One-Line Review: Fail Safe (1964) starring Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau, and Henry Fonda

Fail Safe is too optimistic about the logic available to the American president and the leader of the Soviet Union.

One-Line Review: Acts of Vengeance (2017) starring Antonio Banderas and Karl Urban

Acts of Vengeance relied too heavily on voiceover narration.

Review of Palace by the Bay by Someone Who Hates Fish

Palace by the Bay is a lovely restaurant with elegant decor that takes full advantage of its location on on the shore of the bay. The soothing ambiance inspires excellent conversation, which in my experience centers mostly on how sad it is that such a lovely place serves primarily fish and seafood. The staff greeted me warmly, no doubt repressing the fact that they must work surrounded by the smell of dead fish. My table had a great view of the water, which looks gorgeous with the city's night lights until someone places a fish-smelling dish in my view, reminding me irrevocably that I am in a place that prepares fish.

The waiter wasted no time in listing the many disgusting fish creations soiling the kitchen that were not on the menu, no doubt left off out of common decency. I asked the waiter to surprise me, since all the dishes were equally objectionable.

The meal was pretty, if one can look past the fact that it is fish, which I could not. In short, Palace by the Bay is a beautiful restaurant with great views and good service where they expect you to eat fish. Avoid at all costs.

Americansplaining: Democracy 3

Taking only one hour in a game before writing about it is a special torture. I don't have long to make decisions or poke around. I can't indulge the analysis paralysis that usually gets me. I just have to go. So here I go.

Democracy 3 puts me in a nation's driver's seat. Choose a nation, select policies, manage influence, and make a better world. Let's see how much trouble I get into.

The game gives me several options for which country to rule with an iron fist, but I take the first. I am going to command the strange, foreign land known as the UK.

I take as much time as I can afford with the tutorial, and maybe five minutes in, I get to institute my choice of new policy. The Space Program it is, then!

After that capricious choice, I notice that, excuse me, Britons, your country is labeled a technological backwater! What have you lot done with yourselves? This cannot stand! Up education! Up science spending!

One year into a four-year term, I find the statistics button. I've dropped crime by 23% and violent crime by 19%. Equality is up 10%. That sounds good. But GDP is down almost 10% That's probably bad.

I have a plan to help the GDP, but it'll have to wait until I've crushed creationism in schools, which I promptly do. I didn't realize that was a problem over there, I thought it was just in backwards places like Kentucky. You poor bastards.

Heading into year three, my credit rating has been downgraded to CC, but my polls are at 42%.

I admit, money is tight. But my policies are good! If I make it through the election, I promise I'll jack up income tax and balance the budget. I'll make the hard choices for our economy. I'll make a difference.

That's when the game freezes on me. Having a legislative body lock completely up is a pretty familiar feeling to me over here, so I am unperturbed. I ponder the lack of a CTRL-ALT-DLT option for Congress while rebooting the game. Happily, it autosaved.

A capitalist plot, the Battenburg group, forms to unseat me. That seems malicious.

I legalize pot in an effort to create more tax revenue.

With only one year left, I go all in. My space program is nearing completion, and our debt may be mounting, but an educated, tech-savvy populace is worth it.

With half a year to go, technological advantage replaces technological backwater. I've done it! In a frantic effort to curry favor with my enemies, I plummet taxes, but it's not enough. The popular vote dumps me from office, 38% to 28%.

In four years, I dropped crime by 48%, unemployment by 12%, CO2 emissions by 32%, and traffic congestion by 18%. I've raised technology by 21% and equality by 45%. But high salaries dropped by 25% and middle-class salaries dropped by 50%, with the GDP dropping 15%.

Ingrates. I'm going back to the colonies.

Keep Right: One Way Heroics

You know that dream where you're running, and everything behind you is disappearing into darkness and you just know that it's crumbling away into nothing and somewhere out there is a platypus? No? Just me, then? Okay. Well, One Way Heroics is the RPG-style version of that dream, minus the platypus. The darkness encroaches from the left, so you head forever to the right, fighting monsters, gaining levels, and finding better gear so that you can eventually best the demon lord and save the world.

While it looks like a lo-fi JRPG, it's really a puzzle game. Keep going right, manage your energy and hit points, and improve your gear through loot drops or buying from merchants. The hardest part is managing your inventory. You can only carry around 20 weight-units, and armor and weapons can weigh anywhere from 2 to 8. Fighting monsters consults the random number generator for hitting and damage, and most of the strategy is making sure the monsters come to you and knowing when to run.

And running to the right. Always go right, because if you tarry the darkness catches up with you and devours you.

As with a lot of games lately, One Way Heroics makes death a stepping stone. You earn points depending on how well you did, and you can spend them to keep items for your next life and unlock new classes and abilities. It also gives you the opportunity to express something about your death: Was that enemy too tough? Was your armor just not good enough? The game gives you a selection of last words. My favorite: "I curse youuuu!"

