Hot Heart

*cough* Century: Spice Road

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate I'd held off doing the last mission and was just doing side missions and collecting things; even though I know the game doesn't lock you out from doing stuff after clearing the story. Mechanics-wise, it's the best AC game and there's plenty of enjoyment there, but the story -- both the past and present narratives -- at this point, is just... eh. Having twin protagonists seemed more like a way to get a female protagonist in a "mainstream" release than actually doing anything that interesting. There's a potentially deliberate contrast with how Unity ended and how Syndicate sort of retreads the same steps even though I thought there'd be something made of having a "spare" protagonist.

If the store page is correct for Scythe, it says "Only the host needs to own this DLC" I'm up for playing this Saturday if that suits? I'm playing IRL board games on Friday, but can stay up late to match with US timezones. I can see if my friend who has it on Steam is up for it as well. EDIT: Well, I bought it anyway because it was £3.35 and increases the chances of at least two people being able to have a game.

Hi! I already own TTS and have an actual copy of Scythe that I have played precisely 3 times.

Anyone watching Preacher now S2 has started up? It's funny how S1 felt a lot like an extended prologue, but did it all so much better than Westworld. Now the characters are "on the road" and I'm interested to see where it's headed. It's still got the over the top gore and black humour that sets it apart from everything else I'm watching.

In "The More I Hear About It, The Less I Like The Sound Of It" News: weapons won't have randomised perks, i.e. everything will have a fixed set like raid and exotic weapons. I think Luke has said they want to do something to make guns feel more personal, but it is just a change made for easier rebalancing. I mean, sure, that's probably a good thing overall, but I loved the bizarre or cool combinations that random rolls could throw up and how you could experiment. It feels like lots of stuff getting axed to support PvP more than anything.

Hero Hadn't watched this since the time it saw release over here (about 2004/2005) so I had forgotten a lot about it. The blu-ray version is strange, because some images are... suboptimal. I'm not sure if it's an effect of the colour-grading but I was noticing a grainy sort of look on some of the closer images of people's faces, particularly during the "orange/red" section. Overall, it's still the beautiful, highly-stylised, feast of colour it was before and most of the visual effects hold up well. Anyway, it's a moving tale about heroism and sacrifice with a sort of Rashomon-style of storytelling. Having said that, this version still carries the "mistranslation" of the two words by Broken Sword being "Our Land" rather than "Under Heaven" which sort of gives the film a pro-autocracy vibe at the end.

