tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14623605609279611692024-02-19T23:59:27.547-08:00Sam's OutlandsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-90784337563973007792017-05-20T11:45:00.003-07:002017-05-20T16:20:48.075-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrfnTzDt1Ctp2bsJJrDU9q8vG-GJFyWuu-CfXpCNE90_6SdvdC-C8i2Hyh9dcpf7EVgsdx1Q-8kxGIzrQdeIQz99o5dU1tG_hi-LxFb5-_scfaf0U-J79LNdvHDLN_Fb5sOICOKjwrJyAb/s1600/alien+covenant+opening.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrfnTzDt1Ctp2bsJJrDU9q8vG-GJFyWuu-CfXpCNE90_6SdvdC-C8i2Hyh9dcpf7EVgsdx1Q-8kxGIzrQdeIQz99o5dU1tG_hi-LxFb5-_scfaf0U-J79LNdvHDLN_Fb5sOICOKjwrJyAb/s320/alien+covenant+opening.png" width="160" /></a><br />
<b style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">Alien: Covenant</b><br />
<span style="color: red;">2017 - 20th Century Fox</span><br />
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<i>Alien: Covenant</i> is a fine thing on a technical level. This makes the sloppy narrative especially frustrating.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I'm as prone to excitement as anyone when a dear franchise caws with life once again (just ask me how I really felt about this year’s <i>Power Rangers</i> movie), but <i>Covenant</i>’s flaws… well, they run deep.<br />
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It’s not just the characters making dumb decisions. That is frustrating, but I suppose <i>Covenant </i>is at least consistent with <i>Prometheus </i>— it is established Scott-canon that humans were still developing common sense through to the 22nd century.<br />
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But we’re here for a good time, so we take a deep breath and we try to ignore the trained astronaut poking their face into unknown extra-terrestrial flora without protection. Again.<br />
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While we’re on the subject, though, there was another space horror film that came out this year in which the characters did a lot of dumb things, and I don’t think <i>Covenant </i>comes out so well in the comparison. <i>Life </i>is by no means a great movie, but at least when Ryan Reynolds tries to kill the invulnerable baking sheet it’s because a) he doesn’t know any better, b) he’s angry, and c) he’s a bit of a bloke (hello, alien, let me mansplain fire to you using this blowtorch). When Hiroyuki Sanada’s character (who I can only think of as Hanzo, though his name is Sho) leaves the safety of the hypersleep pod, it’s because he’s crazy with desperation to see his daughter again.<br />
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I’ve heard the internet folk try to defend the decisions of <i>Covenant</i>’s characters as “human mistakes”, “character flaws”, and so on, which they inevitably follow up by pointing to a time a character in a great movie made a cock-up. But there are bad decisions that are coherent with the circumstances and the characters, the sort of thing that deepens your understanding of the character (even if you’re watching the scene through a facepalm) — and then there are characters acting like idiots. No, first mate Oram, it was not a good idea to follow the evil robot into his cave and then sniff his alien sacks. I hate to sound unsympathetic, but you brought that face-fucking on yourself.<br />
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Anyway, all that aside, let me say that I think there are two excellent, powerful moments in <i>Alien: Covenant</i>. The second of which is actually one of the darkest and most uncomfortable scenes I have experienced at the cinema for a good year or so. I'll get to those in a minute. In the meantime, I think I can best describe where the film went wrong by looking at it from two angles: the human side, and the monster side.<br />
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<h4>
THE HUMANS</h4>
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One of my favourite modern horror movies is last year’s <i>Don't Breathe</i>. That film only had three heroes, so it couldn't afford to waste them. And if they were going to be killed off, it couldn’t afford to waste that either — and it didn’t.<br />
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<i>(Covenant</i>, by contrast, has a ton of characters, a ton of deaths, and wastes almost all of them)<br />
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From start to end, <i>Don’t Breathe</i> felt like a struggle. Everyone worked their asses off to stay alive, and you were never sure if a scene was going to be lethal or not. When somebody did die, it wasn’t expected, and it rocketed the sense of danger to an awful new high for the survivors and the audience alike. I seriously feel my heartbeat rising just thinking about that movie. <br />
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In <i>Covenant</i>, the characters are on a conveyor belt towards evisceration. You might think "Well, that's just like any other horror movie, right?" Well, yeah, but you're not supposed to actually <i>see </i>the conveyor belt. The movie is supposed to trick you into thinking it isn't there, that anything could happen to any character. That's the art of a horror movie. The movie should be telling us that any of them could make it out alive, even when experience tells us that only one or two of them will. Otherwise, what’s the point? Just to see some movie kills? Well, that’s exactly what <i>Covenant </i>felt like to me: a series of expendable characters getting unceremoniously gibbed.<br />
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<b>There is an exception. </b>The first of the two excellent scenes in the film that I mentioned above is the first kill of the movie, and it’s intense. It builds up from what looks like a sick man (Ledward) needing medical attention, up to an otherworldly nightmare. Everyone is reacting, freaking out: Karine is just desperately trying to help a crew mate; Maggie doesn’t know whether to help or evoke quarantine; they’re all confused; Tennessee is calling in wanting to find out whether Maggie, his wife, is safe; Ledward is slowly dying, and you really feel everybody’s pain at this awful development — this was supposed to be a colonization missions — how did this happen; Ledward is dead for sure but we don’t know if Karine and Maggie can make it out alive — how will they react, what will their actions mean for the rest of the crew; then you think Maggie can take out the Neomorph with a shotgun but holy shit she slips on the blood oh god it’s coming for her —<br />
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It’s amazing. But there is no action scene in the rest of the film that comes to the stomach flipping intensity, and complexity, of that one.</div>
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From then on, it’s the conveyor belt. For the other ten-odd deaths, the other characters barely even react! The movie is telling us: "Don't bother caring, we're just thinning the herd now". Just a day in the monster movie offices. Six characters dead by home time. Chop chop. This isn’t “less is more” storytelling, it’s “nothing is nothing”.<br />
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Tess Haubrich pouts before her character is decapitated in an Engineer's bathroom. She’s found twice by colleagues who barely react to her detached head floating in a bath. Oram, the officer in charge, and the most prominent crew member after Daniels, is the first character to get head-cuddled. He’s not even mentioned again.<br />
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The humans in Alien Covenant aren’t only dense. They’re pure fodder.<br />
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<h4>
THE MONSTERS</h4>
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People have said Covenant is a good Xenomorph origins story. To me, even the explanation in <i>Alien vs. Predator</i> was better. In that film, Xenomorphs were engineered by the most powerful warrior race in the universe, specifically to be strong enough to be able to kill those warriors (or at least the weaker ones). There's a backstory that makes the Xenomorphs <i>scarier</i>. If Predators can’t reliably handle them, what hope do humans have?<br />
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<i>Covenant</i>’s take: one angsty android creates the Xenomorphs because of daddy issues. Nope, that’s definitely lame.<br />
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Nevermind. More importantly, this film had a very poor… “continuity of horror”.<br />
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The monsters that are set-up in this film are the Neomorphs, and they are pretty nasty fucks. First of all, there are the Neomorph spores, a different method of alien infestation than we have seen in the other movies. While this ciagrette ash is hardly genre-icon material, the spores do have their own horror potential: this is an airborne, near invisible, lethal parasite, and that’s pretty terrifying.<br />
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Then, you see the Neomorph itself. Unlike the Xenomorph, the Neomorph is absolutely a threat even when newborn: it is more physically developed than a chestburster, it’s just as fast, and it’s aggressive from the moment it breaks skin. The Neomorphs can kill with every part of their body, extinguishing life in an instant, and guns don't seem to do must to them other than make them flinch or temporarily route.<br />
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By the middle of the movie we are all thinking these new aliens are pretty tough mofos. The only way they escape the first onslaught is when David reveals their weakness: light. No other alien in the series has had an easy weakness like that, but that opens the door for some nail-biting “stay out of the dark” scenes.<br />
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So, there are two cool ideas that are set-up… which are then never brought up again. Both the alien spores, and the Neomorph’s weakness to light, are used once, then ignored. If you just bring something up once, it’s an excuse, it’s a McGuffin, it’s an empty plot point, in some case it’s a deus-ex-machina. You have to develop that idea <i>into </i>something to get something meaningful out of it. They laid out all the pieces, then started looking for pieces for an entirely different puzzle!<br />
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To highlight this, the film then does something very bizarre. I’m sure it was justified in Scott’s mind for thematic reasons, but to me was a total stall in terms of development of tension. What happens is simply that first mate Oram kills a Neomorph… very easily. With, like, two bullets. And there are basically no repercussions. That's just the end of the story for that monster. Total anti-climax.<br />
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I get what the scene was trying to do for David’s character, and I liked that a lot, but it was absolutely not worth neutering the monster.<br />
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For the third act of the film, the Neomorph threat is dropped entirely in favour of <i>Covenant</i>’s version of the Xenomorph. You might think: well, that there is the development of the threat, so what’s the problem? It was just off to me. There wasn’t enough connective tissue there, I guess. The Xenomorph is a different species, and it wasn’t set-up. We rush through its completely different, complex lifecycle in about five minutes. All we get is David’s brief implication that this other alien is somehow more perfect than the Neomorph. What, like the one that was easily killed two minutes ago?<br />
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It’s less “Oh shit, this just got serious”, and more “Hey, you like the Xenomorph, right? Well, um, here he is!”.<br />
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As I said at the start, I get the enthusiasm, the excitement for seeing our favourite monster on screen again after ten years (and if you’re trying to forget some of those films don’t exist: excuse my mistake, I meant to say twenty years. Twenty-five? More?). But that’s exactly why we should expect more. Not just the alien for fan service, but the alien for a good story. And this wasn’t it.<br />
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<h4>
THE ANDROID</h4>
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Now, you might say that the real monster of the film is not an alien at all, but David, and I would agree. I sincerely think David's story had the potential to glue this whole mess together.<br />
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The basis of David as a villain, and it's a pretty a great one as they go, is that he is an artificial intelligence that is having something of an existential breakdown about his creation, so decides to destroy everything that created him, and create a lifeform of his own that is better. It would be a bit heavy handed for a human villain, but allowing for an uncompromising computer logic that a malfunctioning sentient android might have, I think it's pretty great.<i> In theory. </i><br />
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Unfortunately, David’s motivations are not so much established or utilized for effect as they are muddied by absolutely everything that happens with him in this movie, which include, among other things, homoerotic twincest flute-fingering, and a Fassbot-on-Fassbot kickboxing match. Also, I have an unconscious reaction where my eyes roll dramatically whenever a villain quotes passages of classic literature.<br />
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<b>But:</b> all this nonsense is piss against a chilling wind when you consider the ending of the film, which is my second excellent moment of the movie.<br />
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To be clear, it’s not great because it;s a “twist” ending, and if you were busy dismissing it as an “obvious twist” then you missed the point. This was not a moment of revelation for the audience, but a moment of empathy. This was the moment Daniels realizes just how utterly and helplessly fucked she and Tennessee are, along with two thousand sleeping colonists and many unborn babies. She realizes this because she brings up her late husband's dream of building a house by a lake, wanting “Walter” to reassure her and sympathize with her — how heart-breaking is that! When you consider that moment alongside the earlier images of David’s laboratory of twisted horrors, and, more subtly, his pinning down and forced kissing of Daniels, and the power he now has over her and all the colonists… well, you can understand why it took me several seconds of rolling credits to fully and uncomfortably accept what had happened. For a film to pull that off is… well, I was impressed.<br />
