thomasnash

To me this seems like an alright solution, really. I also think that requiring companies to display odds would be a reasonably good move. I do think that banning it all outright might be an overreach.

Was saying something similar to a colleague earlier - the biggest isssue for me is that it's a model that protects itself from market correction - as long as the game has whales willing to throw money away on loot boxes, it doesn't matter if the rest of us consciously avoid it, games will still be designed around a progression that is less fun, to milk money from a minority of people who will be suckered into it.

I saw it on Saturday, and I've been thinking about it a lot in the two days since - but not in a good way.

In the end it wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but nowhere near as good as I'd hoped after the rapturous critical reception. It was enjoyable enough, perfectly serviceable if overlong. I think the problem is that it seems to presents itself as so important and mindblowing, with long takes and an incredibly heavy-handed (and to be frank, underdeveloped) score. I just think the ambition doesn't match the end product, which makes the end result a bit like seeing wallpaper where the pattern hasn't been lined up properly.

For starters, for a film that makes a point of long takes of postcard images, there were probably only two moments of the film that had any visual impact on me - one is the kubrickian shot of flame embers that turns into the cityscape, which I thought was a rare moment of dynamism and movement. The other was a nearly aerial shot of the city, which at first looks like a completely impenetrable wall of concrete, but slowly you start to see little lines of neon light where chinks in the canopy let you see the bustle beneath it. It was a great little update on the imagery of the first film, and it was a great visual representation of the inversion of the viewpoint of the original that is all over the place in this film. I found the baseline tests interesting for the same reason.

I can't think of anything else I felt particularly positive about though. It's taken me a bit of time to really hone in on why, because I felt it might be something relatively minor, but I realised today that my big issue is that the actual main narrative is cobblers. For a while I thought the biggest issue might just be that the Joi story line feels disconnected, and should probably have been excised entirely to make something a little leaner and procedural. But then you're left with the prospect of a plot which is conceptually ridiculous, and parasitically and retroactively rewrites aspects of the first film in the service of a trite, hollywoodised soap opera of a plot. It takes a small-scale, personal story and spins it out into a grand, epic struggle that reminded me of the worst elements of, say, Bioware's recent stories, and feels cynically geared towards continuing the franchise. In particular, Jared Leto's villain is absolutely awful. I can't comment on the acting, but the character is horribly written. He declaims exposition, whilst doing things that don't serve much purpose beyond informing the audience that he is bad. His lines are tediously mystical, whilst always feeling infuriatingly obvious. These speeches deploy religious imagery with the subtlety of a pneumatic breaker.

There are other problems I had with the film around the edges of all this as well. I felt like it was pedantic in trying to build on the "universe" of the original, but never managed to do so convincingly. It never felt as lived in or busy as the street scenes of the first film. To be honest most of the sets reminded me more of the Fifth Element than Blade Runner, especially as it trades in the run down, faded grandeur and disrepair of the original for more conventional concrete tenements and graffiti look. It also includes a story element that massively changes the situation from the one in the first film, but does so in a bizarre way that makes it feel like a different plot has been grafted to the end of Blade Runner, where the world already seemed post-disaster. It is introduced in a jarring way, and seems to only be included to paper over some of the narrative cracks. It just feels clumsy.

I found the constant need to explain the plot with flashbacks to events from 20 minutes ago very irritating.

In some ways the depth of my negativity towards it is more to do with it not being terrible than it actually being bad. I do think it is a very mediocre film on its own terms, and I think it is pretty wide of the mark as a continuation of the first film.

@monkeyking1969: Ah I really enjoyed those books as a younger. Only got 5 or so in before I started reading other stuff but always wonder if I should go back to them. My mum and sisters still read them religiously!

I've been reading the new John le Carré, A legacy of Spies. It's his first book foe about 20 years dealing with the cold war.

I'm pretty ambivalent about it so far though. He seems to have completely dispensed with the "thrilling" aspect of spy thrillers. Where I am now the plot has become completely bogged down in Peter Guillam reading reports about details that are intended to connect loose ends from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to his Karla trilogy, but doing so slightly stretches credibility, and none of it feels urgent in any way. The cold war stuff seems to be focused on all his worst impulses, and a lot of his modern stuff just feels like...well, like an old man wrote it. Modern characters just don't feel at all modern. Where he is filling in gaps, it feels needless in the same way Prometheus does.

