I recently played an indie sci-fi game on the PS5 titled Deliver Us The Moon. It was alright. I rather liked the story, and most of the methods that the game uses to deliver that story. It's very similar to Tacoma in terms of how it tells its story, but with a greater emphasis on player-driven problem-solving and puzzles. It's biggest problem, however, is the surprisingly poor performance and frequent technical problems. Even on the PS5, this borderline walking sim was barely able to keep a steady framerate, and I experienced multiple hard crashes.

That being said, I still recommend it for gamers who happen to be fans of hard science fiction, because our options in that particular sub-genre are fairly limited. We have butt-loads of fantasy sci-fi games about space marines shooting aliens or robots, or about dog-fighting in outer space. You know, you're Mass Effects, Halos, Dead Spaces, StarCrafts, Colony Wars, and so on (remember Colony Wars? Man that would be an excellent candidate for a reboot on modern consoles, especially if it includes full VR support!). These are the games that are "sci-fi" in the same way that Star Wars or Transformers or pretty much any comic book movie are "sci-fi" movies.

But as far as the video game equivalents of harder sci-fi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Arrival or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the well is considerably drier, and most of what we do have is relegated to smaller indie titles. Don't get me wrong, we have some great options! Games like Soma and Outer Wilds are some of my favorite games ever.

So when I see a hard sci-fi game like Deliver Us The Moon pop up on a gaming storefront, I try to make an effort to play it. There's plenty of total flops in this sub-genre, but there's also some real gems. And I think that if Deliver Us The Moon could have its performance stabilized, it might qualify as one of those gems. But this video isn't a review of Deliver Us The Moon. I have a full written review on my personal blog at www.MegaBearsFan.net, if you want to read it. Instead, I want take a few minutes to dive into one particular aspect of the story and premise of Deliver Us The Moon that just kind of grinds my gears. It's a problem that I've seen repeated multiple games and movies that try to address this particular socio-political topic, and I worry that it might be doing more harm than good to the public's perception of this issue.

A big issue that I have with Deliver Us The Moon is its near-future depiction of apocalyptic climate change.

This essay was released early to Patrons in video format.
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Last year, when the PS5 released, I didn't bother trying to pre-order one or buy one after release. I just wasn't very interested in the machine that first year, as there weren't that many games for it. Sure, I was curious to see what the Demon's Souls remake wold be like, considering that is one of my favorite games ever. And I would gladly have played the Miles Morales Spider-Man game. But neither of these (nor the two combined) were enough to sell me on a $500 console. I love Demon's Souls, and was sad when the servers were finally shut down, but not enough to shell out $600 to be able to keep playing it.

I'm sorry Sony, but you really needed more than just a remake of a 10-year old game from 2 console generations ago, and a single sequel to a popular game from a few years ago, to sell me on the new machine. Maybe if Silent Hills hadn't been cancelled, and ended up being a PS5-exclusive launch title, or if Death Stranding or Ghost of Tsushima had been PS5-exclusive launch titles, then I would have been more eager to procure a console.

Everything else that I was interested in was a multi-platform release. I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam (then never played it because the launch condition was so atrocious), and ended up playing Control (for free) via PlayStation Plus. So what the heck did I actually need a PS5 for?

The only 2 games on PS5 worth playing are not worth buying a new console.

I also didn't feel like going through the trouble of trying to claim the limited pre-order supply of PS5s. I thought for sure that in 6 months or so, PS5s would be sitting on the shelves of just about every Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and Gamestop, just collecting dust. After all, people were losing their jobs and health insurance left and right due to business closures and city lockdowns being imposed due to a global health pandemic. Surely people wouldn't have enough disposable income to justify new $500 consoles, right?

Well, apparently, I completely mis-judged the situation. Losing their jobs and being unable to even look for new jobs (due to the aforementioned business closures and lockdowns) meant that people spent what little disposable money they did have (as well as the eventual government stimulus checks) on home entertainment products like video games. The video game business (along with online shopping, streaming television services, home delivery services, and video conferencing services) was one of the few industries that boomed during the pandemic, and much to my surprise, the PS5 and XBox Series X | S became the fastest-selling video game consoles in history, despite the supply shortages.

I will honestly say that I did not see that coming. Though I do have to wonder if those sales figures would be so inflated if not for scalpers buying up all the stock with automated bots.

Now it's December of 2021 (holiday season), the PS5 has been available for well over a year, and I'm starting to want one, but can't find one. What's changed? Why do I want a console now, when I didn't want one last year?

