Sea of Johnny Depp and entertainment idolisation

 Tangents ahoy!

Sometimes when I sit down to write topics there is the danger that they slightly flow away from the main branch of the blog a little. Well, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. And I don't always do the cleanest job of reigning everything in, most of the time intentionally because I think it's more fun. All that being said, this one here is something that I have a hard time condensing down into a small lane, because it's such a lofty topic that whenever I think about it I end up going literally everywhere with it. That will absolutely come out in what in this mess of diatribes and 'but what about this', yet hopefully I've laid something out for you at the end. Afterall, there's just so many different avenues of talk to tumble down whenever I bring up the utterly bizarre cross overevent which graced the Sea of Thieves world recently, the Pirates of the Caribbean event starring their rendition of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow. I mean, who in the heck could have seen that coming? (Disney showing up with presents to a Rare game? What a twist.)

At the time of this announcement I remember making a note of this event, but I didn't really feel like I had too much perspective on it and so I left it on the back burner. Then I was reminded again when the event actually dropped, but I passed once more figuring I'd see a little more of what became of the event and how people received it. Now it's been a while, and everyone's had time to guffaw over Jared Butler's (not Gerard Butler) rendition of Johnny Depp, forged in a career peppered with Captain Jack impersonating roles, and I've sat back and watched it all. And now I have something to say! I don't like it. Not the performance, that was miles better than Kingdom Hearts II's Johnny Depp voice, I mean the very practice of Disney (and others like) throwing around the likeness' of celebrities in order to push their products ever further down our throats. I find it an ill branch of the entertainment art form.

And yes, I understand that Captain Jack is a Disney owned character who was just bought to life in live-action by Johnny Depp; but let's be honest, that was a character-role by Depp and when you bring that character back around you're bringing the actor us as well. Which essentially means that Disney's death march to infuse celebrities irrevocably with entertainment transcends pimping out their cadre of actors and becomes a strange sort of immortalisation of these celebrities by making them into the definitive characters and then selling that character around long after the actors aren't involved anymore. (And they really want the face and not the person for Captain Jack. Rumours are that they want to kill Jack Sparrow off screen for the next Pirates movie) I'm sure it made for a fun event, and Sea of Thieves is apparently looking very healthy in it's wake, but it feeds a growing trend that I feel is a misstep on the road to a better and more creatively free industry. (As well as one with ample opportunities for it's suitors) And it's a trend that doesn't just touch on gaming, but movies and television shows as well. A trend of characters being replaced by celebrities.

Prolific and celebrated actor Nolan North was interviewed once, not too long after the launch of 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare'. Now the game was only really bought up in passing, Nolan wasn't in it afterall, but I found his tongue-in-cheek response remarkably striking. You see, the big thing about Advanced Warfare was that it was staring Kevin Spacey (before all the bad things came out, obviously) and that was used as a springboard to ask Nolan, this savant of the gaming voice acting field, what he thought about celebrities getting involved in game voice acting. Mr North took a moment to ruminate, or perhaps just to let the room sit with the devious gleam in his eyes of practised jokester orator, before responding; "F**k 'em". He elaborated that those people had their own success' and these opportunities should be for someone else, namely him. And though Nolan said this all in a light-hearted way, with a smile on his face, irrelevant as he likes to be, the point is a solid one. Celebrities have made their mark, why do they need to take show in places they don't rightly belong too?

The blame doesn't lie totally on the celebs themselves, of course, but on the studios who seek them out for 'star power' and 'brand appeal'; rather than seeking out people to fill roles who would be best for them and who would bring the role to life. Recently HBO tried to make this really dumb Family Guy clone based on the Royal Family called 'The Prince'. The show itself was total uninspired boredom personified, but the majority of the bored enthused cast who manned this trainwreck; they were celebs. No reason for that, the show was animated, but it sure made headlines before release! That's a pattern you'll see shared across practically any animated movie, every big budget movie and most TV shows both traditional and new-wave streaming-site feed. (Guess it's not really 'new wave' anymore, is it. Just the status quo now.) Now of course, the obvious argument is that this is how Hollywood and showbizness works, the person with the biggest credits gets the biggest roles, which is whatever, but often times you have situations where people who have no business getting a role with the credits they have, end up there anyway. Why was Russel Crowe playing Javert in 'Les Misérables', despite not being a singer? Or putting effort into learning how to sing? Or being a somewhat decent singer? (Okay, he wasn't terrible. Most of the time.) See what I'm driving at?