Unlike a lot of people, I like le Carré's post cold war stuff, and don't mind his occasional preachiness. The Constant Gardener, for example, more than justifies a bit of haranguing because it feels like a good, perceptive presentation of a real issue, wrapped around a good thriller. This book so far has just been moribund. It's really very disappointing.

You should give it a go, honestly. The Far Cry similarities aren't nearly as bad as you might expect, and the worst excesses of Far Cry are mostly avoided. It's way more restrained in the amount of stuff it puts on your map, and I think with one exception you could easily skip most of it. I was also wary of it for similar reasons, but ended up enjoying it a lot.

In terms of the narrative, I agree with the OP that the opening section is great. It really drew me in and set up a few really compelling mysteries.

The game tells two stories - the "present day" story and the "ancient lore" story. The first I think quickly deteriorates after the opening segment. It has some pleasures, but I think it has the age old videogame problem of feeling a little bit like a bunch of story segments were cut up and shuffled around. The world building gets a little fuzzy and it the attention to detail of, say, The Witcher just isn't there.

The other stuff though, the story you discover about the past and why the world is the way it is, is absolutely brilliant, imo. It might not be the most original story ever, but it's told well. They never withhold so much of the mystery that it's frustrating, but they make sure there is always enough info given to maintain your interest. It wraps up in an emotionally satisfying way, that ties in neatly with the more immediate story. Best of all, it feels very complete. There are one or two loose threads that I think will be picked up for a sequel, but it's not something where you feel short changed.

This being apart from the fact that the gameplay is pretty good too!

Interesting take, but I disagree with the premise - or not entirely.

The Russian faction from the games is a group of Ultranationalists. In the years since the game came out Russian nationalism has become an increasingly large concern for people in the west. Likewise nuclear fears which have been very in the news recently, but I think were always a part of the fear of middle eastern terrorism (cf 24, the "10 minutes to torture the location of a nuke from a terrorist" conversations).

The idea of an ultranationalist Russian faction who are intervening in the Middle East in ways which go against US/Western interests seems pretty up to date, given the sort of narratives (I say narratives mostly because I don't want to start a whole political conversation) we have around Syria and Russia now.

EDIT: With the obvious caveat that a lot of the tension between east & west that pervades our current culture could itself be seen as a resurfacing of cold war sentiments and rivalries that never fully went away.

I don't know what I would like to see from Fallout. I have absolutely no interest in anything Bethesda does with it, as over two games they've shown almost know understanding of what is great about Fallout. I would love to see the storyline that runs through the Black Isle/Obsidian games continued.

With that said, "improvements" to the combat notwithstanding, I don't really have a desire to play something that feels like Fallout 4 ever again, even if the story appeals.

It depends on a lot of stuff. I liked it in CoD4, where it was pretty much just a straight "level up, get new stuff" mechanic. It gave me an incentive to try and tackle the challenges, so I could unlock stuff quicker. I also think most call of duty games are pretty good about making sure the default gear is pretty effective.

They lost me somewhere around MW3, though. Too many little individual progression paths and stuff.

I also dislike when the progression is random, because you can't work towards stuff in the same way. It's annoying that they've backfilled CoD4 with that stuff in the remaster, even if it is mostly cosmetic. The whole loot box thing is my least favourite aspect of modern gaming.

With that said, a good enough game can outshine that stuff, can't it? I still really enjoy Titanfall 2, despite having the same issues with every piece of kit having its own progression.

Quite enjoyed the truce talks, although when they all arrived it suffered a bit from that "Quick! make sure every pair gets an interaction" that we saw in the beyond the wall episode.

But virtually everything else...woof. Did I miss something or did they just completely fail to resolve the situation with the unsullied in Casterly Rock?

