Love Live! is a hugely popular series, which has spawned multiple spin-offs. With its blend of happy music and cute girls, it’s not hard to see why this would easily develop a large fan base. The story concerns a group of girls who join together to form a school idol group, eventually going on to compete in a national tournament. The stakes are high, because their school has not been able to attract enough new pupils, and is going to close. The girls realise that if they can attract enough attention to themselves with their music, more kids will want to apply to go to their school, and they might just save it from closure. By the end of the first season that’s all wrapped up, and the second season focusses on the build up to the national competition. Continue reading
Labyrinth / Cooking
Patterns of the Soul poses a serious question in a post Covid world: is there any justification for suppressing information about the potential spread of a virus? The story has Gideon and the crew of the Excalibur sent on another mission that is more important than finding a cure for all of the people of Earth: they have to find 30 people who may have escaped from Earth while infected with the plague. Brian Thompson guest stars as the stone-jawed scientist who escaped Earth with his deep voiced friend to start a life elsewhere. Sure enough, we learn that they have been infected with the Drakh plague and Gideon is ordered to take them home. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones on the planet that are infected; a small tribe of Dureena’s nearly extinct people are on the planet and they have only a year to live now. Gideon’s orders are from an Earthforce General that seems to place all his calls from somewhere that clearly isn’t an Earthforce office, giving us our first clue that he’s not playing a fair game. Needless to say, Gideon has to come up with a clever way to save the day for Dureena’s people and the human’s who have been poisoned by someone in Earthforce. 
What’s black and white and red all over? A mauled penguin? A nun having fallen out a window? A newspaper? A Grendel graphic novel? Damn these puzzles are tricky. OH, what about Superhot Team’s Superhot? Yes, that is the name of the developer, publisher and game! And in 2016, when it came out for the PC, I thought it sounded gimmicky. The premise is that nothing moves unless you do. In other words, every level opens in perfect stillness. If you start to move, so do your enemies. You want to stop, just stop moving. When they shoot you, a bullet can be seen moving through the air as slowly as you want, if you just stop moving. And this gives you ample time to dodge it. You’d think.
Magnificent recovery! For a few episodes, I had been wondering why I loved this series as a kid. There were simply too many in a row that we predictable and dated. A Feasibility Study brings back the awe and mystery that the Control Voice is always promising! First of all, it captured my imagination when I was younger and held me captivated again now in my adulthood. My friends and I often refer to “mind candy”; this is what we mean! Production-wise, the use of music is superior to that increasing note we’ve had so much of lately. This episode offers us some very slow, deliberate and above all, eerie music to ramp up the tension. Fog, sounds on the telephone, shadowy figures, robed characters slowly walking in the mist… all these things are used to outstanding effect. Best of all, it exemplifies what was amazing about old television; it creates all of this without the need of blood, gore, vulgarity, nudity, violence. All the things we’ve come to rely so heavily on in horror and science fiction, this episode avoids completely and ends up with a far greater success than most modern stories of a similar vein. But that’s not all! There’s another thing used to great effect in this story: community. 
Yu-Sibu, also known as Yu-Shibu, or to give it its absurdly long full title I Couldn’t Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job, is an anime series set in a fantasy world, with some entertaining similarities to our own. That full title describes the premise of the series pretty well. Raul Chaser has gone through all his training at hero school, and just when he gets to fight the monsters the Demon Lord dies and there’s nobody to fight any more, so he gets himself a job in a shop selling appliances.
Accident / Technology / Takeoff
There’s a game that kept popping up on Steam that I would look at and think: why?!? The game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, appears to be about prehistoric people fighting against robotic dinosaurs. Huh?! Every time I’d look at it, because it kept popping up on the store page, I thought it looked idiotic. Visually nice, but the idea just didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy. Luckily I have friends who are gamers and one of those that I work with said it was actually very good. Since it was on sale, I grabbed it. What my friend should have told me was: this is Far Cry without the Far Cry title. Had I known that, I would have picked the game up ages earlier because Far Cry has a damned good format and readers of the Junkyard know how much I enjoy those. 
I nearly fell off the couch when I realized this episode didn’t have a preview of what’s to come. Just one episode ago, I skipped the spoiling effect without checking. Now I wonder if that was a mistake. (I checked; it was the right call!) But it means I’ll have to be careful with each subsequent episode! This offers a genuine prelude: Mr. Zeno has to move his operation across country because someone found out what he was up to. So he moves to the east coast and he has some nefarious plans in mind for young Kenny Benjamin! 
It might not be fashionable to criticise scientists at the moment, but I’ve long held the view that eventually they will go one step too far with their messing around with things and do some real damage to the world we inhabit. It might have happened when the first atomic bomb was tested, despite one of the scientists involved warning of a risk of igniting the entire atmosphere of the planet. It might have happened with the creation of biological agents for warfare, or the high-speed collision of particles. Mercifully, the chance of this kind of tinkering with nature leading to an apocalypse is remote, but the threat posed by people trying to play god has captured the imagination of writers for a very long time. Patema Inverted shows us a fascinating vision of the future, where scientists have finally gone too far. 
House / Nap / The Sound of Rain
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been discussing adventure games and one of the things I’ve noticed is the lack of violence in most of them. This thought popped into my head and was almost immediately disproved by the other side of my own personality. Pshaw! Of course there’s violence in Adventure games; just look at Sherlock Holmes games. Oh yeah, duh, that’s absolutely true, said that side of my brain. Yet, I argued back, you’re not actually the one committing the violent acts, are you? No, you’re investigating them. And so my internal monologue felt settled. But my brain wasn’t done and pointed out that in Sherlock Holmes Vs. Jack the Ripper you actually have to think through the crimes to such an extent that I was using a statue in my house to try to envision how certain acts were committed. After all, you are investigating some brutal real-life murders. I had to go through facts systematically which was both rewarding but also quite challenging. 
Visitors to the Junkyard may recall September of 2020 when we reviewed Star Trek’s Contact Information
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DrAcrossthePond
Roger Pocock
