Metallica's Through the Never

A few years ago, Metallica created a movie, Through the Never. I heard about it at the time, but didn't pay a whole lot of attention. The opportunity to watch it came up recently, so I took a couple of hours to check it out.

I had basically no pre-conceptions going in, since all I knew about Through the Never was that Metallica was involved. I wasn't sure if it was a documentary, or live concert, or what. Turns out, it's pretty much a 90-minute music video, with a large amount of concert footage included.

There's a storyline, kind of, where a roadie goes out to find a missing truck while the concert is going on. All sort of surreal stuff happens, from riots in the streets to the guy setting himself on fire. There's almost no dialog or explanation, which is one reason the movie feels like a music video. Seems to me that weirdness-on-screen while the music plays is a music video staple. The story bits weren't bad, but I didn't feel like they really added much to the experience.

The majority of the screen time isn't the roadie story, though, but rather concert footage. This was really well done, with lots of good close-ups of each band member and a goodly amount of wide-view shots around the stage and crowd. Some concert footage is pretty much static, showing the same few angles over and over, but Through the Never doesn't have that problem.

I've been to a good number of Metallica shows over the years, so I recognized several of the stage tricks. Either from my own experience, or videos I've seen. The giant coffins suspended around the stage from Death Magnetic, for instance. The giant blind justice statue from ...and Justice For All, and the cemetery crosses from Master of Puppets. And most notably, the "stage collapse accident" with the burning roadie running across the stage. I saw that one in person on an earlier tour - right after Load came out, if I remember right.

As a concert video, Through the Never is pretty good. I was a little disappointed that they didn't use Seek and Destroy, but otherwise the music selection was good. It was worth spending a couple of hours on the couch. I think I'd have been disappointed if I'd gone out of my way to see it in a theater, though. If you're going to make the effort to go out and see a band, better to go to a real concert, not just a movie about one.

The Hockey Playoff Streak is Alive in Detroit

Twenty-five straight years of playoff hockey in the Motor City.

That's a really long time. The streak is old enough to vote, smoke, and drink. There are little kids running around Detroit in Red Wings mini-jerseys who can't remember a time without playoff hockey in their city, and neither can their parents. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to hockey before I moved to Michigan in 1998, so effectively I also have no memory of a Detroit team that missed the playoffs. ESPN did an amusing article on what the world was like the last time the Red Wings weren't in the Stanley Cup playoffs: no Internet, the Berlin Wall was still up, Pretty Woman was a popular new movie, their leading 2016 goal scorer hadn't even been born, etc.

It wasn't pretty this year. The Detroit Red Wings just barely made it in, requiring a tiebreaker with the Boston Bruins since both teams had 93 points on the season. The Wings have the worst goal differential (-13) of any playoff team. They ended the season with two losses.

But none of that matters, because the playoffs start later this week. Forget the regular season stats; playoff hockey is a whole different beast. First round will be against the Tampa Bay Lightning, same as last year. Which is annoying for me, since the Lightning are my second-favorite hockey team, but I'm still fully on board for a Detroit win. Especially after losing a close series last year, in seven games.

Detroit is certainly a long shot to take the Stanley Cup this year. But then, it was a bit of a long shot just to make it to this point. You never know what might happen.

Happy West Michigan Spring

Welcome to springtime in West Michigan!

Spring officially started almost three weeks ago, and we've had some nice weather, but winter isn't done yet. I woke up this morning to a couple of inches of snow, and a forecast for more. Made this morning's trip down to the exercise room require a bit more willpower than usual.

Today is the home opener for the Whitecaps, our local minor league baseball club. They might get it in, but it'll be pretty miserable in the stands in this weather. I tend not to plan on trips to the ballpark until June or July, myself. While snow is fairly rare, cold and windy is pretty common early on in the season.

This is likely the last gasp for winter. Forecast says that we should see days in the 50-60 degree range next week. Bring it on.

Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles was only available on the PS3 when originally launched back in 2008. I liked what I read about it, though, so I've kept an eye out for a PC version. That was made available a couple of years ago, and a few weeks ago I finally picked it up.

The game is a hybrid of a visual novel and squad-based tactics. The story is told through voice-overs on mostly-static images. It's mostly linear with very little in the way of decision-making, and feels very much like reading a story rather than participating in one. On a regular basis, the story puts you in a position to go fight some enemies, which drops your squad into a tactical battle. Win the battle and move ahead in the story; lose and your only option is to try again until you win. There's no open-world, choose-your-path-to-victory aspect to this game.

