Rocket League: Car soccer is so much better than real soccer

If I asked you to play a video game and told you that it was car soccer, you’d say I was dumb and there was no way you’d spend good money on it. You might think, “This couldn’t possibly work, car soccer is stupid, stop texting me stupid things.” Well you, sir, are a jerk, because car soccer is one of the biggest sports games ever now and it’s also one of the best.

There’s not much to Rocket League. You pick a car, join a 5-minute game, and try to score the ball in the other person’s net by hitting it with your car (duh!). You can rocket yourself into the air with boosts, flip your car around, and there’s a few specialty modes which give you powers, turn the game into basketball or hockey with cars, or force you to prevent the ball from falling onto your side of the field entirely. There are ranked and unranked matches, and each finished match gives you some stuff to equip on your car. That’s… well, that’s pretty much it.

As far as a multiplayer game goes, this one can be frustrating to no end. Unless you actively pair up with people, it’s all luck whether you get a solid, crafty partner or someone who keeps sabotaging your efforts. I’m more antisocial with these types of games than most, so playing with random people often gets on my nerves, especially when the opposition scores a goal and my partner just quits. Playing ranked matches is almost a lesson in frustration, since no matter how well you might play, you can’t control anything else your partner does. Unranked mode isn’t bad, and it’s great just to sit down and learn the game without any concrete result, but they’ve recently taken away from of the unranked features, like all the specialty modes, making it kind of dull. People also like to talk shit (yes, guilty), but every online game is filled with trolls, and Rocket League is probably pretty tame compared with others. If anything, it leans toward sarcasm, since you have insta-chat buttons that let you type “What a save!” every time your partner makes a garbage play and lets in a goal (seriously, what were they thinking? The gall to NOT EVEN TOUCH THE BALL ON A SLOW PLAY COMING AT THE NET, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME DO IT, OKAY ASSHOLE?! HOW DID YOU EVER MAKE IT TO PLATINUM ANYWAY???). 

With that said, the frustration is more than worth it because of the unique gameplay. The designers realized that car soccer need not be a realistic venture and decided to make the cars jumpy and drive flexibly. Everything happens within a second or two, so that you’re never out of a match, even if you’re down by a few goals with a minute left to play. There’s so much style to hopping into the air and directing the ball into the goal that nothing is ever the same from one match to another. It’s a bit stressful but requires both skill and knowledge of how the game rolls, making it a kind of chess-on-wheels. It’s also played in three dimensions, which separates it from any other sports game that’s based mostly on 2D movement, like the NHL or NBA games, or even just regular racing games.

I don’t know what the price of Rocket League is anymore since I bought it for a measly $20 on both PS4 and Xbox One about a year ago. Whatever the price is, it’s worth it for the repeatability and the content that’s always being added. I haven’t ever been able to just sit down and play a game so nonchalantly in my entire life, where you can jump in and out of matches as you wish, vegging out on the couch after a long day of work and playing with the kids. It’s like a couch for my brain, where I can let it slowly unwind and eat junk food at the same time. For one of the cheapest games I’ve ever purchased, you can’t ask for much more.

Howard the Duck: Dumb, stupid, and one of the best movies of the 80s

I know this movie gets a terrible rep. I google searched “terrible 80s movies” as I was wondering what I should write about next and out pops up Howard the Duck to go along with Cannibal Campout and Slumber Party Massacre II (anyone got copies of these I can borrow?). But really? Maybe it’s my strong sense of nostalgia, including having watched this several times as a kid, probably when I wasn’t feeling great and wanted to just watch movies, but I loved Howard and I bet most people who’ve seen it secretly do too.

The movie centers on Howard, voiced by Chip Zien (who no one will remember from anything important ever) and physically played by Ed Gale (I can’t believe this is the same person who was in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey as Station, holy bleep), as he is unwillingly transported from his home world, full of living ducks, to Earth. There, he falls in love with Beverly (Lea Thompson), and tries to send himself back home with the help of a scientist, Phil Blumbertt (Tim Robbins, who is never not amazing). It’s much more complicated than that, and yes, Howard, who is a duck, falls in love with Beverly, who also loves him back, and things…happen. You see how this might go off the rails and become one of the worst movies of the 80s. I mean, duck on human sex isn’t something that an Oscar-caliber movie is going to get away with.

