"I really thought you were going to go after it if it fell," the stranger next to me scoffed.
The high-end earbuds are a lot of things: an audiophile's dream, a fashion statement, Snoopy's face in headphone form. But it took very little time for me to realize the AirPods Pro are not necessarily harder to lose than their less expensive sibling. At $90 more than Apple's starting model, you'll be that much sadder when they end up on train tracks or mysteriously disappear into a couch cushion, never to be seen again. It costs $89 for a replacement earpiece ($29 with Apple Care).
The fact that many people, myself included, still flock to buy up these pricey, easily misplaced wireless earbuds highlights just how appealing they are. Apple's original AirPods have emerged as a surprise status symbol and a runaway hit at a time when Apple desperately needed one to offset an ongoing decline in iPhone sales. Now Apple hopes to build on this success with a new luxury version of an already luxurious product.
In a sense, this is Apple(AAPL) doing what it does best: rolling out a premium version of its most popular products. The company has used this same playbook with Macs, iPhones and iPads -- and it already seems to be working with AirPods. On Wednesday morning, I saw a long line of people waiting at the Grand Central Apple Store in New York for the new AirPods Pro, the way customers famously once did for the latest iPhones.
Apple builds on a surprise hit product
Almost no one would have predicted this back in 2016 when AirPods first launched. The devices originally inspired an onslaught of memes, mocked by many who suggested they looked like electronic toothbrushes dangling from ears. But the earbuds proved to be so popular they were emulated by knock-off fashion companies and copied by a number of Apple's rivals. It's a product so easily spotted on ears in gyms and on streets that it's become, in its way, a public symbol of Apple's product lineup in the post-Steve Jobs era.
Apple hasn't shared how many AirPods it's sold, but the company's wearables segment, which includes AirPods, is growing fast. In the most recent quarter, this segment generated more than $6.5 billion in revenue, a 54% spike from the prior year. And when Apple calls AirPods the best selling headphones in the world, it's hard not to believe it.
Now the earbuds have been completely redesigned, with a vent to alleviate some of the pressure that noise-cancellation silicone tips typically add, as well as two microphones to better hear or block out background noise. They also have shorter, stubbier stems, making the older versions look even longer and more odd-looking than ever.
The top-end AirPods feature the same H1 headphone chip used in the second version of AirPods, announced earlier this year, which enabled Siri capabilities to increase the volume, answer a call or pull up directions with voice commands. But now it allows more physical commands, although it's tricky to remember what exactly a squeeze versus a tap will do.
The biggest draw to the Pro earbuds is noise cancellation -- a feature that impressively drowned out sirens and traffic during my busy commute. The change is dramatic; it's like shoving everyone at a party into a closet so you can better hear the DJ.
For those moments when you don't want to block out the world, perhaps when waiting for an announcement at the airport or ordering a coffee at Starbucks, transparency mode lets you clearly hear background noise and other people's voices without sacrificing what you're listening to. At the same time, Apple says the internal software continuously adapts the sound based on the individual's ear canal's shape and length, and the surrounding noise levels.
The AirPods Pro box comes with three interchangeable silicone tips (small, medium and large) to enable noise cancellation. These tips are not new to earbuds, but they are new to Apple, which has until now only offered an all-hard-plastic earbud.
Like fingerprints, no two ears are the same. A new comfort test, conducted through the Control Center in iOS, revealed that my left ear requires a medium tip and my right ear requires a large tip. While this mix has proven comfortable and relatively secure, minus the time one escaped my ear, it's still unclear what learning this new fun fact about myself has done to my self esteem.
Not perfect, but appealing for many
Although AirPods Pro are rich in sound quality and range when it comes to songs and videos, placing calls is another story: In a series of tests, I was told my voice through the device sounded grainy, like I was using speaker phone or a Bluetooth speaker in a car.
Getting a handle on the various touch modes takes some time, too. By pressing the side once, you can play, pause or answer a call. Touching it twice will let you skip a song. It took me a few minutes to teach myself what each action does. I still often get it wrong.
In an earnings conference call on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he anticipates existing AirPods owners to be among the first to buy the Pro model. Judging by how many people waiting in line to buy a Pro set already had AirPods outside an Apple Store in Manhattan on Wednesday, I'd argue he's right. AirPod loyalists are fanatical about the earbuds, and the love for them is about to get even deeper.
Buzz around the new Pro version will undoubtedly convince other Apple users to make a purchase, too. They'll also soon know the pain and anguish of (almost) losing a fallen earpiece.
Yesterday, on late Halloween night, Google engineers delivered the best scare of the evening and released an urgent update for the Chrome browser to patch an actively exploited zero-day.
"Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2019-13720 exists in the wild," Google engineers said in a blog post announcing the new v78.0.3904.87 release.
The actively-exploited zero-day was described as a use-aster-free bug in Chrome's audio component.
Google credited Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev, two malware researchers from Kaspersky, with reporting the issue.
Use-after-free vulnerabilities are memory corruption bugs that occur when an application tries to reference memory that was previously assigned to it but has been freed or deleted in the meantime. This usually causes a program to crash, but can also sometimes lead to other, unintended consequences.
The March Chrome zero-day was also a use-after-free vulnerability. It is unclear if this recent Chrome zero-day is used by itself to launch attacks on Chrome users, or is part of a more complex exploit chain, like the March attacks.
A Kaspersky spokesperson was not immediately available for comment on this issue.
Chrome 78.0.3904.87 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The release will slowly roll out to all Chrome users in the coming weeks but users can trigger a manual update right now by visiting the browser's Help > About Google Chrome section.
