Miguel Sanchez

Boyce

Erica (PS4, 2019) Erica is a full-motion video game about a girl named Erica who wakes up one morning to find a box on her doorstep with a severed hand in it. What follows is the investigation into where it came from, what the medallion it was holding is for and Erica's own past, with gameplay taking the form of choices for how to respond in situations and conversations, and the odd situational prompt to interact with an object. I've never played a FMV game before, but I've postulated at length about all of David Cage's games in the past so I think I know what I'm doing. That said I'm going to split this up into two parts. One for the format, one for the story. The game opens... in fact it doesn't, before the game opens you're prompted to download the Erica companion app and control the game with your smartphone. It's a better experience apparently. f**k off. It's a games console and I have a controller. I'm using that. That said, the touchpad on the PS4 really isn't a good way of interacting with this game. With Quantic Dream games you have a selection of options on screen and a button prompt next to them. You press the button for the one you want. This is how video games work, and it's fine. Erica manages to make quick time events worse, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Having to move a pointer over it via the touchpad is much less intuitive. In all the PS4 games I've ever played I don't think I've used it as intimately as I did with Erica. I did get better at using it the more I played through the game but it still doesn't work. The area of the pad itself is less than an inch high yet some times you need to do an action going from the top down. This doesn't feel natural, and you're often worried you won't do something right and the action won't progress the way you intended. Sometimes you'll need more than one swipe for it to register. The same goes for picking dialogue options, where I occasionally picked the wrong one. When I got my PS4 I wondered how games would use the touchpad. Erica is probably the most extensive use I've seen and it's really not that good. The game opens with the declaration that no one path holds all the answers and you'll need to play through it several times to get the full story. This is fine, and it's a premise which we've seen in several genres and to great effect. Given it takes about an hour and a half for a full run of Erica it's also quite helpful and even encouraging, making you want to play again so you can try and figure out what's going on. The biggest problem with this seems to be that you might find some different details, but the story always goes to certain places and ends in the same location, with minimal differences to the outcome. Given how nonsensical the story itself is this doesn't really help. I think that opening declaration is what proved to be the game's undoing for me. By suggesting I could find all the answers or figure out what was going on it's like a sense of false hope. I saw every ending, I made every choice and I still have lots of questions. Erica finds the hand on her doorstep. The police turn up and say the hand belonged to someone who worked with her father. She spent a lot of time in the mental hospital her parents set up together when she was growing up. Her dad was killed there and she has nightmares about it, so she goes hoping to figure out why her dad was killed and what was really going on. I won't go into the story in every detail but the premise is that the hospital is a front for some sort of drug-fuelled cult which tries to copy the Delphic oracles of Ancient Greece by pumping young women full of hallucinogens and making them see the future. This is obviously nonsense but the game's biggest problem is that it never seems to decide whether or not it's real. Erica sees people performing the ritual, but there aren't enough people at Delphi House for this to actually be real. The movements and actions of the prominent figures there never makes any sense and doesn't align with any of the things Erica sees or reacts to. I've seen the argument made online that Erica is an unreliable narrator in the midst of a Fight Club-esque split personality madness, which is why a supposedly dead former patient at the hospital is the one who killed her dad and is following her around getting her to disrupt the rituals. Unlike Fight Club though there's never any convincing denouement where this is rationalised. The action moves from one stilted conversation to another in settings that don't make any sense. Erica tags along with the police inspector in charge of the case of the hand that was sent to her but he doesn't make any sense either. The way the game is shot and framed doesn't help matters here. As my first FMV I have to say this didn't give me a strong impression of the genre. The entire thing looks filmed and staged far too neatly and precisely. Ultimately the game is an assortment of video clips strung together based on your choices so I understand why there has to be some sort of uniformity. But the stilted nature of conversations and confrontations that have to wait on your input gives the entire thing an awkward quality which feels even more unreal than the story itself. This isn't helped by the girl playing Erica, who might be very young and pretty and have immovable hair and never sweats but there's no point where she reacts to anything the way a normal human would. The entire game takes places in her nightmares, her extremely sketchy flat, the mental hospital filled with hallucinatory plant extracts and "The Chief Inspector's House" which I didn't even realise was a new place the first time I played it. Nobody else acts with a modicum of normality either. It's a silly premise but the way the characters react to things make the whole thing seem even more surreal, but not in a good way. I think there might be a decent story somewhere at the heart of Erica. The way it's filmed screams "mid-range three part TV drama that everyone who watches it forgets about a week later," so I think it could work stylistically on some level. A coherent (or any kind of) story where things are justified or explained would help. Erica might have nightmares and visions and we might not know the difference between that and reality but this doesn't help when the player/viewer is actively trying to figure out what's going on, rather than being shown it. Ultimately my impression of Erica will always be the expectation or desire for something more. Whether that was better controls, more convincing acting, a story that either makes sense or gets resolved properly, I'm not sure. Hopefully if I play an FMV in the future it doesn't make the same mistakes.