You don't see celebrity roles being snatched up by celebrities too often in the gaming world yet, but it's cropped up now and then and when it does, it rarely feels like it was done for the health of the role and more cynically for the health of the marketing cycle. Take Natalie Dormer's role as Lexi in Mass Effect. She's the ship's medic, doesn't have much of a role, yet for some reason there was entire pre-release interview video talking about her involvement. Yes, Doctor Chakwas before her had a famous voice, Carolyn Seymour, but she was just there, and playing a role that fit with what she was good at as an actress. Not saying that Natalie Dormer was bad at all, she was completely fine, I just don't know what she bought to the role that no one else could have. (You know, except for the fact that she was also doing Game of Thrones at the time.) It almost feels like a hold over from the old age of entertainment, where roles were made to fit famous actors and those actors would go around pretty much playing themselves everywhere. ('Arnold Schwarzenegger is- John Matrix', etc.) But now that's giving way to a new age of idolisation where characters are now becoming larger than life and taking on a reality of their own: Like the Avengers cast. (Which is funny because Anthony Mackie has talked about something similar before) And I'm not sure either is healthy for the overall art.

Seeing the same faces pop up everywhere as the same character used to make total sense to me. (consistency is good, right?) But the more I've grown up, as an amateur artist and just as a viewer of content, the more I realise that this sort of stuff is just stagnancy for the artform. Tolkien, for example, used to be uncomfortable about attempts to illustrate his work because he apparently saw that as a breaking down of the creative potential of his work. Should any one interpretation become 'definitive', then that could rob the original source material of it's infinite evocative range as a written piece of fantasy. I personally like it when art transfer mediums, but I can see where he's coming from. This new Amazon version of Lord of Rings feels hollow to me before I've seen a single inch of it, simply because Gandalf, Frodo and the gang are already set in my head and attempts to recast them will just seem like bad cosplay to me. That's ridiculous, of course, there's no such thing as a 'definitive adaption' but it's a symptom of this idolisation syndrome.

So what does any of this have to do with Johnny Depp? I just find it a cynical and weird symptom of this whole affair for the literal face and features of an actor to be profited off without the actor's approval or involvement, and I'm trying to rationalise how we got here. I'm sure that Sea of Thieves treated the entire thing with respect and dignity, Rare seems to made up of decently folk afterall, but I'm still left disquiet. To play devil's advocate, I'd much rather actor's likenesses and performances be immortalised through their roles than the actor themselves being dragged around the industry for their 'star power' alone. Ideally, though, the art would come first. Larger than life celebrities sticking their heads everywhere without provocation, or simply for marketing, could do with some serious toning down. So there's my utterly unfocused rant out of the way, back to gaming talk tomorrow!

GoldenEye returns

 I found his weakness

Gaming history holds a great many nexus points wherein pervasive ideas have sprung. Little nodes in the web of gaming that set the standard of what some new system or idea could be, thus dictating how every game since will be made. It's a consequence of the nature of creative industries, in that ideas are generally shared built upon throughout the years. (Something that Warner Bros. Interactive seems intent on quenching with their latest copyright, but I've already delved into that whole situation previously) As such we have a number of 'progenitor' games that we can point to as instant classics because they, alongside other advances, pioneered a style of gameplay that's now commonplace. Shenmue, for example, bought us the tradition of day and night cycles and NPC schedules, Wolfenstein 3D bought us our first 3D shooter environment, Alien: Resurrection defined the now universal control scheme of first person shooters. (However that last game is admittedly no where near as popular as the other examples.) And more to the point of this blog, GoldenEye 007 popularised competitive PVP and is just an all-round beloved game.

