Fortunately, we had a guest room that we could transform into a temporary office. After moving some furniture around and doing a bit of redecorating, I officially “moved” my workspace upstairs. But my desk situation was still pretty dire. I actually ended up using a folding sewing table as a stopgap in the guest room because I wanted to keep the writing table downstairs. I thought I’d be okay with it since this situation was supposed to be temporary. But as weeks turned into months, I realized this was probably how it’s going to be for the long haul. 

Engadget

After doing copious amounts of research, I settled on the aforementioned Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk by Fully. It has a ton of positive reviews, I liked the design and it comes in a small enough size to fit in our space. At around $600, it’s not cheap, but I found that it’s actually fairly priced compared to similar desks (the Uplift V2, for example, is around $50 more for a similar configuration). After a brief shipping delay due to a back-ordered bamboo desktop, I finally received everything a week or so after I ordered it. 

But then I ran into a problem. After putting the whole thing together, I realized (to my dismay) that the desk was much too high for my 5 foot 3 stature. I had mistakenly ordered the mid-range desk frame, which has a minimum height of 29 inches, and not the extended-range desk frame, which has a minimum height of 24.5 inches. My husband was especially annoyed because he had spent nearly an hour putting the whole thing together, only to have me disappointed at the outcome. 

At first, I thought I could make it work. Maybe if I piled a few extra cushions on my chair, I could have a better sitting height. Or maybe if I just committed to standing all day long it would be okay. But after a few days, parts of my body started to hurt, and I decided that the poor ergonomics were to blame. I bristled at the thought of having to dismantle the desk and return the whole thing, but I emailed the company anyway, informing them of my dilemma. 

To my absolute surprise, Fully was ready and willing to exchange just the frame, which allowed me to swap out the legs while keeping the desktop and its components mostly intact. In other words, I would purchase the extended-range frame on its own, swap it out with the mid-range frame, send that back to them, and I’ll get the difference in price refunded to me (The extended-range frame is only $20 more than the mid-range option). 

Engadget

In a little over a week, the extended-range frame arrived. We then took apart the desk’s existing frame as best we could, and replaced it with the new one. It took a bit of work — it’s not quite as easy as the company claims — but we got it done in under an hour. Then, since we had already thrown away the old packaging, we simply put the old frame into the box the new frame came in. 

What’s more, I needn’t have worried about the hassle and cost of returning it. Fully sent FedEx to pick up the box directly from my house and covered all of the shipping expenses. I didn’t even have to print out a return label. What I thought would be a complete nightmare of a returns process was actually incredibly smooth. 

Importantly, I am also now much happier with the desk, and no longer have to suffer from poor posture. When sitting, I can lower it to the point where my elbows are at the proper 90 degrees, which I wasn’t able to do before. I also opted for the advanced controller where I can assign memory presets for my desired sitting and standing heights — pressing a single button and having it automatically go up or down is fantastic (I would’ve preferred tactile buttons to the touch-sensitive OLED ones, but it’s a minor quibble). I’m finding myself standing at my desk more frequently as a result. The desk itself is also lovely, with a handsome bamboo finish and plenty of space for my laptop, keyboard, trackpad and various other knickknacks. 

If Fully hadn’t made the returns process so easy, I would’ve likely had to suffer through either a troublesome exchange, or years of enduring a less-than-perfect office desk that I had spent hundreds of dollars on. Instead, I now have a desk that I am very happy with, and I have the company’s really excellent customer service to thank for it. 

The problem with these examples is that they’re overly familiar; I built my Animal Crossing island myself, so there was nothing new to discover once I’d unlocked everything. And the Manhattan of Spider-Man is, well, Manhattan. (Except without being able to actually enter the shops and museums.) I was missing the thrill of travel, which is to see new things. 

The idea of using video games as a way of “traveling” is nothing new, and plenty of games can scratch that itch if you like detailed world building. I could spend days in Breath of the Wild alone, and I’ve always enjoyed the historical tourism of the Assassin’s Creed games. But you also run the risk of being attacked, or falling off a tall building or cliff. There’s danger. 

No, what I needed was something more laid-back, something casual. What I ultimately wanted has been derisively called a “walking simulator.”

My colleague Devindra wrote about A Short Hike earlier this year, and I gave that a shot, because it is, at its heart, a travel game. You’re walking around a small island where there’s plenty of little trails to explore, beaches to comb and several islands you can swim to. It’s a surprisingly apt recreation of a weekend getaway, even down to the glut of characters you bump into everywhere. The magic of reaching the peak is akin to finding those one or two solitary moments in a public forest, when everything is beautiful and it belongs only to you.

