Jinx Protocol A blog , undefined.

I’ve always thought of Nick Cave as someone who would do something stark for stark’s sake, the guy who will cut through the din of a party by shouting something inappropriate for the pleasure of seeing everyone’s discomfort. Push the Sky Away is not a stark album by any stretch of the imagination. As much as it potentially bothers me to say, it’s the easy listening Nick Cave. the later period album that explores a gentler, more ethereal aspect of the group’s personality.

That’s not to say that the album is toothless. Most of the songs are well-constructed and interesting, but it feels like a mostly too-polished record for the name hovering above the title. There wasn’t anything truly experimental, truly thought-provoking about Push the Sky Away. It’s an album of good songs, both in production and follow-through, but for some reason I expected something different from Cave and The Bad Seeds.

It doesn’t end in any significant way than it begins, which is sort of problematic. The whole album seems to inhabit the same wavelength throughout, and it never really seems to break free of that ever. That being said, it is one of the most listenable and uncomplicated albums Nick Cave has ever made.

It is a sparsely arranged record, which only reinforces the ethereal feel of it. There are some nice touches that make it seem orchestral in parts and Eastern in other ways, but for the most part, it strays only very seldomly from its main flourishes. There is something comforting in it, and it is nice to see an entirely different side of the band, so maybe expectations are what are disappointing here. One can bask in the unexpected as he can in the quotidian.

As a listener, I always expect Nick Cave to be able to tell the uncomfortable truths, but this album seems to be mostly devoid of Cave’s direct, unflinching stare into the darkness. Not only that, though it maintains a central thematic orbit, nothing about it screams the sort of prophetic wisdom one is accustomed to from Cave.

It doesn’t have the funky swagger of the tracks on Dig, Lazarus, Dig! or the poetic horror of Murder Ballads, nor does it possess any of the ironic sentimentality of tracks like Into My Arms or Are You The One I’ve Been Waiting For?, but it does possess some elements of No More Shall We Part and The Boatman’s Call. Cave here seems detached from the violence and pain he describes, which, the more I think about it, becomes increasingly interesting. But that does not shine through on the first or second play-through.

The opening song, We No Who U R, is the darkest track, and even though it is simple, structurally, it is by far the most evocative of earlier albums, especially the mordant Murder Ballads. I would say it’s a highlight of the album, but several other songs reach nearly as high. (Water’s Edge (reminiscent of Lovely Creature), Mermaids, and the title track are all really very good songs.

However, it is Jubilee Street that sticks with me well after the whole album has ended. It reminds me of some kind of mid-90s ballad, and the drums and guitar become hypnotic backrops for Cave’s lyrics, which tell the all-too-familiar story of desperation and hypocrisy in a grimy urban setting. The accompanying strings – strings are a major player in this album – are beautiful and (if the word is not too overused in Cave reviews) haunting.

Overall, it is not an album that explores the nature of humanity like previous albums. He is not the angry preacher on this fifteenth record, but the disappointed lounge singer, the man who has resigned himself to a world he could do nothing to change. He is a man telling sad truths rather than rebelling against them, and the result is an alarmingly calm outing. Which, come to think of it, might be the most unsettling aspect of the whole thing.

It’s always being said that retro is new again, and people of our generation - Gen. XYish - have a penchant for authenticity that for some time got lost in the digital flood of the early 00s.

However, it seems as though tangible is returning, at least temporarily, as vinyl sales increased for a fifth consecutive year, up nearly 18 percent from previous years. Trend-watchers tend to become too heavily invested in deriving meaning from upward slopes in spikes of this fashion, but it should also be noted that a five year incline is nothing to ignore.

Overall, physical sales are down, but a resurgence in vinyl may speak to some attempt to defy music becoming a commodity. Hypercommercialism has made everything, from clothes to pictures and even (through the rise of social media) experiences, merely things to be traded with one another, often cheaply.

The vinyl “movement” - does using that word already mean it’s dead, in some way? - could be a way, like organic food, of reclaiming meaning in what we consume. Having everything, having too many choices, can be bad, as anyone who has ever given up on watching something on Netflix Instant after searching for fifteen minutes can attest to.

Buying vinyl, like eating organic food or drinking craft beer, is all about conscious choice. It is also expensive, so the need to be thoughtful is a must, and people in today’s economic climate need to be picky about monetary decisions, so maybe that, too, is a reason for a resurgence in vinyl purchases.

However, it should also be noted that people have always romanticized records, even in the age of (superior audio quality) compact discs and (especially in the age of) cassette tapes. It isn’t an arbitrary decision, in other words, for people to “choose” vinyl over buying MP3 albums on Amazon or torrenting songs from The Pirate Bay.

I guess there may be no overarching theme to why people buy records now, because seldom is any single reason creditable for a movement, but if ever there was a time to indulge in vinyl, it is now.

