“The Greatest Science Fiction Novel of All Times and Our Time – ‘Dazzling’ — Time.” This statement appears on the cover of 2001. I won’t argue with Time magazine.

If you are a member of the National Space Society and have never read a science fiction book, this is the one science fiction book you should read. And you have to watch the movie which I consider to be one of the best ten movies ever made. Clarke wrote in the edition I reviewed [the ROC 1993 edition] that 2001 “has been called one of the most influential movies ever made and almost invariably turns up in the list of the all-time top ten” [p. viii]. It made my top ten.

This book is odd because of the way it was written. In the beginning section of this book, Clarke writes that in 1964 Stanley Kubrick, a movie producer and director, asked Clarke for an idea to make the “proverbial good science fiction movie” [p. vii]. The screenplay for the movie was a cooperative effort between Clarke and Kubrick, and when the movie was in production, the two of them were changing the screenplay as the film was being shot. Clarke writes that “toward the end [of the movie, the] novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions” [p. xi]. The way movies are made, normally the novel is written first and separately, then a screenplay is developed from the novel. For 2001, the novel and screenplay were produced at the same time, therefore “odd.”

The movie has four distinct parts, whereas the novel has a discrete beginning, a middle and an ending, all blending into a single story. There are differences between the movie and the novel, but I would consider them to be minor.

The novel begins with man-apes fighting with each other. These man-apes discover a smooth black monolith but they have no interaction with this monolith.

Moving to 2001, Dr. Floyd is sent to the moon to investigate a smooth black monolith found there. This is a solid rectangular object with 1:4:9 dimensions, the squares of the first three integers. The geologists learn that the monolith is three million years old. Then the monolith sends a powerful signal aimed at Saturn (changed to Jupiter in the movie).

Discovery, a manned spacecraft, is sent on a mission to Saturn to see if the signal to Saturn would reveal something about the monolith. The active crew of this spaceship consists of two men, Frank Poole and David Bowman, as well as three others who are in hibernation. The astronauts in hibernation are expected to be brought to life when the spacecraft reaches the vicinity of Saturn. The entire mission is under the direction of a human-like computer, HAL 9000.

HAL 9000 has secret information about the mission that Frank and David do not have. HAL discovers a plot between Frank and David to reduce HAL’s capability and HAL, fearing for the mission, is able to dispatch Frank into space. David, in his attempt to save Frank, is shut out of Discovery by HAL. But David is able to return to the ship and disables HAL.

Frank then goes on a short space journey in his attempt to learn more about the monolith and becomes part of the monolith. Frank’s statement as he enters the monolith is, “it’s full of stars.” The last twenty-eight pages describe Frank’s journey through space and time. It seems that Frank becomes a “Star-Child” without a physical body.

Arthur Clarke at first thought that this would be the end of his effort with the black monolith, and his characters. He writes in the introductory material that “I indignantly denied that any sequel was possible or that I had the slightest intention of writing one” [p. xii]. However, the scientific and photographic results from spacecraft of the solar system bodies led Clarke to change his mind.

2001 ended up being the first in a series of four books. Each book describes some aspect of space flight into the solar system and a meeting with the monolith.

This first in the series describes the adventures of astronauts as they venture to Saturn in search of the identity of the black monolith.

Part of me wants to run counter to all the hype surrounding this game. “Look” I want to scream “It’s just another rooms and corridor 3D shooter. It isn’t doing anything that revolutionary. The AI isn’t as good as F.E.A.R. Half of the gameplay is straight out of Deus Ex and System Shock 2. The DirectX 10 enhancements aren’t all that great. Isn’t all the waffle about interactive art and moral choices getting a little bit out of scale?”

But the simple fact is that I can’t. Bioshock isn’t a game you can compare with others in terms of technical features, graphics and AI. The only way you can judge it is to take the experience as a whole. And frankly, on those terms, it’s out in a league of its own.