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Now, if this scene also <i>had </i>been a twist ending, as in the writers had effectively hidden the truth about Walter until the end, it might have been the greatest horror ending ever, or it might have actually made the film worse. Because it was the dramatic irony of knowing that David was there, and knowing that Daniels and Tennessee didn’t know, and waiting for him to strike, that gave the otherwise damp climax just a little crackle.<br />
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PROMETHEUS</h4>
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<i>Prometheus </i>asked a lot of big questions — they were pretty much the driving force of the movie — and left a lot unanswered at the end. One was "Why did the Engineers create humans?". Another was “Why do these creator's want to destroy their creation now?”. Also "What happens to humans after they die?" — yeah, pretty big questions.<br />
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I was also wondering "What is the engineers home planet like, what is their culture, what are they all about?", and "What will a Xenomorph be like if it gestates in an Engineer instead of a human?".<br />
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I know a lot of people hated <i>Prometheus</i>, but when Shaw, along with David's detached android head, launching off into the unknown to seek out the home planet of their creators, I was pretty damn intrigued for the sequel. How would they answer all this? How <i>could </i>they answer all this?<br />
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Answer: they didn’t. I mean, Shaw is just pointlessly dead in this film, and the Engineer’s planet and city are totally boring. Along with the lame explanation of the origins of the Xenomorph I think that makes <i>Covenant </i>a possibly unique situation where a film, which is both a prequel and a sequel, has a negative effect on BOTH the film it was a prequel to and the film it was a sequel to.<br />
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Covenant felt stitched together, having to meet both the demands of being a Prometheus sequel and a proper Alien film, and not really doing either of them very well at all.<br />
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<h4>
CONCLUSION</h4>
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Tennesse is a good character. Just thought I should mention that before the end.<br />
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While we’re being positive, if there is one other thing that <i>Alien: Covenant</i> is not just competent at, but amazing at, it is the visuals. The sets, the environments, the camera work, the practical effects, and generally the CGI (with a few bits that stuck out), all build up a proper adult sci-fi movie atmosphere, just as as well as <i>Rogue One</i> did last year.<br />
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But, as I said at the top, it’s these small areas of excellence that makes the absolute belly flop of storytelling that takes up most of the movie doubly disappointing.<br />
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At the start of this review I mentioned <i>Life</i>, and it kind of baffles me that, of these highly similar movies (<i>Life</i>, by the way, also has<span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: black;">a twist ending where you feel sorry for a helpless female stuck in a pod while the villain prepares to have his way with a human population</span> — weird), it was the Alien revival directed by Sir Ridley Scott that turned out to be generally worse. Of course, <i>Life </i>had problems, and<i> </i>is a lot smaller in scope, but it had a monster that is a visceral threat from start to finish, and it had characters that made plans and cared when somebody died, and no amount of quoting <i>Paradise Lost</i> is going to match that.<br />
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It bums me out to say it, but right now I’d rather see "Life 2" than <i>Alien: Awakening</i>.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">3/5</span></b></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-47597710763796642412017-04-30T14:41:00.001-07:002017-04-30T14:52:37.374-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_W09fN9L4fsTgCozAW2nDirxc3rTscqzkV-vJTTBxf1uQ-sdMWp6oS-vgRsIogy7YSFcKuC1KlSdLWE20dbtBsW_BjT0f4wDVrJomhmIn1T_MOLf_LBIJeufbG040WBp9D-NikyBaWx_z/s1600/pac-man+256+opening.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_W09fN9L4fsTgCozAW2nDirxc3rTscqzkV-vJTTBxf1uQ-sdMWp6oS-vgRsIogy7YSFcKuC1KlSdLWE20dbtBsW_BjT0f4wDVrJomhmIn1T_MOLf_LBIJeufbG040WBp9D-NikyBaWx_z/s320/pac-man+256+opening.png" width="160" /></a><br />
<b style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">Pac-Man 265</b><br />
<span style="color: red;">2015 - Hipster Whale</span><br />
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I wanted more Championship Edition. What I got was Child's Edition.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>It's mobile-game style endless Pac-Man, which means grinding one randomized, endless level for coins to buy upgrades to use in that level, rinse and repeat. But even compared to other rubbish mobile games, <i>Pac-Man 256</i> is boring. At least in <i>Jetpack Joyride</i> the upgrades make the game feel different, and the scenery changes.<br />
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I would rather play Pac-Man 1 for a few reasons:<br />
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<ul>
<li>It had <b>levels</b>, so something to aim for, something to discover. </li>
<li>It had <b>lives</b>, and as that supply dwindled, and as you risked getting kicked back to the start the game got more intense. In 256, one hit kills you. Besides, you are supposed to die at some point anyway, so you can deposit your bloody coins, which takes quite a bit of the excitement of progressing out of it.</li>
<li>The maps <b>didn't </b>go on forever, so it wasn't just about dodging a ghost once, but what you did after that, and after that. Sometimes you had to exploit the ghost's AI to escape, such as scaring away Clyde or confusing Pinky. That's what Pac-Man was all about, for me, so this game doesn't even get nostalgia points because it fucks it up. </li>
</ul>
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So after 255 sequels this series has actually gotten worse.<br />
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There is one cool mechanic in 256, actually, which is how as you eat pellets in an unbroken chain, and your combo increases, the sound effect frequency increases, until, after a minute or so, the beat is out of control and it climaxes in a satisfying screen-wiping explosion. It's kind of addictive. But not worth installing the game again.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-33957724353017181322016-09-30T12:52:00.000-07:002016-09-30T15:48:19.198-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>The Rumpus Room</b></span><br />San Il Defanso / Nate Owens</span><br />
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"I write all of this stuff because games are just that important to me. I think about them a lot and I am actively trying to raise the level of discourse when it comes to this hobby."<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The broad-view, analytical, unpretentious: <a href="https://sanildefanso.wordpress.com/">The Rumpus Room</a> is home to some of the best writing on board games that I have yet found. Sharp critiques of trends in the hobby. Reviews that go beyond describing a game or its effect on you, and trying to get to grips with the why. For a hobby filled with educated fans there seem to be few writers who tackle their subjects with much ambition - Nate Owens, as the quote above indicates, is one of the precious few.<br />
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In the spirit of sharing and celebrating the work of good critics, here are some of his articles that I would call his best:<br />
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<a href="https://sanildefanso.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/why-video-reviews-suck-and-how-to-fix-them/">Why Video Review Suck, And How To Fix Them</a><br />
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"To start off with, I hate that most of the video content in the hobby is in the form of reviews. Reviews are a tiny part of what’s possible with the board gaming press. They are important, yes. But the most thought-provoking material is an idea or discussion about how we relate to other players, or about consumerism in the hobby, or even just talking about a particular series of games that was cool. Unfortunately, video isn’t simple. It takes time to produce and edit, and so most content producers are satisfied to simply churn out a 10-minute video about the latest whatnot. Often, even these are limited in scope. It’s usually a guy sitting in front of his game shelf. He introduces the game, spends 8 minutes explaining the rules, and then 2 minutes giving an opinion. It’s the 8-minute explanation that truly galls me, especially when I’m already familiar with the game. Invariably I will skip to the part where they give their opinion, usually in a way that suggests they just walked in front of the camera and started talking. </blockquote>
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First of all, I think it’s vital to inject some visual inventiveness into how videos are shot. Do we need to see one more shot of someone standing in front of their game shelf? The straight-on poorly-lit shot is not one I need to see again. It’s here that some film-making chops would probably serve someone well. Robert Florence had a flare for changing it up when he produced Downtime Town videos. Those were videos that looked fun. And for crying out loud, does the rules explanation need to be a pair of hands hovering above a pile of components?"</blockquote>
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<a href="https://sanildefanso.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/heroes-and-wonder-mare-nostrum-review/">Heroes and Wonders - Mare Nostrum Review</a><br />
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"What’s striking about Mare Nostrum is how lean the rules are. There is nothing there that isn’t necessary, and at first glance it feels under-designed. Certainly that was the initial response on Boardgame Geek back in 2003. The different civilizations all are distinct with their own strengths and geographical advantages, some of which aren’t evident until you’ve played several games. Greece was a big sticking point for some who felt they were especially vulnerable to attacks from a belligerent Rome. I’m not one to often comment on balance issues, but anyone who is griping about the balance in Mare Nostrum has not played it very much. The real issue is that the game doesn’t make any effort to balance itself. There is no catch-up that will help the guy in last place and hold back the leader. The players have to take it upon themselves to hold each other back, and if that’s not something that sounds fun then you will hate Mare Nostrum, because that’s basically the whole flow of the game. Pay attention, use all of the tools to hold back the winner, and sneak into that win by yourself. It requires a good five games before it begins to come together, which would be a deal-breaker if the game were more complex. </blockquote>
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In theory this is a eurogame, but it feels like no other eurogame I’ve ever played. It absorbed all of the good lessons of European design, the threaded turns, constant player involvement, and manageable playtime, but it’s a design without a safety net. It trusts the players to figure things out on their own, based not on some strategy hardwired into the rules but on what the other players are doing. It is truly wonderful to see the game unfold, both while you’re playing it and from session to session. There are so few rules to keep in mind, but there is so much to consider, and you consider those things as a group. It’s risky for two players to go after the leader, because that often will mean that another player will have an opening. Building a wonder is almost always a good idea if you can manage it, but it usually taps you out of resources for a whole turn. Resources are limited and every one counts, so even the status quo of establishing borders and hunkering down isn’t sustainable. Someone will always rise up and need to be dealt with, and it is done with more than military might. It involves agreements, promises, and threats."</blockquote>
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<a href="https://sanildefanso.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/board-gamings-missing-history/">Board Gaming's Missing History</a><br />
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"I don’t mean to say that there’s no actual history there. Obviously there is. I do mean that we have a shocking lack of interest in what has come before. Although the hobby is around 40 years old, it remains very difficult to understand the context of our past. Most gamers possess a saddening lack of perspective about a hobby that has been going on well before many of them were aware. </blockquote>
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I’m not sure where we get this dearth of perspective. At least part of it is due to the generally unprofessional atmosphere that has always been a part of board gaming. Basic things like contracts are so murky that people often have no idea who has the rights to some out-of-print titles. It’s not hard to see how details and anecdotes have slipped through the cracks. In addition, the board-gaming community is so tied to the internet that it’s hard to research any details that happened before the internet became the key driving force of the hobby. Boardgame Geek only goes back to 2000, and many gamers seem to regard that as the cut-off date, where the Dark Ages ended and the Golden Age began."</blockquote>
