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Blood in the Felt
The original Fallout — the original original, the video game, the one from so long ago that they refused to sell it to me at the media section of my local grocery store because it was rated M for mature and as a twelve-year-old they suspected I didn’t qualify — it had a time limit. After a certain number of in-game weeks, the quest failed. Sayonara, Vault 13. Sorry about the terminal dehydration.
You know what else has a time limit? My life. Your life. All of our lives. I was once advertised a wall calendar that would count down the weeks in the average lifespan. It was perhaps the grimmest thing I’ve ever seen, one’s life scratched off week by week. Fallout: Power Play is that ghoulish product in board game form. It is a waste, the subtraction of every minute in its presence keenly felt. If the function of art, as Tarkovsky noted, is to harrow the soul and prepare it for death, then Fallout: Power Play is anti-art. It is a game that makes me unready for the beyond, incurious to receive the answer to the great mystery that awaits us all. It makes me resentful and crabby. It makes me want to claw those minutes back from the felt and stuff them red-nailed into the craw of whichever anonymous designer retched forth this slouching antichrist.
I do not recommend it. Not ironically, not for a sake of a lookie, not to release its carbon back into the atmosphere through combustion. Stay away. The radioactive skeleton has been thus mounted atop the dump, its meaning undeniable. If you enter here, you will leave poorer.
Leave It in the Pattern Buffer
Montgomery Scott, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise, was known to quadruple his estimates for emergency repairs. This excess was eventually termed “buffer time,” and allowed Scott to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker. Later, after becoming stranded on the surface of a Dyson Sphere, he kept himself in suspended animation for seventy-five years via his ship’s pattern buffer.
The moral of this story is that Star Trek contains one too many uses of the word “buffer.”
Despite growing up on The Next Generation and loving “Lower Decks,” the episode about the Enterprise‘s lower-ranking officers who lived in fear of Commander Riker rather than regarding him as a lovable goofball who never learned how to sit in a chair like a normal person, I haven’t watched even one minute of the animated series by the same name. It isn’t anything personal. I just don’t watch much TV these days. After playing Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time: The Card Game, that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.
Wrex. Shepard.
What is there even to say about Mass Effect? It’s old. The final installment came out twelve years ago. Not counting Andromeda. Which we don’t around these parts.
But, sure, I’m a sucker for Commander Shepard, the Normandy, the whole goofball crew. I have a pile of opinions nobody cares to hear, fond memories of blasting through human supremacists and robot supremacists alike, even some suppressed affection for the Mako, that tumble car I rolled sideways down every mountain in the Armstrong Nebula.
Now Mass Effect is back as a board game. Why now, you ask, a dozen years after all the cosplayers were airbrushing themselves blue? Pffft, who cares. Designed by Eric Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon, Mass Effect: The Board Game — Priority: Hagalaz is one heck of a mouthful that I intend to never repeat. It’s effectively a generous side quest set during the third game’s galaxy-spanning war against the Reapers. And, some hiccups aside, it’s a nostalgic treat to see the gang back together for one more bash.
SPACE-BIFF! 