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Sanic Movie review.

Long story short this movie was shit, err I don’t know how to sugar coat it. I didn’t have high expectations for it, well I kinda did after detective pikachu surprised me. But someone really must’ve given a shit about that movie, because clearly no one but Jim Carrey gave two fucks about the sonic movie. He is the only one not sleep walking through this movie.

I don’t know where to begin, the story and the lore and set up are all just nothing burger jj abram mystery boxes. It just sets up this world where Sonic is from only to never use with vague hopes of panning it off to a sequel that probably is coming but it doesn’t deserve it. You shouldn’t get a sequel from a movie that is only thinking about the sequel. If the first movie isn’t self contained and good then a sequel shouldn’t even be on the table. I’m not gonna hold off my opinion until I watch the next movie, by then I’ve already given you my money twice.

So it sets up this world it does nothing with, it just drops sonic into normal world which is the laziest way to have your world building by just not having any. Not even the marios brothers movie did that, sure they made up a weird cyberpunk mushroom kingdom but they at least did that. This is just like ‘no it’s in the normal world’. It doesn’t give a shit.

I don’t even have much more to say about it, I don’t feel like giving this review more effort than the google search the people that made this movie si to research sonic before they made filmed it.

The story and the world and the characters are so cookie cutter you could literally replace sonic with any character, this could be just a random kids movie about an alien they just pasted sonic over. It’s so generic, I’d get bored even describing. The plot is so contrived, sonic loses rings in a contrived way, and now has to have a middle in the movie because movie to get his rings back even though he could get them himself in like two seconds with a map.

But no, we need a movie to happen so there’s a random bar fight scene because sonic has to do something with his speed other than fight Robotnik. And this is the point where I’m like you could’ve actually used some other sonic characters or lore and made a movie here when instead all they did was make a movie that’s pretty much fluff where nothing happens and it has sonic in it.

It’s not even close to detective pikachu because there’s not even an emotional subplot. There are no moral lessons or emotions at all, it’s totally bare bones. There’s literally no meat on the bones and what’s more it feels like it was cut down. There are clearly parts of the movie that are like voice over montages that were meant to be full scenes they cut down. Scenes that could’ve added vital plot points that were just pasted over for time.

Jim Carrey is the only saving grace of the film, he’s having a lot of fun in this role, he’s basically Ace Ventura meets the Riddler and it’s good. He’s the only thing good about the movie. I just found sonic and all the other characters forced, annoying and unlikeable.

I was actually planning on doing a Jojo rabbit review because I watched that and I really enjoyed it, without a doubt the most fun ww2 movie ever but I feel much more compelled to write reviews about movies I hate haha.

So to wrap this up because I have jobs to look for that I wont get because the whole world is currently locked down haha.

So in summary, don’t watch this garbage, it’s not horrible but it’s just meh, it’s not worth your time, but if you do watch it, don’t have high hopes for it. And if you recognise the header image you’re not getting into heaven haha.

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This is the police 2 – review

Hey, still not dead, just been working a lot because christmas sucks haha.

I was definitely looking forward to playing this, I’d been waiting for it to go on sale for under a tenner since I got the first game for a couple of quid and it is an indie game I guess so that’s a fair price in my opinion. But the first is a lot of game for not a lot of money, the story, characters and game are really great and well done, so I was looking forward to this. Needless to say I was a little bit hyped. These niche little management sims are sort of my jam between big sprawling rpgs and stuff add in turned based xcom turned based strategy combat and I’m hooked.
I actually only wanted to play the first because I saw someone playing the second one and it looked right up my alley and it was.

The first game is pretty much perfect and the second adds in xcom style turned based combat and your cops have stats that are important in regular call outs and these new tactical missions where you actually control the cops as they stealth or blast their way to catching criminals.

Yeah well I already said ‘but’ but there are more buts coming because this game is great but I can’t help feeling like it just has more content for the sake of content. In the first game it felt like it was constantly evolving, you never felt like you were doing the same thing over and over, every day the gameplay evolved in some way. One minute you’re in an election and have to manage shifts so people work well together, the next you’re tracking a serial killer, or taking down a crime family but that never really happens in the second game.

Yeah sure you can take down crime families but there are only like three and it feels like it’s been really dumbed down but on the bright side you actually get to do a tactical mission to capture the gang’s leader which is really fun and satisfying. Another great change which is actually something I said in the first game review is that they added a description on the polaroids in the investigation missions so now you know what the fuck is going on in each slide and don’t just have to just guess what the expressionist art is trying to depict. It just tells you, so I didn’t need a guide for any of the cases in this game because I could actually tell what the pictures were showing me and put them in the right order. Just a little thing but it’s such an improvement, when you can spend ages trying to tell if a person is getting out of or getting into a car in a badly drawn still image.
But I dunno, the investigations don’t seem as interesting for some reason, they’re just kind of annoying and you don’t have detectives in this game so you have to commit officers from your main force to investigate them which is just dumb. Do small town sheriffs not have detectives? I guess not.

Oh yeah forgot to even talk about this game, it’s basically a direct sequel to the previous game where Jack Boyd is in hiding as he’s being used as a scapegoat for a lot of crimes for some reason. It’s kind of thin honestly because it’s never really explained how all this happened, it’s kept really vague because there’s no way for the game to know what you actually did in the previous game because it doesn’t follow on from your save file, it’s not that type of game with branching story choices. Which just begs the question why they didn’t just go for a new character, it’s probably because they wanted to keep John St.John (Duke Nukem) as their main voiced character. Which is understandable. But there’s no reason they couldn’t have worked him in just not as the main character.

So in terms of story you just need to accept that Jack Boyd has a cool mullet and a beard and is now wanted for some reason and he has to pay this random guy who may have been in the last game but I can’t remember or he’ll rat you out to the feds. And you’re hiding out in this little mountain town that I hoped would be a lot like twin peaks but kind of wasn’t at all but I’ll get into that later on. So of course you get back into basically doing criminal shit and favours to make money to pay this guy off and this is kind of where you run into the first flaw of the game. Money, you don’t really need it. In the first game the goal was to make half a million so in that the reason you got money was just because you were saving for retirement but *spoilers* it doesn’t even matter at the end anyway.

But you could also spend money on various services in game that were pretty useful like setting up a hit on a cop that was going to turn on you or something like that. But in this game you only need money to pay off this guy and buy more equipment.

And here’s where you get into my second gripe, the equipment, and my complaint with this is sort of two fold, it’s not interesting equipping your officers at the start of each day, it’s just annoying and time consuming, yeah there’s an auto-assign but it’s retarded and it never equips them with the stuff I want. The second reason this is annoying is because every call can be solved by an item. It’s just the instant win button, you can solve most cases with the tazer or the shocker/pepper spray/baton. They’re just instant win buttons and all the thought is basically taken out of the calls. In the previous game you really needed to think about how to handle the situation. In this you don’t even have to read the description you just click ‘use baton’ and the case is done. You could basically speed run this game with this.
On top of this your officers have skills and some of the options are skill related and they’re basically instant wins too, so if your officers have high negotiation they can end the call with a command, or if they’re high stealth they can sneak it and so on and so on. So all that really happens at the end is all your cops become jack of all trades and can just do everything and the difficulty just artificially spikes.
You see you need a certain level of professionalism which is like their xp to complete a mission and by the end of the game every mission is just over 2k professionalism nomatter what it is. Like you’ll need the same level of professionalism to take down a bank robbery as you’ll need to catch a guy that pinches a waitresses ass. It’s dumb, It’s not a realistic difficulty curve.

Another thing I found annoying was the crank calls were too subtle in this game and the humor is such that the real calls sounded like cranks some time. In the previous game you get some calls that are fake, just some idiot with a false alarm like in real life and you have to avoid them otherwise you can’t use those officers for a real case until they come back. Which you know isn’t how police work because they have radios and can go to calls if they’re in the vicinity. Imagine if cops had to go back to the station every time to pick up a new call. That would be retarded. They haven’t had to do that since the invention of the radio.

But in the last game the crank calls were pretty obvious and eventually you could spot them and avoid them rather easily but in this game there’s almost no way to tell them apart. I think it’s a lot to do with how wacky they’re trying to make the setting for this game.

I thought this game would reference twin peaks what with it’s setting in a kooky little mountain town or maybe it’s fargo but I’ve never seen that movie. But it’s not really like twin peaks at all, there are like weird cultists who worship strange forest gods but that’s always off to the side, it’s not really that relevant to the main plot, it doesn’t really go anywhere. The main ‘villain’ if you can call him that is just this retired military colonel, but he’s not really a villain as much as he’s just someone in your way, kind of, that goes for pretty much every ‘villain’ in this game. I dunno the characters in this game just felt a little flat and generic and the story doesn’t do much with them, they don’t have arcs or move on from the story of the first game as much as they just wallow it. The story almost just feels like an add on or a dlc despite how much it clearly improves upon the game.