Every inch of Death Stranding teems with meaning or implication. Even the stupidest and most pretentious developments build to create a multi-layered game, one with numerous potential points of attack to analyze. It is a story about fatherhood. It is a broad dig at the gig economy. It is deeply concerned with upcoming environmental disaster and American politics, old and new.
Death Stranding is also about throwing grenades made from your own piss and shit at ghosts. It is about hiking alone in the wilderness for hours. It is a tireless grind. It is a commentary on social media and the internet, delivered through the asynchronous interactions players can have with one another as they play. It is breathtaking in scope, consistently intelligent in design, and beautiful to behold. It is a heaping pile of pretentious nonsense. It is a game in which characters drop overwrought interpretations of Kōbō Abe quotes. Its most recurring visual motif is a not-so-subtle gesture towards Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It progresses not with the quiet stroke of a pen but with the pounding crash of a hammer. “I brought you a metaphor,” one of the characters says late in the game. It is stupid, and obvious, and perfect.
Death Stranding is also Hideo Kojima’s first major project following his departure from Konami in 2015. The context is charged: here is a widely acclaimed “auteur,” supposedly shackled by corporate overlords let loose at last, ready to blow your mind open with a masterpiece. The game follows on the heels of the tragic cancelation of Silent Hills, which was to be a video game collaboration with film director Guillermo del Toro, starring Norman Reedus. (Reedus now stars in Death Stranding, along with del Toro and tons of other celebrities.)
Then there’s the supposed weirdness of Death Stranding itself. During development, its plot and gameplay were tightly guarded secrets, with exorbitant and celebrity-laden trailers providing the only hint of what was to come. The game has been mythologized through its marketing, and Kojima—already considered a legend—has been further mythologized along with it.
But that narrative is replete with mischaracterizations. Kojima is a man with a highly skilled team at his disposal, decades of experience, celebrity friends, and millions of dollars in Sony backing. He’s no scrappier than any other rich and famous person. Because of this, there are two Death Strandings. There is the one in public consciousness, and there is the one that I have played. The first is a dream, an impossible (and frankly unnecessary) vindication of games as art created by a glorified mastermind. The actual game is a fantastic mess.
But is it good, Heather? Yes, friends. I love it.
Death Stranding is set in an alternate future where a cataclysmic event called the Death Stranding has devastated most of the world. The incident, described as a great explosion, has blurred the lines between the land of the living and the afterlife. In the world of Death Stranding, there is in fact something after death, and it is observable and measurable. Furthermore, every person has been discovered to contain their own “Beach,” which is a limbo-like space that they arrive at before finally moving into the great beyond. The thinning boundaries between our world and the afterlife released spirits called “beached things,” or BTs. BTs ravage communities, wreaking havoc on the living. They are so dangerous that if a human makes contact with a larger BT, it can trigger an event called a “voidout,” a sort of miniature nuclear explosion that can destroy cities in the blink of an eye. The world has been fractured into a few remaining cities and pioneer outposts. Connecting them are delivery services, staffed by porters who brave the expansive waste and sneak through BT territory to bring essential supplies to the disjointed smattering of humanity that remains.
Players control Sam Porter Bridges, a lone wolf courier who is more content in the wasteland than around other people. After the last living president of the United States passes away, Sam is asked to carry out her final directive: connect the remaining settlements to the “chiral network,” a futuristic internet that allows for instant communication and fast 3D printing of infrastructure and supplies. The goal, he is told, is to “make America whole again.”
Carrying out this directive becomes ever more complicated as terrorist factions conspire to kickstart mankind’s extinction, politicians cover up horrible crimes, and a literal ghost bent on revenge wages a personal war against those who wronged him. It’s operatic, excessive, and ultimately leads to a finale so spectacular and absurd that it moves beyond anime overindulgence into a glorious pimple popping of plot.
So, there are grand political machinations that extend far beyond Sam’s reach. But throughout it all, he’s still just a postman who needs to make his deliveries while living in the worst possible world. To help him navigate that world, Sam is given a “bridge baby.” This baby in a pod grants Sam the ability to perceive BTs and progress on his journey across the continent. Throughout the journey, he will deliver countless packages and supplies from outpost to outpost, hiking untold miles in solitude while slowly bringing settlements into the network. Each new excursion is dogged by tough terrain, lurking BTs, raiders, and a corrosive rain called “timefall” that rapidly accelerates everything it touches.
Most of the time, Sam navigates these dangers while wearing a backpack crammed with packages and gear. The contents of the backpack must be balanced. If Sam’s too heavy on either side, he’ll fall. And if Sam falls, his cargo will be damaged. It is painful to traverse terrain and all too easy to fall, especially in the early game. But over time, Sam gets stronger, and the player gains more resources.
At first, Sam’s gear is little more than a good pair of shoes and maybe a rope for climbing. As players progress, they’ll gain access to a variety of robotic rigs to increase how much Sam can carry or how fast he can move in extreme terrain. Eventually, that means portable 3D printers than can build bridges or even safe houses to rest at provided you have enough raw materials.
It costs a lot of materials to build a bridge or a shelter. These structures also take damage over time and must be repaired. But you aren’t the only one in this world who is building bridges over coursing rivers, or hanging ziplines in rocky mountaintops. Death Stranding will put you on a server with other players, each of them building their own structures that you can share and use. You can even deliver packages that they’ve dropped, or leave behind packages you can’t deliver yourself. Every time Sam connects another town in the world to the fictional chiral network, Death Stranding will connect you to the real-life network of other players and their structures.
Sharing is rewarded. These structures exist in a pseudo-social network where players can “like” those that they find useful. The more “likes” you get, the better. It contributes to a progression system that uses a variety of criteria—mission completion time, the size of a cargo haul, completion of special conditions—to increase a player rank that eventually gives rewards, like the ability to carry more items or run down slopes without slipping as much.