Those who harp on the weirdness of Howard the Duck are missing the point entirely, though. This film is a great piece of 80s fluff, made in the same vain as Back to the Future or Gremlins. No, it’s not as good as those two, but it’s almost as much fun to watch a duck with the attitude of a down-on-his-luck 40-year-old man beat people up and get thrown around himself. It’s full of bad puns, 80s action sequences with mostly practical effects, and the rapport between the actors, for a movie as supposedly terrible as this one, is pretty entertaining. I love Lea Thompson and Tim Robbins, so maybe I’m being partial, but don’t you love them too? And I can’t imagine Howard being any more endearing than he is here. Sure, the idea has been floated of making another Howard the Duck movie, but it’s like saying you’d rather watch Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in all their CGI glory and with zero personality, than the old 90s version, which was a childhood classic. Why was it a classic? Because everyone knows how ridiculous the whole enterprise is, from the actors and directors to the special effects people, yet the actors let their personality flow freely through, making it campy but heartfelt. They don’t care that they’re dressed up in stupid costumes! LET THE ONE-LINERS FLOW THROUGH MY VEINS!@$%^#

For sure, this movie is a strange bird (yes, you see what I did there). It has–spoiler alert—space aliens, a duck civilization that’s close to our own, and duck on human sexual innuendo. But who cares? I’d watch it every time it’s on tv because it makes me smile when Howard says, “That's it, no more Mr. Nice Duck” or “No one laughs at a master of Quack Fu!” People take things way too seriously, as if there needs to be some grandiose point about the world in every movie to make it “good.” I enjoy those movies as much as anyone too (see The Assassination of Jesse James). But guess what? Some movies are made to be dumb and stupid, and I like having dumb, stupid fun. And I’ll be damned if Howard isn’t as fun as anything the 80s has ever made.

Life is Strange: A meditation on the meaning of life through time travel

Life is Strange is a weird video game experience. I’ve played through Until Dawn, and though it has limited gameplay, the effect of the game was pretty straightforward. It asked you to be scared and intrigued, giving you some form of control over the fates of the characters as they solve mysteries and navigate through a typical horror movie scenario. The gameplay was limited (walk around and observe things) as was the puzzle-solving. Life is Strange has a similar gameplay style, heavy on walking around and exploring your environment, with tasks that lead you to the next part of the story. It adds a bit more strategy as some tasks require you to rewind time after you’ve already changed something, and rewards players who investigate everything, either through necessary exposition or changing the story itself. The main difference between Life is Strange and most other story-based single-player games, including Until Dawn, is how the story is told. Even without the aspect of time travel, it’s a unique experience. It shouldn’t really work, because the story is so emo that were it a movie, only teenagers would enjoy watching it. The game revolves around a young girl, Max, who came back to her hometown, Arcadia Bay, after leaving 4 years ago and finds that she’s able to rewind small bits of time. Max is also having visions about the impending doom of Arcadia Bay, as she hallucinates during class about a massive storm heading for town. There are also posters for a missing girl stapled all over the school, and she bumps into her old friend, Chloe, who became friends with the missing girl after Max skipped town with her parents 4 years ago. It all sounds like an afterschool special with some sci-fi thrown in.

Playing Life is Strange doesn’t feel like an afterschool special at all though, and I think it boils down to ownership of the character and the pace of the game. What many movies in the drama genre fail to develop is a sense of identity. They gloss over key details that allow the audience to generate empathy for the actors, either turning them into stereotypes or making them do illogical or unreasonable things. Life is Strange is odd, in that your actions, whether you know it or not, affect the characters, and you get to peer into their lives by looking at all their most personal belongings. The basic storyline won’t change, but by putting the audience in a position to make choices about everyone’s outcome—including Max—in response to certain events, it makes you feel so much worse when you fail to save one or end up hurting another. This effect isn’t a quick burn like Until Dawn, where button presses ultimately dictate whether your character lives or dies. The choices you make can be contemplated and taken back in the moment, if you wish, by reversing time. They’re deliberate and, once chosen, permanent, because the effects are usually only seen later in the game. Just like real life, your choices appear to matter, and many of them are neither right nor wrong. As such, time travel is the perfect theme for Life is Strange, where tinkering with each decision can alter the timeline and affect people in unexpected ways. I should put a disclaimer on that statement though, since there still is a streamlined plot that requires puzzle-solving as well as choices that all advance said plot one way or another. However, the game gives you ample opportunities to fiddle with how it advances, with varying results for each character.   

