Strathy

I have never been more cautiously optimistic...

There was probably two options on the table:

Option A: Rush it out this year to try and pull out of the Vanguard nose-dive ASAP

Option B: Just eat the whole foot-long with Vanguard and come out with a better game next year.

I think option B is the more future proof choice. Three bad Call of Duty's in a row would be a Bioware level reputation killer.

I'm not going to go all the way down the hole on how much of a fuck factory I found this movie to be, people should form their own opinions, I'll just say I don't think I've been this dismayed by a piece of cinema in quite a while. Ultimately I'm the idiot, knowing exactly where the original Matrix sequels went and expecting something different out of this one (yes Vaas, I know, thanks).

Ultimately, I think crap like this is a product of our own laziness. Until people collectively demand better and stop dumping money on these streaming services then this is going to continue to be the output. Actual cinema movies were (occasionally) good because they were cash on delivery, if they were good then word got around, people would go see them and they made money, conversely if they weren't then people didn't and they bombed. These asinine productions that get extruded by streaming services are payed for before they even hit the screen, and shmucks subscribing to the service will begrudgingly watch them because the cost to them is already sunk.

The first Matrix movie was pretty good you know? It was pretty god damn good. Maybe contemporary media just doesn't deserve it any more.

This has been nagging at me since I played this (I eventually dropped it, quite far in).

Spiritfarer was lauded fairly universally when it came out in 2020, with many commenters becoming openly overwhelmed with emotion when discussing it. But my experience was a jumble of extremely shallow game play systems arranged around what might as well have been a visual novel game. Shallow game play is what it is, and this title is hardly the worst offender by a long shot; what really turned me of was the narrative threads, which all seem meanderingly tangential (boring in most cases, top be honest) until it's time to cast out the net and fish for any memories of grief and loss the player might have.

I have Asperger's pretty hard, so I admittedly see this emotively engaging stuff through a somewhat skewed window, but I wasn't buying what Spiritfarer was selling here at all. All the people discussing the game as some profoundly effecting thing seemed to be driven by a past episode of personal loss that Spiritfarer had dredged up, rather than anything that materially occurs within the game itself.

I guess my thesis statement here is that Spiritfarer is effective the same way that showing arachnophobes pictures of spiders is effective, only we are all susceptible to the grief of losing loved ones. I think the actual narrative it spins is self-indulgent and lazy, but gets away with it because it strikes at a place where so many people are so open for manipulation.

f1.cool

They fell over themselves chasing every popular multiplayer FPS trend. Seemingly oblivious to why battlefield players turn up to that game and not the 'popular' ones.

In other news, Macallan single malt whisky planning a new 30 year old release. Several Saudi princes already interested.

I'm from NZ, and even for people here the inner workings of Weta Digital (a Weta is a native insect that looks kind of like a large locust) have always been a pretty closed box. Weta has a visitors center, but it's just a bunch of props.

The only sense I can make out of the purchase is that Unity wants to move into tv/movie CGI like Unreal has already.

That time during a LAN game of AOE2 I chopped a path through the forest into the back of my friends base and flooded it with garbage. Friendship ended.

I've been giving AOE4 a go due to the positive buzz (and game-pass), and as someone who's into the Company of Heroes style of tactical RTS I'm not really loving it. But never mind. What really surprised me was how bafflingly low detail the unit and building graphics were, particularly considering how zoomed in the game is. I had a look around in case something was up with my settings and noticed this:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-08-14-first-look-at-return-to-empire-the-china-only-age-of-empires-mobile-game

It obviously plays a little more phonerific, but the similarities in the graphics assets look nigh identical...