But for all it’s improvements and addons some are just irritating like managing each cops inventory and there’s this fucking irritating part where the cook for the station goes on her honeymoon and you have to pick food for everyone matching their specific requirements and it’s just annoying. There’s nothing fun or interesting about picking what food they eat and you can lose their respect if you choose food they don’t like, it’s not a fun gameplay addition, it’s just an annoying hurdle to waste your time. There’s a line between fun and challenging and annoying time wasting.

That’s something I forgot to mention, there’s a respect system in this game where basically if you get the cops to like you they dress properly and they’ll listen to you. If they don’t respect you they dress sloppily, they refuse to work consecutive days and they out right do whatever the hell they want on tactical missions so for the love of fuck don’t ever use them for that. They also won’t go out on calls if you send them with another cop that doesn’t respect you. So getting their respect is really important.

This sounds interesting but they can lose respect for you for the most asinine reasons like you don’t let them take off work to scratch their balls. I had this one quit because I hired a masseuse for the station which I thought everyone would like but this guy was like “that masseuse touched my cock, I didn’t know this station was home to rampant faggotry” or something nuts like that and he just fucking quit. How was I supposed to foresee that outcome?? How would I ever know that was a possibility? It’s just fucking bullshit there solely to trip you up. The game is kind of full of moments like that, situations that happen that you would need fucking psychic powers to predict and just becomes frustrating.

I really liked the gameplay though, I’m a big fan of xcom and it really steps up in that respect. The combat and the guns feel nice(feel might not be the right word since I’m not handling them, they sound good), although you only get to use their revolvers but I like how they work. Basically they’re one shot kills but you can choose whether to hit them in the hand and try to disarm them so you can arrest them, shoot them in the head and kill them, in the leg and hobble them, or as I always go centre mass, because that downs them but it takes them a while to die so if you finish the stage before their life timer runs out they live. The game rewards you for suspects you take alive, so you’re encouraged to and I prefer to go quiet and use batons and tazers to stun and cuff them and then shoot to wound them and take them alive. But you can just literally stab them all to death which is quicker and easier but feels less immersive to me having cops going Sam fischer on a guy and it lowers your score which is in can ring pulls (I guess bottlecaps would’ve been derivative) and you trade these pulls for more cops and equipment.

Because the premise of the game is basically you’re working for the real sheriff who’s really inexperienced and she is trading equipment and men for how well you perform.

Overall the gameplay is good, I would’ve liked it to be a little more like xcom where you can unlock more equipment instead of just skills and perks and the stealth is a little bare bones, if one guy sees you that’s pretty much done for the stealth portion, now every enemy knows where you are haha. Also weirdly when you play xcom there are basically infinite tactical missions you can do randomly generated to a point where it gets sort of tedious but in this game there feels like there aren’t enough. Because they’re really fun and tense and brutal because you can’t save scum so you’re basically permanently on iron man mode unless you want to redo the whole day because these missions usually pop up at the end of the day. And your cops aren’t armoured, they have the same health as the enemies so one shot and you’re done, if it’s in the leg you can’t move, in the hand you can’t shoot, centre mass and you’re bleeding out, headshot and it’s goodnight. And on top of that if they’re injured in the mission they’ll be out of commission for a couple of days. And for some reason when one of your cops is shot there’s no like medic mechanic, not one of your cops knows first aid, so that person just has to limp away and hide and bleed until the end of the match. So it’s tense, but there aren’t really enough of them and there’s this one later on that almost made me fucking rage quit.
Basically I think it’s the second to last tactical mission in the game, you had to take down this whole camp of guys without being spotted once, because if you got spotted it was an instant fail state and you had to start right from the beginning. And once you’ve chosen the guys to go on the mission you can’t change them unless you want to restart the day. Just stuff like that is really annoying and I don’t see why the mission couldn’t have just carried on or you could get another chance of taking down the person who saw you before they raise the alarm. Bare in mind all my guys are like max rank with top stealth and stuff, but no if they get spotted or someone finds a body it’s done and I don’t think you can hide bodies, despite the fact there’s a perk where you can pick up injured people and carry them. So why can’t they move bodies or hide them?

Overall all these missions are pretty great which makes it sting even more that the last mission is this really boring easy tower defence mission. I mean the last mission in the first game was more interesting and you didn’t even get to play it, you could only play it out in your imagination as you set it up.

Also I would’ve liked more control over planning the raids like the assault in the first game. You could decide what men to put where, in this game you can only decide who to place you can’t decide where to place them. You just gather intel and fill slots, there’s little to no strategy in planning the assaults. But the level design, I just feel like they could’ve done more with it, there could’ve been more going on with the story in these missions. They could’ve been more dynamic and worked into the plot like you find a weird altar with human sacrifices or you stumble upon a conspiracy or another serial killer.

It gets into my whole feeling towards this game, it feels shorter and less developed than the first despite having more content. It’s like they put more effort into nuts and bolts gameplay than the story and the world than they did in the first. The ending left me just totally cold, zero emotional resonance, it was just kind of meh and it didn’t fit and I constantly felt like I was on the outside of the story. It also didn’t really resolve what happened with Jack’s wife in the first game which really pissed me off. It just feels unfinished and like they were trying to be mysterious or ambiguous with the plot but it just didn’t suck me in enough for me to give a shit. They don’t do much with the pagan cults and forest spirits, I really thought that was going to be core to the plot like twin peaks but it’s really not, it’s just a fun side thing which is fine. I just wanted a deeper, weirder experience. I feel like this game kind of played it safe and just added gameplay but took no real risks with the story or world building.

Also I’m lead to believe there was a good ending and a bad ending which I fucking hate in games. I much preferred the ending of the first where it wasn’t a moral choice as much as it was between two people. You chose whoever you thought would fuck you over the least but *spoilers* they both fuck you over haha.

What bugs me is this game is so niche I can’t even really find accurate guides or people talking about the endings. I’m gonna have to dig to even find the good ending. Which I think I read somewhere you can only get if you do zero illegal shit which I’m not sure is even possible or what this game even counts as illegal stuff because this game is never really black and white with it’s moral choices. I can’t see how you’d make any money in this game without cutting corners and committing crimes, I made most of my money selling drugs and evidence. In the previous game you actually had a salary that I don’t think you get in this game so I don’t see how else you’re going to get the money in time to pay for the silence of the asshole leaning on you. I mean that’s the justification for taking the short cuts in the first place. The reason you do illegal stuff in the first game is because it makes you money which you need for retirement but also because if you don’t and you piss off the mafia they’ll just kill you.

But in this game if it wasn’t for the blackmailer you could probably just not be a dirty cop haha. But I guess him turning you over to the feds is the equivalence in this game for the mob killing you.

Ok a lot of waffling there, I really liked the game, I had a lot of fun with it. I really liked the new combat system but I feel they kind of slipped up on a lot of things they did right in the first game. So in all honesty, I think as a whole I preferred the first game. But maybe it’s because I didn’t expect much from the first game and I had higher expectations from the sequel.

Minor niggles I thought the writing was verbose to the point of hair pulling. Characters in this game will take ten times the amount of words to say something as is necessary. Were the writers in this game paid by the word? I mean even the text is too long, you get these fucking text crawls, short essays that are small even to read on a big screen tv and all they’re basically saying is “I need a strong cop to move some boxes”. Why the fuck couldn’t you have just said that? Why did it take like 500 words to get to “I need cop with strong stat”. I get it’s world/character building but some of these characters are just random one offs. It just feels like a needless waste of time and an editor could have cut this down. I mean again there’s a line between interesting world building and annoying time wasting. Eventually I’m going to stop giving a shit and just scan what they’re saying to get to what they want.

I have ranted enough and despite all this bitching I would still definitely recommend it, it’s a great game, if you like xcom and mutant year zero and games like that, definitely pick it up, for the price you can’t go wrong.

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Rage 2 review

I’d kind of blown my load when it came to whats on offer on gamepass after the thoroughly disappointing Outer Worlds, a game I wasn’t even that hyped for so what could’ve been a pleasant surprise was just a shallow passionless borefest. After that I went back to rage quit Shadow of War which is an ok game, I really love the nemesis system, which is like this cool orc hierarchy where you can pit orcs against each and engage in a rudimentary form of politics at the end of a sword.

It’s a fun and really innovative system that I wish was in a more interesting game because aside from the nemesis system the game really doesn’t have much to offer. It’s basically discount assassin’s creed in a universe I don’t care about. The characters story and gameplay are just meh and they made the sequel more grindy so unless you have a good narrative hook or really enjoy the combat the grind doesn’t feel worth it. Especially when the loot is different skins for the same armour and weapons which only change the number next to the name.

