Earlier today, football gaming fans got some bad (but not un-expected) news. Take Two has apparently canceled its proposed new NFL 2k video game. There wasn't any kind of press release or public announcement (that I saw). Instead, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick broke the news in an interview with Game File. The full interview is behind a pay-wall, so I wasn't able to read the entire thing. So I was reliant on other media outlets, such as Insider Gaming, to summarize the interview.

Take Two had obtained the rights to make an NFL game back in 2020. The kicker was that EA still held an NFL-mandated exclusivity on "simulation" NFL games, which meant that anything 2k would develop or publish would have to be some kind of "non-simulation" (i.e. "arcade") game.

However, the little shreds of news that we got about this game over the years indicated that it was in development hell, and may have been completely restarted multiple times. Now, Zelnick has confirmed that the designs that Take Two was experimenting with simply "weren't working out creatively". Take Two couldn't simply make an NFL 2k game like they used to back in the early 2000's, since that would qualify as a "simulation" game. This apparently left them struggling to try to find an alternative identity for their game. Would it be something like NFL Street? NFL Blitz? Legend Bowl? Or maybe ... ugh ... their own variation of Ultimate Team, but without a Franchise Mode to go along with it in order to appeal to sim gamers like me? Well, apparently, none of those ideas really panned out, and the designers were unable to come up with any ideas or prototypes that the executives felt would appeal to a wide enough market to justify the costs of the NFL license and development.

The only product that came out of the deal was a mobile card-collecting game called NFL 2k Playmakers, which went out-of-support after only a year on the market.

NFL 2k Playmakers was a mobile card-collecting game that was shut down after only a year.

You may have already read my review of NFL Gameday (the board game; not the old PlayStation video game). While I was looking up information about that game, I stumbled upon another, slightly older, football board game called 1st & Goal. This was an un-licensed football board game from a small publisher of family-friendly games. It looked incredibly similar to NFL Gameday, except that it seemed to involve more detailed football strategy and actual dice that added randomness to the final outcome of plays.

This looked like a huge upgrade over NFL Gameday's over-simplistic, rock-paper-scissors strategy. I went online trying to find out where I can buy this game, but I didn't find it listed for sale anywhere. It wasn't listed as being in-stock at my local board games' websites, and I had never seen it on the shelves at any of those stores. Believe me, if I had seen a football board game, I would have noticed! It was out of stock on Amazon (but has apparently since come back in stock!), and it wasn't available from any of the online retailers that I commonly buy board games from.

But one online retailer had a 2nd-hand game shop that listed 1 copy in "near mint" condition. So I gambled and bought it. Thankfully, it showed up in great shape, with all the components! In fact, it even included some expansion content that I didn't have to pay for. So I got a bargain!

I was imagining making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

Upon receiving the game and flipping through the rulebook, my first reaction was "where has this game been all my life?!" Seriously, how did this game exist for 15 years without me hearing about it? One of the reasons that I bought NFL Gameday was that I had actually been mulling the idea for Kickstarting a football board game in my head that would have worked very similar. However, NFL Gameday was actually a much simpler version of what I had envisioned. But when I saw 1st & Goal, it was almost exactly what I had imagined for my own football board game.

So, hooray! My dream football board game already exists, and I can play it!

But also, boo! Somebody else beat me to it...

But, I do have some nitpicks with this game, so maybe there's room for me to come up with some revisions and improvements. And given how hard this game was to find, and that very few people seem to know it exists, there might be plenty of room for a competing board game. So maybe I should start that Kickstarter after all...

© Amazon/MGM

Project Hail Mary

As frequent readers probably know, I'm a fan of hard science fiction. I'll try to make a point of seeing new, high-concept sci-fi movies in theaters, especially if they are receiving positive word of mouth. Two of my favorite movies of the past decade or so have been The Martian and Arrival. Project Hail Mary is almost like a combination of those 2 movies, and its based on a book by the same author who rote the novel of The Martian, so it should be right up my alley.

I did still like it. But I also found myself disappointed that it was so "cutesy" and not quite as smart or thoughtful as I had hoped it would be.

Yeah, the rock alien is adorable. And the practical effects looked exceptional. The scenes of Grace and Rocky learning to communicate with each other, explaining concepts that are common to them, but alien to the other, and then solving problems together are the highlight of the movie to me.

And hey! Rocky is from 40 Eridani, which is the same star that Star Trek's Vulcan is supposed to orbit. So that was a fun little Easter Egg! Rocky is a Vulcan. He's a "Rock Spock"!

But Rocky is also a symbol of much of what annoyed me. For every moment in which the two are having slow, thoughtful conversations about the nature of existence, there is also a scene of Rocky running around like an excitable puppy for strictly comedic purposes. It just seems off for a character who is supposed to be a highly-intelligent engineer on an interstellar mission to save his species from extinction.