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Last summer I wrote that my experience with the COVID-19 pandemic at that time was "pretty pedestrian". At the time, I was optimistic that the pandemic would soon be well under control, despite the absolute ineptitude of our government's initial response. But here we are, a year and a half later, and community spread of COVID is still causing almost as many deaths on a weekly basis as it did at the height of the pandemic a year ago. This is despite the widespread availability of free, CDC and FDA-approved vaccines!

Vaccines are now available for children as young as 5.

My partner and I are vaccinated, as are most of our friends and relatives, but we have a 11-year old child attending public school, and a 2 1/2 month old infant. Neither child is vaccinated yet. The vaccines weren't approved for use in children under 12 until recently, and even then, they are only approved for children as young as 5. We had scheduled for our 11-year old to get the first vaccine shot in early November (the week after it was approved for children in her age group). But in a twisted bit of irony, COVID made it into our household before she could get that shot.

Close calls

We narrowly avoided contracting COVID earlier in October. I was asked by a neighbor to walk their children to school one morning because she and her husband had to go into work early. I was happy to oblige. It's the neighborly thing to do. What I didn't know was that the father is unvaccinated. Had I known, I likely would have refused. And I would have been vindicated in that refusal because their entire household came down with COVID that week. The father is a teacher and was required to do weekly testing. He tested on Monday, I walked the kids to school on Tuesday, the father received his positive result on Wednesday, and the kids and their mother began showing symptoms that weekend.

Lucky for us, none of us got sick. The kids either weren't contagious yet, or we just weren't close enough to contract it from them. And don't worry, our neighbors and their kids are all recovered now.

The next exposure, we weren't quite so lucky.

Our luck runs out

The week before our daughter was scheduled to get her first vaccine shot, my partner contracted COVID. The likely vector for the virus was another child of un-vaccinated parents who went trick-or-treating with our daughter on Halloween. The mother of one of our daughter's friends had been watching him on weekends because his deadbeat mom kept dumping him off on her. He had been feeling sick the week before, but didn't bother to tell us, nor did his mother bother to tell us. I think she just wanted to get him out of the house so that she could get some booty calls.

It's too bad the CDC couldn't have authorized the vaccine for younger children before Halloween.
I imagine we weren't the only ones to catch COVID while trick-or-treating.

We had 2 occasions in which we socialized with children of un-vaccinated parents, and in both cases, we were exposed to COVID. We had been rigorous about making sure that any adults we socialized with were vaccinated. But children couldn't be vaccinated, and we couldn't deny letting our daughter visit with friends. All of her friends' parents were vaccinated, so it never really occurred to us to make a policy of verifying the vaccination status of other childrens' parents. It seems obvious in hindsight, but we just never thought of it.

We avoided COVID for a year and a half,
but our luck ran out this November.

Anyway, he tested positive the day after Halloween, and our kid's friend's mom tested positive a couple days after that. A week after Halloween, my partner started sniffling and coughing while breast-feeding our son. I had her take a home COVID test, and sure enough, it was positive. We promptly put her into quarantine in our guest room (thankfully we have a house large enough to allow us to keep a guest room). And since we couldn't be certain that we had quarantined her before she spread it to myself or our 11-year-old, we were forced to all start wearing masks in the house whenever we were around each other, or whenever any of us was handling the baby.

It sucked. You think it's uncomfortable and inconvenient to wear a mask in public? Imagine having to do it all day in your own home!

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There are days in all of our lives in which our life irreversibly changes forever. A few weeks ago, I had such a day. My partner of 7 years and I welcomed into the world a new baby boy. Little Julian was born via C-section in early September at 7 pounds and 3 ounces, and is so far healthy and happy.

My partner and I welcomed our baby son, Julian into the world in early September.

Regular readers might know that I already have a child for all intents and purposes. When I met my partner, she already had a 3 year old daughter from a previous relationship. We've had full custody of that child, and so I've been raising as my own. Since I didn't even meet her until she was 3 years old, I missed out on all the baby stuff. In fact, she was just finishing up potty training when I met her, so I never had to deal with diapers. I had a daughter, but I never had a baby.

The only time I've ever had to deal with infants and diapers and bottles was years ago when a co-worker and friend friend had twin daughters through (I think) in vitro fertilization. She was raising the girls as a single mother and needed some extra help, and since she lived a few minutes from me, I offered to go over and help watch the babies from time to time so that she could take care of chores around the house. She taught me how to change diapers, feed babies, hold them, and calm them when they were crying. One of the twins was particularly responsive to me, and always seemed to calm down when I held her.

They were my little "practice babies", and I was sad when their mother decided to move out of state to the midwest to be with family. She had limited support here (even with friends and colleagues like me trying to help out whenever we could), so I can't blame or fault her for the decision.

But now I have a little baby of my own, and so that practice is finally paying off!

With my partner bed-ridden after the C-section, I was responsible for diaper changes in the first couple days.

