Neymar joins Barcelona

The fact that Barcelona, for whom above all else the lack of defensive cover was brutally exposed towards the end of the season, have gone and signed an expensive striker brings back worrying memories of the Joan Gaspart era, when they used to buy forwards like Marc Overmars, Javier Saviola, Geovanni and Simao Sabrosa, almost because Barcelona had to make an annual prestige signing from abroad. It was quite clear as they started to tail off in spring this year with Carles Puyol injured and ageing, and Gerard Pique inconsistent and lacking leadership, that Barcelona really needed another top-class centre-half, but the players they did use to replace them were either inexperienced – Bartra – or not really defenders, like Javier Mascherano and Alex Song. One of the riskier things that Guardiola tried as manager was to put such players in the team, knowing that the system covered their lack of positional experience, so that their existing strengths could be utilised. With him gone and the system creaking due to the health and form issues of Messi, Xavi and David Villa, the absence of defensive power beyond Puyol and Pique was laid bare. Neymar is a formidable signing, but not one that appears to be driven by a coach’s vision or the result of a collective need. Rather, it’s the sort of boardroom acquisition that Barcelona were fond of making back when they weren’t very consistent. It will be curious to see whether this singular talent, all hair and jinking feet, can be the new Ronaldinho or the new Saviola.

Hans Zimmer hits another one out of the park with ‘Man of Steel’ soundtrack

Looks promising.

Hans Zimmer’s music for the Dark Knight trilogy has given me and many others a lot of joy over the past few years (my favourite track being this particular piece from the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack last year), and judging by the recent Man of Steel trailer he seems to have hit another homerun. Here’s just the music without the dialogue and the explosions. I mean, it’s just impossible not to feel completely pumped when you listen to it.

To the Moon (2011)

Having sat unplayed in my Steam catalogue for months and months, To the Moon finally received a proper runout and I finished it last night. A short game, but one that grabbed me from the title screen, where an exquisite tune plays out and immediately makes you swoon. Hearing it you just know there’s something special coming, and that expectation was more than fulfilled by a game of rare heart, tenderness and emotional maturity.

It starts with a fairly well travelled premise, but with a twist: in the near future, technology has enabled dying people to do the one thing they have always wanted to experience, to fulfil the dream they could not in life. But instead of providing a one-off virtual reality scenario, hired scientists retrace the patient’s memories using charmingly retro-looking headsets and plant, Inception-style, the impulse to achieve the elusive dream for him/herself. The patient then grows up motivated to attain the goal before he or she passes away, so that in effect a whole life is re-lived to a different conclusion. In To the Moon, the patient is Johnny, now in coma and a day or two away from death, and the scientists Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts. As per the title, Johnny’s wish is lunar travel, but his home help Lily notes that the old man has been curiously unable to explain why he wants this. The two doctors are then tasked to travel through Johnny’s memory, from just before being bed-ridden all the way back to childhood, trying to fulfil the terms of their contract by making their client want to go to the moon, while encountering some unexpected past events which throw their mission in a new light.

The setup allows the developer, Kan Gao, to tell Johnny’s story backwards, and what is slowly unveiled is a moving tale of a lifetime’s love between him and his late wife, River. As Drs. Rosalene and Watts find the memory items – a book, a backpack, a stuffed platypus, and so on – which link one era of Johnny’s memories to the next, what initially plays out is a troubled marriage between a devoted yet frustrated husband and an oblivious wife afflicted with mental illness. Delving deeper, the doctors are increasingly perplexed by Johnny’s dying wish: they don’t find any evidence for him wanting to be an astronaut at all, instead coming across a number of meaningful yet cryptic dialogues and mementos which create a pervasive feeling that some important event is missing. Rosalene and Watts travel through each timeline via some limited point-and-click adventuring plus small bouts of puzzle mini-games, but these never take centre-stage and are mostly in service of allowing means for user interaction with the narrative. As Johnny’s life is peeled away layer-by-layer, and we get closer to the real reason for his desire to go to the moon, things build up for a payoff that packs a truly poignant emotional punch.

A potentially mawkish premise is made consistently fun and engaging by the wonderful wit and humour of the two scientist characters. An early gag pokes gentle fun at the 16-bit era JRPGs with which ‘To the Moon’ shares aesthetic kinship, while the banter between Rosalene and Watts are sharp and affectionate, inducing genuine laughter as well as a real sense of camaraderie. The pixel-based graphics are charming and expressive, while leaving enough for our imagination to fill in the gaps. Probably the most noteworthy is the music, by turns soaring and intimate, bracing and wistful. Also written by Gan, the soundtrack is more than just a pretty complement, but an essential part of the game. It’s as crucial to the work as, say, Simon and Garfunkel were to The Graduate, and carries the game whenever the dialogue or the visuals hit (self-imposed) technical walls.

