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The Crown Series One Review

[I realise I’m 5 years late to the party with this one but I occasionally like to write about the various films, games, tv and miscellaneous content that I consume for two reasons: to practice my writing skills and to make all those hours sat on the sofa feel like they counted for something. It’s not my fault if you read it.]

I recently discovered the term “procedural” to describe a genre of media that shows the technical inner working of a particular job or process, the classic being a “crime procedural” that demonstrates the steps taken in solving a crime. I was glad I had found the term “procedural” because it turns out I like them very much. I think in particular I enjoy law and political procedural dramas because I like to see the complex workings of those worlds that would otherwise be hidden to me. I am also fascinated by the interplay between tradition and practicality. Why do barristers wear wigs? Are the practicalities of today the tired traditions of the future? In a sense The Crown is this kind of procedural drama.

The Crown (L to R) Prince Philip, Elizabeth Elizabeth and Philip discuss Charles’ education

The first series follows the young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) from her marriage to Prince Philip (Matt Smith) through the first few years of her reign. It reveals the details of the complex relationship between the Royal family, Parliament and the political, religious and courtly minefields The Queen must traverse while burdened by a thousand years of custom and precedent. Basically it’s right up my street.

Beyond that however, it is simply far better than it has any right to be.

To begin with the narrative, the themes are fairly predictable: power and unwanted responsibility; the distinction between a person and their role; life in the public eye. The Crown, however, manages to take on just the right amount so that the chosen themes (and characters) get their time and space to develop. International relations (trouble in the Suez) are combined with personal relations (Princess Margaret wants to marry a commoner?!) seamlessly. With so much documented history to choose from, the creators must be praised for the care and precision used in portraying just the right elements in just the right amounts.

The same could be said for the characters, who each have time to breathe and for their own stories to grow. The show does an excellent job of humanising characters (Prince Phillip, Princess Margaret, The Queen Mother and of course The Queen herself) who, to the rest of us, are so far removed and alien. The finest example of this is John Lithgow’s Churchill, seen at the waning of his power through the 1950’s. I watched a lot of the show with my girlfriend who has repeatedly told me of her distaste for Churchill due to his foreign policy, traditionalism and general old-white-man-ness. It is testament then to the acting and characterisation that she literally “awww”-ed out loud at some of the tribulations that befell the aging parliamentarian in The Crown.

Perhaps a well-cast, talented ensemble of actors is to be expected for a production such as this, but The Crown also shines in its cinematography. From the sweeping valleys of Scotland to the smoky bowels of Whitehall, the shots in The Crown are consistently visually striking and offer a complement that intensifies the majesty and drama of the acting and story.

This effect is built further by Hans Zimmer’s fantastic score. Zimmer’s Hollywood bombast, only slightly tempered here, suits the piece remarkably well and seldom strays into melodrama. In one particular scene portraying Churchill’s stroke, the combination of music, acting and sharp editing left the scene ringing in my mind for days after viewing.

With all the above components working in harmony, as they very often do, The Crown strikes a resonant chord. For the nerds like me there’s enough “You must have parliamentary approval!” and “Protocol dictates that…” to go around, but there’s even more humanity to make the piece accessible.

Great stuff, very looking forward to season two.

Score: 4 Constitutional Crises out of 5

Thoughts on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro

Or, An Idiot’s Guide to Local Gamestreaming

Having recently built a new PC, I was frustrated with the lack of an easy way to play games from that machine (in my office) on my living room TV. I tried using SteamLink on the TV itself, which was a working solution but found the performance to be pretty poor; poor enough to stop me from using it altogether.

Amazon.com: NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Pro 4K HDR Streaming Media Player; High Performance, Dolby Vision, 3GB RAM, 2x USB, Works with Alexa: Electronics

As a result, I tentatively splashed out on an Nvidia Shield TV Pro. It’s a box that can play all your streaming favourites (Netflix, iPlayer et al) and also stream games from a PC on the local internet using Nvidia’s proprietary Gamestream software. The USP of the shield is Nvidia’s homemade AI Upscaling technology which will take a lower resolution image and increase it to 4K using magic AI algorithms (or something). I bought the box from Amazon on the condition I could return it if things didn’t work out. Long story short, I did keep the Shield but using it has been such an experience I felt the need to write about it. There’s a lot of articles out there espousing the Shield as a top-of-the-range steaming box, but surprisingly little on the range of issues that accompany it.

Fair warning, this is an article aimed at people seriously considering getting a Shield, people currently wrestling with one, or nerds. It’s going to get technical so abandon faith all ye who enter here.

My first impressions of the box were very positive. The UI was snappy, a delight in comparison to my TV’s built in software. The remote control was ergonomic and the whole thing had a quality feel. So far so good.