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<a href="https://sanildefanso.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/im-tired-of-campaign-games/">I'm Tired of Campaign Games</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The other tonic to campaign games has been one that is, ironically, an even bigger commitment: Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve been working through a campaign with some of my best friends using the fifth edition rules, and it has made me a believer. It is still extremely challenging to find the time and energy for everyone to play, but unlike campaign board games, here the effort is absolutely worth it. No matter what anyone says, this is OUR adventure. Our DM has created it for us, but she couldn’t have foreseen us doing some of the things we’ve done, like when I managed to steal a magic mask from a nothic in a dark room without ever having to enter combat. It’s something special that belongs to us. It took a lot of preparation and effort, but it’s so rewarding. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Details like that put to shame anything that can be generated by a board game, because board games are not really designed to tell set stories. They are designed to generate their own narratives on the fly, not to impose one outside of the framework of gameplay. There’s nothing really wrong with campaign games in terms of design, and indeed some have done really well with this. I like how the Pathfinder game basically abstracts the whole thing into a Dominion-level kind of card game, and Pandemic Legacy’s impact has been undeniable. But even the best of the genre still feels like its struggling against the medium to me."</blockquote>
Keep up the great work, Nate!</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-34508423787986655042016-09-23T14:54:00.005-07:002017-01-22T15:12:37.162-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGwuJrETl6N58IRXFwrzuEkTSjGSerZ-tMqBQBU1q91qYnypN8_dd5T_N9-RDclWenkK8ckiXj2zdwIcjhCMxXQcaYZ8zwk1aiiq9FV600d8KfoIof3hDFc5o1o3pMTzmo0aXUEhUww2ck/s1600/pokemon+go.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGwuJrETl6N58IRXFwrzuEkTSjGSerZ-tMqBQBU1q91qYnypN8_dd5T_N9-RDclWenkK8ckiXj2zdwIcjhCMxXQcaYZ8zwk1aiiq9FV600d8KfoIof3hDFc5o1o3pMTzmo0aXUEhUww2ck/s320/pokemon+go.png" width="160" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Pokémon Go</b></span><br />2016 - Niantic / Game Freak</span><br />
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Also, my geocaching diary.<br />
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Most Sunday’s of my youth, our Mum would coerce my sister and I into long treks across the Isle of Wight countryside. At that age, spending hours outside of the house felt like nothing more than time wasted not playing <i>Pokémon Red</i> (later Gold) on my yellow Gameboy Pocket (I was, like most children, quite single-minded). Against my nature I did come to love these walks, through woods with rope swings and across fields of cows and sheep, and even after learning to cycle, drive and motorbike, wearing out my shoes has been my preferred method of transportation. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0wljKzjj68BQRRiQ9vQGCnlDjbbpPvsyMUIpNvH5waza-6ifaQZDGSfOqLirV4mY3IM5Ho75gf5p2eGTZ6bePoapgKHZp-AS8NiFBpoD36-72wzrsOi52nawU7bxdcSDRx23utTPIDIFB/s1600/Screenshot_2016-01-23-23-14-43.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0wljKzjj68BQRRiQ9vQGCnlDjbbpPvsyMUIpNvH5waza-6ifaQZDGSfOqLirV4mY3IM5Ho75gf5p2eGTZ6bePoapgKHZp-AS8NiFBpoD36-72wzrsOi52nawU7bxdcSDRx23utTPIDIFB/s400/Screenshot_2016-01-23-23-14-43.png" title="Pretty average day" width="225" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pretty typical.</td></tr>
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I remain a fond fan of Pokémon. These two loves considered, I would think I must be in the top 1% of people predisposed to love <i>Pokémon Go</i>. So, rationally, it must be a pretty awful game for me to dislike it as much as I do. <br />
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Yeah, <i>Pokémon Go</i> does give you an excuse go outside, and when you first open up game and see the world around you filled with points of interest stretching far into the distance, and animals to hunt... well, these are some primal instincts being tapped into, right? All the more potent because this is the real world, not a defined and tailored virtual world but the much vaster, more intricate and far messier real one. Your hunter-gather sense of adventure is aroused. Which direction first? <br />
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How long did it take (for me it was about two days — others must have seen it in the trailers, but I have friends who still haven't clocked on months later) till it occurred to you that what we enjoy about the game has almost nothing to do with what is happening on the screen?<br />
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<i>Pokémon Go</i> would be a perfect <i>parody </i>of JRPG design, and a statement against it, if it didn't deliver it so straight. It is all carrot-dangling, grind-demanding, and attention wasting. The cycle of walk-flick-walk-flick serves to evolve monsters that we grew to love in much better games, even though in this game there is barely anything to do with them, excepting an occasional shallow and perfunctory battle. It is less fun, even, to evolve the monsters in <i>Go</i> than in the proper games, because sometimes you just run across the evolved version anyway, or just a more powerful one, and end up throwing away the old one before you can get attached to it. <br />
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It's all such a sad, vague imitation, like sitting down in what looks like a TGI Friday's and being served a single gummy burger.<br />
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What you have at the center is almost entirely the work to make the numbers on your screen bigger than the numbers on your friend's screens — and the numbers go up forever. As <i>Cookie Clicker</i> (which, too, would be a perfect paradoy of JRPG design, if people didn't play it seriously) has shown us, that is pretty much all we need to keep doing something, even if we aren't, really, enjoying it. If you’re a user engagement analyst at Ninantic, <i>Pokémon Go</i> is a victory of game design. If you’re a <i>Pokémon Go</i> victim, it’s sinister, and you might not even know it yet.<br />
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There certainly aren't any aesthetic or narrative treats to be had, expect those that occur in the real world: the fun of <i>Pokémon Go </i>is entirely in going on a nice walk, and we can't credit Niantic for designing that. If you listen to Nirvana whilst playing ET, you don't give Atari praise when you bang your head to Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter.<br />
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What you enjoy in Go you don't need the game for, and, vitally, <i>vitally</i>, can do it better <i>without </i>the game. <br />
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I'll try not to write a poem, but walking deep outdoors is pretty swell. The taste of the air. The accent of the light. It's just a healthier place to be: you feel it on your skin, in your posture, in your legs, with all your senses, if you let it. But I don't always let it — I'm thinking about where I'm going, usually somewhere inside, and I'm not the only one. We get distracted. We forget to walk for pleasure.</div>
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<i>Pokemon Go</i> is designed especially to put you outside,<i> and then distract you from it!</i> <b><i>Bzzt</i></b>, a Bellsprout: Look At Your Phone. <i><b>Bzzt</b></i>, a Nidoran: Look At Your Phone. <i><b>Bzzt</b></i>, a Zubat - <i><b>Bzzt</b></i>, a Zubat - <i><b>Bzzt</b></i>...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fuck's sake.</td></tr>
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In this sense, it is negatively impacting a great game — reality — so it justly deserves a negative score. <br />
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After two days I ditched <i>Pokemon Go</i>. It’s a physical as well as a mental thing: craning over a phone when walking is less comfortable, less relaxing. I vowed to walk more, to walk slowly and for it's own sake. For reminding me, <i>Pokemon Go</i> can have some thanks. Some.<br />
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It was on one of these later walks that I remembered Geocaching, and after I found out what it actually was I had to try it. Now I pass on this wisdom to you, like a noble Pidgeot feeding Pidgey chicks from its own mouth: friends, if you liked Pokemon Go, you gotta try Geocatching - uh, Geo<i>caching</i>.<br />
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Geocaching is something of an open-source game, first invented in 2002, that <i>makes use</i> of the outdoors! It doesn't tug on your trousers for your attention at each turning. It points and says "Go: enjoy that direction". <br />
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<i>Pokémon Go</i> asks you to go to the popular urban centers, for the number of Pokéstops and number of people putting down lures, but these are the most boring places to walk. Most geocaches hide in the countryside. If you've still got your phone out at this point, you might have to put it away just so you have two hands free - clamber down that slope, climb over that rock. Move, move, move your body, baby: it's what we were designed to do. Flat streets? Bleh.<br />
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There are urban caches too, but where <i>Pokémon Go</i> only asks you to be within throwing distance of the thing, finding a geocache is an intimate act with the city. You need to get on all sides of that thing, appreciate it from all angles. Maybe get your hands on it, around it, in it. Phwoah.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Get as many success smilies as you can you your city. Just as satisfying as catching a new 'mon. </td></tr>
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When you get there you might look at a hint on the app. From the geocachers who also solve crosswords or played Monkey Island, the clue may be cryptic, or there might be a hint in a Geocache that leads you to another Geocache, so this game even has puzzles. <i>Pokémon Go</i> has no such ambition, of course.<br />
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Most importantly, I think, is that hunts for a geocache demand that you keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, be aware of the world around you, and isn't that a more useful state than focusing your attention pointlessly on a mobile phone screen. Moreover, that is the first step to enjoying your surroundings. This is the solution to treating outdoors like a slow, tedious mode of transport.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nice view of the shit side of my city from up here.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Can you spot it?</td></tr>
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Finally: community. <i>Pokémon Go</i> is a kids game: it's pedo-safe, entirely insulated. It is not a multiplayer game in any meaningful way, and unlike the Geocaching app you can't leave messages or stories for other players nor directly contact them. Great. For kids. Maybe.<br />
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Messaging aside, I feel weirdly close to the people whose handles I recognize in log books, and oddly distant to the real life humans with their heads in their phones I would run into at Pokéstops. I don't <i>think </i>it's because I'm a sociopath. Finding a cache is genuine small experience that you relate to in the other person, even though you don't know who they are. What exactly is it you are sharing with another person who has the <i>Pokémon Go</i> app installed on their phone? Something to consider.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Schofield got to this one before me, too. At least his name isn't Blue. </td></tr>
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The main question for me is: is it really so great that a videogame got you to go outside, or a little sad that you'll only go outside on the orders of a videogame? I guess it's both. I'm not trying to act superior (I need to keep friends so I have someone to play board games with), but it's worth a thought. The way I see it, you can download the Geocaching app and go outside, or you can find a copy of a main Pokémon game (Gold/Silver and Black/White are my favorites), and either way it'll be a better adventure.</div>
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Now if only Geocaching had some good route music.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-7690567617200374522016-08-06T05:48:00.000-07:002016-08-07T03:34:59.220-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>X-Men: Days of Future Past</b></span><br />2014 - 20th Century Fox</span><br />
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A dark, dual-timeline, super-powered science-fiction thriller, and a movie I don't think Marvel Studios could ever make -- but I think I could make some improvements.<br />
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Chris Claremont, legendary writer who popularised the X-Men in the first place, has often suggested the mutants of his stories can be an allegory for nuclear weapons. I’m not really feeling this metaphor, but the foes of this film, the mutant hunting and world-ending sentinels, perhaps <i>are</i> a good metaphor for nukes: a weapon created to protect but with the potential for global levels of ruin if misused. The film opens into what might as well be a nuclear winter.<br />
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In an opening scene that quickly establishes a great deal, the sentinels attack a mutant hideout in the wastelands of the future. The mutant Blink opens holes in space for her allies to jump through to avoid sentinel lasers, to get behind or above the foes, or to shoot at them safely. It’s a captivating dance. Bishop absorbs mutant attacks to energise his gun. The Avengers wish they could pull off such synergy. The best they can do is have Captain America bounce Iron Man’s laser off his Shield -- except why would they need to: Iron Man could just turn around and shoot in that direction himself. These action sequences in <i>Days of Future Past</i> are used sparingly, yet no other comic book movie made up until 2016, when Civil War was released, could compare.</div>
