I should probably rename this newsletter ROUGHLY THREE NEW THINGS because there are always more than three things I want to talk about each week. This week is no exception. Since today is the LONG-awaited (it was first announced six years ago) release of Crimson Desert, I want to cover game performance on various platforms here in the front section. There’s a lot of jargon that goes with video game performance and I want to break it all down for those who love games but don’t really bother with all the nitty-gritty of resolution, frame rates, and all the rest.

Crimson Desert is being released for - deep breath - PC, Mac (surprisingly), Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PS5, PS5 Pro, and ROG Ally (handheld). On top of that, there are three modes for consoles (Performance, Balanced, and Quality) and five modes for PC (Minimum, Low, Recommended, High and Ultra). It can be a lot. Here are the spec sheets Pearl Abyss released last week.

So what does it all mean? Let’s break it down.

First, you’re likely going to choose the version of Crimson Desert that aligns with your platform. (I’ll be playing on my Xbox Series X.) There are considerations beyond graphic fidelity that go into choosing which platform to play the game on, but if graphic fidelity is the thing you care about the most, the order from best to worst is:

PC (w/ AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU and AMD Ryzen 7 7700X or Intel i5 13600K CPU + 16 GB RAM)

That’s your benchmark for best possible performance on the highest end machine. After that it’s…

PC w/ Lower Specs

Mac w/ M3 Ultra or M4 Max Chip

PS5 Pro

XBox Series X / PS5

ROG XBox Ally (handheld)

Once you’ve settled on a platform, you then have to decide which mode to play in - Performance, Balanced, or Quality OR Low to Ultra on PC. Generally, that comes down to a preference of frame rate.

Once upon a time, I was a Quality Mode gamer. I wanted the best possible graphic fidelity and cared less about frame rates. (With higher graphic quality comes lower frame rates unless you have a top-of-the-line PC.) Over the last couple of years, I’ve become a dedicated Performance Mode gamer. Once you get used to a buttery smooth 60 FPS (frames per second) frame rate, it’s hard to go back. And the smooth frame rate kind of plays a trick on your brain where it makes the graphics seem better, even with lower graphic fidelity, because everything flows so well.

Crimson Desert has a Balanced Mode that splits the difference between Quality and Performance, and I’ll be interested to see how I like it. It will likely depend on whether my brain notices a difference between 40 and 60 FPS. I definitely notice a difference between 30 and 60.

Crimson Desert - if the hype turns out to be real - may be the game of the year, not named GTA VI. If you plan to pick up a copy, hopefully, I’ve provided you with some clarity if you’re trying to decide which version of the game to purchase.

Now, let’s get on with the rest of THREE NEW THINGS!

Tone is an interesting thing. Last week I covered the show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. That show featured a very vivid, hyper-realistic tone, both visually and in terms of the acting. Colors that pop with a look that apes Michael Bay or J.J. Abrams movies and acting that’s big and not particularly subtle. The tone Monarch is going for is summer popcorn movie and it does that pretty well on a streaming show budget.

DTF St. Louis, from a tone standpoint, is almost Monarch’s exact opposite. The colors are muted. The acting is subtle. The writing is smart but not too clever by half, so the dialog never feels unrealistic. The people in DTF talk the way people really talk. There are a lot of quiet moments and soft conversations. DTF does a great job making you feel like you’re right there eavesdropping on things you shouldn’t be hearing. Despite the craziness of the plot and some of the insane situations the characters get into, the show feels like one of the most “real world” on television. The only other show that made me feel like I was being dropped into slices of real life the way DTF does was the Pamela Adlon show “Better Things.”

DTF St. Louis has a VERY different subject matter than Better Things, however. On the surface it’s about friendship, marriage, cheating, and the truly weird things seemingly normal, midwestern people can get into. (St. Louis was chosen because it feels very middle of America.) And while I feel like I know where the show is going, there’s still a bit of a mystery unfolding.

The show revolves around three main characters. Jason Bateman plays Clark, a local weatherman, David Harbour plays his goofy new friend, Floyd, who signs on TV for the hearing impaired, and Linda Cardellini plays Harbour’s wife, Carol, who works at Purina. Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday round out the main cast playing a detective duo with a great comic back and forth. Richard Jenkins’s dry humor, in particular, is a delight.

Like White Lotus, it’s not giving anything away to say DTF St. Louis is a murder mystery. And maybe not all that much of a mystery. We’ll see where it goes. Half an hour in, we learn that Floyd has been (apparently) murdered. DTF then flashes backwards and forwards in time to fill in the rest of the story.