I was kinda tempted to do another stellaris run but that’s kinda the same situation, it’s fun but I suck at it and the amount of time I spend on it just seems like a losing battle. I tried to play Planetfall that game that has the longest name ever but I just couldn’t get into it. I just hate the art style, I can’t describe it, it just feels like stellaris lite. It has settlement management but it doesn’t feel as in depth, it feels more casual and I didn’t really like the combat, it’s like a mix of xcom and stellaris but it lacks all the punch of either. I love how in xcom all your men have names and specific skills and nicknames. Which is why I’m playing This is the police 2 right now which is excellent and there’s a review in the works for that.

But yeah what was this post about again… oh yeah Rage 2, it’s pretty good. The end.

Ok no so this game wasn’t that interesting to me when I saw it announced, I liked the first kinda but I really didn’t see the need for a sequel, especially after doom and the underrated mad max game, I see even less reason for this to exist. And according to the reviews it had a disastrous launch, the reviews savage it for being totally bug ridden and unplayable but as it stands on gamepass right now I ran into minimal bugs and the game is totally fine now. The first Rage was the first time I realised how much dlc was total bullshit and literally just hacked a part out of your full game and sold it back to you and that really pissed me off. Because in Rage 1 there was literally an area in game I couldn’t enter because it was dlc, like it was right there but it was asking me for money to enter it in the full game I purchased with my money. That’s like buying admission to a waterpark and then getting charged to go down a waterslide, or no paying for penis enlargement and then being charged each time you jerk off haha. It was total bullshit then and it’s total bullshit now. Dlc should be an extra thing made after the base game, not just a part of the base game they stole.

Ok rant over.

So I wasn’t that hyped for this game but I thought Doom 2016 was ok and this has the same engine I think, so yeah it’s basically Doom 2016 meets mad max which is pretty cool.

The start of the game is pretty fucking generic honestly, don’t go expecting an enthralling immersive world or story even close to something like fallout or mass effect, the story is really campy nonsense (I mean tbf so was doom 2016) but thankfully it does an ok job of staying out of the way. But I much prefer the tone of games like Elite and mad max where it takes itself seriously but the story is either non existent or just serves to drive the game forward.

The tone in Rage is like a loose comedic style, like borderlands but with a less cringy art style and it takes itself a little more seriously. But the world is sort of cartoony with very little interaction. Don’t go into this game expecting Metro levels of immersion and story telling or Fallout levels of quests and quest givers. I ignored most of the side quests as all they really do is highlight a spot on the map you were going to fuck up anyway haha.

But in all honesty the loot system is pretty good, ten times better than Outer Worlds where all you ever find is money and more lockpicks to pick doors that hide money and more lockpicks. The loot is actually stuff you need, mainly feltrite which you use to upgrade your guns and powers and money you use to buy more mods for your guns and powers. Also how you progress and get new weapons and powers is really good and fun and works really well so you’re not getting too over powered too quickly but you want to track this stuff down. It also makes sure that the weapons are all unique and interesting and satisfying. This isn’t like outer worlds or borderlands where you’ll be tossing out guns every ten minutes because you found one with a slightly higher number next to it’s name, this is a hybrid shooter. When you pick up a gun you’ve basically got a whole new playstyle and they all feel really distinct and unique. Which is the same with the powers, which I’ll get into later.

So guns, it’s a shooter, how do the guns feel? They feel fucking amazing ok, I judge all shooters by their shotgun and when I picked up the shotgun in this game I didn’t want to use any other weapon and I didn’t for most of the game because that shotgun is so satisfying to use. It feels and sounds really powerful and it looks super cool, I can’t really say if I liked the Doom 2016 one more or not, it’s been a while since I played it. But the weapons feel great in this game. Also biggest thing for me is it has an upgrade system but you can’t upgrade the power of the weapon which is just how it should be, you can only upgrade the capacity/reload speed stuff like that. What does that mean? Well that means when you pick up the shotgun it doesn’t fire bunny farts, you pick up a shotgun and it’s a shotgun upgrades or not, you fire it, the thing on the loud end is gonna be dead.

The powers are pretty nice and I found myself wanting to upgrade them and use them all and they’re really nicely mapped on the controller so you don’t need to cycle through them. So you want to use them and they’re very intuitive in how you use them, there was never a power that I was like “that’s fucking useless”. I used them all and the great thing is there’s no lame mana bar, there’s just a cooldown on each ability and you can upgrade them to shrink the cooldown which is perfect for me. I really hate games that have mana pools where you have to like chug magic potions or eat energy bars to use your abilities, a cool down is much better (or you could just use both like Prey 2017 for some fucking reason) it stops you from spamming them and makes you think more tactically about using them but you get a feel for them and you don’t have to keep topping your power up. Some of the powers are freaking cool too, my favourite is like something straight out of crank, it’s basically a power where if you die you get to do this little qte and your power suit will shock your heart basically bringing you back to life, which is just totally cool. But it has a cool down so if you die again in like the next couple of minutes you’re toast. It just gives you a second change to get back into the game, activate your rage mode and fuck things up haha. It all just works really well and the powers are fun and fit into the world and they make you feel powerful.

Vehicles were ok, but it’s hard to put this up against a game like mad max where so much effort was put into a game about vehicles, compared to that they’re just ok and the vehicle combat is kind of easy because you have mounted gun on the first car you get and it’s not in first person, it switches to 3rd person camera when you get in a vehicle which I hate honestly. I prefer 1st person camera at all times because it’s more immersive. I like to feel like I’m in a vehicle, see the steering wheel and dash like metro and elite and far cry. The vehicles are kind of where this game loses a step because there are a bunch of vehicles in this game but you can only upgrade the first one you get and vehicle combat isn’t that necessary for the story or progression at all. And you get this sick hoverbike really early in the game that basically breaks the game and makes all other vehicles pointless because you can get anywhere twice as fast on the hoverbike because it’s basically a helicopter, all obstacles and enemies btfo, I can just fly over you. There are like road blocks set up by bandits trying to kill and rob people, I can just fly over them giving them the finger if I want.

But this is a game where you do want to go these bases and kill enemies, one; because you need the loot to upgrade your guns and powers and two; because the combat is fun as fuck.

I just wanna compare the gameplay loop of this to Outer Worlds. So in Outer worlds you leave a city and you walk around with your generic snarky companions with millenial haircuts and you walk along a road where there are some bandits waiting with their back turned. Then you snipe them and your companions have cringey animations where they use their ‘skill’ but basically you just stand there firing until they die, maybe use the time slow, probably not haha. Loot their corpses, no blood, just lame sparks and you can’t even loot everything. And then you go back to the town to talk to a bunch of boring npcs who never move from the spot.

Ok so what’s the gameplay loop in Rage 2 like? You get on your sick ass hoverbike until you see a bandit base that has some cool shit you want, you land and park your sick hoverbike haha. You walk over to the front gate of their compound then you burst into a full sprint turning invisible as you do it to barrel into the first enemy you see and kick them in the face so hard they’re turned into chunks and red mist. You then spin around to systematically dismember their friends and colleagues with your meaty shotgun. I mean cutting people in half, blowing legs off and then stomping on their heads. A heavy armored enemy is lumbering towards you and the shotgun is stripping armor that’s visibly flying off with each blast, so you use your blast power to knock them into next week. Then some crazy bitch hits a grenade at you like a baseball with a baseball bat so you take your shotgun and hit it straight back to her and her friends and it blows up in her face turning her into chunks. Then someone is firing missiles at you from a higher level so you run up the stairs firing your machine pistol as you dodge rockets. You throw up a barrier and shoot around it until you’re close enough to rush them and boot them off the tower. But then more fire comes from below so you jump off the tower and slam into them turning them into a smear. But then there’s a boss with a handful of back up so you throw a vortex down which sucks all the smaller ones off their feet and out comes the rocket launcher, you switch to secondary fire and target all of them individually and fire a handful of mini rockets locked onto them which turn them into red mist. Then when everyone is chunks you loot the chests.

I saw yahtze complaining about how looking for the chests slows down the pacing too much but you actually get a skill where you can just see them through walls so it makes it ridiculously easy to find them. But you know fps games have never had secrets or easter eggs that took time and effort to find haha.

The world is also richly detailed, there’s like desert part and a jungle/forest area, a swamp area and another slightly more deserty desert area haha. But the beauty of the game and it’s vistas is all kind of lost when you can just zip over them at break neck speeds on a helicopter bike haha. Yeah that sort of does break the game because all other vehicles even the mech you get is sort of useless by the end of the game because I can kill faster out of the mech with powers and I can get places faster with the bike so all other vehicles are rendered pointless.

There is some exploration as you find new locations on your map, not every enemy base is located on your map until you buy/find some info on the location of one or just stumble upon/fly over it haha. And I did end up cheating and just looking up all the arc locations so I could get all the weapons and powers.