By now, you’re probably at least dimly aware of the basics. The game takes place in Rapture: an undersea city built as a utopia by a rich industrialist and a gaggle of intellectuals looking to escape the political and moral strictures of the surface world. Sadly, Rapture’s dream has gone horribly wrong. A mixture of deep-set corruption and dangerous substances has brought about its ruin. As you – the lone survivor of a mid-Atlantic aircrash – enter, Rapture is falling apart. Its tunnels are collapsing, leaks are everywhere, and its denizens have gone utterly, barking mad, splitting into gangs of ‘splicers’ who roam the halls and corridors in search of ‘plasmids’, ‘Eve’ and ‘Adam.’

Here things get a little murky. To survive in and escape from Rapture, ordinary weapons are not enough. For one thing, ammo is hardly in plentiful supply. For another, the splicers are so numerous and ferocious that it’s hard to pin them down with bullets alone. The only way to stay alive is to use the plasmids, genetic enhancements that enable you to harness the forces of fire, ice and electricity, create air traps or enrage splicer gangs so they fight one another, or use telekenisis to catch and throw objects around the room.

The problem is that plasmids rely on supplies of Eve to keep running, and on Adam if you want additional powers or upgrade your existing ones. Eve can be found just about everywhere, but Adam is a little more tricky. The only reliable source is to ‘harvest’ it from Little Sisters: the weird, child-like creatures you’ll see wandering around. This leaves you with two dilemmas. The first is physical – the Little Sisters are guarded by Big Daddies, hulking, armoured automatons with formidable offensive capabilities. The second is moral – is it ever right to do away with something that looks like a little girl, even if you’re told they’re not human and you never actually see what ‘harvesting’ entails?

All this is only the beginning, and I desperately want to avoid telling you anything that might spoil the experience for you. The storyline here isn’t imposed on you in countless cut-scenes, which are used sparingly and from the same first-person perspective, when at all. It’s drawn together from a dozen or more recorded voices, from the radio messages sent to you by the main cast of oddball characters, and just from the jingles, posters and public announcements that haunt Rapture’s private places and abandoned public spaces. If you just want to shoot things and destroy them in ever more inventive ways, Bioshock lets you wreak havoc with a vengeance, but there is something deeper going on here. I’ve played games where I’ve been gobsmacked, pumped with adrenaline or shivering with fear, but I haven’t encountered many that can manage to shock or disturb; that can make you feel pangs of guilt or pity or even something approaching tenderness. It’s not simply a case of creating atmosphere – Bioshock wants you to connect both emotionally and intellectually with its world.

Doing so isn’t difficult. Running on a tweaked version of the Unreal 3.0 engine with a lot of heavily customised shaders, Bioshock has to be seen to be believed. The water effects have got a lot of attention, and quite rightly so: the ripples that cloud your vision when you step through a sheet of pouring water is going to be imitated a lot over the next twelve months, and the reflection and displacement effects are completely and utterly wondrous. The lighting, too, is beautiful, with everything illuminated by harsh incandescents or an understated neon glow. Yet none of this would matter without one of the most cohesive and constantly impressive prolonged feats of production design I’ve ever seen in a video game.

From the masks and costumes worn by the splicers to the art deco architecture and the authentic period furniture littering every room, Rapture feels like a real underwater city in an advanced state of decay. While other FPS developers seem stuck in a stagnant relationship with industrial landscapes, jungles, barrels and crates, or forever feeding off inspiration from Aliens or The Matrix, the Bioshock team have let themselves go and create a world all of their own imagining. It draws on the work of Ayn Rand, the architecture of pre-War New York and the designs of Nazi architect, Albert Speer, but at no point does it feel totally indebted to any one influence. What’s more, the game packs in more variety than you might expect, with the glossy civic areas of Rapture covering a number of industrial zones, and some surprisingly beautiful scenery in the areas designed for leisure purposes.

What’s more, you can’t ignore the cinematic skill with which it’s all presented. Other games – The Darkness, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 – have done wonders with décor, lighting and motion to create a brooding tension or a sudden feeling of deep unease, but Bioshock takes it to a whole new level. This, you can’t help feeling, is what a truly great game is meant to be: not some dozy semi-interactive movie, but a world where your interaction is the biggest part of a rich, fully-realised experience.