I liked the story in Valkyria Chronicles, though I wouldn't call it groundbreaking. The setting is a fictionalized version of Europe in the World War II era. You play a militia soldier who is defending his country from invasion by a neighboring empire, leading a squad into various battles around the country while fighting off the invaders. The cast of characters is fairly extensive: every member of your squad has at least minor background details in their biography, and several have recurring roles in the story. There's plenty of small details to poke into, such as the relationships of the people in your squad or parts of the history leading up to the current war. The general arc of the story will be familiar to most gamers or readers of historical fantasy - evil empire vs underdog militia, semi-magical ancient powers, love story against the backdrop of war - but that doesn't keep it from being interesting.

Whenever the story reaches the point of a battle, you're sent to the tactical battle system. You choose your squad at the start of each battle, allowing some level of customization based on the map and mission. Each turn, you're given a limited number of command points to use in moving and attacking. You can choose to spread those points out to keep multiple units in the fight, or focus them to get high performance out of a smaller group. The maps have terrain features to take into account, some of which certain squad members may handle better than others. Each action puts you directly into control of the acting unit, so moving and attacking (and getting yourself killed) feels immediate, not just a matter of moving a piece on a board.

Between battles, you can upgrade the abilities and equipment for your various soldier classes and tank. You might also learn new special "orders" that can be used for temporary bonuses on the battlefield. If the story missions are getting too difficult, you can also do repeatable "skirmish" battles to gain more experience and upgrades before moving ahead. Those skirmishes are mostly just repeats of the story missions you've already completed. I didn't spend a lot of time in this portion of the game, just enough to buy a few upgrades after each battle. Progression in the story missions didn't seem to depend too much on gear and experience level; it was more about learning the quirks of each specific scenario.

The tactical battles have some issues. For one thing, they take forever to complete. I spent more than an hour on several of them, more if you count all the times I had to reload. Controlling your characters isn't always easy - several times I ran into invisible walls when the terrain looked clear, or was unable to move out of ditches or around obstacles. And the battles are designed to force you into using specific tactics, limiting your choices of troops and gear. Want to use your experience and weapons upgrades to specialize in using snipers or shocktroopers? Too bad, the next battle will be unwinnable without heavy use of lancers. Or vice versa. The system appears to be customizable at first glance, but there's really not a lot of options in how to progress. I think the game would have worked just as well if they'd simply made your troops a bit stronger after each battle, without bothering with the whole leveling/upgrade system.

The worst part of the tactical battles is when the story changes the rules while you're in the middle of fighting. You might be moving steadily toward claiming an enemy supply depot, when suddenly a enemy general teleports in to block your path with his heavy tank for a few turns. Or you're advancing across the desert when a sandstorm springs up out of nowhere. I get that changing conditions is part of battle, but these feel arbitrary and designed to cause mission failures (which you then must repeat, with knowledge of what's coming). I did a whole lot of reloading of saved games about halfway through a battle, when some twist was thrown at me that made my original squad selection and tactics obsolete. None of the battles were especially difficult once you discovered the details of that particular scenario and started over, taking advantage of your future knowledge. It often took a good long time to get to that point, though, with several reloads and lots of frustration. My save game file says 32 hours of playtime, but Steam says 47 hours, which gives you some idea of how much I had to re-load and re-try the battles.

Despite its weaknesses, I enjoyed the majority of my time with Valkyria Chronicles. It's a fun story with enjoyable characters, and while the battle system has its issues, it works well enough. I don't have any desire for another play-through, though, now that I've seen the whole story.

Happy National Beer Day

On April 7 1933, people could legally buy beer for the first time since Prohibition began. Sounds like a good excuse to celebrate!

By happy coincidence, some friends and I met for beers last night out at Hudsonville Pike 51 Brewery. Three of us had beers, anyway, and the fourth tried a few wines. Which was easy enough to do since the same location holds the Hudsonville Winery also (same ownership).

I had two sets of four sampler flights. Began with a couple of different cream ales, neither of which did a whole lot for me, but my friend Joe liked them. My taste runs to darker beers, so that wasn't a big surprise. The other two beers in the first flight were the Q-Hut Red and Knight's Brown, both of which were a little more bitter than I like, but not too bad.

Then I moved on to the darker beers. A honey wheat stout, a coffee-infused stout, the Sinister Kid imperial milk porter, and a special blend wild ale. All four of these were good, but the last two really stood out. Supply of the wild ale was limited since it's apparently pretty complex to make, but I was able to fill up my growler with the Sinister Kid porter.

Good times with the fellas, and some good beer to take home. That's the way to celebrate National Beer Day!

1980s/90s Christian Rock and Metal

Poking around the Spotify catalog has been interesting on several fronts. Discovering new music via recommendations and playlists is the main draw, but it's also been a trip down memory lane.

As a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I listened to a whole lot of rock and metal. Mostly Christian bands, though there was a good amount of Metallica and Rush in there as well. And I mean a lot, to the point where I wore out cassette tapes and broke tape players. Yeah, cassettes, although I did mostly switch to CDs toward the mid-90s. That all seems so ancient now, but I still have some of that stuff lying around. Though I don't think I have any cassette-playing equipment any more.