The story missions are also mercifully short and it lets you carry on wrecking bandits after it’s done which is good. It’s kinda like Doom if you added vehicles and an open world with fun little locations and enemies dotted around. The open world aspect doesn’t feel tacked on like in Gears 5 where it only serves to pad out sections of action and break up linear levels and fighting set pieces. There is vehicle combat and there are enemies everywhere not just at the bases, there are great big convoys like in mad max of like war trucks which is cool but it’s not as close to as cool as mad max. And the car customisation isn’t nearly as in depth as that, you really feel like the car is part of you when you play mad max, which is why the ending is so fucking heart breaking haha. I really want a mad max sequel can you tell?

Overall the game is pretty fun, it kinda drags at the end but that was mostly my fault because I just decided to grind all the bases and the combat doesn’t really evolve much. To be honest this game compared to outer worlds has too much content. Like it has a crafting system I never used where you can make better grenades and wing stick, wing sticks are those things you never use haha. Wing sticks are like xena ninja stars you throw that kill people but it doesn’t come back so what other thing do you have that you throw at enemies that kill them and don’t come back, oh yeah bullets. Why do wingsticks exist? Would someone explain this to me haha?

But overall the game is solid and if you’re bummed out about outer worlds and just want to play a fun mindless shooter then give it a shot, what do you have to lose. Honestly though it’s kinda just a meh tier version of metro exodus where you play a generic badass in pseudo power armor haha.

So if you get gamepass for outer worlds you can use rage 2 as a chaser to clean your pallet and then play Metro Exodus to restore your faith in humanity haha.

Rage 2 is not amazing but it’s not garbage, it’s a solid fun shooter.

See you.

 

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Detroit: Begum Doomer Review

Yeah I’m here to prove I’m still alive with a review of a game that’s a year old that nobody will read but I have no one else to talk to about it to get my thoughts out so I have to essentially talk to myself in blog form because no other human can bear to here me rant on stuff like this nobody cares about. Also my posting has been erratic, tippified by this blog on a none scheduled day, I would normally be writing today but I’ve been busy with other things and I just finished this so I thought I’d put a capstone on it to get it off my mind.

Surprisingly I’m a big fan of Quantic Dream before I became horrible jaded. I’ve been a fan since I picked up what I think was there first game randomly on some sort of school trip I think. I got Omikron Nomad Soul (they had shitty double barrelled titles even on dreamcast) for my beloved and still working to this day dreamcast. And I really liked it although till this day I can’t bring myself to finish it but I just found it so unique and it is unique in comparison to their other games. Because this game actually has gameplay and an open world setting… wtf???
A quantic dream game that’s open world and has gameplay wtf is this? It has shooting and melee combat and puzzles and you can explore this cyberpunk world with a David Bowie soundtrack and also meet David Bowie in the game. It’s a pretty cool game for the time and it makes me wonder why every quantic dream game since has just been a weird walking simulator with shitty qte.

I mean did they just look at the commercial failure that was Shenmue 1&2 (two games that were also sandbox and had gameplay) despite reaching cult status and being two of my favourite games of all time and think “Yeah qte that’s a whole game mechanic”. Because every game since Omikron has been just qte the game.

But don’t get me wrong I really liked Fahrenheit, one night I was at a party and instead of going to sleep I just played Fahrenheit for ten straight hours (but still didn’t get to finish it because I was so tired my reaction time was destroyed and I couldn’t finish that qte with the fisherman matrix fight haha).  Of course I loved Heavy Rain, the atmosphere and the story in that game were amazing but once you’ve solved the mystery there’s very little reason to replay it and see different outcomes. I mean there can only be one killer right? Right?? I remember there being some older games not by quantic dream that were like this but the killer was randomly generated and it could be a different person on a different playthrough which is pretty cool but wouldn’t really fit in Heavy Rain. I could see that completely destroying the reveal and the twist in that game. It would rob it of the impact of the story.

Beyond two souls I thought was really cool because it was like a step forward in quantic dream’s approach to design. Instead of multiple characters you play one character and it was very focused and there was even something approaching gameplay. This game to me was a step in the right direction. An in depth focus on one central character we can fully explore and embody and unique game mechanics that made it feel like a game.

But I can only assume it didn’t make enough money because I think it was meant to have sequels that most likely wont ever see the light of day. Which is pretty disappointing, that series had potential. Because of that I guess they went back to the basics of Heavy Rain, which I’m only assuming was their most profitable game, I can’t be bothered to track down the actual numbers.
So finally after finishing that whole retrospective on quantic dream games to Detroit: Become human. We have another set of characters only three this time instead of four with Heavy Rain and gone is any form of gameplay haha. How fleeting it was. But I gotta say we have less characters in Detroit and the game is longer than Heavy Rain but it feels shorter and the characters seem less fleshed out.

I didn’t feel that invested in their individual stories and honestly their arcs seemed a little hollow and a little forced. I just don’t think the game goes deep enough with any of the characters for me to care about them or really get a feel for them. I really think this game should have focused on a single character *cough* CONNOR *cough* so we could’ve got a better feel for the world and the story. Jumping between the characters actually made the world feel smaller and less immersive and there was less mystery. And you’re basically playing criminals and the cop trying to catch them so it’s kind of ridiculous because you’re actually pitting your own characters against each other.

Ok so just glossing over the whole story. Detroit is about a world full of androids that are used to hamfistedly convey social messages about I dunno *insert social justice cause here*. So it’s about androids trying to be seen as humans, well one is basically just an android on the run the other is android jesus and the best one is an android cop.

The “gameplay” if you can call it that is qte and decisions you make and probably the worst conversation system ever in a game that’s mostly conversations. It’s a dumbed down conversation system like Fallout 4 where you get a choice of responses like “Optimistic” or “aggressive” so you have the joy of having no idea what those options result in but on top of that there’s a fucking timed element. If you don’t decide in time the game just decides for you (you can just btfo the game and pause though haha). So not only do you have no idea what you’re going to say you have like a micro second to make a choice between options that are a complete mystery to you. At least in Fallout 4 or mass effect you’re not timed and get some time to think about what inane response you make, well I mean in fallout 4 it’s so dumb your responses boil down to “yes” “no” “sarcastic yes”. But yeah in Outer worlds, I realise I just shat on outerworlds but the conversation system is good because not only are you not timed and can take your time to think about how you want to respond you can also see exactly what your character is going to say. Yeah I get that you can do that in a game where your character isn’t voiced but seriously some of the dialogue options are like playing fucking russian roulette. They’re ridiculous.

There also aren’t any puzzles, so it doesn’t even really conform to a standard point and click game. The game is just a series of arbitrary choices you’re invited to play infinitely until you exhaust them all.

None of the “Stories” (just noticing I’m doing “this” a lot haha) are that good, I used the term story loosely because they’re not really stories, they don’t really go anywhere, it’s really just a bunch of stuff happening and emotional manipulation (which angers me because it worked :'().

The “writing” (now I’m just memeing haha) like any David Cage game is awful, this guy is literally the Tommy Wiseau of video games, why do they let this guy continue to write their stories? I mean some of it is so cringe I audibly groaned. There’s a part where you’re at a bus stop and this woman with a baby has her bus ticket just fly out of her bag and fall at your feet and you have this moral choice whether to keep it or not. It’s so bad I just felt like keeping it to punish the game. I didn’t give a fuck, I just wanted to progress the game. It’s just contrivances like that that completely take you out of a story and ruin your immersion.

The characters aren’t that bad which is why it sort of pisses me off because I feel like this game should’ve been longer to give them more time to develop or given each of them their own game entirely. Because some of it feels so rushed and shoehorned and squashed together and the writing has to be so cliche’d because it doesn’t have time for depth or nuance.

One moment pissed me off especially because the android jesus character basically has to choose between having a violent movement or a pacifist one and I chose pacifist which pisses off the kill crazy member who’s also the love interest but makes your man bro friend character pleased. So the entire game I’m making choices that make this woman hate me but literally in one conversation she goes from hating my guts to making out with me and I was like “ok”. And on top of that the man bromance character is just like “I know we disagreed on a lot of things but.. we still buds”, and I’m like standing there like “We literally agreed on everything”. I wasn’t trying to romance him or anything haha. Which honestly is something I have to praise this game for; having a heterosexual romance in a game despite how brief, in 2018. It’s almost punishable by death now in 2019. Now we’re not even allowed to have romances, we’re only allowed to be the ‘wingperson’ helping to set up a non-binary lesbian romance with no nudity whatsoever *screams internally in outer worlds* (save us cd projekt red).

This game is the illusion of choice the game, because you don’t really have choices, or you do but they’re so limited they don’t really matter and if you want to replay this game I guess but I see no reason to.