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If you’ve seen a Marvel film before you might not expect what happens next: all the mutants in the fight, including some favourite faces such as Bobby Drake, whose history with the X-Men goes back to the very first film, are all unceremoniously killed. This is when we learn that Kitty Pride can now send a person's conscience back in time to an earlier existence of their body in order to change the past. To stop the sentinels from ever being created, a plan is devised to send Wolverine back to 1973, at which point the film becomes a period piece complete with tie-dye scarves and CRT televisions. <br />
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When it seems that all other blockbusters have eschewed unconventional sci-fi plots in favour of linear hero’s journeys and obvious villains, this plot seems thoroughly daring. And if it doesn’t sound entirely original, consider that the Days Future Past Comic Book, written by Chris Claremont, predates James Cameron's <i>The Terminator</i> by over three years.<br />
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Events continue in a brisk plot of one delightful, stylish scene after another. Like the Terminator films, the dual timelines give the story a sense of larger-than-the-present consequences. It moves with purpose, each chapter building up to a peak scene, each peak (at the Pentagon, at the peace conference) spinning the story off convincingly into a new conflict. The script is straightforward but when the exposition comes it never feels unnatural and only aids in keeping you strapped in for the ride.<br />
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(With maybe one exception: Kitty pointing out to Logan that he won't look any younger when he gets sent to the past because his mutant ability means does not age. Considering how much of the film relies on knowledge of the X-Men world, this seems a strange titbit to awkwardly drop like this. More on this in a moment.)<br />
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A dark, eerie future where optimism is at a premium, and a past dour enough to be taken seriously but with enough good humour born of the mismatched characters and strange circumstances to make the film energetically fun in spite of the threatened holocaust -- this film strikes a perfect tone, and it looks great whilst doing it: even the mundane is elevated with appropriation of 80s fashion, decoration, and technology. When the comes to the weird, we have the strange lighting of the cerebro machine, the morphing skin of the future sentinels, or the hilarious frozen-in-time Quicksilver scene. Every frame has something to please the eyes: this may be the best looking superhero film ever. <br />
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There is an excellent attention to detail throughout. Just as an example, the colour purple, the traditional colour of the comic-book sentials, is used recurring: in the future, where the sentinels are super-advanced liquid metal and entirely different from the robots of the comics, purple is seen as the laser cages keeping mutants and dissident humans caged in concentration camp like scenes. In the past, the 70s, where anything could get away with looking more garish, the robot sentinels later appear in all their purple glory, and you’ll also see the plans trask hands over to Reagan in a purple folio and drawn up in purple ink.<br />
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Another example: post-Vietnam is the backdrop to the mutant conflicts, where the people in charge act more tolerant, more ready for peace, than films set chronologically later; but Trask uses it to his advantage, warning government officials not to lose a second war in their lifetime. This appropriate use of history helps ground you in the period. <br />
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Probably more importantly than anything, it’s an absolute pleasure to watch these characters. Fassbender showing off scene-dominating dramatic power when Magneto takes Xavier to task for abandoning them between films (I’m not sure why they needed to free Magneto in the first place, but it’s hard to complain when it leads to such moments). Wolverine’s usual gruffness, and the amusing moments that he forgets he didn’t have metal claws in 1973.<br />
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It’s for such references I don’t recommend <i>Days of Future Past</i> as anybody’s first X-men film, by the way. Some sequels can be watched alone, and you can take the gaps in your knowledge as adding to the mystery of the film, but I do not think this is one of those cases. I should say as least <i>X-Men: First Class</i> needs to be watched to understand the relationship of Charles, Eric and Raven, and you you’ll also want to know a bit about Wolverine if you don’t already. Of course you could, and should, watch the original two movies, <i>X-Men</i> and <i>X2</i>, especially to get the most out of Logan’s final scene in this film (Jean and Cyclops would be strangers to you otherwise), but I think <i>The Wolverine</i> fills in Logan’s story nicely too, and the post-credits scene actually ties into this film somewhat. So <i>First Class - The Wolverine - Days of Future Past </i>might be the quickest advisable route, and putting <i>X2</i> at the start would be one longer but one better. <br />
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Speaking of that ending, I have to ask: when Logan returns to the rewritten future in the ending, does his memory entirely overwrite the memories of the Logan that has lived the previous 50 years of the new timeline, in a sense killing that Logan? Xavier seems a little too pleased to see the mind of a presumed friend and colleague wiped out, if that is the case. I guess new future Xavier didn’t like new timeline Logan very much, and was just waiting for him to be replaced. This device is supposed to facilitate a bright happy ending that is also a sendoff to the characters of the old films, and it almost works, but I also found it rather confusing.<br />
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So, yeah, I can see a few problems with this film. I guess I’ll keep going:<br />
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It must be said that the characters are a little too simple. Charles is the good guy; Magneto makes all the bad decisions because he is playing the role of the baddie. I'm not actually convinced of his motivation. Is this story of apocalypse and timetravel enough for him to want to kill his ex-lover, Mystique, when he find her attempting to kill Trask, to stop the government scientists getting hold of her DNA (these being the two events that lead to the creation of the future sentinels). Wouldn’t it be more in his character to kill Trask anyway, then kill the people involved in the sentinel program? If he’d bought into Xavier and Logan’s story at the Paris Peace Accords, why does he then immediately run off and do something different? For the sake of living up to his villainous reputation?<br />
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On the other hand, the scene in Paris at the peace conference with a wounded Mystique limping to escape Magneto's attack, partly seen through the lens of a 1970s television camera, is fantastic, another great visual set-piece that is at once enticing for being atypical, and appropriate for the period, and also representing the idea that her actions are in the public eye, particularly shocking for the character used to hiding behind a mask, and for the mutants in general for whom keeping a good public image is a matter of life and death. So in this case I can just about forgive the iffy motivations for the sake of another great scene.<br />
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Mystique herself is only barely a better character than Magneto, though: the groundwork for an emotional revenge plot is there (finding the autopsies of mutants killed Trask, and a hint that she does not believe the time travel plot to being with) but needed to be a little stronger for us to believe she would single-mindedly hunt Trask even despite Charles's protests. Perhaps it is because Jennifer Lawrence comes over too human, a little too conflicted throughout, and we see a bit too much of her, where the tenacious, mysterious assassin of <i>X2</i> might have been what the plot called for: difficult to control and with her own agenda and view on the situation, and therefore a real threat to the plans of the heroes, and therefore to the future itself. As a femme-fatale seducing an official in France and strangling him with her foot acrobatically raised above her head whilst she casually reads the documents his coffee table at the same time, Mystique is great! In the airport with her waist exposed, confused and without conviction... not so much.<br />
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There is one moment in particular I would have changed. When the Charles and Eric interrupts Mystique’s assassination of Trask, instead of Mystique and Charles getting sentimental about seeing each other again (and having Eric rather spoil the moment by trying to kill her), Mystique only needed to show that she was more determined to carry out her goal of killing Trask than to catch up with the boys (and by this I include getting cozy with Eric and then Hank in later scenes). Now Magneto has a good reason to try to kill her -- she’s not going to be stopped, and the future won’t be saved, otherwise -- and she remains a convincing a threat for the rest of the film.<br />
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Some of the fan accusations of Fox wanting to take advantage of Lawrence's then-new super-stardom by getting the camera on her character more often, and making her more sympathetic (and less blue) might not be misplaced. If so, it hurt the story just a little, and getting some sexy shots of the smouldering Lawrence in heavy <i>human</i> make-up is only a small consolation.<br />
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Speaking of X-Women, the second time I watched the film I saw the Rogue Cut. Let me tell you: the Rogue Cut was cut for a reason. It adds nothing but a Saturday morning action scene to interrupt the 1970s storyline, in a dull, factory like set of concrete walls and metal grating that is at odds with the visual flair of the rest of the movie. This sequence is badly spliced into the scene of Magneto dramatically retrieving his helmet, ruining the flow of the original scene. More than that, it messes with the flow of the entire film, which is more dramatic when past and future mix only rarely. It is harder to feel the weight of any one of the conflicts if you are constantly flitting between the two.<br />
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The exception to this is finale, where the two stories are inseparably linked during a climactic montage that juxtaposes a huge battle between the sentinels and the most powerful mutant survivors of the future, where they fight to keep Logan and Kitty (Rogue, in that version of the film) safe to give Logan more time to change the past, and a smaller scale conflict where Logan, Xavier and Hank stop Mystique and Magneto from unintentionally setting off that future apocalypse during a press conference outside the White House. As an action set-piece it almost works beautifully. <br />
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My only issue is that Logan quickly becomes useless after Magneto twists metal girders into his flesh. If he is not involved then why does it matter to the audience that the X-Men need to keep him alive in the future? Pressure is released from both scenes as a result.<br />
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But I am in two minds about this, because the ending of the 1970s conflict, involving only Mystique, Charles and Eric, is entirely perfect as it is. It is a meaningful, character driven finale in a genre where empty skies-falling bombast is the rule. Moreover, to have X-Men poster-man Jackman run in to save the day would have been a horrible cliche.<br />
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I think there is a nice solution that screenplay writer Simon Kinberg missed: the X-Men only needed to maintain Logan’s presence in the past long enough to do his part, say, killing some of the purple sentinels, or distracting Magneto as he faces off with Mystique (disguised as Ronald Regan), then Logan can be incapacitated and drowned and whatever else, and then you immediately <i>end</i> the future storyline by having the sentinels breech the stronghold and kill future Kitty and future Logan. At this point the past had been affected by the future as much as possible, and you leave the final, key, future-changing decisions to the mutants of the past -- whose responsibility it is to own that decision anyway. The future is set at this point, but the audience don't know the outcome: we would imagine it teeters between saved and destroyed as Charles tries to persuade Mystique to do the right thing.<br />
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Come on, tell me that doesn’t sound awesome!<br />
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But I'll try not to be too disappointed: this movie is already amazing. Amongst Marvel fans it is popular to disparage Fox and call for the mutants to be folded into the Marvel Studios universe. Fox has made some horrible films, to be sure. <i>X-Men Origins: Wolverine</i>. The Fantastic Four films. But I don't have to watch them. Marvel Studios and make consistently good films year after year, and I love them for it, But without Fox I would have not been able to watch unconventional superhero masterpieces like <i>Deadpool</i>, <i>The Wolverine</i>, and <i>Days of Future Past</i>.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-13502315377240997262016-07-29T12:06:00.002-07:002016-08-07T03:42:23.636-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgu8WyCMLsrKOIlVvWH9Mwloh_Q7-jugvHAJGAHsEBSdb0Z7QSriAMMFhBNDptffar-de5xUp2bkmHgMvxiWSO0FA8aVaW1OHlHPX1jEpBGpeAZ34ZmcR7HSiBWgEZDpG5CJqWEgWkLwx/s1600/star+realms+7.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgu8WyCMLsrKOIlVvWH9Mwloh_Q7-jugvHAJGAHsEBSdb0Z7QSriAMMFhBNDptffar-de5xUp2bkmHgMvxiWSO0FA8aVaW1OHlHPX1jEpBGpeAZ34ZmcR7HSiBWgEZDpG5CJqWEgWkLwx/s320/star+realms+7.png" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;"><b>Star Realms</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">2014 - White Wizard Games</span><br />
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Isn’t that the name of a knock off movie from made by The Asylum? Surely this cheap little box couldn’t compete with the other deckbuilding games I had just started to love when this game was released... fortunately, even I am wrong on occasion.<br />