However, reaching the peak is the end of the game — you could continue to explore, but I’ve never been a completionist. I’m fine with being shown the door after the credits. And besides, I wanted to continue to travel, but now with an eye toward recapturing the look and feel of A Short Hike. Wide Ocean Big Jacket is another game I’ve played (and written about) this year with a similar feel, though more narratively driven. 

I ended up gravitating toward itch.io, which trends more toward experimental thanks to its low barrier of entry for creators, and also has a wider variety of what are now called “wholesome games.” [Be sure to check out our roundup of favorite titles from itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice!] Games like Animal Crossing in that they engender warm, happy feelings with an emphasis on being nice or cute instead of mean or violent. They’re also easy to spot because they use a decidedly different color palette from more mainstream titles, embracing soft yellows and oranges and plenty of pink. (They make me think of creamsicles.)

Olivia Haines

The first title that caught my eye was a short meditative title called Terracotta. As you can guess, there’s a lot of soft reds and browns punctuated with yellow and pink. It’s a fairly simple play, you’re just walking from your house to the store. As you walk, dialogue reveals that you’ve suffered from depression, and this short walk is a bigger deal because of it since you hardly leave your house. It was strangely appropriate in this time of social isolation, when there were months where I only left my apartment to go to the store. Familiar sites outside tend to gain more meaning when you haven’t looked at them in a while, and the game represents that alienness with strange moving chalk drawings. It’s a very minimalistic and short title, but it left an impact on my psyche.

I then looked for something a little more far afield, and found Forgotten Fields from Frostwood Interactive. The download available on Itch.io is only a demo, but it was enough to capture those feelings I hoped it would: The game has a strong sense of mood and place, with beautiful shots of homes and fauna, you even get to ride a scooter near the ocean down a road flanked by palm trees. For me it strongly evoked my grandmother’s town in Puerto Rico, even if the setting of the game is on the other side of the planet. The story is a little less comforting, that of a writer suffering from writer’s block (ugh). But the parts where he’s brainstorming are interesting because the game lets you play that fantasy story as well — at least until he loses his train of thought. 

One more promising game I took a look at was Venice 2089. Aha, I thought, a game that lets me explore a city I’m unlikely to visit any time soon! And it does lovingly recreate the buildings, tiled streets and canals of the Italian city — I can’t speak to its accuracy, but it feels close enough. And the story encourages exploration of the city, with a main character who rides around on a hoverboard (it’s the future, after all). There are items to collect, tasks to perform and people to talk to, and I was eager to do so. What ultimately stopped me wasn’t the short length of the demo, but the fact that at this stage it’s very janky. When I looked at the comments a low frame rate seemed to be a common problem, one that the developers are working to correct. But if you have a higher-spec machine it might still be worth a look.

Even though more places are starting to open up to visitors and I find myself longingly browsing deals on travel websites, I don’t think my love of wholesome games with a strong sense of place is going away any time soon. If anything, I need those quick getaways more than ever, especially as the weather cools down again. I’m happy to support any developers trying to capture that special feeling, the one you feel when you’ve wandered into a sun-dappled glen with only the sounds of birds and a cool breeze as your companion.

There’s also a plethora of attack options which are also coded by type. It gets confusing pretty quickly and the tutorial does a poor job of explaining it well, to the point where I was almost done with the game before it actually clicked.  You even gain experience points and level up, with additional abilities you can purchase to assist your verbal sparring.

When I played Undertale I was stymied by the bullet hell monster attacks, to the point where I needed to restart the entire game and never actually finished. In Last Word, the mechanics still manage to honor the more strategic and thoughtful turn-based menu systems I’ve come to appreciate (and rely on) in RPGs but yet feel incredibly new.  The contemporary setting is also a nice change as well, and probably necessary, given that the debate-based battles mechanics are more at home in the parlor of a fine 20th century manor than they would be in a medieval castle.

It’s also blissfully short — only six hours — which means if you love RPGs but often find yourself shying away from them because you don’t have 60 hours of your life to waste away, Last Word is definitely worth checking out. 