But it’s not just delivering packages, building bridges, and connecting people to one another. Eventually, Sam gets weapons: rifles, shotguns, and grenades, all made using Sam’s blood and other bodily fluids. Because Sam is special, you see. He’s a “repatriate,” which means that instead of dying in mortal situations, he is able to guide his soul back to his body and rise again to complete the job. This makes him a perfect candidate for tough deliveries. His bodily fluids can be weaponized against the BTs as well, especially his blood. A “hematic” grenade can dispose of a BT in an instant, while blood-soaked bullets can slowly perforate them into mist. The best option is to avoid BTs altogether, relying on Sam’s bridge baby to perceive the ghosts’ locations and sneaking past them.
Death Stranding pulls from a variety of sources. The resurrections and multiplayer aspects of Dark Souls, the wandering of Proteus and No Man’s Sky, the clumsy body movements of QWOP, the skeletal remains of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and more surprisingly Metal Gear Survive. These pieces come together into a unique package with a simple loop: you start here, now please go there. Pick a mission, grab your gear, figure out how to get there, climb over whatever mountain is in your way without losing all your cargo. Fall, get up, keep going. Rinse and repeat, with added layers of intrigue and combat challenges as the story progresses.
The larger narrative of Death Stranding is spellbinding, but like The Phantom Pain before it, Death Stranding speaks more clearly through its systems, and is more interesting to play than its raw narrative is to experience. Using the game’s system of shared building and messaging, it’s possible to warn fellow players of BT hunting grounds, leave garages stocked with vehicles to freely use, drop shoes and excess gear into shared storage lockers, and create complicated pathways through a treacherous game world. The word strand, we are told early in the game, refers both to a tie that connects something and the act of being stranded, isolated from others. Just as Metal Gear Solid V’s war micromanaging expressed the endless cost of mercenary violence and revenge, Death Stranding’s systems speak to these two interpretations. Initially, players are indeed stranded. They are alone in a game world with few signs of human interaction, then slowly but surely, the topography changes. Footsteps on a path, the start of a road. These span out to form a complex spider’s web of player structures. Every piece feeds into the other. It turns out having ladders, better shoes, and increased mobility matters a lot when you might stumble over the perfectly placed rock at any moment.
Eventually, I reached a particularly treacherous part of the game where most of my deliveries involved hiking through thick snowfall. A few players had braved this area before me, but I found many of their structures to be incomplete. A makeshift series of magnetic ziplines covered some peaks, but there were no connecting ziplines on the most obvious paths. The foundation of a more complex system was there; all it needed was some work to become the thing it could be. Instead of progressing forward with the story, I gathered the materials I needed and ventured through BT territory to place the required ziplines, ones that could allow travel over the most dangerous areas, the areas that Death Stranding clearly expected players to pass through.
It was not easy. Time and time again, I was dragged to the ground by shadowy ghosts and pulled into a stream of tar that rushed me away from my destination. I fired bullets coated in my own blood and threw grenades containing my sweat at massive beasts until I somehow managed to get where I wanted to go. Over the course of several hours, digital blood and sweat literally spent, multiple hikes through the worst conditions accomplished, I connected my ziplines with the broader network. Anyone who came after me would be able to use them, crossing over the mountains easily and flying over the BT’s feasting ground. I’m proud of those ziplines, of the work that went into making them. I’m thankful to the strangers whose devices I literally connected with to make something that would benefit not only us, but everyone who stumbled through the treacherous paths after us. There was no real point to doing this, other that it could be done and I thought it should be done. I needed to do it. I needed to build something.
During my time reviewing Death Stranding, I had a relationship fall into disrepair. That my most valued personal connection frayed while playing a game that is ultimately about the bonds we make was not lost to me. Time and time again in Death Stranding, I wandered through harsh red deserts and snow-capped peaks with the mission of bringing people together. I crossed bridges left by strangers, trusting that the paths they had laid would bring me where I needed to go. Outside of the game, I was lost. What does it mean for a connection to unravel, like an old rope bridge across a ravine? What does it take to rebuild one?
I don’t have answers to this. Death Stranding didn’t provide them. Instead, it insisted on a simple idea: that we are made strong by the grace and, more beautifully, the chance of others. That we travel on the roads of those who went before us, leaving our own marks that ultimately affect the path those behind us take. We walk alone more often than we walk together, losing ineffable things along the way like so much fumbled luggage. And yet, we sometimes see signs of care. In life, they’re small. A random text message from an old friend, a free drink at the neighborhood bar, an enthusiastic conversation with a co-worker about nothing important, the sound of your roommate playing his guitar. In Death Stranding, these things are literal. A generator powering our car in the middle of nowhere, a glowing thumbs up emblem at the city gates, a ladder crossing a flowing stream, a structure protecting us from the acid rain.
“I brought you a metaphor.”
Death Stranding’s multiplayer aspects function as both criticism of online parasocial relationships and a strong metaphor for themes of togetherness and worker solidarity. Crossing the lonely wasteland encourages players to build narratives in their minds. Stumbling upon new bridges and seeing the names of familiar players, it’s easy to believe you know something about them. I noted how one player seemed to place their structures in areas with heavy foot traffic, maximizing “likes.” Another always seemed a step ahead, building exactly what was needed with care and consideration. You build affection for some players, annoyance for others. The opportunists, the caregivers. You crave “likes” and engagement because it feels good to have something, anything in the wasteland. One time, I built the start of a highway outside of a distribution center and woke up to find the road had been expanded by someone else. My initial structure has thousands of likes. Later on, returning to it, someone else’s name was presented as the owner and they had even more praise than I’d received. Who was this asshole, swooping in to take implicit responsibility for something I had built? I bet he’s the kind of person who steals people’s jokes on Twitter. These thoughts are, of course, nonsense. There’s no more sense to our interaction than whatever meaning I brought to it. Yet I cannot help but believe I know who they are, and accept that they’ve undoubtedly formed their own thoughts about me.
