesus thing going that can be a bit much at times, despite the fact that I genuinely like the actress that plays Burnham: Sonequa Martin-Green. In fact, I like most of the casting on this show. Doug Jones plays a Starfleet officer named Suru and his physical performance goes a long way to make Saru believably alien, not just another dude with plastic crap glued to his face. Anthony Rapp plays the ships engineer (Staments) with a believable tinge of Aspergers. Wilson Cruz plays the ships’ doctor (Culber) and Stamet’s love interest. They have pretty great “opposites attract” chemistry and their relationship makes sense within the story.

Discovery Season 1 establishes Burnham’s character and explores the Federation-Klingon war.
Discovery Season 2 is a time-traveling / runaway AI story.
Discovery Season 3 is a dystopian future story.
Discovery Season 4 is the story of the future dystopia making a turn back towards core federation values.

Star Trek Picard

As a fan of STTNG, I looked forward to character study of Jean Luc Picard. Instead… we got something else.

Picard Season 1: The JL Apology tour
This season introduces the viewers to an even further aged-up Jean-Luc Picard. It introduces us to a new crew of younger characters. The casting on the new characters is good but there are some truly baffling writing choices in this show. One character: Raffi, lives in a trailer, smokes snake leaf and has a frustratingly over familiarity with Picard. She calls him ‘JL.’ One admiral that I’m going to call “admiral bitch face” just cussed Picard out when he comes to her with valid concerns. Picard spends the majority of the season just sort of meandering between plot contrivances. Patrick Stewart’s charisma still comes through at times but it mostly overshadowed by the dark and violent mood of this series. One side character gets his eyes forcibly removed, while he’s awake. Plenty of disintegrations, decapitations and death. One bright spot is seeing Jonathan Frakes and Steward together on screen. Riker is always a joy and has some great line delivery. I’d also love to build his pizza oven in my backyard. One day..

Picard Season 2: The Voyage (Sorta) Home
I came into the second season ready to overlook the numerous shortcoming of the first season. First seasons can often be shaky until a cast and crew finds their groove. Stewart has better energy and people spend less time bitching him out this season but the overall story still feels like something written as part of a middle-school writing contest for a free personal pan pizza. This season is a time travel plot that brings the characters to our near future, much like The Voyage Home. Also like The Voyage Home: Season 2 explores social commentary and contemporary issues such as the wild fires in the Western states, climate change in general, CBP abuses of illegal immigrants, poverty, healthcare & the pitfalls of late-stage capitalism. Unlike The Voyage Home, this season of Picard explores takes on these issues without any nuance, proposes no solutions and isn’t particularly fun. You never get “nuclear wessels” or “double-dumb-ass on you” moments that you got in The Voyage Home. You could watch the 1st, 2nd and final episode of Season 2 and not miss much. Worst of all, John Delancey never really shifts into the mischievous gear.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds

Star Trek Strange New Worlds is a refreshing entry to modern trek. The cast is great, the story is good, the enterprise looks amazing and the overall “feel” is Star Trek. It is a campy, optimistic romp through the stars and a true return to form for Star Trek.

PS5

I scored a (retail) PS5 last month. Pretty wild when you think about it that the PS5 was released in the end of 2020 and in the 1st third of 2022 they are still hard(ish) to come by; outside of scalpers.

My in, was the Best Buy Total Tech membership. I had signed up for it in order to get access to a GPU for a virtual pinball and gaming PC build. Aside from other benefits around warranty and rewards points, the Total Tech Membership gives you early access to hard-to-find things as they come into stock. The membership is $199/year (kinda steep IMO) but since I was able to buy an RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 at retail, it already paid for itself in my view.

At any rate, I’m not a huge modern console gamer but there are some touchstone titles that I feel compelled to play. On Sony’s Platform, for me: God of War & God of War Ragnarök are must-haves. The original game left such an impression, I was excited to revisit it with upscaled graphics in preparation for the new game this fall.

Astro’s Playroom

The PS5 is bundled with Astro’s Playroom. This game is great, especially considering the tenuous footing from which it was created. The point of the game is to acclimate you with the controller on the PS5 and the game itself is little more than a playable commercial for Sony PS merch. In it, you play as this little robot, Astro and explore hardware-themed levels and unlock Playstation memorabilia. That’s it. Doesn’t sound fun, but it really is.

The primary thing that makes Astro’s Playroom great is level design coupled with adorable characters. I know, that makes me sound like a pre-teen girl referring to a favorite stuffed animal but Im a 40-something beer-and-whiskey drinking nerd guy, unashamed to tell you the characters are cute. If you stop playing for awhile, it pulls out a little PS Vita or PSVR and entertains itself. At times, you can see the character shaking its little robot ass to the theme music of the stage you are on. All hail our future ass-shaking robot overlords.

Most gamers are probably aware of the history of Mega Man and its influence on level design that reaches even into modern games. Kitamura paid special attention to level difficulty, the idea being to allow the difficulty of the game to ramp up at a natural pace while maintaining a consistent-average-play-time per level. He wanted the game to teach the players how to play gradually, wanted to reduce the chance of players being stuck and frustrated and emphasized re-playability.