Kudos, too, to the audio team – so much of Rapture’s rich atmosphere is conjured by the period music sounding out from slightly tinny speakers, or from the evocative voices that rise from abandoned recordings, or the radio messages that dish out guidance, mockery or assistance. In the early stages of the game, the mad mutterings of the various lurking splicers are a constant source of terror, to the point that the sudden appearance of the blood-crazed freak is practically a relief. And the lines they utter when they’re standing over your twitching corpse are packed with pitch-black humour.

You’ll get the latter more than you might like, but don’t worry. Bioshock eschews checkpoints or the usual save/reload nonsense in order to keep you constantly in the game and in the world. On dying, you instantly respawn with meagre quantities of health and Eve in a local ‘Vita-chamber’, meaning you don’t lose anything but your self-respect and a little time while you retrace your tracks. This is typical of the way the game handles its mechanics. You don’t organise your plasmid powers and passive abilities by pausing the action and going into some arcane status screen – you find a machine and get it to reprogram your mind and body. You can buy health and ammo from vending machines, or upgrades from a gatherer’s garden. At times, you can almost forget you’re playing a game.

And like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock, Bioshock gives you freedom to do things your own way. It’s only on a second play through that you’ll truly realise how much scope the Plasmid system gives you to create your own character to match your own style and play. You scan specialise in hacking machines and security systems (done through a simple pipeline puzzle game) or in melee combat or in offensive Plasmid-based techniques. You can try to play using stealth, cunning and misdirection, or you can simply concentrate on all-out assault. As with Deus Ex, if you play through just the once you’ll only get to grips with half the game, if that.

Some people have a lukewarm response to the combat, but I think the creative use of Plasmids and the sheer viciousness of the splicers – particularly later variants tooled up with Plasmids of their own – makes up for the lack of what you might call advanced collaborative AI.

To be honest, if you can play Bioshock and you choose not to, then you’re as mad as the nuttiest splicer Rapture holds. Have your head examined before it’s too late. On the 360 it’s a no-brainer, and on a moderately specified PC – in one case an Athlon X2 3800 with an ageing Radeon X1800 GPU – a few detail concessions result in a smooth and still stunning experience. I was lucky enough to try it on a Quad Core system with an Asus GeForce 8800GTX, and it’s easily the best thing that I’ve ever seen.

Yet at risk of reiterating a point, it’s not the technology that matters here, but the fiction. Moments of Bioshock will haunt me for months to come, and I don’t believe for a second that I can resist Rapture’s lure and not return. Only time will tell where Bioshock sits in the pantheon of all-time greats, but if you buy one game this month, this year – let’s be clear, this whole decade – this is the one you shouldn’t miss.

The finest game of the current generation. Other games may match or surpass it on technology or features, but it’s hard to imagine anything competing in terms of storytelling prowess or overall vision. A masterpiece!

Alright, let’s do this one more time. Now, this is going to be a bit of a strange video. As some of you may know, I’m a pretty big fan of the persona series. In fact, longtime viewers might be a bit confused since I’ve already covered persona 5 before on this channel… twice. I’ve said basically all that’s needed to be said at this point so why am I even talking about this? Well, the answer is quite simple. The kind folks over at Sega and Atlus were generous enough to send me an early copy of the Persona 5 PC port that, at the time of this recording, has recently released. I initially only wanted to talk about the port’s quality and whether or not you should consider picking it up. However, I figured I could use this opportunity to have a more nuanced discussion about how I believe Atlus have been mishandling their rereleases of the megaten series. This video is going to be divided into two distinct parts. I want to cover the Persona 5 ports before diving into the main meat of this topic. A lot of people have been looking forward to either getting back into the game or trying it out for the first time, so I think we should quickly look and see if these ports are at all worth getting. Just a heads up, I’m going to make the assumption here that you’ve either already played Persona 5 or know the general gist of it. While there aren’t going to be specific plot spoilers in this video per se, the footage you’ll be seeing is from the mid-game since it best represents what to expect out of it gameplay-wise. Just keep that in mind in case you’re a new player looking to get into this game for the first time. I’d also like to reiterate that I played the PC release for this video and everything said is about that version of the game. I won’t be covering the PlayStation and Xbox versions of the game, but I will briefly talk about the switch release since a lot of people are excited about that one specifically. The Problem with Atlus Rereleases. in The Problem with Atlus Rereleases I’m going to be talking about why Atlus Rereleases are bad. I’ll also be dedicating a large portion of this video to the recently released Persona 5 Royal PC port, Persona 5 Royal Switch port, Persona 5 Royal Xbox port, and Persona 5 Royal PS5 port. We’ll be taking a look at Persona 5 Royal PC to see if you should buy Persona 5 Royal PC and to answer if Persona 5 Royal Switch is worth it. You can actually view this as a Persona 5 Royal Switch Review if you want. But don’t let that distract you from the fact that this video is on The Problem with Atlus Rereleases by Nam’s Compendium. I want Atlus Rereleases to get better in the future and the Persona 5 Royal Ports are a good start, but it doesn’t fix The Problem with Atlus Rereleases in its entirety.