In practice, building structures and expanding pathways creates more camaraderie than contention. There’s no denying the strange narrative context underpinning it all—we were, after all, extending from coast to coast in an effort to make America whole again—but the effect of these mechanics is more romantic than unfortunate. Countless workers, united in the solidarity of their task, creating public and functional means to allow essential services to continue. The work mattered enough that players had each other’s backs and tended to the essential parts without prompting. Death Stranding waxes poetic about intertwining souls and bonds that last from one world to the next. If love, sadness or duty could move from the land of the living to the dead, then perhaps these feelings of pride and solidarity can shift from the digital to the actual. We made something; we helped each other. Video game or not, there’s a comfort in that. It turns out that being an Amazon worker in the apocalypse isn’t so bad when solidarity prevails.
The larger world of Death Stranding is far from idyllic. Scattered throughout the broken continent are pockets of hoarders know as MULEs, as well as other terrorists, all of whom are eager to steal Sam’s cargo. These human adversaries provide a different challenge from BTs. If you want to pilfer MULE supplies or rob caches from terrorists, you still can engage in some stealth action, as you would with BTs. High grass and natural obstacles provide plenty of means for ingress, and gear like a bola gun and rope to tie up enemies let you incapacitate foes. The other option is loud and hectic, and just as worthwhile. With the right arsenal, it’s possible to descend upon an enemy camp like a marauding archangel, firing away with non-lethal rounds—killing a human would produce a BT, after all—and causing frantic firefights that reward prize resources and gear.
This is the most obvious vestige of Metal Gear Solid’s DNA. While Death Stranding is not an action game, it does handle action well when needed. This extends to boss fights, which I cannot spoil here except to say that they range from stealth guerilla affairs to biblical clashes that would feel right at home in Yoko Taro’s Drakengard. Violence is a last resort, and Death Stranding is best experienced in a careful and stealthy fashion, but when the time comes for the silence to break and explosions to ring out, it’s powerful. Not everything can be solved with a bridge. Combat is a hard truth, and one that always feels dirty and messy.
All of this is work. Death Stranding is a long and grueling game, but that grind and sweat is fundamentally important to its identity. After the initial plot is set up, the next 40 to 50 hours are devoted to quiet hikes and desperate forays with only a few plot punctuations. In Death Stranding, labor is key, and offering any convenience to the player outside of a few weapons and gadgets would rub against the game’s themes. If players are meant to value connections, they need to be alone for hours.
I did have a constant companion in these journeys: my friend and colleague Tim Rogers. We have talked for hours in his darkened office, chatted relentlessly over Slack messages. Plenty of it was goofing for goofs’ sake but when the time came for us to think about the world design, Tim spoke clearly.
“Games build excitement out of parts a filmmaker would edit,” he told me.
I can think of the moment that was most clear to me. Multiple hours spent in snowy mountains assembling underappreciated ziplines and shelters had taken its toll. I was playing a portion of Death Stranding that was miserable, which gave me the harshest environment and robbed me of essential tools. Cold lapped at my face, steel girders popped out of the snow like massive crucifixes. For two nights, all I knew was snow and acid rot. All I knew was white. Then I came over a ridge and saw green again. Glorious, growing grass. I wish I had the words to describe what it meant to see the color green again. It wouldn’t have mattered nearly as much if I didn’t put in all that goddamn work beforehand. I don’t think you can do that with a montage or smash cut.
For all of Kojima’s pretensions as a would-be filmmaker, for all of the celebrity casting and cameos from his famous friends, not to mention the corniness of the Monster Energy Drink brand deal (drinking the stuff in-game will fill your stamina gauge), the glue that holds everything together is how well Death Stranding works as a game. While a majority of the time is spent wandering, it’s never pointless, and even the emptier interactions—what does it even mean to “like” a stranger, anyway?—contribute to a whole that is always asking you to consider something. That can be the uncomfortable implications of American expansionism, the current era of Trumpism, the disastrous effects of climate change, the vapid but reassuring nature of social media, the raw physicality of bodies, or broader notions of labor. It’s all there, and it’s wrapped into a game that is both hard work and rewarding to play.
The strongest story in Death Stranding is the one told by its systems, but the cut-scenes and other narrative elements are still captivating, a slow burn that starts with quiet character moments and ends with a mountain-high pile-up of plots and motivations. Death Stranding takes a long time to define its world, and still leaves plenty to implication when the credits roll. There’s a lore database for learning some terms, but Death Stranding comfortably luxuriates in ambiguity before exploding outward into excessive action. Buried under all of the sci-fi terminology is a simple story; once everyone’s motivations have been laid bare, it’s not nearly as complicated one might imagine based on the game’s bizarre trailers. Death Stranding is ultimately more impressive in the raw sensory overload than in the moment to moment plot, but it’s hard to deny how much of an improvement its storytelling technique is when compared to Metal Gear Solid V’s lumbering monologues and swooping camera movements. Death Stranding, for all its convolution and visual excess, is evocative and often moving.
Much of this is owed to how much the actors commit to their roles, even if they’re often tasked with spouting overwrought metaphors or clumsy exposition dumps. There’s a sense that everyone knows this is a little bullshit, and that winking edge comes hand in hand with a larger commitment to the story as a whole. It’s more like watching opera or musical theater than a film. At times, its tone comes off more like a sentai show or B-movie, schlocky and sometimes sleazy. There are grand gestures, deep outpourings of emotion, deliberate choreography.