At the time it aired, Deep Space Nine got a lot of flack for not being like its predecessors; it was too dark in tone, everyone argued too much, it was boring because they didn’t travel around in a ship, it was a ripoff of Babylon 5. All of these complaints seem rather quaint now, given the themes in both Discovery and Picard (and no one except maybe Dan Cooper really talks about Babylon 5 anymore). But one thing about the show that people continue to bring up — as a positive this time — is how it pioneered serialized storytelling on TV.

DS9 certainly wasn’t the first or only show at the time that ran plots over multiple episodes and seasons, but it was still rare in both syndicated and genre programming, and a first for Star Trek. At the time, I remember being delighted at how the show was rewarding my dedicated viewing. Now that’s par for the course with all kinds of television, from network to streaming. The fact that so many shows now follow a serialized model is why it’s almost impossible to start watching a series in the middle, with people putting aside time to binge entire shows from the very beginning.

With DS9 jumping on the serialized boat earlier than most of its contemporaries, you would think it would lend itself well to modern binge viewing, but over the few weeks I went through the seven seasons, I found this to be the opposite. The characterization and plot hooks were still as solid as I remember, but some of the storylines and pacing felt… thin. I remember Sisko and Kassidy Yates having this long, epic romance, but watching that season so quickly made me realize the relationship didn’t get a lot of screen time. The same goes for Rom and Leeta, who move from first date to marriage in a fairly short number of episodes. What I realized is that, while serialized, DS9 still depended on a weekly schedule for its pacing. Sisko and Kassidy’s relationship, or Leeta and Rom’s, felt long because they were each a handful of episodes stretched over months.

It really makes me think of the concept of “water cooler talk,” where people might discuss last night’s episode the next day at work. In high school, I looked forward to Tuesday mornings so I could talk about the new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my friends. You would discuss what happened and speculate about where the story was going next week. That gap between episodes left room for the story to grow, similar to how movement in comic books happens in the gutters between panels. Our minds would fill in the blanks.

Nowadays, there’s no room for that kind of thought anymore, since Netflix will queue up the next episode before you’ve even had time to process the one you just watched. And streaming shows are designed around that, too, sometimes padding themselves out with detail both to increase episode count (a huge problem in the streamer’s Marvel shows) but also because the audience had no time to do that mental lifting. 

Even with its vaunted serialization, DS9 still took the time out to do standalone episodes, and many of those are considered not just the best of the show but the best in the franchise: ‘Duet,’ ‘The Visitor,’ ‘Far Beyond the Stars.’ They pack in all the information you need to get to the heart of each story neatly enough that, more than 20 years later, they’re still as enjoyable as when they first aired. 

None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy the rest of the show; I still shed a tear during that final shot of ‘What You Leave Behind’ as the camera zoomed away from the station. But I feel like I learned a lot about how format and your method of consumption can twist how you feel about a story.

— Kris Naudus, Buyer’s Guide Editor

‘Deep Space 9’ is available for streaming with subscriptions to CBS All Access, Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime, or by purchasing episodes via video on-demand.

Netflix’s ‘Kingdom’ opened a gateway to more subtitled shows

Keeping the number of episodes per season down has its benefits.

JUHAN NOH/Netflix

I have developed a pandemic habit. Well, several habits. But one of them is watching a (usually) foreign show every Friday with my friend Wendy from Singapore over Skype. It’s a fun way to get me to watch things I would otherwise be too distracted to pay attention to. When we first started in March, Wendy suggested we kick things off with the Korean series Kingdom. I was still a little resistant to watching foreign-language shows because I wasn’t into subtitle reading. And as much as I love zombie movies and TV series, I felt the genre was getting a little tired.

I just wasn’t prepared for the ridiculous amount of love and appreciation I would develop for Kingdom. Set in Korea’s Joseon period, the show follows the Crown Prince as he fights for his throne while a mysterious disease spreads across the country. It’s odd to think about zombies in historical costumes, but somehow it works. Wendy and I devoured the first season in one sitting, before deciding we had to pace ourselves for season two. There are only six episodes per season, so that was quite the challenge, but the relatively small number of episodes keeps the show tight.

There are no superfluous subplots dragging the storytelling down. There’s no need to insert unnecessary romantic tension that takes the viewer away from more interesting scenes. Kingdom is a show that has a story to tell, and by focusing on the drama, it’s incredibly engaging. It also offers a unique and compelling reason for the zombie disease, as well as potential cures and limitations. A twist at the end of the first season also kept things fresh, presenting our heroes with challenges that don’t feel forced.