Forgive me in advance for all of the things I’m going to say in this review. Every so often, a game comes along that makes me feel that thing that drove Chris McCandless, say, into the wilds of Alaska, or Grizzly Man to go out and live with the bears. It’s akin to transcendentalism but more thoroughly selfish and related to the solipsism of religious experience.

Basically, I will gush about Journey. It will be utterly sickening for those who are not prone to the occasional bit of romanticism. Basically, I got in the right mindspace to play the game.

First and foremost, I must cop to never playing Flower. (Flower is the previous game from Thatgamecompany.) I have an occasional bias against games, and Flower fell into that category. With the thatgamecompany collection out, though, and with such a great experience in Journey under my belt, I look forward to playing Flower, as well.

I also must admit to not having read any reviews for the game, either - I actively avoid reviews, save for the occasional discussion overheard on Giant Bombcast - so please be forgiving if some of the swooning and philosophizing turn a bit cliche.

Journey is, if nothing else, a playable metaphor. A working version of allegory. Heavy in religious analogy - and mindfully so - Journey is as much about what it is trying to say as what the playable experience itself is.

In Journey, players take control of a nameless protagonist. The implication for the game’s goal is for the main character to reach the summit of a distant mountain, visible in the first moments of the game’s opening.

When the game begins, you, as the main character, are sitting cross-legged in the sand, with the mountain distantly visible in the distance. There is a beam of light shooting skyward from it, and it is pretty obvious that is your eventual goal.

The mountain itself, the ostensible goal, is an interesting aspect of the game itself. This seems to be the overall metaphor of the game. Like life itself, sometimes you can see the big picture, but most of the time, you only ever catch glimpses of it. It reminds you of what you are supposed to be doing, but it also takes a backseat to the immediate. It really is a wonderful way of keeping players invested, or at least reminded, of the task at hand.

The controls are fluid, and though the game isn’t on rails, the setting fairly clearly leads the player in the direction he or she needs to go. Discovery is the main method for figuring out what to do next, or where to go, and it only takes a small amount of inference to be able to solve the various puzzles throughout the game.

That being said, the game really excels in the interaction between controls and the environment. The art style is integral to the experience, because a less beautiful game would probably be less intriguing, even for such a short experience. The sands sparkle, and though the landscape is beautiful, it becomes slowly evident that the world players inhabit is a kind of wasteland, what with all of the ruins surrounding you.

Players gain experience through the process of lengthening one’s own scarf. By the end, you should have tailored quite the scarf. Whenever you interact with the pieces of fabric, you fly, and the longer the scarf, the longer the temporary flight. As a metaphor, it serves to show how you are able to salvage the remaining beauty in your desolate world.

The other method for progression is very simple: forward motion. Progress becomes an extended metaphor, so it is difficult not to make comments or fairly obvious conclusions about what the game is trying to say. Walking is Journey’s major function, and the feeling of covering ground is made somewhat tangible, because there is so much of it. That’s not a complaint. In fact, a lot of games use “magic” to make time compress in a lot of ways, but Journey forces players to cover a lot of ground on foot, so the distance really is felt.

Desolation and loneliness are intertwined in Journey, which is what makes the multiplayer experience itself so rewarding. Because you spend the first little while alone - or else you spend much of the game alone - it is refreshing to see someone else, someone like yourself. It also helps that you cannot communicate with other players, save for a brief, melodious yelp.

These sounds simultaneously convey nothing and everything to the other player: impatience, joy, confusion, and sadness. This feature becomes increasingly meaningful toward the end of the game.

Not being much of a fan of multiplayer myself - I come from an older generation of couch co-op - the multiplayer actually worked quite well. The co-op is less a game mechanic than a social aspect of playing, which takes a lot of pressure off of the competitive aspect of moving forward.

It is unavoidable to have the discussion about the nature of games when talking about Journey. It is provocative exactly for that reason. It is not the antithesis of the modern game, though a lot people seem to put it in direct contrast with virtually every other shooter and typically violent game on the market in order to either make a point about gaming, to point out some flaw in it, or else to extol Journey’s own virtues.

In the end, Journey is a fine experience, but not one for every single person who plays video games, but, then again, why would I even bring that up with this particular game? Is there really any game that every person should play? Journey certainly highlights what makes video games special, because it separates itself fundamentally from the things that movies, comic books, and television do well. It tells a story visually in which players actively participate in reaching the end.

Replay is not a must, but players might find the experience short enough and rewarding enough to go back through the game. From other reviews I have heard, plenty of people go right into a second playthrough, mainly for the sake of being able to interact with the world with a second player. The multiplayer aspect seems to be the driving force for replay.