It’s hard not to like Sam Bridges, who faces all of Death Stranding’s bizarreness with a welcome everyman’s weariness, encapsulated in in Norman Reedus’ characteristic growl. Troy Baker hams it up as the villainous Higgs, and Léa Seydoux nails the mixture of toughness and raw emotionality as Sam’s close ally ‘Fragile.” Then there’s Mads Mikkelsen, who commands attention every time he’s on screen. Yeah, it’s funny as hell to hear him whisper “I want my BB,” but when the time comes, he puts in the damn work.
Death Stranding sometimes falls into reductive gender tropes, in much the same way that other Kojima games do. This is a story of fatherhood, very often to the expense of the women in the cast. Sam’s ongoing bond with his bridge baby intersects with the story of Mads Mikkelsen’s mysterious villain Cliff, underpinning the main plot’s world-shaking politics with more human and relatable sentiments. But Death Stranding stumbles when the time comes to handle the women and their stories. There are gestures at motherhood themes to go along with the fatherhood themes, such as a storyline that uses ghosts as metaphor for postpartum depression, but this is ultimately a story about men, and one where even the bravest sacrifices of the female characters come hand in hand with the same characteristic leering camerawork of Kojima’s previous games. It’s never so gross as Metal Gear Solid V’s Quiet, but it’s still a noticeable issue that undercuts the narrative’s larger examination of parental pain and sacrifice.
That said, Death Stranding is also just as infatuated with the male body. Whether that’s the sensual framing of Mikkelsen smoking a cigarette or the way the camera moves to ensure you’ve seen just enough of Reedus’ naked body during shower scenes, Death Stranding’s bisexual camera is more interested in men than even the torture-laden, blood licking Metal Gear franchise. The difference is ultimately in how lovingly men are framed compared to women, both by the literal camera and also their place in the larger narrative. Fragile’s body can be marred by timefall, rain lapping at her skin, but it’s still ultimately Léa Seydoux running in the rain as the camera focuses on her ass. Reedus stands naked on a beach, and Mikkelsen rises out of a tar pit, and yeah, it’s sexy, but they’re also allowed far more nobility.
Death Stranding deals with many universal themes—children and their guardians, death, labor—but it is also speaking to more specific current topics as well. At the forefront is a deeply environmentalist sentiment about deteriorating habitats, extreme weather, and societal collapse. As reports flood in about our mounting climate crisis and the resulting cost of inaction, Death Stranding imagines a world where the most extreme conditions fracture the ties that bind the world together. This is evident in the world design, which ranges from rocky shoals and more reasonable terrain to extremely alien topography. There are portions of the map that look more like Mars than Earth, nearly blood red in the color of the sands. Raging snowstorms warp space-time, and sunken cities lurk beneath rising tides of tars.
Death Stranding’s conflict rises to biblical proportions. Many characters believe that humanity is doomed no matter what, that any action forestalling imminent extinction is a band-aid on a mortal wound. After all, with enough time, there’s no doubt that humanity will be little more than dust. Death Stranding has an undercurrent of fatalism that feels very much of the moment. Even as other characters maintain a hope that a better, sustainable future is possible, there is also a quiet acceptance that, you know, maybe we really are struggling in the face of something too big. That the little victories we find might be dwarfed by the larger problems we face. This is never offered as an excuse for idleness; it is clear there is work to do, despite it all. Death Stranding pulls between these two extremes. One that says there is no point. Another that says although the future is unknowable, there’s a duty to fight for something better, even as the sun grows hot, the bodies pile, and world cracks.
This message comes paired with gestures towards modern American politics. “Make America whole again” is the common refrain. In Death Stranding, America is a nation broken, scattered to disparate pockets of people just trying to get by, beset by monsters and marauders. The solution to this issue is suitably quixotic: what if we just fix communication lines between everyone? It’s an idea that doesn’t grapple with some of the more pressing questions of modern American politics—for instance, civil resistance—and one that can seem naive. The fracturing of real-life America is a symptom of a larger systemic problem of bigotry that’s seen a rise in violence and isolationist rhetoric around the world. In the face of this moment, Death Stranding decides that this is fixable. That the politics of division can give way into something more holistic and inclusive. Death Stranding, to its detriment, never quite reckons with its use of American iconography—it is a nation founded on slavery and colonial slaughter—but it still opts to point a finger. Things as they are cannot stand or they will lead to ruin.
The silver lining, of course, is other people. Death Stranding is not a subtle game. The mechanics are the message. Build connections, use those to literally span divides. Even as the story swells to a convoluted chaos that would make Metal Gear Solid 4’s monstrous canon-welding blush, Death Stranding’s most fundamental point is not hard to understand. Yes, this is hell. Yes, we are falling apart. Yes, this might be the end. But there is redemption in other people.
Now that you’ve finished reading this review, you could watch this ridiculous video by me (Tim Rogers (hello)), if you want. Hey Tim, this is Heather typing now from Blizzcon. This video is great and I’m glad we went on this strange journey together. I see you used my piss footage! Also, yes, watch Tim’s video!
Small wonder that Sony moved to snap up console-exclusive rights to Hideo Kojima's first game after his acrimonious split with Konami. Kojima and PlayStation have a close relationship that dates back to Metal Gear Solid's debut in 1998. Beyond that, Sony's commissioners have a helpless weakness for the most ambitious and bizarre visions of video gaming's great auteurs and obsessives. If you are a Fumito Ueda, or a David Cage, or a Kazunori Yamauchi, and you have a weird idea for a game that cannot possibly be made on budget and will confuse the hell out of the marketing department, then Sony has a few million dollars with your name on them.