Speaking of our heroes, I’ll admit it: Kingdom resurrected a crush I developed in my youth for Ju Ji-hoon. He plays the Crown Prince in Kingdom and had the same role in a 2006 series called Princess Hours. Not only was it a delight to watch Ju’s growth as an actor since that show, but I swooned over every clever decision he made as a strategist protecting his people against relentless zombies, rampant poverty, hapless politicians and devious usurpers. Thoughtful and brilliant world leaders? What a fantasy. (Ju is also a beautiful man, which is a nice bonus.)

Kingdom is a great ride, and it opened my eyes to the world of Korean entertainment. It was also a gateway into other foreign shows on Netflix, where the bar is often higher for non-English content. I’ve also come to appreciate six-episode seasons as it’s highly likely that they’re tighter and focus on plot and drama. Since finishing Kingdom, I’ve watched a slew of Korean shows, and Wendy and I checked out some foreign entries on Netflix like Freud, Bloodride and Into the Night. They’ve been hit or miss, with Freud being a convoluted mess.

I do want to briefly shout out Into The Night, which is Netflix’s first Belgian original series. It’s a masterful work and a supremely enjoyable ride, featuring a gripping story, multifaceted characters and deeply complex moral situations amid a mysterious deadly phenomenon killing the world.

I’m still not very likely to dive into foreign shows on my own, but my attitude to them has changed. Subtitles will no longer keep me from devouring the best work the world has to offer. As we quickly run out of things to watch, I’m glad we have a global variety of entertainment within our reach.

— Cherlynn Low, Reviews Editor

‘Kingdom’ is available for streaming with a subscription on Netflix.

‘Solar Opposites’ is so much more than another ‘Rick and Morty’

Don’t miss the Terrordome terrarium.

Fresh from the mind of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, Hulu’s latest animated sitcom series, Solar Opposites, is a turducken-ish tale of refugees struggling to adapt to their new adoptive homes.

The main story revolves around a family unit of sentient space plants from the planet Shlorp who arrive on Earth after an asteroid annihilates their world. After crash-landing in middle America, the Shlorpians — Korvo and Terry, plus their two replicants, Yumyulack and Jesse, as well as their infant genetic supercomputer, Pupa — must integrate themselves into society until they can repair the damage to their spacecraft. This, of course, invariably results in a series of hilarious misadventures: Korvo and Terry unleashing a von Neumann machine upon the town to gain popularity with their neighbors ahead of an HOA board election, Yumyulack and Jesse unwittingly achieving perfect attendance records during summer vacation or Korvo’s misguided attempt to build both a robotic mother for the replicants and a man cave for himself. 

But that’s only half of the story. Super-advanced aliens capable of traveling across the galactic quadrant aren’t particularly well-known for respecting the autonomy of Earth’s native inhabitants (looking at you, Predator). Jesse and Yumyulack are no different, the mischievous pair having developed an affinity for shrinking humans that displease them to Tom Thumb-size and unceremoniously dumping them into a wall-mounted terrarium. There, the unlucky humans must fend for themselves in a Mad Max-meets-Escape from New York apocalyptic wasteland with nothing to subsist upon but Jesse’s occasional donations of candy and whatever they were carrying at the time of shrinking. This story-in-a-story format is really clever as it allows the showrunners to seamlessly transition between the goofy, albeit ultraviolet adventures of the Shlorpians (just wait for the white power scene in episode 2) with a far darker drama unfolding within the terrarium walls.

Viewers will be able to tell from the opening scene that Solar Opposites is very much a Justin Roiland joint venture (co-created with Mike McMahan), from the generous dusting of pop culture references to the R&M-esque squiggly pupils of their eyes. Roiland himself voices Korvo, while Thomas Middleditch portrays Terry. Sean Giambrone and Mary Mack voice Yumyulack and Jesse, respectively. 

The entire first season is currently available on Hulu for your viewing pleasure. The art style and semi-improvisational humor are very much in line with what viewers have come to expect from Rick and Morty. However, this show is in no way a spin-off of the popular Adult Swim series. For one thing, you won’t see fans of this show jumping on McDonald’s counters caterwauling about dipping sauce availability and that, in my opinion, is reason enough to give Solar Opposites a shot.

— Andrew Tarantola, Reviews Editor

‘Solar Opposites’ is available for streaming with a subscription on Hulu.