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I was still dubious after a few plays. This certainly wasn't as complex as <i>Dominion</i> or as thematic as <i>Thunderstone</i>. It’s a very straightforward deckbuilding game. You start with a deck of ten crap ships: scouts and vipers. Five cards are drawn randomly from of deck of all the other cards to make a shared trade row. Use your crappy ships to buy better ships that go into your discard pile and eventually making up your new deck. Make a better deck of spaceships than your opponent. Draw your spaceships and kill your opponent with your spaceships.</div>
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If you’ve played Ascension, yes, it’s almost the same thing. With spaceships.<br />
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What both games have over <i>Dominion</i> and <i>Thunderstone</i> is that dynamic trade row, which puts the players in immediate, direct competition for cards. No need to play with yourself anymore. Basic <i>Dominion</i> is largely playing out a strategy you thought of when you saw the cards at the start of the game. In <i>Star Realms</i> your opponent's deck will spin off in a different direction to your own based on the cards you each run into. There is no choice but to react and evaluate what's on the table constantly.<br />
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Some people won’t like the two layers of luck, the trade row and the draws of your decks. These people are accountants. Twice the luck is twice the excitement. Every time you flip cards in the trade row or draw a new hand is a little buzz as you eagerly search for ways to snatch an advantage in this barely controllable fight.<br />
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Even the deckbuilding snobs will confess <i>Star Realms</i> is cheap, portable and playable, but in truth this is the least of what it has going for it. It is genuinely smartly designed, a blast almost every time. It lives in the same exciting place beyond Kingdom Cards and Duchies that <i>Ascension</i> took us, and then tells <i>Ascension</i> too to take a hike -- and it's not only because Ascension is ugly as sin.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Come on, now.</td></tr>
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<i>Star Realms </i>has a central conceit so compelling you can't not be drawn in -- and they call it the combo. <i>Ascension</i> flirted with the idea ("If you played another Lifebound hero this turn..."), but <i>Star Realms</i> commits: almost every card has a combo effect that can be used if you play another card of the same faction in that turn. Some of these effects are as significant as the card’s basic power. The difference between playing one card of a faction and two cards of a faction can sometimes be devastating.</div>
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The important, delightful tension here is that each faction is <i>also</i> tied closely to a particular game effect: the red faction have a monopoly on the scrap mechanics, which you need in order to ditch your rubbish scouts; blue is loaded with health gain; green with combat; and yellow with discard effects. You can’t get by without some trade to get better cards, or combat to take down your opponent. Nor can you allow your opponent to dominate the scrap or discard effects or you might find yourself overwhelmed. So on one hand you want some balance, and on the other hand you'll need the powerful combo effects.<br />
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This dichotomy makes valuing cards <i>so damn</i> interesting. Each turn you might only have a choice of two or three of the cards in the row, but if the decision is a close one, or otherwise tricky to work out, as it often is, that’s all the choice you need. <br />
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All white Wizard has done is up the importance of the faction of the card, but this alone makes <i>every</i> card more meaningful: if the choice is between a poor green card and a decent red card, but you already have a Blob Carrier in your deck (which combos to take a card for free) that green will look quite a bit more attractive. But what if your opponent has a Patrol Mech, which combos to scrap, and that other red gives scrap too… maybe you should take the red card to stop him getting a scrap advantage… agh!</div>
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Of course, any of those two-card combos mentioned above still need to come into your hand at the same time. In Star Realms you become the commander of numerous vastly powerful warships and weapons platforms, except you can only pray that they will show up when you need them.</div>
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Once you’ve got your fleet working, you can draw five great ships that combo and you really let loose with a barrage of 20, or 30, or 40 damage. You feel like a beast. Get a pants draw and it’s hilarious. "Five scouts! Again?! Where is my Battle Blob?" Well, hilarious for at least one of the players, anyway.<br />
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Then again, getting all your shit cards in one hand means you're statistically more likely to get a nice combo in your next few hands - one the lovely consequences of the deckbuilding mechanic. This game really can do no wrong.<br />
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As a minor note, this importance of factions also makes it more visually impactful when you draw a good hand: the cards are probably mostly the same colour.<br />
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Ejecting the monsters of Ascension from the trade row also works in Star Realms favor. Monsters had a habit of getting in the way, limiting options until somebody could kill them. Or they wouldn’t show up at all when you had combat to go around. Now your combat is used directly on your opponent to win the game, and to take down his bases to stop him getting repeating effects. It's tighter and fightier.<br />
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Like all card games, it gets better the better you know the cards. The Death Star is more terrifying once you've seen it destroy Alderaan. Similarly, once you've seen exactly how ridiculous scrap-two-cards-and-draw-two-cards really is, you will sit up in your seat every time a Brain World breaks into the trade row.<br />
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<i>Star Realms</i> is only about 20 minutes long; you can play a bunch of games in a session, or, as some people at my board games club got into the habit of doing, a couple turns on your phone in between turns of a bigger game. Actually, don't do that: you’ll annoy everyone else at the table. But this game is addictive enough to make you want to, and that says it all.<br />
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<i>Dominion</i> <i>is</i> just as engrossing, and if I had a chance to play it more I might prefer it. Yet, it feels like it works harder for it. It needs all those cards that introduce new mechanics. It needs players to carefully track their turns. <i>Star Realms</i> is just casually awesome. It is fundamentally more exciting. There is anticipation in seeing what ships the trade row delivers, tough and dangerous decisions to be made in choosing what ships to take and how to build your deck, and tension in the direct competition of blows as you race to be the fastest to beat down your opponent — and pretty much nothing else to get in the way of those elements. If <i>Dominion</i> had cards as simple as <i>Star Realms</i> it'd be crap. If <i>Star Realms</i> had cards as interesting as <i>Dominion</i> it would blow every other deckbuilding game out of the water.<br />
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That said, the cards are still very smartly designed.These are some of my favourites:</div>
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This is the one card always available on the trade row. It's vitally the card that keeps the game moving if the trade row is five cards of 6+ cost on the first turn, but it's also just nicely balanced for the first half of the game: you can scrap it, so it's not going to get in the way in your deck like a scout does, and you get bonus 2 damage. Maybe you still want the Explorer for trade but you could use the 2 damage to get an enemy base out of play. Decisions! </div>
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The number one card to give a blob rush legs, or whatever blobs use to move. An early trade boost to gestate the new blob damage dealers, plus it turns into a damage dealer itself when you have the blobs to combo it, and will trigger the combo of other blob cards. But if it all falls apart a three-trade card is nice in any deck.<br />
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Can work into an offensive yellow strategy or into a slower base heavy strategy. The special effect might be used to replay one of your own bases (repeat War World for total 22 damage, maybe) or to get an opponent's protective base out of the way so you can deliver a killer blow. Nice as an unusually complex effect. </div>
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More cards that works into a base heavy strategy. Not so good if you can't get any other bases, but massively powerful if you can put down a base every turn or so. </div>
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Ha, just kidding, this card is terrible. "So called because it's the last thing you would pick", as one of my regular <i>Star Realms</i> opponents pointed out. Then again, if you already have a War World… agh!</div>
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Speaking of spaceships, didn’t it suck that <i>The Force Awakens</i> introduced, like, one original vehicle design? The <i>Star Realms</i> artists aren’t Colin Cantwell or Ralph McQuarrie (I only wish they were), but you do get some 50-odd cool looking spaceships to play with. That’s rad.</div>
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...the thought of<i> Star Realms</i> with art at the level of Ralph McQuarrie or Chris Foss makes me dehydrated from drooling. White Wizard has already improved its graphic design and sourced better artwork for it's recently announced fantasy game, Hero Realms. I say let's see what they can do with Star Realms 2!</div>
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<b>5/5</b><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-60085963551357634272016-07-22T15:54:00.004-07:002017-05-06T03:55:35.365-07:00<div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;"><b>God of War</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: large;">2005 - PS2 - SCE Santa Monica Studio</span></div>
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God of War’s critics have two complaints: it is an adolescent depiction of violence, sex and masculinity; and it is a button masher without the depth of Devil May Cry.<br />
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We'll get to the tits later -- first: the combat, which is way better than anyone gives it credit for, yet it still only, like, the fourth best thing about the game.<br />
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This much is true: if you can block and position yourself around the enemy competently most of your combos are only about as useful as each other. This is the origin of this oft-parroted criticism: “it’s all just square-square-triangle” — which ignores the reality that you still have to get yourself into position to use that combo, and if the other combos don’t add fathoms of depth, they still add variety. Still, said block is very generous, as is the dodge which will even cancel through your attacks. To keep this sort of thing from becoming a snooze you need to throw everything possible at the player... but it’s not until the second game that the player throws down with the varied groups of enemies that make the combat kick and bite.<br />
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This is where the original God of War mostly makes up for it: many fights have some gimmick to agitate your play, an environmental hazard, a timer, movement restrictions, and so on. Few battles are alike. The most memorable to me are the battle with on the conveyor belts against undead archers and harpies; the one where you kill centaurs whilst trying to stay within magic circles; and the final boss fight itself. Throw in some competent platforming sections and puzzles and you have a stew of delicious scenarios. <i>Devil May Cry 3</i>, released a few months earlier, has a different approach: it takes the quality and quantity of moves and weapons to another level (and moreover absolutely oozes with Eastern style in all the combat animations), where <i>God of War</i> concerns itself with varied level design.<br />
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By the way, is it just me, or does God of War feel like an descendant of not only the beat-’em-up, but also the action platformer? Consider: the importance of spacing, jumping to avoid hits, close combat weapons swung at a distance, dealing with interesting combinations of enemy movement and attack patterns. This is... Castlevania, in a 3D space! For all the kids who say <i>Castlevania: Lords of Shadows</i> is "just" a God of War clone, give MercurySteam some credit: choosing God of War to mimic was a smart choice. Sure, <i>Castlevania 64</i> was also Castlevania in a 3D space, but God of War actualizes it like <i>Super Mario 64</i> did for Mario.<br />
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What <i>God of War </i>does add to the combat of 3D action games is the finisher move that leads into QTEs. This is not just a superficial effect, a way to get flashy, gory cinematic moves into the game, though it is that. It is mechanically interesting as well — stay with me guys, it’s true. First, it doesn't force you to kill an enemy once you've damaged it enough. Keep it hanging around so you can take advantage of the finisher effect later, if it's worth the risk, such as killing a gorgon only after you've used up your magic because you know you'll get magic orbs for finishing it — this element is especially effective in the sequels when we get better group combat and more finisher effects.<br />
