Let’s end the year with something positive.
I checked out the UnderTale demo. It’s pretty awesome and you should try it out. (more…)
Tag: Single post review
Catching Fire movie
Well, I finally went to see Catching Fire. It’s…well, pretty much like Hunger Games was, most of the objectionable bits cut out either intentionally or because they were dross getting in the way of a streamlined tale.
Before we begin, let’s talk about the trailers at the start.
1) About guys and hustling. There were at least two female characters in it, but only in relation to men.
2) 47 samurai thing. Shouldn’t even need to explain.
3) What seemed to be a guy romcom. I think this may fail reverse bechdel depending on how liberally you interpret “about a women”, actually.
4) The thing about the guy who has no life and gets one and also the girl.
5) A female voiceover! It’s Maleficent, and involved the princess and Maleficent as the only speakers.
6) Hobbit. It’s good they added a female character, but it doesn’t change much.
7) Frankenstein (wtf) which has female characters who don’t talk to each other and are defined in relation to men and I think one of them was doing the pretty but secretly ugly monster thing.
8) More female characters talking! Lots of them, in fact! It’s Divergence, reminding us that YA may be terrible but it’s that or movies about guys having their guy problems and nothing else.
So with that in mind, I was feeling particularly favorable toward Catching Fire, and indeed, it opens with Katniss, in the woods, being herself! Then she tries to shoot a turkey only for her to think she’s shooting a person and freak out. PSTD about harming others and not just being afraid for herself! Katniss goes on to exhibit more self-loathing that’s about her and how upset she is about what she did, not about how much better than her Peeta is and how she should just die for not being good enough for him already. (more…)
Crossed and the moral courage in murdering screaming kids
Crossed #3 is about how how if kids have seen bad things, you should murder them because they are forever tainted by this. It is revisited again as the series goes on to add that in retrospect, killing those kids was absolutely the right thing to do.
Mermaid Swamp
Like the Crooked Man, this contains a content warning. Unlike that one, it is well and truly deserved. While not excessively gory, it has detailed images of bloated bodies. I also found it overall to be much creepier and I spent much of the game on edge. Go play it! (more…)
The Crooked Man
The Crooked Man is a pretty amazing game with a couple issues in execution, but you can use a walkthrough to sidestep most of those. (more…)
Crossed #1, or a word of warning about comics
(Contains gore and rape. If you’re at all bothered by that, or possess a sense of taste in general, you should probably skip this one.)
I want to do a recommendations post on non-manga comics, and while I was writing up my opening caveats, I realized it couldn’t really express how, while 90% of everything may be shit, comics plumbs certain depths within that you don’t see much elsewhere. That you would not expect to see elsewhere. That basic sanity would tell you simply would not exist. There are many great comics, but you absolutely do not want to just dive in on your own.
For example. Crossed is a zombie-styled comic in the modern infectious vein. People gain a cross-shaped rash over their faces and turn into monsters who, as usual, prefer to tear into the uninfected rather than each other. Unusually…
Crossed (Matched sequel)
Crossed. We are not going to be doing Crossed piece by piece because somehow, Crossed managed to be astoundingly worse than Matched. Remember all that nothing that happened last book? Imagine that, only it’s happening even though they’re ostensibly running from their government in a war zone, and also it’s even more insipid, somehow. I’m not sure how that’s even possible, but it is.
Let’s take a moment to ponder the cover, because it’s pretty fitting for the disaster that is this book.
The Witch’s House
I was somewhat underwhelmed by The Witch’s House – it’s got a lot of cool ideas and isn’t overly difficult, but it has a bunch of fast reflex bits that annoyed me, especially when a lot of them were at the end of a sequence with no save point.
Telepath RPG: Servants of God – Guest review
Last time, I looked at the first entry into the Telepath RPG series. This is the next game in the series, Servants of God. It’s clear that this is where the developer started seriously pursuing game design as a career. It’s bigger, more professional-looking, and it has a price tag.
I remember being so hyped about this game when it first came out, and it is certainly a solid piece of work, but it’s not without its flaws. I think it definitely shows the lessons the developer learned from his earlier games and is an overall improvement, but it’s actually remarkably different from the first Telepath RPG in a number of ways.
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Telepath RPG – Guest review
The Telepath RPG series is comprised of story-heavy western-style RPGs with tactics-based battle systems. There are currently three games in the series (though two of them can really be counted as part of the same game), as well as two spin-off games focused on gameplay over plot. Another entry to the main series is currently in development, as well. This review will focus on Telepath RPG Chapter 1 & Chapter 2, the first two games in the series.
Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin
Those of you with a grasp of Japanese may notice that the English title isn’t a very accurate translation. The Japanese is closer to “Advancing Titans”, and that’s also a much, much better description of what the story’s been about so far.
The Mirror Lied
The Mirror Lied is a very short game that’s intriguing while it lasts, but fumbles terribly at the end. I strongly recommend the experience but don’t expect much of an ending.
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World War Z movie
The WWZ movie is, shockingly, not terrible, and I’d even go so far as to call it good. It bears little resemblance to the book by this point, but the book isn’t perfect. So while it’s dropped some of the good things, it’s also dropped plenty of the bad. The zombies are runners (Olympic runners at that) but they follow simple, consistent rules of behavior that can believably result in some of the more complex things we see from them, the people act like people and get lots of little characterization moments, plot points that are raised are followed up on, and the resolution is foreshadowed repeatedly throughout movie. You really wouldn’t know that it’s been rewritten a dozen or two times. Also, people are decent and work together, which is always nice to see.
It really isn’t gory either – that was probably a poor decision that angered many, but it’s also the only reason I could watch it in the theater in the first place, so I don’t mind. The couple minor jump scares it has were more than enough to terrorize me.
The Void – Guest review
The Void, also known as Tension or Turgor, is an adventure…horror…survival…thing made by Ice-Pick Lodge, the same people who made Pathologic, which you’ve probably never played either. Unfortunately, though it improves on almost all of Pathologic’s faults, I do not have nearly as high of an opinion of it. (Also, naked women herein.)
To start with: the presentation of this game is gorgeous.
Star Trek ITD and Superman movies
Unfortunately, I need more time to properly chew through the next batch of Host chapters.
So, let’s talk about the new Superman and Star Trek movies.