Bought to us in 1997 to remind us all that no matter how far back we look, they'll always be some rare examples of good movie tie-in games, (Although as the movie was 2 years earlier, I suppose you could say that the 'tie in' title is debatable.) Goldeneye has been long considered one of Rare's greatest games. It presented a comprehensive and fun campaign, characterised one of the most popular movie heroes of all time and, as I mentioned earlier, pretty much wrote the model for multiplayer games in the years to come. But let me not drag credit away from where it's due, much of this game really did change the way other titles would be made outside of mere multiplayer. Specifically I find that to be true in the level design which, through a process that one design themselves called 'clumsy', focused on being interesting first and functional second. I'd say this not only helped inspire some other beloved FPS' like the widely overlooked Timesplitters franchise, but perhaps even contributed to modern level design standards. So why is that we're only hearing about a potential remaster for the game now?

Of course it must be noted, there was an actual remake eventually made for GoldenEye, but that game came with the incredibly odd caveat that Peirce Brosnan's face was replaced with Daniel Craig's. That alongside several story changes, reworked levels and- okay it was more of a retread of the idea of making a GoldenEye game rather than a remaster of the classic N64 title. A proper remaster was however, in the works for a time, which just makes sense considering the fact that the game had actually already inspired a sequel from within Rare. Only, that sequel couldn't legally feature James Bond or his stories because Rare didn't own them, and so was born Joanna Dark and the Perfect Dark games. (Good luck on that AAA sequel, Microsoft, hope it doesn't turn into too much of a predictable disaster) Coming back to remaster the old classic for the Xbox Live arcade seemed like the perfect move in the late 2000's now that Rare was owned by Microsoft, with the only outlying factor being that the original was sort of a Nintendo property.

As such, development on the Remaster apparently went through before Nintendo has been told of the deal, and if you're foreseeing disaster then you've a sharper eye for such things than the Microsoft heads who neglected to let the developers know this. To be fair, it was assumed that Nintendo wouldn't have a problem with this for whatever reason, which in hindsight sounds a little naïve knowing how straight draconian Nintendo can be with their old games. Development was halted right at the finish line when negotiations started to get this done, but from what I heard some leaks of the project caused Nintendo to go nuts and pull the plug on the whole thing. Honestly, I can't imagine why this would be the case, given that the game was so obviously close to being done that this leak couldn't have been too consequential, (Leading me to believe there may have been other factors involved and Nintendo merely scapegoated the leak as a handy Casus Belli) but I guess those are the sorts of fine details that are doomed never to be known outside of Nintendo HQ.

But then, how do we know all this? And more specifically, how do I know that the game is in such a polished state to be nearly sellable? Well, that would be because as recently as this year someone posted footage of the game in action to prove it's existence. And then, to put a cherry on top of the cake, another soul leaked the ROM file of the game onto the Internet for anyone who travels in those sorts of circles. (Don't mind me whilst I fire up Retroarch... I'm kidding, anyone who might be reading this with legal power behind them. I would never condone a legally grey action like that.) From the accounts of those that have played it, however, we know it to be a mostly complete touch up remaster of the classic that retains the charm of the classic that so many grew up with. (Not me though. That was way before my time.)

Visually the remaster does a great job of retaining the exact visual style of the original with significant resolution improvements and detailing. Specifically, one might note how 007 actually appears to have facial features in the remaster, and if you squint your eyes and do a handstand it almost looks like Brosnan's mug too. Experts and nostalgics have praised the game as being 'the best remaster you will never play', and I even heard some talk that small servers have been sourced to actually play the multiplayer once more. (Not sure if anything has come of that. Multiplayer games are so oversaturated nowdays anyway) Unfortunately I've heard no confirmation about whether or not this remaster would feature the rumoured 'All Bonds mode' which the original allegedly scrapped for licencing reasons. So I can only assume it's missing yet again. (Shame, I'd love to see who'd win in a brawl against Connery and Moore. As, I assume, would Alan Partridge) Although I hear Lazenby was never considered for the mode so I guess it would have disappointed anyway. (Bet they would have forgot David Niven too.)