Those come more into play on the public games. I don't know exactly how it works, but you can join new-generated worlds (or return to old ones), or join existing worlds where others are playing. You can see when they get to new regions or when they die (and how they feel about that death).

So far, it's a fun puzzle. My deaths feel earned. When I don't run from the Phantom Knight, or when I get stuck in a maze and the darkness catches up, or when I forget to use one of my powers and die, it's my fault, not the whim of the game. And I like that. It makes me feel like I can learn from it, and makes me want to play again to demonstrate that.

If anything annoys me, it's that gear isn't identified when you first find it. It always makes me uncertain about whether I should use it, and since pack space is in such short supply, I usually don't. I'm not sure what game purpose it serves, requiring me to ID weapons before I know what type they are or how much durability they have left. But I need to swap eventually, as all gear eventually falls apart.

In summary, playing One Way Heroics is better than that nightmare with the platypus. It's available for $1.99 at Playsim and $3.49 on Steam, and apparently there's a Plus version available.

Burn, Don't Slash: Wildfire

I often have the secret, secret urge to use fire to punish my enemies and destroy the unworthy. Please don't tell anyone. Happily, I've backed a game on Kickstarter that lets me indulge my urges without becoming inventory in one of America's many corporate prisons. Wildfire is a stealth platformer where you have the power to grab fire from existing sources and throw it. Unlike most games where you hurl fire through the air, you can't set people alight and watch them slowly cook and crackle to death. You can only light the environment, such as the tall brush and bridges. Using this as distraction, visual cover, and a source of terror for those poor souls who didn't sign up for the fire-controlling electives at school (foolish, really, but art's an easy A), you navigate levels full of enemies looking to murder you for some reason.

The game's in a playable alpha state right now, which you can get off the site. Backers will get monthly alpha updates, and the game's estimated full release is March '16, which my experience suggests translates to June '17.

It's fun, simply fun, to evade soldiers by hiding in the grass, to terrorize them with fire, and to douse their lights with water (which you can also control) to sneak past them in the dark. The decision of when to use fire and when to use pure stealth is also interesting: you can hide in the grasses, or you can set them on fire for cover from smoke or to scare off some soldiers. When there's snow on the ground, if you bring fire too close, you'll melt all your cover. It's a good balancing act so far, even if it reigns in my instinct to burn them, burn them all.

I played through using a controller, and then again using keyboard and mouse. The second worked much more easily for me, mostly because the button-press combination for calling and throwing fire was unintuitive on the gamepad. The mouse was smooth. The entire thing felt a little like Gunpoint, another 2D platform puzzler that used very similar mechanics. I'm looking forward to the final product.

You too can fulfill your urge to burn things. Check out the Wildfire Kickstarter page, and it's also been greenlit on Steam.

Flailing: Exanima

Exanima is the early release of the kickstarted open-world game Sui Generis, by Bare Mettle Entertainment, a prologue designed to show the current state of the game. What it displays is a 3D world rendered with interactive collision physics and active lighting that moves around you, and people that stumble over furniture and flail about like little brothers shouting, "It's not my fault if you walk into my stick!" It's hard to evaluate the game on anything more than the combat right now, because that's most of what's there. Exanima includes two options, a mystery where you wake up in a dungeon, and an arena combat mode. Initial forays into the mysterious dungeon taught me that I needed to know how to fight, so I turned to the arena.

Combat is... complicated. Exanima makes a point of dealing damage not simply based on weapon, but based on its heft, sharpness, speed at time of contact, and what part of the weapon you hit with. In other words, the physics of the attack. Unfortunately, you can only attack in broad, sweeping flails, either side-to-side or over-the-head, and nothing is quick about your attacks.

At least your enemies are in the same boat. By intent, it becomes a timing game. You have to flail from the correct side at the right time, making sure you're in range for your strike and out of range for theirs, or at least that yours hits first. It's hard, I think also by intent. Exanima combat simultaneously feels like something I want to get better at and something that should not have taken this long to become good at. After a couple hours in the arena, I don't have any consistency with success. I feel like I'm still flailing as much as my character.

Which means when I return to the dungeon, my best bet is to avoid combat. So I run away when I can, and fight when I must. There's some realism to that, and realism is obviously a goal for the designers. But I need to feel myself ascending the skill curve to enjoy a game, and I don't know if that's going to come soon enough. I also need some understanding of why things happen, and the people wandering the dungeon seem to attack me or ignore me based on some algorithm that is completely opaque to me.

I'll go back to the arena. The game is different enough from anything else I've played that I'm going to keep flailing at it for a while. I don't know for how long. Long enough to wish the designers had provided a retry option rather than kicking you out to the main menu every time you die in the arena, at least. It feels a bit like they're flailing at game design, but I somewhat think they know exactly what they're doing, even if it might not be for me in the long run.

You can get Exanima on Steam for $14.99, or at the developer's store.