Spotify has a whole bunch of the bands that I remember in its catalog, and I've been revisiting them lately. The "similar artists" feature means that once you've found one, it's easy to get lost in clicking around to a bunch of stuff from the same time period. I built a playlist out of some of the favorites that I ran across. A few of them, in no particular order:

• Petra - These guys were seriously long-lived, from the 1970s to the 2000s. I best remember the On Fire album, which I'm pretty sure I bought at least three times since I broke one cassette, bought another cassette, and later the CD. But their best work in my opinion was Beyond Belief, both the song (probably my favorite single Petra cut) and the whole album. Saw them several times in concert, too - 3.5 that I can remember. (That 0.5 is a show where just the lead singer, John Schlitt, did a concert with pre-recorded band tracks.)
• Die Happy - I listened to a lot of very heavy stuff by a band called Vengeance Rising, who aren't on the playlist only because my tastes don't run to screaming-all-the-time vocals any more. Die Happy was formed when most of that band split from the leader, and they had a very different sound. Blues Metal, as I remember my friends and I called it. It's too bad they only ended up doing two studio albums.
• Deliverance - I was in a garage band in high school (of course) and we'd have been deliriously happy to sound like Deliverance. Their first two albums were pretty much pure metal, but later on I'd classify their sound more as hard rock. My favorite album is Stay of Execution, which I'd put somewhere in the middle.
• Bride - Southern rock, heavy style. These guys absolutely loved their wah-wah pedals. Judging from the Spotify most-popular list, people seem to like the Snakes in the Playground album. Nothing wrong with that one, but for me, Kinetic Faith was better. Particularly the songs Hired Gun and Everybody Knows My Name.
• Whitecross - I best remember Whitecross for two things: listening to their In the Kingdom and High Gear albums while delivering newspapers, and getting to meet their bass player after a show sometime during my high school days. It was one of those 10-second autograph conversations, but it still stuck with me.
• White Heart - When I came across this Spotify page, I was unsurprised to see that the most popular song by far is Desert Rose. I remember that ballad as their biggest hit, though I liked the rest of the Powerhouse album quite a bit as well. Saw these guys a couple of times in concert.
• Tourniquet - Probably the heaviest band on this list. I listened to some even faster and harder stuff back in the day, but my tastes have mostly left those behind. But even before I started this little trip down musical memory lane, I still had Tourniquet in my MP3 collection. Pathogenic Ocular Dissonance, Psychosurgery, and Vanishing Lessons are all great albums.
• Saviour Machine - It's hard to classify Saviour Machine musically. Some of it is metal, but there are also operatic and classical themes. Thematic classification is pretty easy, though - dark and apocalyptic. Lots of focus on the end times and the book of Revelation. I saw them live twice, easily two of the better concerts I've ever seen from anyone, Christian or secular. Too bad that's unlikely to happen again, as lead singer Eric Clayton had retired from music, at least partially due to illness.

Watching Some Robot Games

I saw some robots playing games last weekend.

The competition area.

The occasion was the FIRST Robotics Competition, just a few miles down the road in Kentwood. FIRST is a youth organization encouraging interest in science and technology through participation in various competitions. It ranges from grade-school events building small LEGO-based creations through high-school events working with fully mobile, semi-autonomous robots.

I'd heard about programs like this in passing before, but this was the first one that I visited in person. I learned about it from a fellow Rose-Hulman alumnus who is an adviser in the program. At his suggestion, I dropped by for an hour or so, just to get a feel for the event.

A robot and supporting gear, on its way home to its booth after a match.

The competition was held in a high school gymnasium, and it was packed. Most of the teams had brought cheering sections of parents and students, as well as all the paraphernalia that goes along with a robotics competition. The competition area took up most of the basketball court area, with lines of pit booths at either end where the teams could store their gear and work on their machines. It was loud with all those people, and during a match the cheering was just as enthusiastic as you hear at any basketball game.

One of the pit booth areas.

There are some fairly complicated rules about scoring and advancement, but the actual matches weren't too hard to follow. Two groups of robots roll back and forth across a match area, gathering up balls to throw through the opponent's goal. The whole thing had a medieval theme, so obstacles were supposed to represent moats and the balls were boulders being thrown at a castle. The robots get in each other's way, of course, but for the most part they do what they've been designed for. It was pretty interesting to watch the different ways that the robots were implemented. They all cleared obstacles, picked up balls, and threw them at the opponent's castle, but not all in the same way.

The robots themselves are pretty neat for a technology nerd like myself, but the part of the event that stood out most was just how many youngsters were there having a good time at a science and technology event. The support structure was impressive as well, with financial sponsors and adult advisers that worked with every team. FIRST is doing some great work. I hope they can continue to provide fun competition and learning opportunities for a good long time.