Well, Kojima has delivered. On time, surprisingly, but also 100 per cent on brand. The first release from his new studio Kojima Productions and his first non-Metal Gear game since 2003's Boktai, Death Stranding is nothing if not an event. It is at once unmistakable as his work and surpassingly strange. It is grandiose and goofy, liberating and frustrating, thrilling and audaciously dull. It boldly strikes out for new territory even as it gets bogged in the mire of convention. Its preoccupations are nakedly displayed while its plot is borderline incoherent. It's hilariously indulgent of its creator; the production could certainly have used more people who were willing to tell Kojima no. Although perhaps we can be glad they weren't around. If they had been, Death Stranding would be more like other games, and that would be a shame.
Mystification at Death Stranding's content and storyline, which has persisted since it was announced, doesn't really end when you start playing it. It turns out the PR wasn't being deliberately enigmatic - it just is that weird. It really is a game about delivering packages in a desolate future where the veil between death and life has been torn. After a catastrophic event known as the death stranding, America is a dangerous wasteland stalked by reckless bandits and frightening apparitions known as BTs. Rain accelerates the passage of time for anything it touches. Understandably, most people live underground. As Sam Porter Bridges - a stolid deliveryman, played by Norman Reedus - you must reconnect a fragmented society by bringing bunker-like waystations, outposts and cities onto the "chiral network", a kind of ectoplasmic internet.
There's more to it than that, of course. A lot more. This might be Kojima's first time in 15 years working on a blank sheet of paper, but that hasn't held back the tide of lore that engulfed the Metal Gear series - especially in its premature swansong, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He remains instinctively arcane, building Death Stranding's script (he is credited, among other things, as creator, producer and writer) and its world out of acronyms, jargon, portentous nicknames, secret histories, hazy philosophising and oddball, comic-book characters.
So Sam is also on a quest to rescue his sister, Amelie (a digitally rejuvenated Lindsay Wagner), from a terrorist known as Higgs (Troy Baker). He is sent on this quest by his mother, President Bridget (also Lindsay Wagner). He works for Bridges, which seems to be a sort of federal corporation in the mould of Amazon and is run by a masked character called, if you can believe it, Die-Hardman (Tommie Earl Jenkins). He is visited by a mysterious woman in a rubber suit with a spiky umbrella called Fragile (Léa Seydoux). He chats, via a Metal Gear-style codec, to a team of Bridges boffins: Deadman (Guillermo del Toro), Heartman (Nicolas Winding Refn) and Mama (Margaret Qualley). And there are visions of a mysterious man, played by Mads Mikkelsen, who seems to be connected to his BB.
This BB is an unborn baby that Sam carries around on his chest in a tiny sarcophagus. It helps him establish a connection to the world of the dead, which is called the Beach, because... well, because it's a beach. This allows him to perceive the BTs, or Beached Things, more easily. Sam has a condition called DOOMS, which is never very well explained, and is also a "repatriate", which means he can come back from death. Any other human that dies must be instantly cremated or risk creating a "voidout" when their body is seized by the BTs, blowing a crater in the map. In this world, killing people really isn't advisable.
The ethereal soundtrack leans heavily on 2011's Low Roar album. It's almost twee, but the needle drops are well timed.
It's an odd universe, laden with symbolism: bridges, ropes, hands, babies, umbilical chords and the signifiers of death are everywhere. If it has an eerie power - and it definitely does - it is not thanks to the heavy-handed thematic treatment or the clumsy writing. Seldom has a game worked so hard to explain itself only to fail. The actors spend most of their time valiantly wading through a tar pit of exposition that somehow does little to advance your understanding or flesh out their strikingly designed characters. (In fact, this game is so obsessed with exposition that it continues through, and then past, the end credits. The entire hours-long final act of the game is so overblown, it's a scarcely believable display of hubris.)
Credit where it's due to the cast: Qualley adds a much-needed note of relatable humanity; Seydoux does her best with a faintly icky characterisation. Reedus does the gruff everyman thing well enough and his compact physicality really grounds Sam as an avatar. Del Toro, the acclaimed Mexican film director and connoisseur of pop-culture weirdness, seems to be having the most fun with this nonsense, and is a lively presence throughout. Kojima continues to have an awkward relationship with his female characters, who are objectified or mythologised in uncomfortable ways: mothers, sisters, soulmates and tragic ghosts, often muddled together. It's fair to say that the men are hardly more than ciphers, either.
Where does Death Stranding get its strange power from, then? Why will it linger in the memory long after the 50 hours or so (not counting sidequests) you spend playing it? At this point, it's worth puncturing the image of Kojima as gaming's supreme auteur to remind yourself that he has had a vital collaborator on almost every one of his games: the artist Yoji Shinkawa. Together, Kojima and Shinkawa have created indelible characters and crafted a signature look: a kind of muscular, sinuous, faintly sinister futurism, powered by robotics and haunted by the bomb. Death Stranding, on which Shinkawa served as art director, weaves in a new strand of ghostly horror, and is perhaps their most potent creation yet.
Norman Reedus and Léa Seydoux. The cut-scenes are very long but the digital actors look fantastic.
It cuts Metal Gear's ties with the real world; although nominally set maybe 100 years in the future, Death Stranding feels as if it exists much farther off. It's a distant, bleak fantasy of humanity drifting toward oblivion. The landscapes are stark, melancholy, empty. Hard, clean materials streak with rust in the "timefall". The technology is skeletal: one particularly memorable creation, brilliantly animated, is the Ordradek, a flower-like scanning arm that sits on Sam's shoulder, pulsing, spinning and pointing to indicate the presence of BTs. The BTs themselves are genuinely haunting. They manifest, variously, as sudden handprints in black mud; floating, smoky figures tethered by winding umbilical chords; grasping torsos emerging from puddles of tar; and ghastly, thrashing, monstrous fish.
