Month: June 2019

A humanoid sentient robot raises a young woman from an embryo in an underground bunker, after an unspecified cataclysmic event wipes out the human population of Earth. That's the basic premise of I Am Mother, a thoughtful and chilling new sci-fi feature on Netflix that explores questions of contextual morality—and what it means to be human.

(Some spoilers below.)

The AI robot, Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne), has a whole room full of embryos in its underground bunker, with the objective of eventually repopulating the Earth. But first she has to prove she can be a good Mother by raising the perfect daughter (Clara Rugaard), who grows into a smart, fit, and highly capable young woman. But Daughter is also naive, a bit lonely, and frankly approaching puberty with no prospective human partners on the horizon. Then their peaceful existence is shattered by the arrival of Wounded Woman (Hilary Swank), who somehow survived the cataclysm. Her hostile presence drives a wedge between Mother and Daughter.

• 

  These images were taken from an earlier, local Doom Eternal demo, but give you an idea of the kind of fast-paced action that looks and plays just fine on Stadia.

LOS ANGELES—Since Google's Project Stream beta test in October and the company's March announcement of the full Stadia platform, one question has loomed large over the service: will it actually work well enough for fast-paced, reflex-intensive games? After playing a demo of Doom Eternal for about half an hour Wednesday, I'm ready to say that the answer to that question seems to be yes—at least in Google's controlled testing conditions.

Google invited me out to its downtown LA YouTube Gaming creator's space—away from the Internet-congested E3 show floor—to try out the latest build of Stadia. My demo was running locally on a Pixelbook with the Chrome browser, connected to a TV via HDMI, and remotely to data centers more than 300 miles away in San Francisco. The Pixelbook had a wired Internet connection that I was told was running at "about 25 Mbps" (Google wouldn't let me run a speed test to confirm the connection quality). I controlled the demo with a Stadia controller connected to the Pixelbook via USB, but keyboard and trackpad controls also worked.

Over thirty minutes of Doom Eternal play, I'd have been hard pressed to point out any differences between the Stadia version and one running on a local PC. The 60fps animation didn't noticeably stutter for the entire demo, and the apparent resolution didn't dip below 1080p either (though a Google representative said Stadia will sometimes lower that resolution briefly to maintain a smooth frame rate if and when bandwidth dips). There were no signs of video compression artifacts or the color gradients you might see in a low-res YouTube video.