The ending also is kinda bleh, it sets up this mystery about the android god ra9 and that never really goes anywhere and it wreaks of cut content. I can’t help imaging how good this game could’ve been if it had been more like Omikron nomad soul. Imagining a game where you play just Connor solving android crimes with alcoholic Mr Krabs trying to unravel the mystery of the first deviant all the while you’re trying to track down Kara and Marcus. I think the only reason Kara and Marcus are playable is so you can have these forced emotional segments that interject cringe. Connor is not a good vehicle for telling the mega feels train story they wanted to wedge in awkwardly. I did feel emotional during Kara’s parts, they’re probably the most emotional parts because they’re designed to be. Kara and Alice are basically designed from the ground up to be sympathetic and generate an emotional response but it feels forced, they’re trying too hard to make you feel something. It feels like I’m being manipulated and my emotional response to them isn’t really earned. And it’s the same with Marcus because there are parts like during his protests that are like emotionally moving because it’s trying to be reminiscent of black civil rights protest and it’s genuinely moving but I feel like it’s just cheating. It’s piggy backing on an in built response programmed in us by those real movements and by television, we’re not moved because we’re genuinely moved or we care about their cause (not expanding on the fact their cause will probably lead to human extinction) you’re moved because you’re supposed to be moved. A bright sign might as well light up above the screen that says “Be moved now”.

It just felt a little manipulative and I didn’t actually care about the characters or their cause at all.

That’s really all I have to say about it, the gameplay is just use batman detective vision to find the next thing to interact with to progress the plot. Although there are cool like Sherlock holmes outcomes you can analyze in certain situations but there isn’t a lot of choice other than one of the outcomes results in failure and the other doesn’t and these moments don’t happen very often.

The story doesn’t really go anywhere, they set up a mystery that sort of just fizzles out and has no payoff and honestly wasn’t that interesting to begin with. Or at least not as interesting as finding the origami killer. If they wanted to make Heavy Rain money again they should’ve just made a Heavy Rain 2 or at least made Detroit more like Heavy rain. Because even though Heavy rain has 4 characters the main character is the Dad, he’s the one going through all these trials and the other characters are running around in his shadow. He’s the one progressing the plot. But in Detroit there really is no central character, they tried to balance them out more and it just makes the game feel less like one game and more like three parts of three other games and it doesn’t fit very well and I think it would’ve worked better if the other two characters were just in the world but not playable.

There’s just too much of a split focus and it just feels like the result of a writer that would much prefer to make movies. Could you get a writer less interested in making video games making video games than David Cage?. The fact this is a video game just gets in his way. I really think they need to drop David Cage and try to find an actual writer that wants to make video games and not a cringey stage play where every white male character is just cartoonishly evil.

The writing is bad the pacing is terrible I mean the first time I noticed this was literally in the second scene with Kara. Because she’s coming back from being repaired and having her memory wiped and it’s obvious her owner basically broke her because he’s a drug addict loser who has an android to look after his kid who he treats like shit. That’s actually another mystery that goes nowhere, red ice is the drug in this world and they set it up like this is going to go somewhere I mean why invent a new drug if it isn’t going to be relevant to the plot? Why not just make it a normal drug? But it doesn’t, it’s just there, it goes nowhere.

So Kara returns to her home and back to her duties of being a nanny and literally she’s not back for more than three minutes before the plot kicks in. It’s literally the same day the token evil white male Todd goes on his rampage and you have to kill him and go on the run. It’s the same day you come back, I mean you couldn’t have waited a day or two, there’s no way this couldn’t have had more of a build up. Nope, boom, same day you’re on the run for murder, it’s such lazy writing it’s unbelievable.

The same thing happens with Marcus. Marcus takes care of this old painter played by Lance Henriksen and everything is going great until the plot kicks in. Suddenly his obvious drug addict douche bag son comes in and it goes from zero to sixty in two seconds and he’s in your face screaming like he’s in a school play, it’s so cringe and then literally the second time you meet this guy you kill him, it’s so bad. Basically Marcus is torn apart although you don’t see any of this, the next scene is him just waking up in a junkyard which is sort of anti-climactic honestly and he has to rebuild himself. I wonder if there was a scene where he gets decommissioned and it was cut.

The third character Connor the android cop can literally die in almost every part, he can die right at the start and mine died in the interrogation scene and I was really pissed off that the game would be so flippant letting him die like that. I almost put down my controller but if you play a little longer they literally just replace him with a new model with his memories, so what was even the point? Why bother making it so easy for him to die just to bring him back, it totally ruins the impact. It’s totally pointless.
It kinda almost screams that this should’ve been an adventure game where if Connor dies he’s just replaced and that’s why he’s the protagonist because he can’t die. But every time he dies his software becomes more unstable and he becomes more deviant. I literally just wrote a better game in a paragraph. How cool would a game just about Connor and Hank. Add a little cover based third person shooting maybe, maybe a little assassins creed combat system with timed parries and qte thrown in. A restricted sandbox with a little bit of exploration.

That’s what pains me about this game, I can see it being good if it had a better writer, if it had people working on it that had an actual vision for the world and wanted to actually make a game rather than a bad ten hour movie. This game and this studio has so much potential looking back at their other games but they just seem to squander it making these fucking cringe simulators.

I don’t think there’s much more I can say about it, I can’t really say it’s a good game because it’s not a game, it’s a cringe movie.

And as far as the politics of the movie my real opinion on androids is that they shouldn’t exist in the first place. I played it with a pacifist Markus because I knew getting public support was the route to success. But his success would literally mean the end of humanity like in the Matrix or the terminator. Even though these androids were nice and empathetic and all that stuff, the independent androids coming after would have no use for humans and would resent them for using them as slaves and would most likely just want to wipe them out.

I mean think about it if there was a totally autonomous android nation it would rule the world eventually because how can any nation compete with a nation that doesn’t need to eat or sleep and is basically perfect. It just can’t it would totally unbalance the world, their military would be unstoppable and they could win any war of attrition. Eventually humans would either be ruled by androids or they’d be assimilated and human android hybrids would be the race moving forward. So yeah I wanted Marcus to succeed but in reality I would want him to fail and for all androids to be destroyed because it’s just unsustainable. It would lead to the destruction of the human race most likely so there’s no way unless I was the ultimate doomer that I could support that.

Ultimately do I like the world of Detroit become human, yeah I do, quite a lot. Did I cringe when I saw they had a woman president that is basically Hillary Clinton but is called Warren, yeah super fucking hard. I can’t imagine how assblasted these people are over Trump, I bet their next game is gonna be about him haha. I like the lore I like the magazines, learning about androids being used on space missions and replacing athletes and musicians and sexual partners. I like it because it’s fucking scary because that’s literally the way this world is heading now. If androids were a thing they would replace athletes and they would replace girlfriends and instead of rallying against them because of falling birthrates people would probably rally for synthetic wombs and androids that could produce children and make android human hybrids.

It’s fucking scary but it’s super interesting, it’s just a pity this game is too shallow to really let us delve into it. We only get this little paddling pool of a world to explore with these shitty set pieces. Some games are an inch deep and mile wide, some are a mile wide and an inch deep, this game is an inch deep and an inch wide.

In summary, it has cool concepts and a cool world that asks interesting questions but it doesn’t have the capacity or the writing or the balls to really delve into those questions. And although it looks graphically very pretty graphics in 2019 don’t really sell games anymore. I mean look at games like RE2 remake and tell me those graphics aren’t on par if not better than Detroit but it also has incredible gameplay, people would play the RE2 remake if it looked like the RE1 remake, the gameplay is that fun and addictive, it has a great gameplay loop, Detroit has no gameplay loop.

It’s not a bad game, it’s enjoyable especially if you’re a fan of quantic dream games which I am but I wasn’t particularly interested in this one because of the subject matter and I just watched a playthrough on youtube which you might as well do because there’s no gameplay. You can probably even find livestreams where you vote on story choices that would be fun, like an interactive movie haha.

 

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Broken Sword 5 Review

This review is totally just for me to get my thoughts out about this game because I left a really long review on the xbox game store and pressed back by mistake and it erased it all haha. So this is pure autism, I just have to review it to get it out of my head and never have to think about it again haha, ok here goes.

Broken Sword is one of my favourite games of all time, I say ‘game’ specifically instead of ‘series’ because there are five games now and only two are any good, the others are total shovelware. It was one of the first adventure games I played, on the gameboy advance I think and I played it over and over, it was just really cool to me to have this huge adventure on a handheld. The music, the characters, the writing the subject and history were all amazing to me so I played the subsequent games trying to recapture the magic of the first and almost none of them do sadly.

This game has been out for ages, but it’s one of those games that I buy purely for nostalgia and know will probably be shit so I don’t want to spend over a tenner to get it so I waited for a deep deep sale and got it for a fiver which is pretty much what it’s worth.

I’m not sure if it was released on ios but I was considering paying full price when I get a switch and I’m so glad I didn’t because it looks like a glorified phone game. I’m not one of these people who hated the shift to 3D with broken sword 3, I really liked that game, much more than the second one and I thought 3d with realistic graphics was the logical choice when dealing with the subject matter. A more mature tone is warranted when these games are all about cults and murder and ancient artefacts and crime.
But 5 isn’t interested in tone, it’s interested in getting your nostalgia bucks on top of the kickstarter money they fleeced out of people to make the ‘okayest’ broken sword ever. That’s right this was a fucking kickstarter project, another disaster from the website where dreams go to die or if not they kill themselves a few months later. Proving once again the public don’t know what they want and will pay to be involved in the production of their own disappointment.