Very courteous of the Rangers fans to say hello hello to both teams as they walk out.

Are Hearts in this final aye?

Did Neil McCann just call Ramsay world class? Is this the sort of thing that happens in football punditry when I'm not watching?

Anyway, mon the yams

The f**k is Thompson wearing?

But then I'd be eating cold eggs which might genuinely make nauseated enough to die.

Holding it with a multi-folded teatowel obviously, but still far more bother than it's worth.

It really isn't Aside from having to time them, aside from having to guess if they're cooked the right amount or not, aside from them scalding you while you're trying to get the shell off - I don't know how anyone could be hungry, want to eat eggs, boil them and still be able to stand the thought of eggs after standing smelling them while they're taking the shell off. Howling.

How can anyone ever be arsed boiling eggs?

Based on that picture I can see why.

Bee update: The pest control guy came from the housing and he can't get to them. I'm living with bees for the summer. He sprayed some stuff near where they're coming and going and I've seen more than usual floating about there but that's all I'm getting. Hopefully they go away after that.

When I was watching the Forest/Sheffield United playoff highlights the other day they showed the pitch invasion and from the limited clips of that, just about every shot that was one or two people rather than a wide shot of the full crowd seemed to have people with their phones in front of them screaming the whole time. Colin Murray went on a decent rant about it which I agreed with. I also agree with the earlier suggestion that should allow players/staff to leather anyone who comes near them.

Guess I'm not going to the Hydro any time soon. What a load of shite. Good luck with yours when it comes.

If you're referring to this sort of thing: I first saw these one year when it was Liam Gallagher day at TRNSMT. The whole city centre full of children wearing these things. I thought I'd entered a parallel universe because there's no way anyone - of any age or gender - should have been wearing those. Yet here they were.

This is the noise I've been hearing for the past week and a half:

Final update: it's bees, not wasps. No insect genocide for me, judging by what I've found online.

It's wasps. It's a constant faint humming/buzzing sound this morning (well, later this morning) with the occasional extra squeak. I went to the landing window and looked up. There's a 3/4 inch bit of pipe sticking out from the guttering and I could see one or two of them buzzing about. It's been nice knowing most of you.

@Solitaire

There's been a strange noise coming from inside the wall next to my bed for the last week and a half. When it first started it was like an intermittent, periodic squeaking noise. Relatively loud. This louder noise comes and goes but other times (and right now, and basically since I stopped refreshing the Rangers thread) it's quieter, lower and more continuous. Am I convincing myself there's a wasp nest growing in the wall next to me for nothing? I'm looking up what nests sound like right now and there's definitely not the continuous buzzing that most sources seem to list, but then if it's a relatively new noise I don't imagine there would be lots of the little shits right away. If I sit here straining my ears any longer I'm going to convince myself it is. I live in a standard tenement with stone outer walls and... god knows what making up the actual walls inside. Most of them are hollow when you knock on them, and a large part of the section next to the window, where the noise is, is hollow too. Does anyone here have experience of a wasp nest (or similar) being constructed in the walls of their bedroom?

Been a pleasure sharing the thread with you all. Good night everybody

This is class tbf