Sam trudges across this unsettling, beautiful space, bringing packages from one place to another. That really is the substance of Death Stranding: fetch quests. It could almost be a parody of rote open-world game design, but it turns out that Kojima Productions is deadly serious about it. It wants the simple act of navigating this world, from A to B, to be challenging and evocative. It is. Sam must carry his load on his back, stacked high, and he must bring the equipment he needs with him, too: weaponry, ladders, climbing ropes, supplies, spare boots in case his wear out. He has finite stamina and endurance reserves, and you need to think about weight distribution and balance. The landscape is rugged, so you need to plot your routes carefully, pulling the controller's triggers to keep Sam on an even keel. Climbing is hard, but descending is more dangerous still, and if you topple your cargo may be damaged.
As in so many current games, the busy interface can barely keep up with the information load and sometimes obscures the game's beauty.
It is steady, hypnotic stuff. Some may find it boring. I enjoy hiking myself and found it startlingly true-to-life to pick my way through the rocky outcrops, footfall by footfall. The maps encourage this, being convincingly organic, meticulously designed and completely open. I liked the game best when I planned a circuitous route for a delivery and was rewarded with a long, lonely walk through silent, beautiful views; or when I figured out that I could shortcut a very long delivery by taking a risky, gruelling trek through a high mountain pass. The loop is one of careful preparation - selecting your equipment, optimising your load, planning your route - followed by the journey. It's fair to say that it can be pretty dry, and the micromanagement can be onerous. But at its rigorous best, Death Stranding reframes your relationship with an open-word landscape in much the same way that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did.
For both better and worse, that's not all there is to it. There are vehicles - bikes and trucks - though they're not always well suited to the landscape. There is combat with human bandits, which is a blend of stealth and scrappy, panicky combat familiar from Metal Gear. There are BT encounters, which are wonderfully creepy and suspenseful at first, as you try to crawl past the ghouls without being detected, but aggravating and strangely pointless when you are caught and must face one of the larger apparitions, which can be fought or fled from. There are some boss battles, though none to match the classic, theatrical encounters Kojima has staged in the past. As in Metal Gear, there is an abundance of overdeveloped, underused gadgetry and systems. As in Metal Gear, there is a satisfyingly exacting way to play, but you are just as likely to blunder or brute force your way through.
Here's another contradiction for you: it is a very lonely game, but you are never alone. Death Stranding takes Dark Souls' idea that other players can leave messages in your game and expands upon it. Once you have connected an area to the chiral network, you can see messages and use equipment players have left behind, entrust deliveries to them or pick them up, and collaborate with them on building useful infrastructure like roads, safe houses and shelters. Sometimes this kills the mood a little, but more often than not it's a life saver, and there's nothing more pleasing than creating a particularly useful structure and having it go viral. Other players reward you with Likes, which you also earn from making your deliveries and other in-game actions, and which seem to be the most prized currency in this world. They are Death Stranding's equivalent of experience points and feed into a fuzzily defined character progression system.
Both the Likes and Sam's job - a kind of heroic, public-service version of a gig-economy courier - have a deliberately mundane and contemporary resonance in this otherwise otherworldly setting. I think it's deliberate, anyway, and Kojima does have something to say about how we are engineering ourselves into a state of busy isolation (though some might question his thesis that the best way to bring people together is by expanding network coverage). The commentary is earnest, if a little on the nose. Sadly, it gets lost in a froth of stoned-undergrad-grade existential waffle towards the end of the game, as Kojima strains unsuccessfully to make something meaningful of his nonsensical story and garbled lore.
As the credits roll on Death Stranding, heavy with unearned pathos, the impression you're left with is of a self-congratulatory monument to the ego of a creator who is high on his own supply. Has Kojima always been this full of it? Maybe. But then you return to the game proper, select a humble delivery order, lace up your boots and plan another reckoning with those unforgettable, haunted moors. And you realise that this game has got under your skin in a way few do.
The Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro is due to be unveiled next week, but we already know plenty about the device. Xiaomi has confirmed that the phone will have a 108MP primary camera and a penta-lens rear camera layout. Now, the firm has revealed that the device, which could be the Mi Note 10 in the West, will have a rather large battery.
According to an official Weibo post, the Mi CC9 Pro will pack a whopping 5,260mAh battery. This is slightly bigger than the leaked TENAA filing, and means it has the biggest battery of any Xiaomi phone in 2019 (edging out the 5,000mAh Redmi 8A). It’s not quite as large as the Asus ROG Phone 2‘s 6,000mAh battery, but it should theoretically deliver two days of moderate usage nonetheless.
A big battery usually means you’ll need to wait a while to fully charge it, but Xiaomi is also bringing 30W wired charging to the Mi CC9 Pro. The brand says the phone will hit 58% capacity in just 30 minutes, and 100% juice in 65 minutes. It’s not the fastest charging solution of the year in terms of pure wattage (that goes to the 65W-toting Oppo Reno Ace), but it’s still very impressive when you take the large battery into account.
We also know what kind of penta-lens rear camera setup to expect from the smartphone, delivering the aforementioned 108MP camera, a 5x optical zoom camera, 12MP portrait sensor, 20MP ultra-wide camera, and a macro camera.
Xiaomi is set to officially launch the Mi CC9 Pro on November 5, but it won’t be the only device it shows off then. The company has already confirmed that it will be bringing the Mi TV 5 and a Xiaomi smartwatch. The watch bears more than a passing resemblance to the Apple Watch, and will offer Xiaomi’s MIUI For Watch software experience.
Jennifer Aniston, left, and Steve Carell in a scene from “The Morning Show,” which debuts Friday together with the Apple TV+ video service.