The Arya/Sansa/Littlefinger stuff was probably the worst. A whole season of them devoted to wringing out some kind of drama in their relationship, only to completely dissolve it at the end by basically saying "we were tricking you all along!" See, a lie can be a twist!

I was a bit sad that Euron's flounce was also a bluff. I thought that would be a very appropriate way for such a shitty character to be written out of the show. I'm quite annoyed that he's going to return.

I've always hated what the show did with the white walkers, tbh. The Night King is a shitty way to put a face to a threat that works better as something faceless and unknowable. It's a bit like the Reapers in Mass Effect - when you found out why they were built it robbed them of a lot of their menace. Maybe the books were heading there eventually but they hadn't yet. It's a big part of why I'm still fond of the books, despite their flaws; they still have some mystery to them.

@theht:Yeah, subtitles definitely help get you Elizabethan ears in, if you can use them!

I believe the scene you refer to where he turns away his friends is actually a scene from Henry IV part 2, interpolated to give a bit more background in Branagh's film.

I just watched A Ghost Story. I was a bit torn going in - the reviews made it sound intriguing, but the trailer made it look excessively pleased with itself. Unfortunately, it's the latter, with the added factor of really not deserving to be. Sometimes critics criticise films for being music videos stretched out to feature length. This is about 6 still images stretched out to the length of a film - badly. It seems really obvious that they've started with the idea of the ghost-in-a-sheet image and worked backwards. The narrative is woefully underdeveloped, and uses an emotional palette that is far too muted for a film that is at least partly about grief. The film centres, inexcusably, on a nihilistic monologue that only seems to exist to explain the themes of the film to the audience, but it has very little traction in the rest of the film. It gestures towards a cosmic, philosophical climax that never arrives (perhaps because of budget?).

Everything about the film is bent crudely around it's visual sensibilities and it's thematic concerns. There isn't a single human interaction that feels real - the aforementioned monologue takes place in a party, but everyone listens patiently to this ridiculous sixth form philosophy without any interruption. When Casey Affleck excitedly asks if a piano comes with the house, while playing it, the estate agent tells him that she can move it if he wants. At one point, Rooney Mara moves a pie in a way that so obviously smacks of an actor hitting their marks that it immediately took me out of the scene. Casey Affleck appears to have been instructed to stand bolt upright in his sheet, to get the right visual impact for the still shots of him standing still, so he never actually conveys anything at all for most of the film.

Perhaps my biggest issue with it, though, was that it was filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio - no idea if the used an old camera but suspect not. I kept expecting this frame to shift and convey some change, but it never does. I don't object to this in principle - the 4:3 ratio was used brilliantly in Pablo Larrain's No, where it was era appropriate and allowed him to cut in archive footage seamlessly. However here it is just totally empty nostalgia, which combines with a hazy, cold light that tries to invoke the nostalgic feeling of old Polaroids, but without support from the narrative it falls totally flat. The definition of style over substance.

I have a high tolerance for what other people would consider pretentious (The Fountain and Upstream Color are both in my top 10), but if any film deserves to be called pretentious, then it's this. Everything in it gestures at something profoundly moving that just isn't there. I don't think you could say that its not earnestly felt or anything, it just pulls against itself in so many different ways, and the central narrative of the film is just far, far too thin to hold it all together. I give it 1/5 badly lip syncing Casey Afflecks.

Was that the Ken Branagh version? I used to love that as a kid. Didn't understand a lot of it, but it's hard to deny the power of the St Crispin's day speech.

With regards to the strange Rom-com ending, I don't think having seen the Henry IVs would help you there! It is quite a strange moment, and the love interest hasn't appeared much before. In the earlier plays, Henry (Hal) is a bit of a libertine, so you could perhaps make the argument that it is intended to show that along with his mature leadership, he is taking a more mature approach to courtship. You could also make the case that it's a canny marriage alliance, and so his courtship shows how seriously he now takes affairs of state - this being the crucial conflict of his character in the earlier plays. None of that fully explains the odd tone of it, of course.

Equally I think you could suggest that Henry V's marriage to Catherine Valois was historically important and he felt he needed to include it, and felt the best way of doing so was to have a bit of easy humour.