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Second, it asks you to get in close to the enemy, so imagine: you're low on health, and whilst desperate a slash finally causes an circle prompt above the Minotaur, a ray of hope to get the upper hand, but careful: all the enemies are still attacking all around you. If that doesn't get your heart racing... you are playing on "Spartan" difficulty, right?<br />
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While simple, there is something inherently effective and impactful in how God of War works, a flow of the fighting to make thrilling and grotesquely beautiful battles. If you're not convinced, maybe consider just how many other games have taken up the finisher and QTE mechanics since. I even wonder if the first developers to use longer QTEs in FPS games had a sneaky look at God of War.<br />
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Still, that's just the combat. As mentioned, more important is the level design, but also the story — and the moments in which they seem to be the same thing.<br />
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I’m not even sure I even have the words to eloquently describe why I like God of War so much as an adventure. I can try, perhaps using words like epic and inventive and complete, and that is accurate, but it isn’t really saying enough.<br />
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To those who have played the game, I can mention things like: ah, what a clever moment it was when, after fighting through the afterlife of Hades, you ascend a rope... and find yourself climbing through the hole you saw a strange gravedigger working on much earlier in the game! (then you have to ask: who is this omniscient gravedigger, anyway, and what is his connection to the Gods?)<br />
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Or how one of the first levels is the same location as the last level, and it doesn’t feel repetitive, but feels monumental because you are fulfilling the quest that was set up very effectively in that earlier level. Also, at the end of that early level there is a quiet bay, a pretty landscape for a serene between-levels breather — then you return there at the end and find the giant Ares standing in the lake, and it becomes the site of the last battle. Epic. <br />
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It feels like a game that was conceived as a whole, built from every direction at once. It employs a wit that elevates it and makes me think of me of a mature Nintendo game, but God of War eschews any contrived “seven themed elemental temples” stuff.<br />
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Instead, it tells a focused story of Kratos and Ares. Though you travel far from Ares in order to find a way to beat him there there are almost no distractions from the core conflict between these characters. You just learn more about their relationship and why Kratos needs to kill Ares, the explanation for his rage and his willingness to kill without mercy. So, the brutality of the action (and even sometimes the puzzles!) is thematic food for... the story!<br />
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Remember the Legacy of Kain series? Action-adventure games, operatic stories of vampire anti-heroes and their violent world. After <i>Legacy of Kain: Defiance</i> I waited eagerly for news of a new game, but playing God of War years later made me realize that I wasn’t so fussed about a new Kain game anymore. Other games can fill that gap. The common prejudices paint Legacy of Kain as a high brow game for adults, and God of War as lurid or trashy — which is about true for the God of War sequels, which have maybe the worst scripts I've ever had the displeasure of hearing, but we'll discuss those another time. The first game is different. <i>God of War</i> might lack grandiloquence, but its violent tale of revenge has hooks that will play in your mind like the riffs of a death metal chorus.<br />
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Speaking of which, just check out the other best thing about the game: the fucking music, dude:<br />
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By the way, if you are still concerned that all the gratuitous gore, professional wrestling physiques and the sex mini-game make <i>God of War</i> “adolescent”, then I say this: all the better to enjoy it. If you can enjoy being an adult and enjoy your “inner child” when playing Mario or whatever, you can certainly still enjoy stuff you started enjoying as a teenager. Embrace your inner adolescent: those are the years that we started to develop into awesome people, so celebrate them. Is all this hatred of games that appeal to teenagers from people who hated being a teenager? Are they jealous or resentful? Put it aside and revel in the base pleasures of simulated hyper-violence and crude erotica. It’s only human.<br />
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David Jaffe’s entire gameography shows he is an artist confident with his adolescence. His latest, <i>Drawn to Death</i>, is inspired by the grim and gory drawings bored male students scribble in their workbooks — skulls, pentagrams, fire breathing dragons, guns — and I think that says it all. He’s not embarrassed by his baser tastes. He embraces them. <i>God of War</i> is a game powered by adolescent pleasures, but is steered by a perfectly adult understanding of theme, drama and irony.<br />
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This is why I'll defend God of War against all non-believers. <br />
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<b>5/5</b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-91119998556118219472016-07-15T14:44:00.003-07:002017-01-22T15:33:03.365-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXCbbh0QTBWvrPyTVAPH3NIl3cJNmZVx4OyV6rnlPhrPz-s2aL6hIrohsjSkzD4Lv7hyxIgosHjuzGhJbFdJ7zbuzo6c5ZVVzTuT61z9qufzOwW8qoht7kRJpVVLOJHVgsfkrySG-BNrBk/s1600/klonoa1+%2528no+border%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXCbbh0QTBWvrPyTVAPH3NIl3cJNmZVx4OyV6rnlPhrPz-s2aL6hIrohsjSkzD4Lv7hyxIgosHjuzGhJbFdJ7zbuzo6c5ZVVzTuT61z9qufzOwW8qoht7kRJpVVLOJHVgsfkrySG-BNrBk/s320/klonoa1+%2528no+border%2529.png" width="160" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><a href="http://sam-outlands.blogspot.com/2016/07/klonoa.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Klonoa</span></a><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-size: large;">1997 - PS1 - </span><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">Namco</span><br />
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What can modern side-scrollers learn from this gem?<br />
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I drifted into <i>Klonoa</i>'s world in the same way I did with the videogames I played when I was twelve. I'm not twelve anymore. In some ways I'm downright jaded. Yet <i>Klonoa</i> enticed me. How?<br />
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Oh, the music is certainly a part of it. Chirpy, outdoorsy tracks full of flutes and other wind instruments — appropriate for a game for which the Japanese title translates as "Klonoa of the Wind". Xylophones and circus calliopes for added cheer. Other tracks are subdued and eerie, others punchy and exciting. All the tracks are fairly long and varied, and every level has its own. They transport you, then settle into your ears and make a home.<br />
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What about the controls? Boy, they hit the spot, too. Klonoa's grab: hit an enemy with your a "wind bullet" and it immediately snaps to being held over Klonoa's head, inflated. You can throw it, or jump on it whilst in the air: you shoot upwards again; the enemy shoots downwards, which can be used as a handy attack. Grab enemies whilst in the air to chain such jumps together. Actions like these, with a sudden changes in velocity, feel vigorous, satisfying. Connect them dangerously together, such as over a deadly pit, and Klona's grab-jump nears <i>Bionic Commando</i>'s dramatic grappling hook swing for kicks.<br />
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If only they had taken it further. <i>Klonoa</i> is not only very easy, but very simple. An early enemy you can grab is a green triangular thing with a propeller head. Hold it and it whisks you upwards, which you’ll need to do to get highest gems in the level. I wish they had done more with these such effects, specific to enemies you grab, that will react in different ways when you hold them or when you throw them, or would temporarily give you new abilities in a Kirby like manner. But propeller-head and the enemies that explode like bombs are really the only ones, and Klona’s range of actions are limited in general. Not that the core mechanic isn’t a pretty great one — and the levels thoroughly and smoothly designed around it — but there’s no, for example swinging, climbing, sliding, swimming, or anything else of the sort to mix things up. You’re unable to pull off the cool momentum based tricks that you can in a Mario game.<br />
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I will also say it’s a shame the game isn’t longer. It’s true I went back to some levels, called "visions", because playing them is so...<i>nice</i>, though I do think with the only middling complexity of the level design and controls the game may have “run out of steam” after another few visions.<br />
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Yet none of them can dampen my enthusiasm, because it is the <i>world</i> of <i>Klonoa</i> that delighted me the most; a sidescrolling world that takes advantage of the 3D modeled environments so that levels twist and turn on themselves. You can see other areas of the level in the distance, and interact with them by punching or throwing enemies in that direction. Paths will bend to split in a way impossible in pure 2D games. It wasn't the first sidescroller with 3D modeled environments — take <i>Pandemonium</i>, levels in <i>Crash Bandicoot</i>, and no doubt other examples I don't remember — but it takes advantage of them better than some games released today.<br />
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It seems these "2.5d" games — horrible term, but I don't know what else to call them — are tricky to pull off. The character looks to exists in three-dimensions, but you see them stiffly proceed in a perfectly straight line though the level — and why is the architecture of this level designed in such a straight narrow line anyway? It looks as awkward as a limp. Compare the coherent 2D <i>Mega-Man X</i> with it's polygonal remake, <i>Maverick Hunter X</i>, and you may see what I mean. It takes some clever visual design to pull off.<br />
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<i>Klonoa</i> fairs better than others, first because the feline hero is a charmingly animated, <i>2D</i> sprite. We only expect him (her?) to move along one axis. Second, because the foreground and background are relevant mechanically, with enemies there that can be punched and switches in the background that can be hit with thrown enemies. Your eyes are drawn deeper into the environment, and the space is more immersive as a result. Where other sidescrollers have been as if set on a balcony overlooking rolling hills, <i>Klonoa</i> and the others of its species puts you <i>into</i> those hills (tied to a foot trail of course, but one that meanders and forks and joins back up).</div>
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The effect is so lovely I think more 2D series should be brave enough to take it up. Castlevania, you shitted up your last 2D game, <i>Mirror of Fates</i>, when switching to polygons. Take some notes. 2D games have made some great improvements in making their environments look more natural and aesthetic (read <a href="http://blog.ubi.com/column-chris-mcentee-on-the-level-july-2013/">this Ubisoft article</a> on the art design of <i>Rayman: Legends</i>), but some contrivances are inevitable. Going the 2.5D route offers even more potential for coherent levels that feel like <i>places</i>.<br />
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My favorite levels are the forest levels, 2-1, 3-1 and 3-2, where the platforms are parts of the trees, or walkways used by the forest dwellers, whose huts you can see in the background and who sometimes pop up to help you by activating the moving platforms, which are in this-case gondolas.<br />
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You might notice that those the levels I mentioned aren’t in consecutive order or over one chapter, because <i>Klonoa</i> takes you around it’s world as befits the story. After the forest level in chapter 2 you need to make a detour to the waterfall level because the forest isn’t getting enough water and is withering. When you come back to the forest world newly nourished plants are shooting up all around you. Now, look at the eight predictable themed chapters of Mario: beat the ice world and proceed to the sky world, and so on. Doesn’t that seems a little trite?<br />
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Now, I love Mario, and how at it's best it can exploit it's own incoherence, making levels that are deep and challenging on a technical level that other platformers cannot match. Yet, with a few cute characters and very short cut-scenes <i>Klonoa</i> feels like an adventure in a way that 2D Mario never really has. The koopa kids can't compare. Despite a colorful cast across Mushroom Kingdom and some clever writers working on games like Mario & Luigi, Nintendo seems reluctant to elevate the worlds of recent games like <i>New Super Mario Bro. </i>which only feel superficially lively. </div>
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Then again, <i>Klonoa</i> has one massive flaw that Mario does not: the Klonoa series did not make <i>Super Mario 64</i> in 1996. Klonoa might be a more captivating <i>2D</i> platformer, but such as they cannot top a true, majestic <i>3D</i> platformer — the real McCoy — and the exciting ways of moving and the new depth to levels that came along with it. So, there we go.</div>
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It’s funny that <i>Klona</i> manages to have levels that feel more natural than other platformers, because it has a set-up would justify nonsense levels: it is a "dream-world". It is a shame this game is so easy. Most competent players will breeze through it without a single game over. Personally I saw the game over screen once during the last boss, partially because I started playing far too late at night. But the fact that I preferred to indulge in <i>Klonoa</i>’s dreams over my own says it all.</div>
