One to properly sink into
I haven’t felt immersed in a game for quite some time.
I can give you a date, actually — December 22nd last year. It was the last time I played Dark Souls 3
before returning home from Christmas holiday. When I came back my computer’s power supply had started to fail.
Since then almost all of my gaming happens on my far more reliable Switch. It’s a great wee thing. It has an interesting range of games and a lot of utility. I recently took it on holiday with me and simply charged it with my phone charger.
That being said, the Switch never immersed me.
Many of its games feel like a strange hybrid between a true console quality experience and that of a handheld game, much like the system itself.
Playing on it takes me back to when I was raising Pokemon on my Nintendo DS on the school bus, not the times I would wake up early on Saturday morning and play Playstation 3 until my dad yelled at me to stop wasting the day.
I’ve sunk many hours into these games, generally because of how long their storylines are, but I rarely feel immersed in them. Xenoblade 3 is different.
It’s the first game I’ve played on the system that doesn’t feel limited by the hardware. The worlds are vast, the gameplay is nuanced and the graphics hit an impeccable sweet spot between stylistic and realistic.
It reminds me of playing Skyrim
for the first time at 13yearsold, when I would spend hours just
Osees. A Foul Form. ★★★★
Another day another release from Osees (or whatever name they are going by at the moment). This time they have taken it to the basement, cranked everything into the red and let their inner hardcore punks come out to run amok. No sound too abrasive, no feedback too overwhelming. Just the sound of grown humans, who have the ability to play the most complex music, reducing their sound to a vicious one two, one two with maximum fuzz. That is not to say A Foul Form contains no melody, only that the ‘‘tunes’’ are drenched in a malevolent crust of garage rock, so you really have to dig to find them. While it sounds like it could be hard going, John Dwyer and co attack everything with such joy that it’s easy to submit for 22 minutes.
If you like: Hardcore
— Cain Lindegreen exploring the world because of how well designed and interesting it was. Every corner has something interesting, be it some form of collectable, a quest or just the gorgeous geography itself.
I’ve never played a Xenoblade game before and thus had no idea what to expect, but the plot is selfcontained and no prior knowledge is needed to follow along.
A lot of that story is characterbased, which is great, as your roster of six are all wonderful and flawed in interesting ways.
More interesting are the themes of the game. Two of your characters are Overseers, speciallytrained military units who magically send off fallen soldiers and allow them to rest.
The game never treats death as a triviality. Instead it is given quiet moments away from the bombastic action. This theme of death extends to the plot itself, as all of your party members have less than a year to live, some
Warren Zevon. Preludes. ★★★★+
Nearly 20 years after his death, Warren Zevon has yet to ascend to the cultural status of other far less deserving artists, contemporaries never good enough to be his peers. Cough cough, The Eagles, cough, Fleetwood Mac. Maybe it’s because the savage, cynical side to his songwriting made people uncomfortable. Look past that self installed shield and Warren Zevon wrote some of the most honest and openhearted songs of the time. This new deluxe edition of Preludes contains 22 tracks that were meant to be works in progress. But the tracks are so good they stand by themselves. Providing a fascinating look at his process, which proves his songs were so strong they could stand totally unadorned and still be completely engrossing. After all this time, it’s just great to hear his voice again. — Cain Lindegreen more than others.
Yes, they want to save the world and beat the bad guys, but they also just want to enjoy the little time they have left.
All of this is brought together with stellar voice acting in a refreshing variety of accents. One party member even has a cockney accent.
It’s not all perfect. The first few hours were rough, with nonstop cutscenes and infuriatingly slow tutorials. It took me about eight hours before it clicked for me.
If eight hours is too long for you, then that’s fair. But Xenoblade is in the family of JRPG where the content is seemingly endless. Eight hours is but a drop in the bucket for the depth of this game.
That depth extends to the gameplay, with a huge amount of interesting and nuanced mechanics built around a unique realtime combat system I’ve never experienced before.
Fights are all about positioning,
Demi Lovato. Holy Fvck. ★★★
‘‘Am I the only one looking for substance?’’ sings Demi Lovato on her new single — to which the answer is, obviously, no. But her search for ‘‘substance’’ takes on a sharply different tone given that Lovato recovered from a nearfatal overdose in 2018, preceded by addiction, an eating disorder and being raped as a teenager. Holy Fvck signals a genuine shift. In the past year, Lovato has come out as nonbinary, launched a sex toy and gone UFOhunting in the desert; in short, it sounds like she’s finally having fun. The album harks back to the poppunk sounds of her 2008 debut, Don’t Forget, with Skin of My Teeth pitched somewhere between McFly and Foo Fighters. But there are some thrillingly dark moments too.
— Sophie Harris Guardian News and Media
In
,the real journey is the friends you make — and battle giant death robots with — along the way. with some classes able to do high damage from the front or side, but this might separate them from the healers. There are choices you have to make.
You can swap your party’s classes between fights and train them in different styles, elements of which can be brought into different classes. The amount of character builds you can create is insane and a lot of my time is spent purely grinding up class levels because I enjoy it so much.
The level of care put into the user experience is unmatched by anything I have seen on any console. With nuanced camera controls and rebindable shortcuts, it feels like a classic tactical RPG experience that is equal to playing on a PC.
Now that I understand Xenoblade 3, I’m going to be playing it for a long, long time. But you need to be ready for a big game that is asking a lot from you. For me it was undoubtedly worth it.
Moonstone. Robert Ashworth (viola), Sarah Watkins (piano). Rattle (2 CDs)
The viola, usually thought of as being ‘‘second fiddle’’ to the violin, larger cello and double bass in orchestral performance, is displayed as a brilliant instrument in this album of two CDs that shows music it can produce with its full range of sounds and effects. All works are by New Zealand composers, written for viola. (Creative New Zealand deserves credit for its grant towards this excellent project.)
Virtuoso artistry is provided by the musicians. Robert Ashworth (a soninlaw of the writer) is the Canadianborn principal viola in the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra . He studied at the University of British Columbia and in Salzburg with teachers and at the Universitat Mozarteum. He has been guest principal viola for the Sydney Symphony and several other
Australian orchestras. Sarah Watkins is wellknown as a former member of NZTrio. She graduated from Canterbury University before attending the Juillard School of Music, New York, winning her master of music and
Nicki Minaj doctor of musical arts degrees.
Dunedin composer Dame Gillian Whitehead wrote the opening four tracks, which are the first performance of her fourmovement work
Moonstone. A huge range of sounds from the viola dazzle the ears, well matched by the piano, and finally this disc is completed by Alfred Hill’s fine
Sonata movement in B minor. Hill, who died in Australia in 1960, was New Zealand’s first professional composer. (No other movements have been conclusively found for this interesting 10minute work.)
Disc two contains works by six other New Zealand composers: Alchemy (David Hamilton), Viola and Piano Ross Harris), Ngake and Whataitai (Gareth Farr), Dream Lines for Viola and Piano (Chris Cree Brown), Miroir (Leonie Holmes), and Sarvaatmanah (Sarah Ballard). All facets of the tonal capabilities of the viola are shown in the double programme, from bass clef to highest harmonics, all in interesting and impressive fashion.
Verdict: Highly recommended introduction to charms of the viola.