It seems such a unexpected, yet curiously timely, development for these games to come out now, as we do live in the age of the remake/remaster. Pretty much every year we hear about another popular game franchise getting a touch up to some varying degree that it can honestly be pretty hard to spot when a new game in your favourite series has just been announced at first glance. Nier Replicant is getting a remaster, Mass Effect 1-3 are getting remasters, the old God of Wars are getting remasters, it only makes since that some of the old classics get the good treatment too. It's only a shame that the nature of the game makes for a proper remaster that goes the whole hog from ever likely hitting our consoles. Especially since the Bond licence has since moved on. This ROM file of dubious legality is likely the best we're ever going to get.

Although if there's one thing this does get me thinking about, it's how many other games have been cancelled at such an advanced state that someone, somewhere has a practically complete version of it sitting on a hardrive. I mean by all accounts this remaster is something of an outlier, even the developers themselves remarked on how easy the project was to fix up, but there's got to be some at least 50% done game out there which suffered the same premature fate. As a lover of gaming curio's, I'd love to see a few more of them float into the public space in the same manner that this and 'StarCraft: Ghost' did, because even if we can't play them I find their history to be just fascinating. 

Everwild

Listen to the beat, listen to the rhythm

Jumping ahead to the Xbox Series X second reveal event, wherein we saw an influx of new games, I did spot a certain group of games that made me excited. Although, as should be obvious by now, Microsoft does suffer from an overabundance of 'Cinematic trailer' syndrome when they could really use just a solid gameplay trailer every now and then. Sony have got this down pat but Microsoft are still dragging their feet, showcasing that even at the cusp of a new generation they are still behind the curve. (Cue the 'mile long ship' analogy.) One problem with all these new games is that a lot of them have left their audience quiet in the dark about what the game actually is (you know, the single most important part!) which really speaks to a failure in marketing if you ask me. Some games, however, do manage to skate past even this, although barely, on the grounds of being just so gosh darn beautiful. 'Everwild' is one of those games.

Back when this title was announced last year under the Rare label, it's teaser trailer was still enough to turn some heads. For me, as a huge fan of the 'fictional ecology' aspect of games like Monster Hunter World, the creature designs absolute glared out to me as something interesting that I wanted to see more of. Take or leave your stylised aesthetic with the smoothing of details and the emphasis on stark, differentiating colour, but I had to see more of the inspired animals and fungi that inhabited this world. They seemed to walk this line between the fantastical and the believable, managing to delight your senses without totally alienating them. So even when I had little to no idea what Rare had up their sleeves for this title, and given their eclectic back-catalogue of games it could literally be anything, this is a game who's image stuck around in my subconscious for a while. It must have made an impression, because even a year later in a year of game reveals, I recognised this title instantly and was excited all anew. (There's the power of a strong design team, folks.)

That's something that was carried through in the trailer once again, and thus I suspect that it'll end up being the main draw and likely the sole focus for whatever the title shapes up being. The fictional ecology just seems so rich well conceived that I'd imagine truly becoming immersed and invested in this fictional, but fantastically tactile world. In the trailer we see an abundance of wildlife take the forefront, from the huge earred elks from the very first trailer hiking along mountain paths to bulky mustachioed beasts-of-burden felling trees in the woodlands. Everything pops out so well. I think that comes, in part, to the glorious fur animation that I think every beast we're seen so far appears to be sporting, it's reminiscent of 'The Last Guardian' in a way and manages to convey the fabric of the animals hair decently. You can just about imagine brushing your hand through the individual strands, it's particularly evocative.