Astro’s Playhouse is a bit of a love letter to these early tenants of game design. The level design finds a balance of feeling open-enough to not be claustrophobic while balancing difficulty, skills and power ups to keep it engaging. Cute characters, good theme music and sound effects and quick respawns round out the experience to make Astro’s Playhouse a very fun game. (Despite being a giant Playstation Commercial.)

As a bonus, the PS5 is powerful enough to play Astro’s Playhouse while other games are installing. Pretty bad-ass.

Unreal Engine 5 City Sample

Unreal Engine 5 released a playable demo alongside the streaming and blu-Ray release of Matrix Resurrections. The UE5 City Sample includes cameos from Reeves and Moss and offer two modes: a playable car chase reminiscent of The Matrix Reloaded and a free-world environment to explore the City.

City Sample is available for free on the PS Store (search for Matrix Awakens) and the City Sample is available for download for free within the Unreal Marketplace. It includes assets, textures, models and examples to highlight UE5’s capabilities for film makers, creators and game devs.

About: Mario Kart Arcade GP & GP2

Game Details

Name: Mario kart Arcade Gp
Manufacturer: Namco
Year: 2005
Type: Videogame
Subtype: Driving game

Cabinet Styles:

• Upright/Standard

source: KLOV

Name: Mario Kart Arcade GP 2
Manufacturer: Namco
Year: 2007
Type: Videogame
Subtype: Driving game

Cabinet Styles:

• Upright/Standard

source: KLOV

10 Minutes with Mario Kart Arcade GP2

Mario Kart Arcade GP -> KLOV LInk
Mario Kart Arcade GP2 -> KLOV Link

ACQUISITION

“Thank you for your service, Mario Kart”

One of my cabinets came by way of a hookup through a friend in Birmingham. This cabinet still has a stock tag on it from asset inventory or from an auction perhaps. The inclusion of an NSN number leads me to suspect it may have spent some time on a military base or perhaps it just passed hands through an auction authority that frequently deals with US Government or Military items.

The other cabinet came by way of a miniature golf closure in Southern Mississippi. Both cabinets are in good shape, they have a few cabinet repairs here and there and some scuffs in artwork or missing decals.

Hardware

The game is based on the Namco, Sega, Nintendo Triforce platform. Typically a IBM power PC w/ 512mb of RAM roughly similar in architecture to the Nintendo Gamecube. The cabinet is a JVS wiring class, includes a Triforce CPU, a JVS IOS Interface Board, a force-feedback controller board & sound amp.

This game also includes Namco’s Namcam(2) camera, a gimmick to snap photos of the player to be used in leaderboards or as in-race identifiers to distinguish players from bot-racers.

The game originally shipped with a 29” CRT but I was forced to put in Wells-Gardner (the video mentions Vision Pro but my memory for these details is crap) 27” LED Monitors in order to get support for Mario Kart Arcade GP2.

Gameplay

The gameplay shares similarity in racing dynamics to the console Mario Kart games with key differences and Namco cross-licensed characters (pacman, ms pacman). The original game advertised 6 worlds and 24 tracks but they phoned-in the effort in that each world really only had two track variations and then environment or reverse traffic flow on those two comprising the remaining 12 tracks.

Mario Kart Arcade GP2 expands the track offering by adding deeper variation between tracks, bringing the total up to 8 cups & 32 tracks.

MAINTENANCE, VALUE, RARITY, FUN-FACTOR

These games are pretty rare and tended to be higher maintenance games when placed on location because of camera failures and force-feedback failures.

I’m not sure what they are worth but I have roughly $1400 in the Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 upgrade, roughly $900 in the monitors, $400 in force feedback repairs on top of an average price paid of over $3,000 each. With incidental repairs I’d put the total cost of ownership in the pair a little over $9,000. After about 4 years of ownership they continue to be the most-played-arcade games in our game room. Pinball-inclined friends like to comment:

“You could put three pinball machines in the amount of space these consume”

With that out of the way, I estimate that the Mario Kart Pair has gotten more play in four years than every Pinball machine I’ve owned over that amount of time; combined.

It isn’t just kids and friends of kids, either. Adults have been known to use it as a form of rock-paper-scissors or as a sobriety scale. (Legal Disclaimer: Accuracy of Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 to determine a person’s ability to drive safely has not been established)

Is it fun? Yep.

Review Shenanigans

In the coming weeks I’m posting a series of arcade and pinball reviews of games that are currently being fostered in the basement. Ten minutes (+/- a few minutes) with each game to talk about gameplay, maintenance or whatever comes to mind.

As I post them, I’ll go back and make the game entries below clickable.

Pinballs

Star Trek: The Next Generation
Attack from Mars
Medieval Madness
Indiana Jones The Pinball Adventure
Scared Stiff
Tales of the Arabian Nights

Arcades

Cocktail Table Arcade-SD Multigame
Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 - Review completed on 4/19/19
Ms Pacman (Cabaret)
Centipede (Cabaret)
Donkey Kong (Multi Kong w/ Arcade-SD)
Namco Reunion
Tapper
Tron
Q*Bert (Mylstar FPGA)
Robotron (Multi-Williams FPGA)
Tempest
Mortal Kombat 4 (and MK1, MK2, MK3 w/ RiddledTV Switcher)

Console

Nintendo Entertainment System Online (Nintendo Switch Online Service)