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<b>4/5 </b></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-30733216811967667792016-07-08T16:57:00.000-07:002016-08-07T15:44:48.192-07:00<br />
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Limbo</b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">2010 - 360/PC</span><br />
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Let’s look at this simply, in black and white.<br />
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To those who got excited for this style after watching the first trailer, let me ask you: isn’t it obvious that an artist can create a greater depth of atmosphere with selective use of other tones, than they can limiting themselves to shades of gray?<br />
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Ah, but wait: we all know the striking effect black and white photography can have. Draining the colour from a photo can make it look timeless, as if the subjects were perfectly carved statues, or perhaps eerie, as if the world in the photo had been zombified. <br />
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A photo gets away with it because it is a complex image regardless. When you take away colour you can better focus on the form, composition, and lighting. But Limbo really has very little to make up for it’s non-use of colour. The problem is that Limbo is so visually simple there is nothing of interest to focus on or enhance, so the effect is wasted.<br />
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Even in a photo, good use of colour could be even more enticing — whether the feel you aim for is calm, oppressive, joyful, morose, chilling, colour come can be harnessed to simulate that emotion, which is what film-makers do all the time.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbJu97yAqs4qsUPmlsWhzx_HQ4TWFrfxk2xquiL1iZ9h8aljN3OpYkhpjma8lCwRBh2wqMV410S-PQ5a_xMGNcJ4_l8va2VV1Jex3iKYBKSrzEXdaX9a6EPlxJRfwIeE0PMoQ2BGbkVf2S/s1600/pan.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbJu97yAqs4qsUPmlsWhzx_HQ4TWFrfxk2xquiL1iZ9h8aljN3OpYkhpjma8lCwRBh2wqMV410S-PQ5a_xMGNcJ4_l8va2VV1Jex3iKYBKSrzEXdaX9a6EPlxJRfwIeE0PMoQ2BGbkVf2S/s400/pan.jpg" /></a><br />
<i>Pan's Labyrinth doesn't look half as bizarre in grayscale as it does in blue and green.</i><br />
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<i>I've never seen Mishmi: A Life in Four Chapters, but this image is haunting — in spite of it being dominated by the colour pink</i><span style="font-size: x-small;">. </span><br />
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What the folks at Playdead do by neglecting all other colour is avoid having to take the more artistically difficult but rewarding steps of working out effective uses of colour for the emotions it wants to invoke. They avoid any garish or dissonant combinations, but also miss any higher atmospheric potential. It’s not exactly aesthetically offensive, but I’m offended by how unindustrious it is. <br />
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I think this example sheds light on much of design philosophy behind <i>Limbo</i>. <br />
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<i>Limbo </i>has no colour, but it also has no story, no coherent world, no characters, no music, and absolutely no detail (under any application of the word). In pointing this out I may be in danger of inviting scoffs from the fans and developer: "that isn’t what <i>Limbo</i> is trying to be”, they might say. I do believe director Arnt Jensen had faith in this desaturated, minimalist "style". I also believe it was a mistake.<br />
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Maybe some comparison will get my point across. Here is a game released almost 20 years ago, in 1997, by very talented artists (many came from the film industry), people who had a story to tell, people who didn’t shy away from demanding visuals — and these stills doesn’t even take into account the additional animation including that in the backgrounds that make the world feel alive, or the wonderful music.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYM1EtEPXa-0T3ATaWby7QlRG48le7stmfAIYuE6aEH_Mc-FiqQxy2aULIsKiKXPqACtVR3s1LmMHmMhm3mt8p4iiGxIq06jJj1HyYuXTMlWKVG2ZiOIWj4JAm1og3OBMy10eYkpxQXYqV/s1600/oddyssee+stockyard.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYM1EtEPXa-0T3ATaWby7QlRG48le7stmfAIYuE6aEH_Mc-FiqQxy2aULIsKiKXPqACtVR3s1LmMHmMhm3mt8p4iiGxIq06jJj1HyYuXTMlWKVG2ZiOIWj4JAm1og3OBMy10eYkpxQXYqV/s400/oddyssee+stockyard.jpg" /></a><br />
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Perhaps unbeknownst to the half-brained flocks of journalists that unanimously awarded <i>Limbo</i> glowing reviews, there is an entire history of a cinematic style of platformers, many with similarly fragile protagonists, struggling through oppressive world's that are enhanced by ambient soundtracks. These are games, like <i>Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey</i> picture above, are utterly saturated with the sort of atmosphere that <i>Limbo</i> could only dream of. They are developed worlds that have locations and events and characters. <br />
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Oddworld is filled with characters, characters that are the most twisted and original caricatures of real life stereotypes you will ever see, like the cigar chomping sales-focused bosses that are also literally slimy animals; octopi in this case. It's a grim, cynical world where the where stark, strange towers of cold metal contrast with expanses of natural yet otherworldly beauty — that are earmarked by the octopi for further exploitation. It's your goal to save the people of your species before they are turned into literal food products. There's an experience that will stay with you.<br />
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In eschewing any story or world <i>Limbo</i> has crippled itself from the start. The brick-a-brack setting actually negatively impacts all areas of the game. Below is the designer’s philosophy for the puzzles — which, in fairness, is rather commendable: <br />
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"At some point, half-way maybe, we really concentrated on putting these things together in a natural way. Arnt was really insistent on everything feeling very natural in the environment. We wanted to avoid the feeling of going from one puzzle to another, even though in some cases that is what you're doing." <br />
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... but I’m chalking it up as a fail. There is no natural part <i>to</i> the environment, it’s all just a random collection of stuff that is there in order to <i>make up puzzles</i>. So game <i>very much</i> feels like moving from puzzle to puzzle. <br />
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(Perhaps what he means is that the puzzles and platforms are made up of real world objects like the giant neon hotel sign that is deadly when it is lit up. Which works fine, but it’s not exactly ambitious)<br />
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Here’s the heart of it: in one of the most famous examples of the cinematic platformer genre, <i>Another World</i>, you can become so taken in by the dangerous, alien world that as you explore new areas of the planet you'll walk unnecessarily slowly to be cautious, you put up shields if you if you feel suspicious, and you run when you get panicked. You live the game. <br />
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In contrast, <i>Limbo</i> is the sort of game in which you constantly tap the jump key whilst moving to madly hop to your destination just for something to do, and in the hopes it will get you where you are going slightly faster. And then, because the puzzles are pointlessly spaced out, you'll eventually even get bored of the jumping. <br />
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When you do get to a puzzle you know you’ll re-spawn seconds behind yourself if you die. And as these are trial and error puzzles anyway you might as well charge wildly into the danger and get the kid killed just to see what happens so you know how to solve it when you get back to it in two seconds time. <br />
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Is this the style of play the team and Playdead wanted? No, but it is the style of play <i>Limbo</i> encourages. If they wanted us to tread cautiously in a mysterious world, maybe they should have given us something to be afraid of by making death meaningful. If he wanted us to soak in the atmosphere of the surroundings maybe he should have given us something to look at that would absorb our attention.<br />
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Even in 1987 <i>Prince of Persia</i>, perhaps the first game in the cinematic platformer genre, was making greater artistic progress, relative to the time period, than Limbo, with it’s smooth running and jumping animations that were copied from videos of the designer's brother running and jumping:<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0cpppGuow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0cpppGuow </a><br />
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That’s some real ingenuity, what you could call proto-motion-capture in a videogame 30 years ago. Then, 30 years later: look at the way Limbo-kid’s legs move when he jumps. His giant head never even turns as he runs. He looks goofy. <br />
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I guess it is funny to see this goofy-looking kid get constantly crunched and dismembered and impaled within the game’s floppy physics engine, but I don’t think comedy was really what the developers were going for, either. <br />
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By the way, I’ve only been talking about 2D cinematic games so far, when of course almost every game genre is thoroughly cinematic these days, increasingly so for at least a decade, since God of War popularized the cinematic beat-em-up, Uncharted did the same for the Third Person Shooter and Modern Warfare did it to the FPS — and if you think there aren’t scenes in Modern Warfare more grim or impactful as the silly twist ending in <i>Limbo</i> you’re kidding yourself.<br />
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So what <i>is</i> good about <i>Limbo</i>?<br />
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One of the hooks of , maybe the only hook, is the close escapes. The timing in every puzzle is designed so it’s enough to cringe when a circular saw misses you by a hair’s breadth. When combined with scripted events you have some potential for excitement. There are a<i> few</i> such moments in the game, the first and easily the best being where you are chased by a giant spider near the start, and eventually take you revenge on your pursuer by dropping a giant rock in his head. The scripting of this chase is reasonably nice. But cinematic platformers have been excellent at this sort of thing for decades.<br />
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The puzzle’s aren’t completely vapid. Many of them have an small "a-ha!" moment. They cover a variety of concepts (gravity, rotating worlds, water displacement, momentum ect). They’re all solvable in a few tries and the game never even attempts to explore any of the concepts it introduces deeply (every concept in the game is used only once or twice), but they are at least somewhat imaginative, and you are introduced to new types of puzzle often enough that you don’t go comatose. So... that’s something.<br />
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What the game does have graphically, a cheap substitute for detail, is a film grain filter over the entire game. This simple filter is absolutely the best graphical trick this game performs. Sometimes these simple filters can be very effective. That’s the whole point of Instagram right? I’m not just taking the piss: the film grain filter was, like, a quarter of the atmosphere of <i>Mass Effect</i>, and if you turn it off in the settings everything just looks shitter. In <i>Limbo</i>, can you imagine playing the game without the filter, so you can really see everything for the simple vector graphics that they are. God, it would like like a flash game. <br />
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<i>Limbo</i> does also introduce some smooth Newtonian physics into the genre. They would feel a little floaty for a game with proper graphics, but in this game it happens to somehow suit the vague, dreary environments, as well as the cartoony character.<br />
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There are some other nice details. If you hit a circular saw at just the right angle, intestines spill out of the boy. Awesome! If a moving platform picks up the boy from below he jumps a little in shock. Subtle, but a nice touch.<br />
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It’s not that the game isn’t conscientiously designed for what it is. It’s very polished, though for such a simple game made over something like four years you would damn well expect it to be. But everything it attempts to do is so unambitious and trifling it’s hard to get very absorbed in it. It would make a pretty nice kids game if weren't for all that intestine flinging (or maybe because of it?).<br />
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<i>Limbo</i> would be a harmless project if the journalists hadn’t latched onto it as a masterpiece, as a work of “art” because it had black and white graphics and it was easy to play. Not one critic had a dissenting opinion. Not one asking “does this really add to the game”, or “has this been done better before”. Even the most negative reviews of <i>Limbo</i> only complain about how short it is (a mercy, in my opinion) or how it isn’t good value for money, further showing that the critics of videogames have no critical faculty whatsoever.<br />
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The <i>Limbo</i> site quotes this as from a review: “Dark, disturbing, yet eerily beautiful”. Not even a child would find this “disturbing”, and how aesthetically insensitive do you have to be to call it “beautiful”? This is just so called "critics" throwing around words again to fill up a page, and probably to look hip. It’s time to stop thinking it’s hip to love rubbish.<br />