It’s hard to identify Telltale Games’ Walking Dead as anything but an experience. That’s the word that kept popping up in my head throughout each of the five episodes of this emotionally impacting game, which is in the same universe as the eponymous comic book and television show. Experience is so much more compelling here than game, mostly because the game-y elements are either buggy or difficult to control. Players experience the world and situations through often impossibly difficult decisions - moral and otherwise - throughout the game.

Because of the game’s set-up, players are almost mandated to care about the people who drift in and out of your periphery. You take on the ostensible role of small-group leader Lee Everett, a convicted murderer, traveling through several destroyed landscapes in rural Georgia. There is no real ultimate goal here, but you are tasked with helping a little girl named Clementine travel down to Savannah to find her parents.

As in most zombie scenarios, you feel the futility of your mission almost immediately, but you charge ahead, making choices and meeting people along the way. This is where the game really excels: you don’t really think about the grand design of what you are doing. You travel, moment-by-moment, in order to either protect yourself, your past (which is shady), your group, or “your” little girl, Clementine.

Like the comic books, The Walking Dead video game really engages players through giving them, at certain critical points, two “choices” - and I will talk about the use of quotes there, in a moment - neither of which is a good or beneficial or satisfying one. Now, in comparing notes with other players, one gets clued into the fact that the decisions are sometimes predetermined, or that they have no real bearing on the game, overall, but in the moment, that does not detract from the overall experience of making a potentially life-or-death decision for a member of your zombie survival team. Hence, the use of the quotation marks earlier.

In fact, your decisions are recorded and ultimately become statistics for players to compare against other people in the community. After each episode, players are given breakdowns of major plot and dialogue decisions and how those decisions compare against the whole of the community. It is a strange feeling, because seeing those statistics either reaffirms one’s position that he or she made the right decision or dashes the belief that this decision or that one was particularly difficult or unpopular. For most of the game, I found myself firmly in the majority with most of my decisions.

Another aspect that makes The Walking Dead so good - related to decisions - is how the person controlling Lee comes to think of him as a person. How he ends up playing him. There is no spectrum of good and evil, as there is in other games like Mass Effect, but with all of the various dialogue choices, players are given dozens of opportunities to shape Lee’s behavior and persona within the game. The fact that some of the decisions are preordained does not ruin the experience, because even if this character’s death or that one’s banishment is not a variable, how the group sees that decision is. Trust has to be built up, and it can go away just as easily. Quibbles over various aspects in the group from different philosophical points-of-view end up spilling over into arguments, and Lee must make the decision to side with one person or the other, and often there is no clear answer, so an unsatisfying compromise must be reached, or else one of the two characters must end up disappointed. This leads to a rift that must be mended or ignored, and depending on which side you choose, few or no people are happy. It really does make for a nerve-wracking experience.

Some of the other characters in the game become increasingly shrill over the course of play - I’m looking at you, Kenny - or were never really characters in the first place, just one-note stereotypes or plot facilitators. Even that seemingly poor aspect of the writing actually becomes a sort of interesting way to twist the story knife in your side and make you, as Lee, make some pretty difficult decisions. You are invited to hate a character, to see his or lack of worth as a detriment to the group and as a bane to you as the leader, and then you are asked to have compassion, to save that character’s life, and so you must make a corresponding choice. What should have made some decisions easy turns them into difficult dilemmas, because the deaths of certain members of the group do not merely have bearing on themselves. They also pertain to other members of the group. What you do to one member, how you respond to a situation, or whether or not you abandon or forsake a character will affect how the other remaining members view you. In addition, there’s always Clem to think about. It is much easier to be self-involved, to see the world through one’s own sense of the idea of “survival of the fittest,” but the writers at The Walking Dead make Clementine such a compelling child figure, such a bastion of innocence, that any coarse or thoughtless decision will have ramifications for how she sees you, and, for me, the weight of Clem’s view of me mattered so much more than how the rest of the group saw me. I ended up making plenty of decisions based on how I wanted Clem to see the world, how she should remain truthful and honest, rather than entirely self-motivated for survival, at any cost.

The gameplay mechanics are less interesting and almost provide a hindrance to the experience. Dying multiple times because moving the cursor proves to be difficult certainly matches the high tension of certain situations - mostly in the form of being menaced by zombies - but it also can be tedious and repetitive, and it takes the player out of the story, which is the ultimate sin a game like this can commit. What it seems that developers at Telltale grasped over the course of development is that story drives this game, and anything that detracts from it really diminishes the quality of the game and the game experience, so some of the more frustrating elements of the first two episodes sort of disappear in the last three, which are by far the best three in the series.

Fans of previous Telltale adventure games should really enjoy The Walking Dead, and people new to the genre will respond positively to the writing and craft of the story. Fans of zombies or the other versions of this world will most definitely find themselves intrigued. The conclusion leaves room for a continuing story - the critical and commercial success of The Walking Dead should not make that a surprise or a spoiler to anyone - but a serious question remains: will they be able to - or want to - repeat the magic they created the first time around?