I immediately ran into problems when I started to use Gamestream. I tried to play Immortals Fenyx Rising from my PC on the TV and the game could not be detected. Thus began my first foray into the sprawling and esoteric online Nvidia community. After a little research, it turns out you can add games manually to the Geforce Experience windows app which will then become available to play on the Shield. Once I had done this, it worked pretty well.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is Ubisoft's over-the-top take on Breath of the Wild – and it works | TechRadar

However, it raised the question: why wasn’t the game automatically detected (unlike some others that were)? There were vague allusions on forums to some games being “Gamestream Optimised” but I couldn’t find any official word on that. Did these secret “optimised” games run better on Gamestream?

At this point it seems a good time to mention that there is pretty much no online documentation for the Shield – AT ALL. There is a “user guide” on the Nvidia website which amounts to “plug it in and hope for the best”. The GFE Windows app helpfully links you to a now defunct page: originally supposed to be a list of Gamestream optimised games, it now shows games available on Geforce Now (related conspiracy theory detailed below). The scant information that is available is spread in an internet breadcrumb trail between Nvidia’s clunky forums and reddit.

Further problems arose when I tried to improve my Gamestreaming experience using the settings in the app. There isn’t much to play with, essentially just resolution and max bitrate. Once again, I was left puzzling over what “resolution” actually meant to the app, for it didn’t always output the requested resolution. Sometimes it explicitly told me my requested resolution wasn’t available. I could even change the resolution of the settings directly in the game I was playing – what effect did that have?

(If anyone is stumbling upon this article trying to solve that particular riddle: it turns out that Gamestream has the ability to change both the resolution of the monitor being streamed, and the in-game settings (as long as the game is on the sacred, secret “officially optimised” list). So the Gamestream will do its best to output the resolution you have asked for. This is actually quite a cool feature, if only it had any signposting)

Speaking of monitors, one of the most bizarre quirks I have run into is the inability of the Shield to intelligently stream the screen that the game is playing on. In fact, for my unmodified (very standard) dual-screen setup, Gamestream exclusively streamed the wrong screen. I have delved deep into this one too and can provide the peculiar explanation here, which is one of the most mind-blowing pieces of programming oversight I’ve ever witnessed (and I used to be a very bad software developer myself).

How to Setup a Dual Monitor Display - Chillblast Learn

Here goes: A GPU has a specific order it checks for connected screens in order to display the startup info for a PC, and the BIOS menu if you activate it. For Nvidia cards this is VGA > DVI-A > DVI-D > HDMI > DisplayPort. As far as I can tell, this is hardcoded and not customisable. Now, Gamestream will ONLY stream the first one of these that your PC has connected. This also cannot be changed.

In my case, my main screen (used for games) is connected by DisplayPort and a secondary screen connected by DVI. The GPU hits the DVI screen first and therefore, when it is connected, that is the ONLY screen that Gamestream will show. This can be solved by unplugging the second screen and restarting the PC, but I don’t want to do that every time I want to Gamestream!

A further arcane mystery of the Shield ( I’m getting to the end now, I promise) is how AI upscaling works. I’ll skip to the explanation on this one, but needless to say the UI itself doesn’t signpost this at all and I only found THE TRUTH after more forum crawling. Essentially, when AI upscaling is active any input below 4K will be scaled up to 4K using Nvidia’s algorithms. This means that you can improve your streaming by asking for a lower resolution and letting the box upscale it. This applies to all possible inputs (Youtube, Netflix) but the results I’ve seen have been mixed. There are a variety of unexplained settings to accompany this that I have yet to master.

In a strange twist, from forum posts I discovered a separate, third-party app called Moonlight which seems to be objectively better than the native Gamestream app in every way. I was surprised other apps were even allowed to connect to a PC with Gamestream enabled but here we are. The Moonlight app has more settings to customise, and they are more clearly explained. I have solved many of my problems by using the Moonlight app and I’d encourage anyone experimenting with Gamestream to try it out.

Moonlight Game Streaming - Apps on Google Play

To sum up, using Gamestream on the Nvidia shield is not a plug-and-play experience. It’s more of a plug-and-spend-two-weeks-poring-over-three-year-old-reddit-posts experience. And sitting here as I am, at what I hope is the end of my saga, I am left wondering why is Gamestream – one of the flagship features of the device, heralded prominently on its Amazon page – so shit?

Don’t worry, internet wisdom has got the answer. Basically, Nvidia has ended up competing with itself with its Gamestream (local game streaming) and Geforce Now (internet game streaming) services. And you have to pay for Geforce Now. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the former list of Gamestream games has been replaced with a Geforce Now page. Perhaps the apparent neglect of Gamestream is an intentional ruse to drive gamers toward the paid Geforce Now service. Of course, this is all conjecture and there has been no official abandonment of Gamestream support, but in light of the removal of the official list of Gamestream games Nvidia’s silence is conspicuous. If this tinfoil hat theory is true, it’s a very shady move from Nvidia; they use Gamestream as a selling point for the Shield. Indeed, that’s specifically why I bought it and inadvertently wandered into the mess described above.

