danielpholt

Finished this too. How'd you feel about the dungeon design towards the end? Kinda felt to me like they'd decided to just throw as many screens (and thus repetition) at you in the hopes it'd increase difficulty when all it did was reduce my enjoyment. Aside from that, it's a really charming experience.

Ditto

Astral Chain. Astral Chain is a bit like the Andrew Garfield Spider-man franchise. Everything on paper looks amazing. However, when you're finished watching (playing) you're kind of left with a big ol' plate of 'meh'. From a technical perspective, AC is truly impressive. It runs super smooth, and looks interesting whilst doing it, the character design is fun and there's the core of a very interesting plot here. However yeah, it never finds a way to transition that into a good game. Astral Chain. Its fine.

Mario Maker 2 70 hours later, and I'm still really enjoying what Mario Maker 2 has to offer. I'm bad at it, both designing levels and you know, Mario as a whole but even for the outright incompetent there's fun to be had. I've hit something of a creative wall with designing my own levels; but I think that'll likely come back once things calm down a little at home (Life eh?). And if it doesn't? I've got a game that will give me new Mario levels until Nintendo decides to make MM3. Telling Lies I'm only an hour in at the time of writing, but its got the same hooks as Sam Barlow's previous effort; Her Story. Only there's more going on? There's certainly more characters, and as such, more perspectives to sort through, more conversations to decipher and obviously, more notes to be taken. I made my way through Her Story in 2-3 sittings, I can't see that being the case here.

Avengers: Endgame Second time through. It's still good. Not as immediately watchable as Infinity War (given the level of crossover between our favourite characters I think that IW is always going to be the more 'enjoyable' movie), but its still a deeply satisfying film for those that have been with these guys for a while.

I'm beginning to wonder if Sony were always planning on this to be the case. What better way to kick-start your own Spidey-verse than by piggy backing off the already huge MCU. There's nothing wrong with that, but again, we lose out. All that being said, Disney really could give Sony what they're demanding and it wouldn't effect their bottom line in the slightest.

There's no good guy in this situation, but there is a loser; us. Disney wanted a bigger slice of the Pie I guess? Not sure they really needed it, but businesses are gonna do what businesses are going to do right? Sony aren't willing to give up that sort of money for their 'premium brand'. I think that's a mistake, the reason Homecoming and Far From Home did so well is directly tied to the fact that they're in the MCU; this is a thing. Taking Spidey out of that hurts everyone, especially the fans. But hey fuck the fans, they're only the ones who go see the movies, buy the home released, subscribe to our platforms and spend money on the merch. Who needs them to be okay with anything.

Just finished reading Artemis by Andy Weir. For those interested, its the follow up to his previous (and first) novel The Martian. I'll be honest, I'm a little disappointing. It never really takes off in the same way The Martian did, although I'm willing to admit that TM is telling a much smaller, more condensed story. Plotting aside, I had a few issues with how Weir writes his female lead (I feel like he fell into that trap that male writers writing female characters fall into far too often), shes super smart, sarcastic, beautiful and yup, one of the boys when it comes to sex, nudity and, well profanity as a whole. There's also a whole condom subplot that frankly, felt forced. All in all it's fine. It's a pretty sizeable drop from The Martian, but if you're into science fiction then its still worth a shot.

Lego Batman I rewatched this yesterday (in a failed attempt to get Mila to you know, chill) and it's not nearly as mediocre as I remember upon leaving the cinema. Is it the Lego Movie? No, but if you're a fan of Batman it''s actually kinda good fun.

Remember when we all dreamed of cutting the cord and getting away from spending more money than we'd like to admit on content we didn't want on a platform we didn't enjoy using? Well, Big Media heard and this is what we've got. I've got a Spotify subscription for my Music. I've got a two gaming subscriptions (not including PSN/Nintendo Online). I've got Netflix. I've got Prime for fast shipping/movies? and I'm looking forward to adding Disney+ in the future. At this point its probably costing me more money than It would have just to continue paying whoever owns the cable box under my TV.

There's a section towards the end of the game where you're endlessly fighting off bad-guy after bad-guy and there was a point where I lost my shit with the game. The Hellblade apologist in me would say that was a deliberate choice by the developers; the frustrated player would say otherwise. I ended up lowering the difficulty (i believe) and powering through it. All in all that was the only black mark on a game I otherwise absolutely adored.