This quarantine has left me incredibly overwhelmed and anxious — so if you give me an open world map to explore right now, like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or HZD, I’m going to end up wasting my time puttering around on sidequests and searching for secrets, with nothing but a few achievement baubles to show for it. But with this game, there’s always a goal; somewhere to go, some switch to activate, some baddie to shoot. Unlike our real lives, there’s forever a light at the end of the tunnel in Uncharted.    

What’s more, these games act as a window onto the world for me. While I’ve been staring at the same set of walls for the past however many weeks, Drake has the freedom to hop from the steamy jungles of Borneo to secret South Pacific Nazi bases in the blink of an eye. One minute he’s infiltrating the National Gallery of Turkey, the next he’s fighting car to car on a train plowing through the mountains of Nepal. He gets to fight zombies and abominable snowmen. I have a cat that generally ignores me.

The only time Nathan Drake is wearing a face mask is when he’s keeping the sand out of his mouth while adventuring in the Sahara. He’s constantly surrounded by people, none of whom are in any way practicing social distancing. He even shakes hands. Oh I am so envious.  

I also like how the combat encourages you to be thoughtful — but not without a sense that you need to micromanage your inventory. And it’s not a horror game so much as one where there’s a long-standing undercurrent of tension. You sit forward in your chair, always primed for something to happen when you’re navigating the desolate, empty world of the game. 

Which is probably why I’ve had to put it back on the shelf, for now. 

You see, I live on a major road and there’s always stuff going on — in the day, you have people going to work, the bar down the street getting deliveries. The trucks delivering food to the supermarkets, the vans bringing parcels to the logistics centers nearby. At night, the bar has live music, and in seven years of living here, you’re always reminded how close you are to other people. 

But, after the UK went into lockdown, all of that stopped, and the background noise of the world fell to silence. The traffic noise, the drunken revelers, the music, the chatter, all of it gone, and now looking out the window fills me with the same tension, and dread. It’s a real, sort of paranoia-inducing silence that can quickly stop being fun and start keeping you awake at night.

100+ live shows. LA’s most iconic venues. One packed week. Netflix Is A Joke Fest is no joke. pic.twitter.com/sIt0jZjx09

— Netflix Is A Joke (@NetflixIsAJoke) March 2, 2020

Comedians including Pete Davidson, Jamie Foxx, Arsenio Hall, Norm Macdonald, David Letterman, Amy Schumer, Michelle Wolf and Ali Wong are slated to perform. They’ll take the stage in venues like The Hollywood Bowl, Wilshire Ebell Theater, The Regent and The Orpheum Theater.

One event, “The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up,” will feature comedy by Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Chris Rock, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman and Wanda Sykes. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin of Grace and Frankie will host an evening of stand-up with an all-female lineup.

Netflix has invested heavily in comedy specials, and it has tons of great talent to work with. Creating an in-person experience makes sense for live comedy, but this is still a big step for Netflix.

I can’t claim to have jumped on Hades early, it’s been out for more than a year. But I started playing it about a month ago, and it feels like Supergiant used the early access model perfectly. It’s a “roguelike” action RPG where you battle through the depths of the underworld, trying to reach the land of the living, all the while dying repeatedly. There’s a progression system where you can gain permanent bonuses, but most of your upgrades are found while playing, and are lost if you die. As with every rogue-like, you’ll be seeing the beginning of the game a lot.

This isn’t a new concept. But Supergiant, developers of the beloved brawler Bastion, along with Pyre and Transistor, has built on the combat from those previous games. It’s created an exceptionally well designed system with weapons that feel unique; fluid and fantastic movement (especially dodging); and a difficulty curve that always feels just on the fair side of punishing. Depending on what upgrades you find, combat can feel totally different from one playthrough to the next. For example, a “boon” from the ever-helpful Artemis launches a seeking arrow whenever you hit an enemy. That power-up felt underwhelming when I ventured forth with a slow-swinging melee weapon, but it made me nearly unstoppable while wielding a rapid-fire cannon.

Supergiant centered the game in the world of Greek mythology, filled with bickering gods and memorable characters to create an actual narrative, something many roguelikes are sorely lacking in. Plus it features three-headed hellhound Cerberus, and he’s the Goodest Boy in the whole underworld. (Petting Cerberus may be the most satisfying virtual-dog interaction I’ve ever had.)

Big|Brave

Beloved (US)

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“IRL” is a recurring column in which the Engadget staff run down what they’re buying, using, playing and streaming.