Few filmmakers short of Luis Buñuel have made better onscreen use of dreams than Robert Altman, and 3 Women is the film in which he most successfully (and disturbingly) captured the hazy logic and off-kilter visual perspectives of the unconscious state. Shelley Duvall delivered the best work of her career as a woman so shallow that it never occurs to her that people are laughing at her behind her back, and Sissy Spacek is brilliant as Pinky, the naive girl who worships her; their emotional give and take as they begin to exchange personalities exemplifies the kind of risky but satisfying performances that Altman knows how to draw from actors. Gerald Busby’s quietly troubling, discordant score and Bodhi Wind’s surreal artwork are singularly appropriate aural and visual backdrops, while Charles Rosher Jr.’s cinematography layers the images in intoxicating washes of yellow and blue. While Altman has made a career out of endings that don’t spell themselves out, the conclusion of 3 Women is both vague and provocative — have we witnessed the aftermath of a tragedy, a descent into insanity, or a quiet but defiant call to arms? Altman isn’t telling, but one can read 3 Women in a number of ways and still walk away convinced that it’s a work of singular vision and emotional power from one of the most gifted American filmmakers of his generation.

Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience’s primal fears. Prevalent elements include ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, demons, dragons, gore, torture, vicious animals, evil witches, monsters, zombies, cannibals, and serial killers.

The Sender – Roger Christian, Friday The 13th Part VI – Tom McLoughlin, Psycho II – Richard Franklin, Prince Of Darkness – John Carpenter, The Hitcher – Robert Harmon, Spellbinder – Janet Greek, Friday The 13th Part III – Steve Miner, The Fog – John Carpenter, He Knows You’re Alone – Armand Mastroianni, Halloween II – Rick Rosenthal, The Howling – Joe Dante, The Entity – Sidney J. Furie, Altered States – Ken Russell, Dead Of Winter – Arthur Penn, Ghost Story – John Irvin, The Changeling – Peter Medak, Friday The 13th – Sean S. Cunningham, Night Of The Creeps – Fred Dekker, Hellraiser – Clive Barker, A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 – Chuck Russell, Evil Dead II – Sam Raimi, The Beyond – Lucio Fulci, Possession – Andrzej Zulawski, Re-Animator – Stuart Gordon, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 – Tobe Hooper, Dark Night Of The Scarecrow – Frank De Felitta, The Stepfather – Joseph Ruben, An American Werewolf In London – John Landis, A Chinese Ghost Story – Ching Siu Tung, Videodrome – David Cronenberg, Wolfen – Michael Wadleigh, Near Dark – Kathryn Bigelow, Little Shop Of Horrors – Frank Oz, The Company Of Wolves – Neil Jordan, Poltergeist – Tobe Hooper, Fright Night – Tom Holland, The Shining – Stanley Kubrick, Aliens – James Cameron, The Thing – John Carpenter, A Nightmare On Elm Street – Wes Craven

Move aside E.L. James, Blanka Lipinska’s breakout series 365 Days has officially begun it’s english translation journey. This is Stephenie Meyer’s extended Legacy from Twilight.