And yet, despite all of this, I would actually recommend the Nvidia Shield to users looking for a premium experience. Content streaming platforms like Prime Video are well optimised and can be upscaled if you like and, when it’s working, the game streaming capabilities are exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Watch Dogs: Legion Review

To begin with the good, Watch Dogs: Legion’s rendering of London is quite phenomenal. The iconic areas are suitably recognisable and some of the less well-known parts are still true to life. I have found myself recognising streets that I used to run down and feeling nostalgic about pubs once frequented. The streets teem with a diverse population that makes London feel alive and realistic. There have been reports of poor performance on PC but it runs well on my admittedly beefy machine *humblebrag*.

WD:L is an open-world action game set in a near-future London, which casts an underground resistance movement against authoritarian forces wrestling for control of the city. The player will use cameras, traps, drones and an incredibly useful spiderbot to take down those who seek power.

The flagship feature of WD:L is the “play-as-anyone” technology. It is possible to recruit any NPC to your ragtag team of resistance fighters, and it works fairly well. After completing a couple of procedurally generated missions, the character is now yours to control and comes with their own unique skills and abilities. This is good fun and the visual variety in “agents” is tremendous, but the downside of this effort is there simply isn’t enough voice-acting to go round. This leads to repeats and awkward dialogue. For these reasons, the story (wisely) doesn’t hang on the player character at any point and is carried by supporting characters. However, the occasional inclusion of the player character rarely works.

The moment-to-moment gameplay in WD:L is fun, but can be repetitive and, on the default difficulty, too easy. Each scenario almost always involves infiltrating a building. With upgrades easily obtained in the first hour of play, you can do this using drones and your trusty spiderbot without ever entering the building. On the occasions when the player is needed in-person, it’s trivial to “neutralise” all the enemies patrolling the area before you breeze through a corridor of corpses. Despite DedSec’s vague ethos of non-lethality, there is no punishment for hacking a drone with a machine gun and mowing the guards down.

When the player is required to do some shooting themselves (how last-century!), the mechanics are competent but sometimes buggy. Due to some interaction between the crouch, cover and gun systems I was, more than once, left pulling the trigger but no bullets were coming out. Frustrating in clutch situations.

While moving through the world of Legion I can’t help but miss the sense of fluidity that comes with other open-world games, most notably Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed. WD:L feels a little stunted in comparison. This seems intentional, as the game encourages more calculated, careful strategies for problem-solving but when this turns out to lack much flair and creativity it ends up feeling awkward. Fingers crossed for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla next week.

The most interesting combat occurs in the pseudo-boss battles which involve holding a point against waves of incoming enemies using all the skills at your disposal. It is very satisfying to defend a point while a download is happening with a swarm of drones helping you, some of whom have been hacked moments before to turn on their masters. Not to give too much away, but the final boss is a fun spin on this which, while not entirely awe-inspiring, felt appropriately climactic.

The city of near-future London is thoroughly enjoyable to explore, but there’s very little incentive to do so. Available to be collected we have ETO (in-game currency) and Tech points (used for upgrading skills). ETO can only be spent on buying new clothes. Perhaps this belies a sad lack of imagination on my part, but I have no interest in customising the look of a character (they already look wacky enough!) so the ETO is literally worthless. The Tech Points unlock and improve skills, which are shared between all agents. This is more-or-less the extent of progression in WD:L. I unlocked most of the skills I used after a few hours, so there was little need to seek out more (plus you are rewarded with them for completion of story missions!). When I identified Tech Points late game I simply ignored them if they were even slightly out of my way.

The small remainder of the game’s progression is built into the Agent Recruitment system. Some agents have unique skills and skills that improve the whole team, such as faster recovery from injury. This is very light and the combination with Tech Points means you don’t get much out of exploring the world except for its own sake.

The story is where the game is at its weakest, rolling out cliche after cliche about the dangers of technology, governmental oversight and authoritarian ideologies. To be fair, the conclusion of the parallel narratives was gratifying, if heavy-handed. It’s always nice to see an ideologue die by the sword that they lived by. However, the overall tone is so up-and-down as to be almost offensive. It is possible to have your street-magician character, adorned with pink LED-illuminated jacket and top hat, helping to free victims of human trafficking or modern-day slavery. The game can accidentally, though inevitably, make light of some very dark and important themes.

Additionally, so predictable is the story that when the third-act twist was revealed, it was something I had thought was assumed from literally the opening sequence of the game. And I had been skipping through the boring, stunted dialogue.

As a native to the north of England myself, it struck me as odd how much this game treats London as an island, its own sovereign state. There is literally no mention of how the game’s events are affecting other parts of the country. Are they also under the control of technocratic authoritarians? I realise this would only really bother Brits, but as London-centric as things in the UK tend to be, even this was extreme. It broke the immersion because this was so clearly a marketing decision – London holds much more capital on the world stage than Liverpool or Birmingham, so they were just ignored completely. Also, to be picky, there were a few annoying non-britishisms that snuck into the script. I’ve been a british nerd my whole life and have never attended a “science fair”.

Overall, Watch Dogs: Legion is an enjoyable but bland romp. I have to give it credit for having something to say, I was just luke-warm on the execution. Generally, this is one that can only confidently be recommended to fans of the series. To everyone else, you might be better off finding your open-world kicks elsewhere.