Alongside the aforementioned Inception, comparisons have been made with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento, but the movie that To the Moon most closely resembles is the Japanese film Love Letter by Shunji Iwai, both in its use of the gradual reveal and the luminous marriage of music and narrative. But there’s something uniquely profound about Gao’s treatment of the game’s main themes. Johnny’s regret isn’t motivated by self-pity over past failures or envy of youth; River’s illness isn’t overplayed or sentimentalised, and the unintrusive way her side of the romance is introduced gives the game’s denouement a terrific emotional crescendo. Then there’s the sheer poetry of the lighthouse motif, which is best left unspoiled. It’s astonishing, then, that Gan was just 23 when he made this.

To the Moon was praised at the time of its release as ‘a game-changer for video game storytelling’, an accolade that was also given 2 years later to Bioshock Infinite. The two games share, intriguingly enough, some important similarities, but they represent the opposite ends of the argument for grown-up narrative in games today. Bioshock Infinite has faced criticism for its excessive violence and the fact that all the shooting and looting get in the way of its brilliant storytelling. On the other hand, To the Moon was decried by purists as little more than a visual novel. You could say that one day soon a game that strikes the right balance will be released and herald a new age for the medium, but for me To the Moon is a perfect little thing: a game designed to tell a beautiful story, and a beautiful story that can only be told as a game. It would lose its essence as a book or a movie, and like other standard bearers for game narrative such as Ico and Dear Esther, it is the act of your interaction with the characters that makes it truly special. I feel – and hope – that this is one of the possible futures for interactive entertainment. It doesn’t have to displace traditional games, which seems to be the absurd fear of some of the more hardcore fans, but it can and should be a new way for talented artists to tell their tales.

Bruce Springsteen – One Step Up

If there was a theme song for that sweet, cursed emotion named romantic doubt, this would be it. Tunnel of Love as a whole is a masterfully intimate album full of great tracks, but ‘One Step Up’ is the standout track.

It’s one long lament of a man whose marriage, much like Springsteen’s was at the time, is on the rocks: our protagonist leaves his loveless home after a fight, to take refuge at a motel. Alone in a bar, he broods on the cold house he has just left, and songless birds, and silent church bells. Same mistakes were made, same words exchanged, and now he is wryly, if ultimately dismissively, contemplating a hint of an affair. All the while there is the recognition that he has let himself, and his wife, down; that his semi-voluntary exile into the night is not new, and it’s down to him more than anything. His self-loathing is endearingly direct – ‘when I look at myself I don’t see / the man I wanted to be / Somewhere along the line I slipped off track / Movin’ one step up and two steps back’, yet Springsteen ends with an elusive, hopeful note: ‘Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms / The music was never-ending / we danced as the evening sky faded to black…’ We never find out if our anti-hero goes back to his wife, even though we are pretty sure where his heart lies. Hidden under the steadiest and sweetest of arpeggios is one of the best breakup songs in pop history: a pitiful story of a man who can’t get over himself to stay, and is honest enough to know it. Like the greatest heartaches, the pain and pity in ‘One Step Up’ is directed at the self: Springsteen tellingly makes no explicit mention of the protagonist’s other half. It’s his fault and suffering alone. From a male perspective, the mood created by the bittersweet melody and plaintive lyrics is note-perfect, hitting just the right mixture of foolish longing and resigned angst.

When he wrote the song, Springsteen’s marriage to actress Julianne Phillips was disintegrating. His true love, Patti Scialfa, was the female vocal in his E Street Band and thus right under his nose, a fact that somehow makes ‘One Step Up’ more poignant. Tunnel of Love is an album full of great love songs like ‘Tougher Than The Rest’, ‘All That The Heaven Will Allow’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’, which are all more optimistic takes on his relationship. Incidentally, the linked video for ‘Tougher Than The Rest’ – the best pure love song that Springsteen has written – is notable for the electrifying look that Scialfa gives him – gives me chills every time.

A big month for consumer tech (particularly gaming)

Internet is going to tremble at the amount of tech news that will come out from for the next month. Looking at the schedule:

• 21 May: Microsoft will unveil the next Xbox
• End of May: Nvidia is rumoured (almost certainly) to be releasing the next round of GPUs, the GTX700 series
• 4-8 June: Intel to officially announce the 4th generation core i-series CPUs
• 10-14 June: Apple is holding the annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference, where iOS 7 is expected to be announced
• 11-13 June: E3, where Sony and Microsoft are expected to announce many of the important details surrounding their next generation consoles

Obviously this is going to be an important period as far as gaming is concerned: PS4 has already been announced, but we don’t know what it looks like, which hopefully will be addressed at E3; Microsoft will finally unveil the next Xbox, amid many rumours and much controversy; the GTX 700-series is only an incremental upgrade from the 600-series, but a new line of GPUs from Nvidia is always fun, as is the new round of CPU release from Intel; last but not least, this year’s WWDC is widely expected to debut the first iOS to be overseen by Jony Ive, and by all accounts it will be a very different beast to what we are used to. It will also confirm whether the iPad announcement cycle has definitively moved to a late-year slot.

I’ve watched E3 on live stream for about 4 years now, and despite the overblown nonsense and gif-friendly unintentional hilarity I generally enjoy them. Sony’s conference this year is helpfully scheduled for 10am where I am, so here’s hoping for 5 years in a row.