The pace of the game is perfectly suited to the themes the game explores. You never feel rushed, even when you’re sneaking around, trying to avoid the security guard. The game shines in its quieter moments though, like in Chloe’s bedroom, the dorm where Max lives, or the diner where Chloe’s mom works. They’re small, lonely places that remind you of when you were 18 years old, hanging around at your friend’s house with nothing to do and all the time in the world. The music is also something that’s both relaxing and bittersweet, never veering off to cater to each specific moment, but rather emitting a calm atmosphere over everything and making each revelation more affecting than it otherwise would be. Just the intro, with Max walking down the hallway of her school, gave me goosebumps and had me listening to Syd Matters on YouTube.  

I haven’t played through the entire game yet, so writing this review may be a naïve proposition since I have no idea how the finale will be changed based on my in-game choices. It could end up like Until Dawn, which was disappointing in that there was just one endgame after all and very little can change it. I’m hoping that’s not the case, but even if it turns out that way, I still FEEL like my choices mattered anyway. Things happened throughout my playthrough that I had no control of, yet I still feel like I was somehow responsible. I guess that’s just life though, and like the game says, it’s very strange.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Enjoy it while it lasts

Once upon a time, this was my favorite movie. I was single then, and I hadn’t really had any meaningful, long-lasting relationships up to that point. But Eternal Sunshine made me feel as if I had been through one, bringing out complex emotions I didn’t know were even there. It made me understand a bit more about the way life works, that conflict is a necessary part of our psyche, and to cherish the good times as well as the bad. It also somehow made me yearn nostalgically for my younger self, even though I was in my 20s when I first saw it, because I wanted to reconnect with all my happiest childhood memories.

As with all Charlie Kaufman movies, the story of Eternal Sunshine plays off an original idea that’s meant more as a subject of discussion than a streamlined story. Here, he posits the question: what if you could erase painful memories? Instead of turning the question into something dreary, like getting rid of memories of bullying or abuse, he turns to relationships and walks us through the mind of Joel (Jim Carrey) as he gets the memories of his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) systematically erased. There are some side plots involved, which interconnect with Joel’s story, but the emphasis is on Joel and his memories overlaid with how he feels about them being erased as it’s happening. Each memory acts as an encapsulated moment, with the most recent scenes of bitterness between the couple erased first. As he slowly goes back in time to when they first met, his unconscious mind saddens to the fact that he’s now completely losing the girl he used to love, asking himself, through the projected image of his ex, if he could simply live in the good moments, not wanting to get rid of them at all.

After the procedure—spoiler alert—the two meet up again in a clever bit of fractured storytelling, where they meet at the beginning of the movie, only for you to find out that their meeting occurred after both lovers had their memories erased. Clementine, dating the guy who helped erase Joel’s memories and takes advantage of them to get in with her, realizes that you can’t fake love, and falls for Joel all over again (though it’s not really as cheesy as it sounds, the two are somewhat distraught about finding out they once knew each other very intimately). It’s got a clear message that no matter how imperfect the relationship is, it’s still worth having and holding onto your memories of it.

It’s Joel’s memories that impact the viewer most and tether everything together, though. I haven’t seen the movie in years, yet I can still recall images of the house where he first met his ex-girlfriend disappearing from him, slowly crumbling as he accepts that it’s likely the last time he’ll ever see her again.  The way these scenes are shot is so earnest, with two people who just enjoy being together, like kids in a playground. The camera rarely focuses on anything other than the two throughout these sequences, making everything around them dreamlike, as one room blends into another, slowly peeling away the memories and smoothly fading into the most intimate and happiest moments they had together. Joel’s memories are disconnected and surreal but so clear and vibrant. As an audience, you can’t help but feel sad for his misguided choice to get rid of them, just as he tries as hard as he can to hold on.

Eternal Sunshine would be a worthwhile movie if it merely showed what happened to the people involved in Joel’s and Clementine’s mind wipe. But filming Joel’s memories give it something that many movies tend to skip over: strong, relatable human emotion. It’s too bad Jim Carrey never received any recognition for this movie, because it’s a unique performance, the type that is extremely hard to come by in mainstream movies (I’m happy that Kate Winslet earned a nomination at the very least). These two characters seem to honestly love each other, and the movie takes the time and effort to show you why they do, creating intense memories of the type that most everyone has stored deep in their head. It’s like listening to a song where you don’t even have to know the lyrics; the music just makes you feel a certain way. And even though it makes me sad whenever I see this movie, it’s the kind of memory I don’t soon want to forget.