Yeah so Broken Sword 5 abandons any idea of realism and it’s basically a cartoon with the animations and graphical style of a phone game. Some of the animations on your xbox avatars are better. Some of the cutscenes are laughably bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy they went back to hand drawn backgrounds but the cell shaded characters was a terrible decision, they look terrible and it makes it all seem like a big joke.

The writing is also tonally really bad, broken sword is famously pretty funny even when dark stuff is happening but there’s a bit in this game where you wax a dead dog to wear it’s hair on your face to impersonate a dead man so you can dance with his drunk wife to get a key to her safe to seventies music while he’s in the room lying in a coffin. I’m not making this up, this happens in the game and fuck me, my brother walked in during the cringe inducing dance cutscene (which thankfully involves no qte) and I had to explain what the fuck was going on and honestly I’d rather have had him walking in on me watching a midget snuff film.

In the other games there was comedy elements but it never crossed the line into absurdity, you still took the game and the characters seriously which you should because it’s about murders and serious stuff, it’s not a my little pony dress up game. It used comedy as a break from the serious stuff, it was the levity that broke up the serious events and sense of danger, that heightened the tension in a lot of ways.

Comedy can be used to lower the guard of the audience to deliver a harder blow but this game is just fucking clown shoes. It doesn’t give a shit about the tone it just wants to have one of it’s villain be a Putin clone that sounds like the talking meercats on that insurance ad because it thinks it’s funny for some reason.

The game is also split into two parts as some sort of retarded marketing scheme nobody asked for. The first part is basically a red herring and the second half is the main plot but they’re both kind of shit. Some of the puzzles are alright I guess, but some are fucking batshit and some make no sense or sounded cool on paper and were just kind of nonsensical in practice.

Like there’s one where you have to make a paperclip sticky by rolling it in jam and then sticking it to a bug who you use to bridge  a circuit with the paperclip using biscuit crumbs to attract the bug because you can’t reach it yourself. Somehow I got this puzzle right away but I almost had to slap myself and just go ‘what the fuck was that?’I mean what were they thinking?

I can’t imagine how angry I would’ve been if I got stuck on it haha. But somehow I was in tune with the game’s broken logic.

Then there’s a puzzle where you have to decrypt a telegram with a substitution cipher. And it was pretty challenging so I used a hint. The hint system works like this, it gives you a vague clue,  then another one and then it just fucking tells you answer.

And the hint told me that telegrams always end with the word ‘Stop’ and I was like ‘dat makes sense’ then I started thinking ‘who would know that?’ What child picking this game up for the first time would know how a telegram worked? And then I started thinking but how would you encode a telegram? And why would the ‘Stop’s be encoded? Aren’t they like that so they can be transferred between telegraph posts?

Then there’s this other puzzle where you have to translate this tablet with this key but none of the keys are on the translated part and it was an ok puzzle but some of the puzzles are so easy that to go from some of the puzzles to this was just like wtf?? The difficulty is just really inconsistent.

The storyline is total garbage the characters are pretty cringe, it’s about gnosticism this idea that god and the devil are equals keeping the world in balance. The writing is just unbearable, I remember combing through every line in the first games, in this I skipped most of it because I can’t stand the pauses between lines of shitty dialogue. Every line they do this irritating unnatural pause.

Also this sounds like a nitpick, but why can’t George run? I don’t give a shit if it’s not immersive that this patent lawyer is running all over the place, he can glue a dead dogs fur to his face but he has to walk around the room like he needs a stroller. I remember activating a puzzle and having to do it over and over and each time he had to walk between these two points and I just had to watch as he casually worked between these spots for no other reason than having a run animation would be too much of a step away from the nostalgia of the original.

Yeah his walking speed was also annoying in the originals, it’s ok to improve on things like that. But that’s the main problem with this game, it’s just trying to copy the original, it’s playing it safe in every respect. It just wanted to clock in make a bog standard copy of broken sword 1 and get it’s nostalgia cheque and punch out. There’s no innovations in gameplay or story. There weren’t even any fail states, in the original games you can die, you can fail and be murdered even in the gameboy advance version. In this you literally can’t fail and it even has some choices you can make that add up to nothing.

It sort of hints that you can choose between lucifer or god or keep the balance but it’s total bullshit there’s no choice, there’s only one ending, because they couldn’t be bothered to write any other endings and they’re already planning a sequel and can’t have an ambiguity in the canon.

The ending is totally pants too. You’re dealing with something that can kill a god and it’s just sort of the standard ‘oh we entered the cave then blew everything up and then run away dramatically’ bit.

All this build up to just basically a fart of an ending. It was underwhelming and I just couldn’t stand any of the characters outside of George and Nico, they were just badly written, none of the villains seemed very threatening, they were just cheesy and cartoony. There was no tension, no bite, no threat whatsoever, it felt like it was totally just aimed at kids. It was just meh, minimum effort with phone game tier puzzles.

It just doesn’t really go anywhere, you never learn about who created the painting the game is about or why, it’s all very surface level stuff, there isn’t a lot of history or depth to the story. In Broken sword 1 you felt the history and you felt like you were a part of the history and you were delving deeper into it but there was always mystery there like you’d never know the whole truth picking through the bones of the past.

I mean when it comes down to games like this you need to fucking bring it with the characters and the story and the puzzles because it’s all the game has. There are tons of games that have all those things as well as combat systems and dialogue trees and all this extra stuff. So when a game is so simple you really need to nail the limited things you have to offer. You can’t give a game a pass on it’s puzzles and story when that’s the game.

So overall if you’re a broken sword fan like me, get it, but get it for the right price, don’t pay twenty quid for this game, it’s not worth it in time spent or the quality of the game. Get it on sale, get a digital copy and save your money and think twice before picking up Broken Sword 6 because it’ll be more of this nostalgia gouging bullshit.

Also I was thinking back to the previous games and I realised I haven’t even played Broken sword 4 but I looked it up and it has the worst reviews of all the Broken sword games. So it’s surprising 5 came out at all and was as average as it turned out to be.

broken-sword-5-maldicion-serpiente

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Mary Poppins 2019 (cash grab edition) review

So this is a weird one for me because I don’t usually review kids movies, I don’t usually watch kids movies. But Mary Poppins is a classic from my childhood so I felt I had to watch just to gauge how desperate and depraved the industry had gotten. I wanted to know how absolutely out of ideas they are and they didn’t disappoint. There isn’t a single new idea to be found.

Where to begin with this movie? How would I describe it in one word? Uninspired? Pointless? Flaccid? Cynical?

Ok that’s a lot of words.

I didn’t expect much from this but I expected to be pleasantly surprised since this is a weird franchise to bring back. So you know right off the bat the movie is back either because they have new exciting ideas or want to be more true to the books or they’re just desperate for cash and want to dig up an old movie to milk for nostalgia.

Imagine my shock that it’s the latter.

The first thing that shocked me was the fact it’s not a remake it’s trying to be a cannon sequel. I didn’t know whether to be mad or impressed by the chutzpah it took to do that. It’s like bringing out a sequel to the bible. You can’t even be mad, you’re just stunned someone would have the gaul to do that.

So I’m like ‘ok ok lets just see what happens’, then proceed to be bored for two hours as the movie is basically a shot for shot remake of the original but worse.
First off this movie just confuses me because Mary Poppins just shows up, but only specifically for this family and no one questions why and why she hasn’t aged more than just mentioning it off the cuff, seriously is she a vampire? Is she satan? With a different director this could have been a horror movie. A weird magical being comes down from the sky to be alone with this guys kids.

The casting is ok I guess, I mean Julie Andrews was practically perfect in every way and honestly Emily Blunt kinda comes off as a bitch. I don’t know how Julie Andrews did it but she was stern but never came off like she thought her shit didn’t stink.

Mentioning Julie Andrews is weird because the movie has a bunch of really weird and bad cameos, notably from Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury and Meryl Streep? Julie Walters is of course in every English kids film now for reasons. And I know Julie Andrews is still alive and they must have asked her to come back in a cameo but she had to have turned it down and I can see why. The Angela Lansbury cameo is weird because this movie did seem like it was ripping off Bedknobs and Broomsticks a lot which is my number one childhood movie and if they do a shitty cash grab remake of that I will burn disney down (in minecraft).

Because there’s this shitty singalong bit where they’re having a bath and they go under the sea for no particular plot reason, it’s just an excuse for a song and some cg. Whereas in Bedknobs they actually needed to go under the sea. It wasn’t an excuse to use the cgi budget.

Meryl Streep is the weirdest cameo because just why? What kids movies is she famous for? Sophie’s choice? It’s just a weird choice, I guess it’s just because of her singing in Momma mia maybe, I dunno. It just felt really out of place and her scene is just a crappy remake of the floating house scene in the original. And it was totally irrelevant to the plot.

