Black Hat, White Hat

Daily Ramble 193:Black Hat, White Hat

Today’s ramble looks at good and bad…good that I finished off the Eve tutorial and am ready to head out into space. Bad because the Angels looked pretty bad in their home opener. And I suppose good for Westworld since we see that William has selected a White Hat as he enters into the park for the first time.

1st Bad Game of the Year

I have to say that this was definitely the worst game the Angels have played this year. They actually got shut out but not only because they didn’t score, but they didn’t look very good either. In the previous loss on opening day, the team fought hard and only lost in the 11th inning, Monday was a different story.
Cleveland really knows how to shut down the team. None of the big hitters of the Angels did a thing in the game with Trout, Upton, and Pujols going 0–9 and only Simmons and Marte putting together multiple hits in the game. The pitching wasn’t very good either – JC Ramirez seemed to think it was still Spring Training or something, giving up 3 HRs.
I suppose I’ll give my player of the game to Simmons, but no one really played that well. I just hope they’re able to shake this one off and come back tomorrow…they gotta figure out a way to beat this Cleveland team if they want to contend this year.

Finishing the Tutorial

I suppose the best thing I can say about the tutorial is that it forces you to die. That is one main constant in Eve that every player needs to learn – no matter what, you will lose a ship and die. Sadly, the tutorial doesn’t make you lose a ship through combat. Instead it tells you that your sacrifice will be remembered and then you “turn into a corpse”. It would be so much better to face an escalating series of battles until you died…pretty much like how it possibly happens in the real game. This whole sacrifice will be remembered thing is phony and insulting since it has no basis in the game itself.

The fact that the tutorial also makes you learn a bit about fitting ships is pretty good too. This at least is something you’ll bet doing in the game and some might even build items in a similar manner to how things work in the tutorial. They don’t show you how you need to acquire materials though. I suppose that may be part of one of the resource career agent tutorials which I assume there are but haven’t gotten to yet. I figure each career agent probably has their own little lesson plan and hopefully they go further in depth on how to play the game rather than all the chit chat of the beginning tutorial. We’ll see when I get to those in the next day or so.

As it was, after the tutorial was over I couldn’t construct the ship from the blueprint they gave me because I didn’t have enough materials…why didn’t they show me how to collect those materials in the basic tutorial?

A First Look at Westworld – Chestnut, Part 2

We finished the last installment with Dolores infecting Maeve with the virus and William getting ready for the park. Today he has to make a decision…White or Black hat. He chooses White and we have our good guy! BTW, Logan shows up with a Black Hat.
(In the last installment, I mistakenly referred to William’s soon to be brother-in-law as Lawrence…his name is actually Logan and he’s playeed by Ben Barnes).

As the two guests get on the train into town, the Man in Black rides up on the sherif who’s getting ready to hang someone. It turns out this is someone the MiB wants, so he shoots dead about half a dozen lawmen and pulls Lawrence (this is the real Lawrence) out of the noose. It’s pretty clear you don’t want to be on the bad side of the MiB.

In any case, he throws Kissy’s scalp (which he procured last episode and which has a strange pattern on the inside) at Lawrence and tells him he has to help find the Maze – the deepest level of the Westworld “game”. This is the holy grail for the Man in Black. He’s on this quest for the Maze and he doesn’t care who he has to kill or what he has to do to get there to find the secret.

Meanwhile, back in town, Maeve is talking up a customer in her saloon and she has a flashback to a band of Native Americans attacking her. It looks like the virus is taking hold. With her glitched out, the techs take her back to the lab where we get the first clue that the personalities of the Hosts can be easily altered. The techs bump up her aggression so she can play her role better but they find no indication that she’s been infected…just like they found no virus in Dolores when they checked her last episode.

In another part of the lab, Bernard expresses his fear that someone is sabotaging the park since the photograph that supposedly triggered the virus in Abernathy (Dolores’ father) should not have been enough to glitch him out. Regardless, he assures Ford that the 2 infected Hosts (Abernathy and the sherif) were decommissioned.

So we’ve got a robot virus, someone sabotaging the park, a Guest who’s on a quest, and a couple of guests who are just there for fun. There’s definitely plenty to keep in mind as I watch this show each time but there’s so much I can’t seem to get through too much of it during my breaks at work.