__Hello.🙂 Today's list of "first impressions" Twitter-length reviews will be shorter than usual because I haven't really seen or played much over the past month. I'm still spending most of my time working on my top ten videos (I'm planning to release them all in quick succession, and working on twenty-two videos at once is taking quite a while), but that project has now hit a snag. One of the lists concerns the ending of Mass Effect 3, and I had planned to just play that section and record the gameplay footage, but somehow all my save data is gone, so I'm currently replaying the whole trilogy to re-establish it. Not that I'm complaining: it's one of my favourite trilogies ever!🙂 But it is putting my video editing work on hold and pushing the release date back even further.
__However, to make up for the lower number of reviews overall, there are a couple of full-length ones in this set.😀 About three weeks ago, working on the videos was getting mentally exhausting, so I felt like taking a break and playing the first two instalments in The Dark Pictures Anthology (I haven't yet bought the third one, House of Ashes) because I suspected they'd be a fairly short diversion. When it came to expanding on what I could fit into a tweet, I found I actually had quite a bit to say about them, so I gave them both the full 250-word treatment.
__But we'll save that for the end.🙂 First, let's go through the shorter reviews of the few movies I've seen, and the other games I've been watching as longplays.
__First, I've only been to the cinema once since my last entry.
Austin Butler disappears into the role of Elvis. There are some intriguing ideas, like the past and present playing concurrently to demonstrate how immersed he is. The problem is the distractingly hyperactive camerawork that lets no emotion settle.
My rating: 60%.
__Next, a couple of movies from earlier in the year that I took a day to watch at home.
It's very slow-paced, with characters often dawdling for no apparent reason, and all the kills are packed into the last act. Still, it should quench your thirst for blood and tits, and the recurring themes are conservatism and perceived loss of beauty.
My rating: 60%.
A good time travel premise becomes a mildly enjoyable action romp, but it's held back by subpar acting and some blatantly stupid moments, like a character's position when taking a stand. Ryan Reynolds' charisma can only get it so far.
My rating: 60%.
__Now for a few longplays I've watched.
__Among them are Guitar Hero 2 and 4. After watching a longplay of the first game, I decided to compile all the songs in the second one as a playlist on Spotify so I could hear the originals first. That's not entirely necessary for Guitar Hero III onwards, since that was when they stopped relying on the cover band and used the original songs full-time, but I initially did the same for the fourth game (World Tour) anyway. But then I started listening to the songs via the game footage, and since I was effectively watching the game itself at that point, I decided to watch 2 first so I could comment on them in order. (For the record, Guitar Hero III isn't included here because that was the first one I played, and it therefore remains my favourite.)
__Then there's Stray, a new release that I suspected would be another relatively short one, so it became my nightly viewing for a couple of days. I'm thinking of getting it on PlayStation, but I decided to watch a Let's Play first just to be sure.
__And finally, I've also been rewatching longplays of the Sonic games to refresh my memory, so I thought I might as well continue the series.🙂 When I last left off, I'd got to Sonic '06. Next is Sonic and the Secret Rings – another unpopular one.
Essentially more of the same. The major differences are the tracklist (which I find very hit-and-miss) and that a couple of the songs aren't covers. Among my new favourites are Kansas's Carry On Wayward Son and Cheap Trick's Surrender.
My rating: 75%.
This is by far the biggest Guitar Hero yet, with over eighty songs and several guest appearances besides the familiar duels. It also introduces sliding to the gameplay, through either the new touchpad or just tapping the buttons.
My rating: 80%.
The platforming makes you feel appropriately agile.🙂 While the story is good and the world is intriguing, I have to wonder how the cat comprehends what it's being told and the tasks it's undertaking. Does it have human intelligence or something?
My rating: 80%.
It's an incredibly bizarre concept, but I found the result neither exceptionally good nor bad. To watch, at least: I've heard the control is awful. Why Sonic's friends are in the roles of the classic characters is beyond me.
My rating: 55%.
The adventure spans an ocean world with many islands to search for shipbuilding materials, but it never really drew me in. It's bogged down by tediously long text-based dialogue scenes, and I can't even describe how annoying Marine is!
My rating: 50%.
__Before we move on, I have a couple of additional comments to make on the Guitar Hero games.
__Don't you just love the Star Power animations in 2: how the guitarist tosses the instrument in the air or spins it on their foot, yet somehow is still playing?😀
__In World Tour, at first I couldn't understand why, at the end of each song, the singer always turned sideways instead of bowing straight to the audience. It took me quite a long time to realise that it was the whole band praising the guitarist, i.e. you.
__And now let's end with the full-length Dark Pictures double bill.🙂
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (PS4)
__The big one is the characters. Good God are they boring! It doesn't help that you have to endure a lot of them wandering around the ship, usually alone and almost completely wordless. They're so devoid of any appealing or interesting personality that I honestly didn't care who lived or died. In fact, I did get a couple of them killed, and was utterly indifferent.
__Also, in my playthrough, Brad was completely absent during the abduction scene, and when he reappeared later, there wasn't a word of explanation as to where he'd been.
__I've heard that in the online multiplayer mode, both players' stories run concurrently when their characters split up. I guess that's a nifty idea, but I'm not really interested in exploring that path.
__The graphics are easily the game's greatest strength: they nail the ominous atmosphere. That and the premise is pretty interesting once it becomes clear what's going on. But although it piqued my interest at times, the one emotion it didn't evoke was fear.
__Final note: depending on your choices, you may end up with an unsatisfying narrative and dialogue that makes characters or even scenes seem inconsistent.
__My rating: 65%.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (PS4)
__The main drawback, once again, is the characters. While I felt nothing for the characters in Man of Medan, I very quickly grew to outright hate this lot! They're constantly being mean to each other for almost no reason at all, and they're often arrogant to boot.
__This is exacerbated by a problem I've had with Supermassive Games since Until Dawn, but that reaches its apex here. The dialogue does not sound natural! Nearly all the lines are badly written and incongruent not just with each other but also with the situation; they sound like nothing people would actually say. I was almost endlessly thinking, "I could have written something better than that!"
__On the other hand, I think the story is miles better than Man of Medan. It's still not scary (partly because of the characters and partly because it escalates too quickly), but I became steadily more intrigued by the events in the 1600s that were revealed through flashbacks. And the ending is genuinely brilliant, complete with an inspired reason to keep everyone alive.
__And yet, I still can't bring myself to rate it higher than two stars out of five. That is how insufferable the characters and dialogue are!
__My rating: 45%.
No comments:
Post a Comment