In fact, there's this sense of spirituality running through the whole trailer, emphasising the connection between nature and man in a harmonious sense, and we can translate that into a connection between the viewer and the fictional animals of this world. Practically every shot in this trailer that features a human is co-starred by one of these animals and we see them tackling the challenges of the day as one, whether that be trekking up a dangerous mountain with falling rocks, sitting at a campfire to unwind or, well whatever they were planning to do with that toad who spewed out his spawn from his mouth. (That's probably my favourite shot from this all, by-the-by. Which actually mirrors my favourite shot from the 'Horizon: Forbidden West' trailer.) Even the climax of the trailer seems to hone in on this theme of spirituality, with the four humans of the trailer conducting some pagan-looking ritual with incense, apparently in order to cure a wounded fawn. Then they get visited by a Deer god or something, it's all very whimsical- Yet frustratingly mysterious.

To say that Rare are playing the actual meat of Everwild close to the chest is an understatement, currently it's starting to feel like they actively don't want us to know anything. (Which could be indicative of the title still being fairly early along in it's development cycle.) Even on their official website all the marketing team could muster to try and sell this game was the following; "Everwild is a brand new IP in the works at Rare, where unique and unforgettable experiences await in a natural and magical world." (Wow, and what does this tell us? That this isn't a sequel to Banjo Kazooie? Figured that one out myself, somehow.) As much as the aesthetic of the game is strong, I'm a big proponent of substance over style, so this secrecy does tick me right off. Don't get me wrong, I understand wanting to be discrete for one's first trailer, but if you can't even muster a blurb at the bottom of your second trailer, maybe you've started the marketing ball rolling a little prematurely.

But this gap in actual coverage does leave space for one of my favourite things; rampant speculation, so that's where I'm headed next. But I should probably start by saying that I'm already fairly certain off the bat that this game isn't going in the direction I most want it too. Because as beautiful as all this fantastic creatures are, my first thought is of all the exciting a cool fights they could put up as I attempt to bring them down in a Monster Hunter style-showdown. That's not this game, I'm almost certain. (Besides, MHW exists to scratch that itch right now.) But then the big question is what exactly all this is leading up to? My gut guess would be that we're looking at some sort of action adventure title that revolves it's story around the preservation of some spiritual threat that's going to look something akin to the swirling darkness from 'Breath of the Wild', only that it's not going to have something as tangible and understandable as Ganon behind it all. I know that, given none of the coverage has even hinted at the slightest sign of trouble, this seems a little like a wild guess in the dark, yet it's also the safest choice. I would personally hope for something a little more original, but I feel like if the team had something like that they'd show it off. (Or at least hint at it!)

I mean, what's the alternative? That this turns out to be some super-pretty survival game that's all about utilising the power of nature to prosper? That just sounds like an even less fun version of 'Ark: Survival Evolved'. (Apologies to those who actually like Ark, I could never get into it.) Maybe there's something to be said for that theory though, as we do get a look in at four humans in this trailer which is typically the go-to for game trailers when they want to convey co-op play. Modern survival titles are almost always cooperative in order to provide some 'depth' to an inherently paper thin premise, and modern Rare do have a prior of releasing a puddle deep game that looks beautiful but was lacking in tangible promise for a least a year. (Looking at you, 'Sea of Thieves') Look at me, the second I raise the possibility of this being a survival game I immediately start looking down on that concept, but I suppose there could be some surprising twists in there that could reinvigorate the over-saturated genre, but I don't know because these developers are adamant in keeping us all in the dark!

And that's my biggest problem with Everwild that I keep circling back around to; what is it that we're supposed to be excited about? Even 'Death Stranding' was proceeded by Kojima letting us know that this game would be unfamiliar to everything else we've experienced, Rare are treating this game like the red-headed step child. I'm not asking for gameplay- well I am, but I'll settle for a genre drop, hell even a perspective drop, so I know that I'm supposed to look forward to. Right now, Everwild could just end up being an animated movie and I'd be fine with it, but something tells me that Rare haven't suddenly started to get into the movie market, especially not in 2020. In closing, Rare, your game looks creative and beautiful but you're being protective; it's time to be real parents and allow your baby to fly the coop.