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Look, this is what is comes down to: I’ve played <i>Limbo</i> twice and each time I was entertained at a few moments but by the end was just wanting it to be over. It’s is a plod through a dreary world of simplistic monochrome vector graphics, that occasionally brings you to puzzle solvable in 2-4 actions. Whatever filter you look at it though, that’s bad art.<br />
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2/5</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-25229575612167896122016-04-29T16:58:00.001-07:002016-08-07T16:11:02.531-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkfhDmveDfGubmO-1RGKKNJHtRdy9OMJzfbhw1zb-AkpNDj3bAR10uzSe9O26-5yH5DKzmV5WFWhHiHkHVoEKUftdYSxGu_pNxMsNDxYRKacCqLpHNrgSwLr78SK_T2CaBJgvthSR4f_NW/s1600/to-be-or-not-to-be1+%2528no+border%2529.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkfhDmveDfGubmO-1RGKKNJHtRdy9OMJzfbhw1zb-AkpNDj3bAR10uzSe9O26-5yH5DKzmV5WFWhHiHkHVoEKUftdYSxGu_pNxMsNDxYRKacCqLpHNrgSwLr78SK_T2CaBJgvthSR4f_NW/s320/to-be-or-not-to-be1+%2528no+border%2529.png" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>To Be Or Not To Be</b> </span><br />1942</span><br />
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I was grinning madly for most of the viewing. A very witty film with just a sprinkling of dread, especially in the middle parts. <br />
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The scene with the search for the professor as he attempts to escape the darkened theater was even pretty intense!<br />
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No one will claim a barrage of jokes will heighten the tension of a film, but having that nazi plot at the front keeps things moving, keeps the jokes from being aimless, pointless, or a drag (as I have often found with Marx Brother’s films).<br />
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In the end it was, naturally, the comic writing that made the film. Conversations are littered with witticisms and gags develop over several scenes, sometimes obviously yet utterly joyfully (special note for the "Colonel Concentration Camp" gag, and of course the titular running joke). Yet it doesn’t get in the way of the very significant and well thought out plot. <br />
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Don’t forgot the visuals: crowds of nazi soldiers arranged in handsome Polish towns, fantastic sets and costumes, and the actors are good looking or, otherwise, distinctive. As for sound, the music smartly stayed silent at key moments to let something sink in , and I also noticed when it used the music to transition from comic exchanges when danger developed. <br />
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This is a movie that just fucking works on all fronts. Fantastic.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-2356517601130752672016-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:002016-08-07T16:11:08.887-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrcTB4b-Ie7JfDJUr7DukLpZ-KIHgIu3wXBkjv2qlbYD0Q1UYhCL3mpEwMGrlQRloqWmiE3ewo_pLl4B_bjAO2uP6L5Omy1hZIC_pq3zgo_Gl7B9kSA1bjJ4lR_Pl6a2STl0b57QqAOHR1/s1600/wonderboy1+%2528no+borders%2529.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrcTB4b-Ie7JfDJUr7DukLpZ-KIHgIu3wXBkjv2qlbYD0Q1UYhCL3mpEwMGrlQRloqWmiE3ewo_pLl4B_bjAO2uP6L5Omy1hZIC_pq3zgo_Gl7B9kSA1bjJ4lR_Pl6a2STl0b57QqAOHR1/s320/wonderboy1+%2528no+borders%2529.png" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Wonder Boy </span></b><br />1986 - Arcade</span><br />
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A gauntlet of trying timed jumping challenges, made under the pressure of a dropping vitality meter. Beautiful and impossible, and overall the best platformer of the time. <br />
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Yes, many of <i>Wonder Boy</i>'s features have parallels in <i>Super Mario Bros.</i> from the previous year, and, certainly, <i>Wonder Boy</i> lacks the multiple paths and hidden areas of that game, and also the demanding control scheme of <i>Pac-Land</i>. It is a more straightforward game — yet better.<br />
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Oh, the vitality meter: it makes collectibles not just kind of useful in a detached, long term sense, but also an immediate necessity. You might even have to rush at times, putting yourself at greater risk of hitting obstacles, in order to keep vitality up. This is a more natural and effective system than the timer and 100-coins-for-an-extend in Mario.<br />
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<i> Wonder Boy</i> is the best animated, best drawn platformer I have played up to it’s release date. All sprites are skillfully crafted and vibrant cartoons, and consistent, too. The objects are pretty big, so you don’t see too broad a view on one screen (if sprite-work repeats too often on one screen, that screen looks immediately unnatural and ugly). It is sensible in visual design, but in setting too, and I can say that despite playing as a caveman who rides a skateboard and collects floating french fries and ice cream sundaes. Sure, there are floating platforms, but no static bricks in the air, drain pipes to nowhere, or what have you. They take a step towards feeling like locations, like... places in a world, rather than a planned level. Hills under blue skies — hills with long, smooth gradients, might I add, not steps of flat ground like in other platformers — woods, and so on. Maybe not so much the the cloud/water levels, but overall. Obstacles are fires, rocks, natives, frogs, all things that should be on these primitive islands. Each has their own simple pattern, but each is animated with character: the stupid looking natives, that just run at you in a straight line, the wild men that rush at you from behind. I’d rather not mention those fucking vacant looking frogs that leap death towards you when you get too close, but those look great too.<br />
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<i> Wonder Boy</i> arranges these in brilliant, varied and increasingly deadly combinations. After World 2 you will be tracking the movements of 2 or 3 obstacles at a time as well as remembering what comes next. It is intense, and that makes it great. If it didn’t demolish what came before it in graphics, setting and systems, here it still takes away the prize. <i>Super Mario Bros.</i> is just too easy.<br />
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Other little touches I like: hit the corner of a ledge and you land on the platform but trip and lose some vitality; kill the boss and the boss of the next stage reveals himself, so you have a face to curse for the trials you will endure in the next stage.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-13307162110605762082016-04-29T15:46:00.000-07:002016-08-07T16:11:18.373-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Elevator Action</b> </div>
</b></span>1983 - Arcade</span><br />
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You can jump and shoot! That’s cool. <br />
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Sometimes whether you jump or shoot — or even crouch! — is vital to your survival. Sometimes you jump over a bullet, then shoot the guy that put the bullet there in the first place. Or kick him, if he’s close, which is a little bit faster as you don’t have to stop moving, but riskier. <br />
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I’m not being facetious — was there any other action game in 1983 that gave you all these options?<br />
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But!: how does it stack up to the competition? There is only one type of enemy, and only one long level that repeats, and between shooting guys you just walk, keeping an eye out for the next randomly appearing guy to shoot, or even just wait for an elevator, through level and level, far less interesting than <i>Donkey Kong</i> where some careful calculation of what is going on around you is always necessary (so even the waiting was active), or <i>Pac-Man</i>, where you could even influence what was going on around you when you were half a screen away from any danger, or <i>Space Invaders</i> where every invader shot down changed the properties of the fleet as a whole. <br />
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<i>Donkey Kong</i> also had nicer visuals too, bright reds and blues bold against black. <i>Elevators Action</i>’s grey character against various blue and pink and grey walls doesn’t do anything for me. The background music is kiddy and repetitive. Not horrible, just sounds like something a funfair machine might play. <br />
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So, that's why we remember those other games and maybe even play them for a diversion. This one got my hopes up initially, but soon descended in my estimation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-52942936562678186882016-04-29T15:31:00.001-07:002016-08-07T16:11:28.012-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicu4lU_7CV0zY8WgRJkWQqGzM3VckAM8DOiOB5eF9PVTirBN_zhgCWtvOtBWZUbrKwLeAwIv7CBQKfcA-KnG76UFgzofI_ScvW1KmznWaRHDnahAE6CpZ3q0CX0_L0gcDMihKHmCMgU1Ud/s1600/footballmanager1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicu4lU_7CV0zY8WgRJkWQqGzM3VckAM8DOiOB5eF9PVTirBN_zhgCWtvOtBWZUbrKwLeAwIv7CBQKfcA-KnG76UFgzofI_ScvW1KmznWaRHDnahAE6CpZ3q0CX0_L0gcDMihKHmCMgU1Ud/s320/footballmanager1.jpg" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Football Manager</b></span><br />1982 - ZX Spectrum</span><br />
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Straightforward strategy, football themed: change your team to maximise Attack, Defence, Midfield, and Energy stats. Then, see which team wins — slowly. <br />
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Sixteen positions per team, eleven playing per match, and you’ll want to keep a slot free for the chance to buy the footballer auctioned off at the end of a match. So, your decisions per match boil down to four substitutions and a new addition. Energy decreases for participating footballers, so some rotation is essential, a small strategic subtly favoring players who only use their best footballers when they need to. With these few options, and a random element, victory largely falls to chance. <br />
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The results, revealed as “highlights” cutscenes, gripped me the first time: I watched with hope and apprehension to find if my strategy paid off, or luck was on my side. But they drag on so that I soon found myself turning away for a few minutes whilst they played, only watching during an important match, otherwise tuning in just for the final score. The game is slow, so slow I was only looking half the time the program was running.<br />
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There is, at least, always opportunity, addictive opportunity. Despite the game speed, despite your losses, you’ll want to push on, because it’s rarely hopeless. You don’t know where your points will ultimately place you on the league table. And could the next player put up for auction change your chances? Will your next match be an easy win (either a lucky matchup or a planned offensive) that could improve your morale and springboard you to victory? These questions will spur you to one more match, another chance to progress towards your goal of promotions through the football leagues.<br />
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I got fed up with this game after a few seasons, but should take it for what it is: an early, pure strategy videogame.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462360560927961169.post-80106308499196737142016-04-29T15:08:00.000-07:002016-08-07T16:11:39.609-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Lmn7iTZJlGoTGN9JdnsrmPi79Ox1w71nIkxtow5hx3hIUvvcWW-1c4V9Ceb25B0rpPOWm6ZxvpWb_phqQdfIm7ktQzoX1-Yc27rUFMssVVB5llLDVKfIaDLeDg_9-4PjIUP1wi_iuii9/s1600/ico1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Lmn7iTZJlGoTGN9JdnsrmPi79Ox1w71nIkxtow5hx3hIUvvcWW-1c4V9Ceb25B0rpPOWm6ZxvpWb_phqQdfIm7ktQzoX1-Yc27rUFMssVVB5llLDVKfIaDLeDg_9-4PjIUP1wi_iuii9/s320/ico1.jpg" /></a><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Ico</b></span><br />2010 - PS2</span><br />
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A short linear path around a quiet castle. Not much needs to be said about it, though the hipsters will insist otherwise.</div>
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Tell me this isn't a good set up for some interesting and intricate puzzles: bring your frail lady companion, who cannot climb or jump very far without your help, to the doors that only she can open. In fact, there are no puzzles to speak of, or at least no obstacles that could be described as puzzling. Pull a lever to open a door, cut a rope to drop a bridge, that sort of thing.<br />
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The designers want to create an attachment between you and the girl. This aspiration is supported by the animation and actions of the characters (the hand holding, the catching) and I appreciated that. You also have to save her from monsters on occasion, as she can't fight for herself, but that's as far as it goes. Nothing substantial actually happens to the characters throughout the whole game, save for one event towards the end involving a bridge. They just walk together. She never helps in the "puzzles". Had they been overcoming challenges together, as you and Agro did in Shadow of the Colossus, by way of difficult puzzles which you both contributed to, maybe I could have scraped some emotions together to care by the end of it all.<br />
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The game deserves some plaudits for preserving a simple drama of adventure — this is Udea’s craft. Some games can fail to engage even with violent battles against impressive titans, but Ico reaches higher with more mundane props. By showing me youthful characters that move with realistic human clumsiness, and allowing the atmosphere to permeate uninterrupted by any pushy narrative, <i>Ico</i> found tinges of turmoil, just occasionally, even when nothing more exciting is happening than a chandelier drops from the ceiling or the characters walk by a precipitous drop.<br />
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Alas... the whole boring castle is brown bricks after brown bricks and there is only one enemy and it’s a shadow. It’s not until one game later that Udea builds on the strong foundations but adds, sparingly and only when appropriate, the bombastic music, the narrative twists, and the violent battles against impressive titans — that is, the points of interest.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0