More generally speaking, this movie leans heavily on the trope of an in-experienced "regular guy" having to bumble his way through an incredibly technically-demanding mission. Yes, the guy is a PhD, so he is a very smart person. This doesn't quite fall into "Mary Sue" territory. But he's a biologist. He's not an engineer, or a pilot, or an astronaut. Yes, he does have months (or longer) to learn the spaceship's functions, but it's still not entirely believable that he would be able to single-handedly figure out how to operate a complicated spaceship. This is what separates Project Hail Mary from the much better movies of The Martian and Arrival. The characters in those movies are experts solving problems within their field of expertise and experience. They aren't middle school teachers thrown into a spaceship with no training at all.

©Amazon/MGM

Grace has to single-handedly figure out how to operate an advanced, experimental spaceship.

When I went back to re-download and play Surviving The Aftermath, I also noticed that Surviving Mars was in my library. I guess I must've bought it a while back on sale and forgotten about it. Due to the similarities of the name, I mistakenly thought that these 2 games were developed by the same studio, so I downloaded both. I had also seen some headlines and social media posts about controversy regarding a "Re-Launched" version of Surviving Mars. I wasn't quite sure what was going on there, but I decided to give the original game a test run and see if the Re-Launched version would be something I might like to try. If Re-Launched fixed some of the complaints that I had with the original game, than maybe I would upgrade to that. Or at least, that's what naive me thought.

After playing for a day or 2, I was liking Surviving Mars, so I went to the Steam page to see how cheap the upgrade to Re-Launched is. That is when I realized what all the controversy is about.

Paradox, in it's infinitely consumer-unfriendly wisdom, decided to make Surviving Mars: Re-Launched into a completely new game; it is not an upgrade or update to the original game! Paradox is selling Re-Launched at full price, even if you already have the original game. Worse yet, Re-Launched is basically a "complete edition" of the game, with all the DLC expansions packaged in, and with a slight graphics update. The original game looks fine as is, so I don't think a graphics update was necessary. But they also de-listed the original game, and all of its DLC expansions, so that if you own the original game, you cannot buy any of the expansions!

Re-Launched is not an update to Surviving Mars; it is a separate, full-priced release on Steam.

This is a kick in the gut to anybody who bought the original version of the game. Especially if you never got around to buying the DLC, and are now completely locked out of being able to do so.

I'm sorry, but this is basically strike 3 for Paradox. I gave them plenty of chances to right their ship, but they have now completely capsized and have lost all of my good will. They bungled the premature release of Star Trek: Infinite and killed that game basically out of the gate. They then went on to do the same thing to Cities Skylines II, and then fired Colossal Order from its own series. And now there's these shenanigans with Surviving Mars. This is all on top of all the older controversy involving Paradox's greedy piecemeal DLC pricing, releasing updates to games that make old saves incompatible, and releasing games that felt generally incomplete.

I have had it with Paradox! I don't think I can buy another game from Paradox, and I am actually starting to feel guilty for playing the Paradox games that I already own. It's a shame too, because Paradox, as a publisher, sells games that are right up my alley. They specialize in strategy, management, and simulation games -- often with historic or sci-fi themes. Now I feel like I can't play any of these games, or else I'm giving money and support to a company that might very well be the sleaziest, greediest, and overall worst game publisher on the market right now. Possibly as bad or worse than the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K.

I don't know, maybe Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K are still far worse. I haven't been keeping up as much with news on those companies since I haven't been on social media as much, and since I actively avoid their games (other than buying used copies of EA's football games). On top of all that, Stephanie Sterling hasn't been making new Jimquisition episodes (now rebranded as "High-Steph") to tell me all about the evils of these companies and their executives. Well, except for a recent episode that reminded everyone of former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick's close association with convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein...

There's been a lot of depressing news lately. The rise of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism around the globe, an unstable stock market and economy being manipulated by White House for private gain at the cost of tax-payers and consumers, wars and genocides, irreversible climate change tipping points being tipped, and so much more. But through all that, there was one shining bright moment this past 2 weeks: The launch and successful landing of NASA's Artemis II mission. For the first time in more than a generation, human beings have travelled beyond near Earth orbit and around the moon. Sadly, this was a manned test run of the capsule, and so this mission did not land on the moon. For that, we will have to wait till 2028, at least.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II crew: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Hammock Koch.

Space exploration has felt rather stagnant for decades. The focus on the space shuttle and space station programs kept manned space flight in near Earth orbit, while deep space missions have all been done by robots. There's been quite a few robotic missions. Multiple rovers have landed on Mars, some of which are still active long past their expected expiration dates. Probes have visited the planets of the outer solar system (as well as the not-a-planet-anymore Pluto). And probes have even done test landings on asteroids and comets! I do not want to diminish these accomplishments one bit. They are all extraordinary technological and scientific breakthroughs on their own. Landing on asteroids and comets is especially significant, because they are a stepping stone towards mining and resource extraction from such celestial bodies, which could hopefully pave the way for abandoning our capitalist economic systems in favor of a post-scarcity model. But as cool as these missions were, they haven't been manned missions. People weren't actually going to these places.

At least not until now. With Artemis II, a group of 4 human beings (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen) travelled around the moon, and saw the far side of the moon with their own, human, eyes. That is something that hasn't happened since the Apollo missions of the early 1970's.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II witnessed the Earth "set" behind the far side of the moon.