There's a game called Supraland which falls foul of this, constantly. When I mentioned it to the dev via twitter, I got some answer back about how its funny or something. Like, nah. I understand why someone might think its funny but you built your entire storyline around something which you're poking fun at in the lamest possible way. Stop.

Void Bastards Wasn't expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. It's the sort of 'Rogue-lite' that someone who doesn't hate themselves might enjoy; not overly difficult or punishing, but treats death as almost a sort of...refresh. Also looks absolutely awesome and there's tiny dudes running around calling me fuck-face. What's not to love?

I can see The Bells doing well on a technical level; it looked absolutely amazing, even if none of the character stuff made much sense to anyone with even a passing understanding of the characters.

I could see Thrones going home with a few technical, production or acting awards, but the story side of the show should be left to rot.

Refunct It's a short little platforming experience where you jump around changing the colour of these um, platforms. You'll beat it in less than twenty minutes but its super charming and I found it really relaxing to play. Also super cheap right now.

We finished it a few days ago. How did you feel after the end of the show? Obviously there's no way around the fact that Dyatlov and (to a lesser extent?) his superiors acted incredible naively on that night, but I almost find myself feeling sorry for them. They had absolutely no idea the get out of jail free card had been taken off the table. Does that excuse the events that lead to them having to push the button in the first place? absolutely not....but there's no way they'd have gone down that road had the ramifications been told to them beforehand. Anyway. I'm working my way through Catch-22. I've not heard great things about the show, but its decent enough so far. Also it's got this man in, and I'll watch pretty much anything with Kyle 'Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose' Chandler in it.

Season 1 was a bit of a hot-mess. Underwhelming loot, poor messaging, and problems with server stability. However the community seems pretty excited by what Season 2 is promising with significantly better gear, skins and unlockables, a map that's seem some pretty sizeable changes since season 1 and i dunno, dragons? Bring it on!

This is not true in the sequel. Discuss.

Mario Maker 2 I didn't really get into Mario Maker on the WiiU. I put this mainly down to kinda-absolutely-hating the WiiU as a console, and to some extent I think that's right. I'm certainly having more fun with MM2 than I did with its predecessor but I'm still hit with this niggling feeling that maybe the game just isn't quite for me. I love seeing some of the levels people have created, and don't get me wrong, Mario platforming is always fun, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm just not really good enough to truly get the most out of this game. Some of that is down to the frankly piss-poor way Nintendo surfaces new levels to players (good luck getting anyone playing your level if you're not outwardly broadcasting it outside the game), and the slightly frustrating way you're thrown back to the front end of a level when you die (I know that's a staple of Mario platformers, I've just kind of moved past that now - Get me straight back into the action!). That being said, it's still an endless stream of amazing Mario levels on a console that I can take with me, or play on a TV. Even if I don't love it as much as some, I'm absolutely certain that I'm going to put a fuck-tonne of hours into this one. Apex Legends So I'm the forums BR guy eh? Yup, I'm still playing Apex. It's still an absolute blast. Season 2 hits in 12 or so hours, and I cannot wait.

Cuphead Much to my own surprise, I think Cuphead is one of my favourite games of all time. It's brutally hard, but the way in which it handles that difficulty never left me feeling like I was cheated, it never left me wondering how I died or if I was missing something. Each state of each boss fight is a delicate dance that needs to be learned in order to progress, and once you do progress I was left with this wave of satisfaction that is often rather rare in this medium. Observation Okay so the moment I realized this was the new game from the people who made one of my favourite games of 2017 (No Code's Stories Untold) I knew I was going to love it, and despite having a few issues with the games control scheme early on, I absolutely did love it. I don't really want to say too much about this one, just that I think you should go play it. It's not overly long, doesn't ask too much of the player and has a really fantastic atmosphere and a killer intro sequence. Also check out Stories Untold. Devil May Cry 5 I like Devil May Cry 5 just fine. My only complaint ( and this is deeply personal) is that there's so much choice in terms of weapons and fight-styles that I often found myself bamboozled by choice; ultimately deciding to just un-equip most anything aside from a gun and a sword from both Dante and Nero. With that said, I still had a really fun time with this one, I just wish there was a little less Devil May Cry in this, and a touch more DMC2 (I would watch a Netflix series based on this universe).