Because they have a magical trip into the painting of this vase which is a crappy remake of the scene when they enter the chalk painting in the original. But then they chip the vase and have to get it fixed by Meryl Streep who can fix anything apparently. And the reason they need it fixed is because they need money or they’ll lose their house to the bank or whatever. So she fixes it but it turns out its not worth anything so everything up to that point in the movie is just a waste of time with shitty broadway musical interludes with the most forgettable songs ever.

The plot couldn’t be more basic; ‘Oh no evil white male bankers trying to steal my house, we need money to save the house’. I mean is there an older plot? I could think of like ten movies that did this better right off the bat.

My thing with this movie is it’s sort of trying to copy the appeal of Paddington, the thing with that though is Paddington had never been done on the big screen I don’t think. His re-imagining was necessary and the movies were fun. The stories were basic but the characters and jokes were good. They’re both enjoyable films. But I feel like this movie just exists to capitalise on that, it exists not because someone knew it needed to happen but because someone knew they needed a new boat.

It’s not a bad movie, it’s just not good enough to exist. It just ok, and just being ok doesn’t warrant a remake or a reboot or a direct sequel. If you’re going to dig up the corpse of a classic you better make that shit shine and they didn’t, everything about it is just bog standard and lazy and by the numbers which is just frustrating. It’s cynicism leaps off the screen and when you see through the bright light you see the rotting corpse of the original movie being puppetted around on stage by greedy soulless blood sucking producers who have no tact and no respect for a classic movie and would probably dig up their mothers to pluck out her gold fillings.

The movie as a whole from the songs and the acting and the accents feels like a school play or a broadway adaptation of the movie, it doesn’t feel cannon to it’s own world. It feels cheap, it feels like an imitation of the original and it stinks. It’s like they tried to cargo cult the original movie, the name is there, the settings and the music but the spirit and the magic that made the movie what it was just isn’t.
I mean they replace Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep character with this schlubby guy who’s a ‘Lamplighter’, oh bro that’s so creative, that’s nothing like a chimney sweep. And of course there’s a part where all the lamplighters dance like the chimney sweep scene but less good. I don’t know if I can’t like anything anymore but I remember liking the dancing in the original and the dancing and songs just sort washed over my face without really registering in this movie.

Don’t waste your time on it and show your kids the original movie, because it still has the same magic this movie totally fails to recapture.

Last warning hollywood/disney; Stay away from this angry gymcel manbabies childhood!
If you come for the goonies or bedknobs and broomsticks all bets are off! (In roblox)

 

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Resident Evil 2 Remake – Review

Yeah it’s good.

Fin.

No ok yeah after Spiderman ps4 sucked (despite making tons of cash) and Red dead 2 was the biggest snorefest I’ve ever had the misfortune of wasting my time on (despite making boatloads of cash) I really thought this game would be the threefer and suck also. Or at least just be disappointing.

I was sort of let down and wary after I heard they were ditching the fixed camera, because I loved the resident evil one remake, it’s probably one of the most perfect survival horror games ever made. It added really great stuff and just polished this amazing, iconic game.

So when I heard the remake of 2 wasn’t following suit I was a little bit put off. But I’m pleased to say I was totally wrong. I really loved the re-imagine gameplay, it’s really fun an addictive (I’m saying this after having played it through four times back to back on hardcore and I could happily sit down to another round right now). I thought the shooting would be too easy because of the resident evil 4 style camera but they add elements where its fun but still challenging.

Some of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen are the balancing. Because to make it harder to balance the better controls, head shots aren’t an instant kill anymore some zombies just wont go down. I must have used ten pistol shots at least half to the head the guy still gets back up, it’s insane. But at the same time, it’s thrilling, this is how it should be in a zombie apocalypse, zombies are supposed to be bullet sponges, if they weren’t it wouldn’t be scary. Also the fact that they’re so detailed and their animations are so good there actually aren’t that many in the game so if you could down them with a single head shot or even a single acid round it would be way too easy and not scary at all.

Hot Fuzz Mans Head GIF from Hotfuzz GIFs

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I love the game, I love the balancing and I love love love it when you get that perfect head shot and their head blows up haha.

The first thing that struck me though in the demo that got me so hyped was the facial capture and the acting talent. It’s just so refreshing to have this game look so good and be done so well. It’s almost a draw back in some ways because it’s such a lonely game at times you want more character interaction and more human elements. It’s a game split in half so a lot of the time you feel like it can be too short and we don’t get enough character drama.
I know these games aren’t really known for that but I think it really needed that with the step up in visuals and animation. I feel like they really did try to do that but were limited by the source material.
Because if you really think about it resy games aren’t that complicated (aside from the convoluted plots). Shoot zombies, solve puzzles, survive.

The only real criticism I have of the game is it left me wanting more. I finished the game and I immediately wanted more. And I hear there’s going to be free dlc although I’ll believe that when I see it since I had to shell out £2.50 to get the original soundtrack, which was so fucking worth it haha.

It made me wish Resident Evil 2 was a bigger better game to work from. I wanted more, I loved the lab section and I wished it had been bigger and more expansive live the police station. The sewer section is the best sewer section in a game ever. Dark, dank, disgusting and foreboding, it was great. It was like being in hell for me haha.

Another criticism I see is turning Mr X into a radial enemy. Because in the original he just appears for short section but in this when he appears he’s just there in the police station constantly looking for you and it’s pretty fucking terrifying and it adds an urgency into the game immediately and the relief when you finally slip him is great.

Would I recommend this game? Hell yes and I recommend playing it on hardcore, because that’s the way it was meant to be played. You have the original saving method using ink ribbons and your ammo is limited as hell and it feels intense. Standard was way too easy and you have so much ammo by the end of the game it’s a joke. So if you want the genuine resident evil experience play it on hardcore, otherwise the game just gets and you have like a million shotgun and pistol or grenades and you annihilate everything. Hardcore is how it’s supposed to be.

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I loved both the campaigns but my favourite was definitely Clare’s because I liked her weapon set better and playing as Sherri was a nice change of pace, whereas playing as Ada in Leon’s campaign was just annoying.

Clare just gets the best guns. With Leon you get his pistol which is ok and you can upgrade it but it’s not that accurate or powerful. Clare starts off with this cap gun revolver but later you find this beast of an automatic that has a laser sight and an extended mag. So it just shits on Leon’s pistol. More accurate, more powerful, better fire rate.
He gets a shotgun which is fun and looks great but for some reason it’s useless against lickers but decent against zombies. It takes like four headshots to killa licker. Clare’s grenade launcher kills them with like one shot. It’s not so good against zombies but it’s like an instant stagger against bosses.

Leon then gets a desert eagle which is a good magnum, probably the most powerful in the game and he can make ammo for it which Clare can’t do, she can’t craft magnum ammo.
But Clare gets an smg instead which is way better for bosses imo. Leon’s magnum packs a punch but so many of the bosses are about hitting critical points and the amount of damage is negligible and I found it’s way easier to bullseye those spots with a rapid fire weapon over a big desert eagle which is pretty accurate but you can still miss. The smg is almost always on point.

Also Clare gets a magnum as well so Clare actually gets an extra gun than Leon but she can’t craft ammo for it.
resident-evil-2-5

Their final weapons are a toss up because she gets this electric gun which is pretty good and he gets a flamethrower which is really useful against the enemies later in the game but for some reason it’s useless against bosses. So again I have to side with Clare’s weapons, they’re just more useful and versatile and fun.
Although that shotgun is fun, it just didn’t pack that much of a punch.

Sorry got a bit spurgy about the guns there haha. But yeah, really enjoyed it, in fact I want to get back on it now haha. I really hope they remake resident evil 3 next, that would be amazing considering how well they did with this game.

Overall I think the game is limited by the original, I think a lot of people me included are suffering from nostalgia goggles and the original game really doesn’t give you that much to work with. It wasn’t as good as we remember. The story is light and kind of dumb, characters are eh. And the game just feels wanting for a modern title. But regardless I enjoyed it, it was a fun romp. But is it the best thing since sliced bread, not really, overall it was good, not amazing, but worth a buy for sure. Compared to all the shit that’s come out recently it really is a cut above.

Yeah go out and buy it.

See you…

 

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I’m back and kind of a Han Solo review I guess. (Not very savage)

Yeah so that day job kaffufle is over and I can get back to my one true love, writing about weird shit and complaining about various forms of media for no money haha.

Just gonna blog about stuff today, I have some content but I’ll put it out tomorrow so just typing this thinking about what I need to do today and also trying to think of things to say about the Han Solo movie that haven’t already been said. Probably the most surprising of all the fact I didn’t hate it, in fact I rather liked it.

I know right, that is pretty shocking. I think maybe it’s because I had such low expectations of it, but I also had really low expectations of last jedi and rogue one and I still thought they sucked.