In fact, I had to put that practice into effect almost immediately. Since my partner had to have a C-section, she was bed-ridden for the first couple days after the delivery. This meant that during those first couple days in the hospital, I was on full-time diaper duty. Newborn diapers weren't exactly what I was prepared for. The thick, black, sticky meconium was quite a bit different than what I remembered from the practice twins. Having a boy also meant I had the risk of being peed on during a diaper change, which isn't really a problem with baby girls (as far as I've been told). Though Julian has actually yet to pee on us directly. He did pee on his own face once though. I was holding is legs up to clean him after a dirty diaper, he started peeing while pointing right at his face. He was not a happy baby.

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I don't think that Capcom and Naughty Dog realized just how topical their 2020 releases of Resident Evil 3 and The Last Of Us Part 2 would turn out to be. Both games were released in the spring and summer, as a strange novel coronavirus (believed to have jumped from Chinese bats to people) began to spread within the United States and the rest of the world. Both games are about zombie apocalypses, and were released at a time in which large portions of the global economy had been shut down, and residents were expected to essentially shelter in place in their homes for weeks or months to prevent the spread of the pandemic. The 2020 pandemic (which is still ongoing 18 months later, despite the widespread availability of multiple vaccines), provided me with some unexpected context on these two games.

Check out the video essay version of this post on YouTube.

Both games are zombie apocalypse games, and zombie fiction is often based around fears and anxieties of societal collapse in one form or another. The original Night Of The Living Dead channeled the anxieties of nuclear Armageddon, and filtered them through the lenses of both McCarthy era Communist witch-hunts and a degree of racial tension. George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead channeled fears that consumerist culture would lead to toxic behavior that is not only self-destructive to the individual, but also to society at large. Zombies in other fiction might represent anxieties about racism, sexism, socialism, technology gone amok, and so forth.

Zombie fiction is usually inspired by contemporary fears surrounding societal collapse.

Video game zombies are no different, and they can represent any of those anxieties from a simple narrative standpoint. Because games are an interactive experience, zombie games can even explore anxieties about a loss of individual autonomy in ways that non-interactive media would struggle to approach. But I'm not here right now to talk about zombie games in general. I want to talk specifically about the pare of blockbuster zombie games that released last year, during the height of a real-life pandemic.

Both Last of Us games express concerns about the increasingly myopic "us and them" mentality in American culture and politics and the apparent inability of many people to empathize with others and see their point of view -- or even their humanity. And Resident Evil, as a series, channels anxieties about the self-destructive nature of the corporate desire to make profit at all costs, and then use their vast wealth and lobbying power to cover up their unethical activities.

Regardless of the messages intended by the developers, playing both of these games in 2020 made it really hard for me to not look at them both through the lenses of my own anxieties about the contemporary pandemic situation that we saw (and continue to see) ourselves in. It was a situation that neither game's developers could have foreseen (even though scientists, public health experts, and futurists have been sounding the alarm bells for the inevitability of pandemics in our increasingly globalized world). Anyway, since neither Capcom nor Naughty Dog could foresee that the games would launch in the middle of a real-world pandemic, they didn't really design their games around the ideas and anxieties of a real-life pandemic, and I think that shows through clearly in both games.

Neither REmake3 nor The Last of Us 2 are really about the pandemics of their settings.

After all, it would be so much easier to deal with a pandemic if we could clearly see the spread of the disease in the way that characters can in Resident Evil and The Last of Us. It would be so easy to isolate and quarantine individuals if infection caused their skin to almost immediately start rotting, or if we could see with our naked eyes the little coronaviruses coming out of people's mouths and noses when they cough, sneeze, or breath. And it would be so much easier if the disease itself were only transmitted between people through invasive physical contact such as a bite. But none of that is true in this real-life COVID pandemic. In light of a real-world pandemic, it seems almost silly that the fictional pandemics of Resident Evil and The Last Of Us could possibly lead to such widespread societal collapse, and the pandemic itself is of little concern to the player.

To be clear, what follows represents my personal contextualization from playing Resident Evil 3 and The Last of Us Part II during the COVID pandemic. These impressions do not represent my opinions on the actual quality of the games on their own merits. You can check out my reviews of both games, or check out my video on the "Lessons Capcom Learned for Resident Evil 3". I understand that neither game is about the pandemic. All I'm saying is that having played them during a pandemic highlighted just how not about the pandemic they actually are.

The lessons Capcom learned for Resident Evil 3.

Needless to say, there will be some minor spoilers for Resident Evil 3 (remake) and both Last of Us games. There will also be some spoilers for Metal Gear Solid V and Death Stranding. Reader discretion is advised.

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A gamer's thoughts

Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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