I can’t render a final verdict on DTF St. Louis because how a show does or does not stick the landing has a lot to say about how good it ultimately turns out to be. All I can say is, after three episodes, I’m really enjoying it and appreciating its tone that is both grounded and a little surreal at the same time.

These days it feels like it’s Bill Lawrence’s world, and we’re all just living in it. The man has been on a hot streak ever since Ted Lasso became an unexpected hit. Shrinking is the coziest 30 minutes on television. Scrubs is back. Bad Monkey was a ton of fun. And now there’s Rooster.

Rooster stars Steve Carell as the author of the trashy, beach read, Rooster novels. They’re not serious literature; they’re just meant to be fun, and Carell’s character, Greg Russo, is very aware of that. He ends up accepting a visiting professor role at the fictional Ludlow College in order to save his adult daughter (Charly Clive), who’s a professor at Ludlow, from being kicked out after she accidentally burns down the house of her husband from whom she’s separated. Her husband, Archie, is played by Phil Dunster, who I didn’t initially recognize as the cocky Jamie from Ted Lasso. A different British dialect and different hair go a long way.

John C. McGinley plays the dean of the college, doing a kinder, more fun-loving riff on his Chief of Medicine from Scrubs. Both characters have a manic edge to them, but the edges are softened for the character of Walter Mann. Playing Carell’s potential love interest is Danielle Deadwyler, who, like most of the characters on this show, has her own quirky sensibility about her.

It’s too soon to say what the driving theme of Rooster goes beyond, “What is the next chapter of our lives if that chapter doesn’t look like the previous ones?” Two episodes in, that’s what I get from the show. But as the show goes on, that theme may deepen or shift. But it’s a tone that resonates with me as I get farther away from my 35-year career in marketing and advertising. I find myself asking the question a lot these days, “What does the next 10 years look like?”

I think Lawrence’s shows resonate right now because everything is so shitty, we could all use a little downtime to feel good. I try to keep this newsletter apolitical, so I won’t go into why everything feels so shitty right now, but I think we all know who’s to blame. Rooster, like Scrubs, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking before it, goes down smoothly. There’s tension and conflict and messy lives, but there’s also hope, laughter, and nice people. There’s even a goofy, loveable cop. And with Shrinking about to put its third season to bed, I’m glad there’s a show with a very similar vibe to add to my rotation.

PEACH FUZZ - “Old News”

Peach Fuzz is an indie/alt rock band (as are most I feature in this newsletter) that combines fuzzy guitars (hence the name) and reverb-heavy textures with driving beats. It reminds me a lot of the sort of music we got in the mid- and late-aughts with slightly looser, low-fi production values. “Old News” is an upbeat song that makes you think back to a time (your 20s and 30s) when you were young and most of your life and choices were still ahead of you. You can never go back in time, but you can recapture some of the vibes.

THE WARNING - “Kerosene”

The Warning is even more of a throwback than Peach Fuzz. Rather than going back to the 2000s, The Warning’s sound takes us back to the 1980s and early 90s. It’s hard, power rock driven by a trio of sisters from Monterrey, Mexico. They first gained attention with a viral cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” so that gives you an idea of the kind of music you’re in for. I hear a lot from my generation (Gen X) that there just isn’t any good rock music anymore. Real rock. And my response is that there still is — whatever your definition of ROCK — you just need to seek it out. Any music streaming service is a great place for that.

Trailers for two big “popcorn” movies were released this week. I don’t really need to say much about either one as both are well-known properties.

First up is the trailer for Dune 3, based on Frank Herbert’s book “Dune Messiah.” There are additional Dune books, but my understanding is that this is Dennis Villeneuve’s final Dune film. And that’s probably for the best. The remaining Dune novels get a good bit messier and weirder. By the end of Dune 2, it’s pretty clear that Paul is NOT the good guy. That will become even more clear in Dune 3.

Next up is a trailer that just came out yesterday - Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Word is we’re going to see a more mature, street-level Spider-Man, and the trailer seems to bear that out, featuring The Punisher and classic Spidey villain Scorpion. Sadie Sink (we don’t see her in the trailer, but there does appear to be some mind control going on) is also rumored to be playing The X-Men’s Jean Grey, which makes sense since Peter appears to be mutating like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly.”

20 issues. Damn. Hard to believe I’ve kept at it that long. I mentioned last week that this might be the final issue of Three New Things. 20 is a nice, round number. But since I’ve a few more things to do before I fold Three New Things into “The X-Ray” so I may keep it going for a few more weeks. I’ll keep you posted, dear readers. See you next Thursday!