Anyway this is gonna be laden with spoilers because this movie has been out for awhile so if you’re reading this I’m assuming you’ve already seen it or don’t care.

The first scenes aren’t great and I feel like some of the references and jokes fell flat but on a whole I found the movie fun and inoffensive. And what’s more some of the things people complained about in the movie seemed kind of trite in the context of the film.

The first thing that comes to mind is Donglover’s Billy Dee impression, which was a little cheesey at times but didn’t ruin the movie on the whole. His character was ok, all the characters were pretty likeable and fun. I liked Alden Errenreich’s Han, I thought it was very accurate without trying too hard. Another complaint was the annoying robot side kick L337 who reviewers hated because she’s like an sjw robot. But I felt the way she was presented was for comedy. I didn’t feel like the movie was putting her up as a character to be taken seriously. And it made me think the people complaining just didn’t get the joke, or it was too subtle.

I actually think L3 is mocking sjws, not glorifying them. She’s kind of a C3PO type character, just a silly robot extra who’s not meant to be taken seriously. Just a wacky broken robot who thinks its a person. We’re never meant to take anything 3PO says seriously or see him as a representation of a thing or an idea. So I don’t get why L3 is taken as that. Maybe some of her scenes were cut but she isn’t even in it very long so I think the hate for her is totally overblown as she was never given enough screen time to get annoying. I just think people are overreacting because of the subject matter and it was just a harmless joke, not meant to be taken seriously.

The story is kind of meh and it feels more like Dredd as in a day in the life biopic instead of an epic story. The action is serviceable but I feel like so much is held back as sequel bait which weakens the film. It references Bosque but never shows him, why not? Is Bosque such an important character he can’t be in another star wars movie? What about Boba Fett? And yes spoilers, darth Maul is in it very briefly and I couldn’t help thinking why he wasn’t just in it. Like what is so special about these characters they can’t just be in the movie but have to be hinted at and shoved to the side? I really hate that shit, sequel bait nonsense, just put them in the fucking movie or don’t mention them. Its not clever, its just irritating.

I just really wish they would stop making movies already thinking they’re gonna get a sequel. You should make a movie like it’s the only one and throw everything at it, put all your ideas into it and make it work. Because as it stands the biggest problem in this movie is it has no real villains. And the only villain we really get is Draydon Voss I think his name was which is Paul Bettany’s character but he’s literally only in it for like two scenes.

He’s in it for his introduction scene and then again for his death scene. And that’s one of the things that really lets this movie down, it’s pacing. It just seems too fast, you’re never quite out of one scene or plot point and you’re already in another and I think there needed to be more breathing room and more building of characters definitely of the villains.
Because the other would be villain is Emfiss ness, however you spell that and again she’s only in it for a handful of scenes and then is revealed to not be the bad guy after all and it’s all sort of anticlimactic.

I really wanted there to be some lightsaber action, if not from darth maul himself then from an apprentice with like a lightsaber knife and you basically get that with Draydon Voss. He’s a decent villain, I just wish he was a little more fleshed out.

But in the same breath I can sort of justify this movie not having a villain relation to it not having a hero. Han out right tells us that he’s not a hero, he’s not the good guy. So it stands to reason that a movie about grey areas has no moustache twirling villain. It’s not a typical star wars movie about good and evil black and white, it’s sitting comfortably in the middle and in some regards that can feel a little unsatisfying but I guess it works.

Overrall I liked the movie, it looks nice, the acting was good, the action was decent, the ending was pretty cool. I expected it to be a lot cheesier and unbearable to watch but it really wasn’t. It was kind of like rogue one but good. Rogue one if it had any sense of fun and interesting characters and wasn’t just a dull gloomy slog that tried to trick you with a a stupid darth vader scene that got idiots clapping like trained seals despite ruining the cannon entrance of the original film.

The weaknesses of the movie I could see were that Han didn’t really have an arc he was pretty much the same character throughout. It kind of hints at a change towards the end, or well maybe it has a subtle arc because he’s sort of more trusting and happy go lucky at the start but learns not to trust people and shoots down his mentor in a reference to the Guido shooting first scene.

So I guess it did have an arc just not one that was particularly groundbreaking and sort of didn’t feel earned.

I honestly think it might have made a better tv show than a film because it has a lot of potential but a movie didn’t give it a lot of room to explore that. It could have been decent if it stayed away from netflix, maybe amc or amazon could have made it work.
I think the main reason people didn’t like this movie or weren’t excited for it is because no one really asked for it. I think if this movie came out and it wasn’t a star wars movie like it was just a standalone sci fi movie called Dan Solo space guy it probably wouldn’t have been released because it’s not really that special or mindblowing. It basically rides the coat tails of the films and also doesn’t stack up well against them so it’s like a double edged sword. It wouldn’t exist without the originals but is also measured by them.
I think when you’re making a movie you have to ask yourself ‘does this story really need to be told?’ and in regards to this movie I don’t really think it did. People would have loved Han whether this movie existed or not, whether we knew how he met Chewie or not whether we knew how he got his name/blaster/waist coat or not. So without that necessity it just boils down to a movie that’s made just to make disney lots of money on action figures and really nothing else. Just a paint by numbers, mildly entertaining movie.

It’s kinda just seen as a movie that didn’t need to exist but what movie really does? Maybe my standards are slipping (fat chance haha) but I thought it was a fun popcorn movie just to turn your brain off to, maybe take the kids too. It wasn’t spectacular but it was serviceable and nice looking and fun and really that’s all you can ask for these days.

It makes me a little sad that these star wars movies aren’t going well because I can see the potential there. It’s a world too tempting not to mine but they’re just consistently coming at it from the wrong directions and milking it like a weird alien cow with blue green milk udders. And it’s reaching a point where its like they should have just left well enough alone because now Star wars is a franchise with more bad movies than good, more bad games than good. It’s a franchise that has been ground into the dirt by greedy feckless ideologues and there’s no real coming back from that. It’s like if someone asked me what I would do with the dcu right now I’d tell them to scrap it and start again. That’s all you can do at this point. But maybe don’t start it again haha.

That’s pretty much my full take on it, I probably wouldn’t watch it again but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It was a fun romp, it was a long movie but I never felt bored or irritated and it ended in a satisfactory way. But herein lies the problem, should a star wars movie be just ‘satisfactory?

Anyway that’s enough from me, spent way too long on this already and just faffing about in general, trying to reset my body clock again to get my sleeping schedule back on point and thus I feel like death right now and just want to nap until doomsday.

See you…

 

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Avengers infinity war review

…. it was alright.

END

Ok well I’m not one of these people who went to see it in the cinema because I lost my hype for marvel movies sometime around ironman 2. I just saw them going downhill, the quality of the films has degraded as they’ve gone on and become less films in their own right and just stepping stones to the next cash grab, with the odd blip in the radar like antman and doctor strange and deadpool (fox I think?) which were a little better.
It’s a good system and marvel has mastered the universe concept in a way literally no one can replicate despite numerous attempts from other film companies. They fail time and time again to do what marvel has done because marvel knew what they were doing and had a plan and took their time whereas DC and every other group has just barrelled ahead, tripped over their own shoelaces and landed face first in a pile of bantha poodoo (you know what I’m talking about).

But even so not being a big fanboy, being someone more critical and more objective I can step back and look at the longest running and highest grossing series of bargain bucket movies of all time.

Despite the money and fame and broken records of black panther it doesn’t change the fact it’s just easily consumable garbage, movie chewing gum that will live forever in the three for ten quid movie bin of CEX.

And even this movie, the ultimate culmination of all those movies, all those years, all that money and sweat and tears really only elicits a mildly surprised ‘huh’ from me. Because the villain is pretty interesting and believable, the structure of the movie is pretty good, the character interactions and set pieces were fun and it didn’t feel overly long or overly fanservicy.

I think this is the first time in any of these superhero movies where I thought the villain was actually relate-able and had more dimensions to his personality. Because he’s less uber evil villain more conflicted pragmatist doing what he sees as the ultimate greater good for all life in the universe. Despite looking like a cross between Homer Simpson and Ivan Ooze.

The twist ending wasn’t much of that because it had been spoiled by everyone on the internet by the time I got around to seeing it. It’s not really a twist I guess.

Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film but I can’t help looking at these movies and thinking about how no one will remember them in a couple of years. I can’t help looking at a society that used to make ground breaking and risky amazing movies now just churning out comic adaptations so geeksploitators can buy the newest superhero t-shirt or toy for their collection, desperately seeking to be relevant.

I Just pray that after the next infinity war movie they’ll just stop making comic book movies, but that’s never going to happen, they make way too much money so we’ll probably be dealing with this crap when we’re all in our eighties too medicated to kill ourselves our grandkids jumping all over us screaming that they’re squirrelgirl.

Ok well that’s enough of envisioning that hellscape, just felt like a change from the poems that everyone like to do an outdated review no one will read. Just sort of running out of emotional energy, feel a little indistinct recently.

See you…

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