Photo:
Hilary B Gayle/Associated Press
Apple Inc.
became a colossus by redefining gadgets including the smartphone, the tablet and the smartwatch. As it takes aim at Hollywood, it is working from a very different script.
On Friday, the company plans to launch the Apple TV+ video service, its contender in the battle between media and tech giants for people’s streaming dollars. Apple TV+ is slated to start with nine programs, including a buzzy drama about television news called “The Morning Show” featuring Jennifer Aniston,
Reese Witherspoon
and Steve Carell. Other offerings include “See,” set in a future when humans lack sight, and “Snoopy in Space,” for children.
Apple’s enormous size, $100-billion cash hoard and fat profit margins mean it can afford the costs of developing and distributing new content. And the more than 900 million iPhones and 500 million other Apple gadgets in use world-wide give it an enormous, built-in base of potential TV+ customers.
But entertainment takes Apple well outside its wheelhouse, and much about its approach to the streaming wars departs from its usual strategy.
Apple is used to charging far more for its iPhones, iPads and Macs than rivals do for their products. It controls its own ecosystem of hardware and software products and carefully rolls out new versions of its gadgets once a year at most.
Speakers at WSJ Tech Live discuss the increasing competition for consumers as a growing number of video-streaming services come to market.
With TV+, Apple is charging less than competitors and pushing its service aggressively on other platforms. A company accustomed to hits is entering a world where TV shows and movies fail with regularity. And the secretive Silicon Valley titan is contending with critical scrutiny in Hollywood that far exceeds the business’s importance to Apple’s bottom line.
Critical reviews of the offerings on Apple TV+ have been mixed. Time said “The Morning Show” lacks the depth and spirit of top TV shows, while New York Media’s Vulture called it a “glossy, largely compelling new series.” Hollywood-focused Variety’s critics found fault with other Apple shows, saying none was “stellar enough to justify someone buying in to a whole new streaming service.”
An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
“Honestly the world should give Apple a little leeway,” said “See” executive producer Francis Lawrence. “Nobody can be perfect 100% of the time.”
Hollywood is central to Chief Executive
Tim Cook’s
effort to refashion Apple as a services company as sales have slowed for its original products. Sales of its bread-and-butter iPhone fell 14% for the fiscal year ended in September, dragging the company’s total revenue down 2% to $260.17 billion.
A Stream of Choices
Several new video services are launching to challenge Netflix. How they compare:
Source: the companies
The hardware heavyweight, though, has a threadbare entertainment library. So its service will cost $4.99 monthly for subscribers and will be free for a year with the purchase of a new iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Netflix Inc., which charges $12.99 a month for its most popular service, pioneered the category and offers more than 1,500 shows and 4,000 movies.
Walt Disney Co.
will charge $6.99 for Disney+, which launches 11 days after Apple’s offering, with popular franchises such as “Star Wars.”
Apple struck deals to make its Apple TV app available on Roku and on smart TVs from
Samsung Electronics Co.
Mr. Cook called the offering a bold move during a Wednesday call with analysts. He said the price is aggressive because Apple wants as many people as possible to view the shows. “This allows us to focus on maximizing subscribers,” he said.
Apple is also rolling out its programming in a way that straddles Netflix’s all-at-once strategy with the one-episode-a-week style of HBO and others. Initially, it will offer three episodes of some shows, such as “For All Mankind,” about the U.S. space program in a world where Russia landed first on the moon, and add a new episode each subsequent week. Others such as “Dickinson,” about a young Emily Dickinson, will be available in their totality.
Apple is famously fastidious about its brand. So far, its slate of shows features themes of resilience and aspiration. The focus—combined with an aversion to over-the-top gratuitous sex, violence and language—has led some Hollywood creators to question if Apple TV+ will be as risqué as Netflix, FX or HBO, whose programs often embrace the underbelly of culture and society.
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Should apple move into creating content or stick to making devices? Join the conversation below.
To be sure, in entertainment the definition of a brand is often fluid, especially if the shows designed to fit that brand fail to catch on and a show that doesn’t becomes a success.
“You’re not allowed to go into this without pretending you have a brand, but then your brand becomes whatever your hit show is,” said producer Mike Royce, whose credits include “Everybody Loves Raymond” and the reboot of “One Day at a Time.”
If Apple can amass 50 million subscribers for TV+, about as many as it has for its music-streaming service, it would add $3 billion in annual sales, estimates Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research. That steady subscription revenue would help reduce iPhone dependency—though it is tiny compared with Apple’s $250 billion in total annual sales.
Apple also wants to draw viewers to its TV app and encourage them to subscribe to other services, such as Starz and Showtime, that can be accessed through the app, according to people familiar with the strategy. It gets a 30% cut of other subscriptions initially.
The business strategy is being fashioned by
Peter Stern,
who joined Apple in 2016 after overseeing strategy at Time Warner Cable Inc. Last year, the Yale Law School graduate was promoted to oversee Apple’s video, news, books, iCloud and ad-services businesses. He has looked for ways to bundle services and directly market subscriptions, people familiar with the strategy said.
The company unveiled one offer Wednesday, with actor Hailee Steinfeld, who stars in “Dickinson,” announcing on Instagram that TV+ will be free to college students who subscribe to Apple Music.
Apple’s decision to bundle TV+ with sales of its gadgets will hurt its hardware business for financial reporting purposes but help services, because it reduces a $699 iPhone sale by $60—the annual cost to subscribe to TV+—which will be recognized as services revenue, analysts say.
In the future, though, TV+ can serve as a marketing tool that deepens the appeal of new iPhones with incremental features, Mr. Sacconaghi said. “They now have something they can use to help maybe iPhone or other product demand,” he said.