Wasn't really gonna bother continuing updating "my blog" but maybe some people are just reading and absorbing? It's alright practice for reviewing/critiquing anyway. Let's try and keep it briefer anyway. Food Chain Magnate Very complicated, very mean, thinky game where you all run competing fast food restaurants. Each round you structure your company in order to market products to the various local households, produce the items these households require, train your employees and gouge prices to steal customers. Hard to give it a fair assessment after one game, but its biggest problem for me is that it lacks a fun sense of growth/progression. I mean, it's there but every single round is a bloodthirsty battle over selling a couple of burgers or pizzas and there's just too much stuff to keep track of consistently, particularly the marketing that comes in various forms (both in type and token size) and triggers at different times. It seems that every single game (I've seen experienced players sharing scores) suffers from a runaway leader problem, and I think that the claims of being "sandbox-like" are vastly overrated given that the milestone bonuses tend to force you towards 3 main paths in the beginning. Like I said though, there's a lot going on and I couldn't give it a full appraisal after one game. Concordia Excellent game that sort of feels like a smart progression of Settlers of Catan. It involves moving colonists around the globe, settling cities and producing/trading goods but the real core of it is the cards. My friends will hate me for saying this, but it's somewhat reminiscent of what I love about Heroes Wanted and its hand management/card timing/efficiency stuff except the decisions and impact are far more generous and easier to grasp here. The cards dictate all your actions, but the key here is maximising your efficiency with each one (sexy stuff, I know) since, at some point, you'll need to refresh your hand. For example, the "Architect" card allows you to move colonists around and then build in cities next to any of your colonists. You only start with one of these cards and because building is based on certain goods and monetary costs, which will increase dramatically thanks to other players getting their buildings in other cities first, it helps to try and get the most out of each one fast. And the "refresh your hand" action is never that punishing either because it's a card you play that a) gives you money based on how many cards you've already played (1 coin for every one past the third, including itself) and b) gives you the opportunity to gain a new colonist if you have the right goods. And then there's one of the most interesting cards, "Diplomat", which allows you to copy any other player's face-up card (i.e. the last card they played). The whole system not only hangs on that personal efficiency goal but adds in all sorts of layers with what you might choose to play as an aggressive/defensive move against other players. In essence, you can try and make them "blink first" with certain moves like playing the "Prefect" card to produce goods for certain regions and the cities within (e.g. they might just want the bonus good to guarantee they get something but your cities within the region grant you even more goods), or even time it so you produce a bunch of goods when their own warehouse is too full to take any more. And the other thing is that you can choose how to structure your hand of cards. Early on, I took a "Consul" card that was absolutely crucial for grabbing the other cards I needed without paying the extra cost for more recently revealed ones farther along the line. Plus, I figured an extra Architect and Diplomat would increase my chances of getting the actions I needed. Looking at some of the other cards, I think there's scope for slightly different approaches (I barely used the "Mercator" trade action) which is probably also supported by having the cards increase your scoring multipliers. See, the actual key to victory is by appealing to the various gods which is represented on the bottom of the action cards by what they value. Some will award points for having more colonists, some for certain buildings in certain types of cities (what good it produces) and others are for spreading your stuff all over the map; there's a bit of "point salad" in that you'll want to do a bit of everything but there's definitely a real incentive to pursue cards for more than just the associated action. On top of all that, there's lots of replayability in how the goods tokens and bonuses get sorted across the various cities and regions on set up. Ace game, highly recommended. Century: Spice Road If you've played Splendor, you'll have a decent idea of how this plays. It's an easy to grasp game that you could probably play with the whole family where you're collecting and trading spices (coloured cubes) in order to fulfill demands (cards that grant points if you trade in the exact combination of spices). Each player starts with two cards; one that grants them 2 yellow cubes and one that grants them 2 "upgrade" steps (the spices go yellow>red>green>brown) on one spice, or across two. On their turn a player can do one of four things: 1. Play a card and perform its pictured action. This will either grant them spices, allow them to trade spices for other ones or upgrade spices. One trick here is that the trade action can be performed as many times as possible from the one card, e.g. if the card says 1 Green can be traded for 2 Reds and 1 Yellow, the player might have 2 Greens they can use to get 4 Red and 2 Yellows or 3 Greens for 6 Red and 3 Yellows, etc. 2. Purchase a market card. There will be a line of cards that allow you to perform the above actions and these are vital for building your "engine" of cards to maximise spice production and conversion. The line order is important because you can take the leftmost one for free but if you want to take any other one to the right, you must place a cube for every card you skip. Obviously, if you take any that have cubes on, you also gain those cubes. Essentially, while players will be trying to find the "best" cards for their approach they also need to weigh up the cost of gaining one. And efficiency is key because another action is simply to... 3. Recover all your cards. That's it. You can regain all the cards you've played to get that engine running again...while you watch some bastard take the card you wanted. Yes, that's because the final possible thing you can do on your turn is... 4. Fulfill a demand card. These are the aforementioned cards with actual victory points on them. There's a little twist in that of the 5 on show, the leftmost pile also has a stash of gold coins while the next to the right has a stash of silver coins. Every time you fulfill the demand in one of those slots, you take the corresponding coin, with gold coins worth 3VPs at the end and Silvers worth 1VP. The game ends once a player takes their fifth demand card and everyone's had an equal number of turns. And that's pretty much it. Everything flows really smoothly as turns are quick and simple, while it's easy enough to track what people are doing on a basic level as you can see the cubes they have. Even if you thought you had a player sussed out and they surprise you with a trade that puts them into position to grab the demand card you were on track to get, you have the opportunity to change tack. It's surprisingly deep because it's all about timing as well, since you could beat someone to the requirements on a demand card but hold off for other things if you're that far ahead, or wait until it shifts into a coin-grabbing position, etc. I think the only "flaw" is that in my first game I had so many cards that I couldn't track all the possibilities while not wanting to hold up the game and subsequently played the wrong one as a "first step", which put me one turn behind... everything, as other players grabbed the demand cards I wanted. But, yeah, great simple-but-deep game and I'm looking forward to how it's supposed to link up with the other "Century" games coming in the future.

True Legend A Yuen Woo-ping film so you know the action won't disappoint in terms of direction and creativity but it's an odd beast. There's an okay dramatic story with some mystical elements, like the villain who learns the Five Venom Fist style, which apparently involves holding his fists in bowls filled with spiders, scorpions, etc. (to... keep him topped up?) and stuff like "The God of Wushu" (albeit, inside the protagonist's mind). It makes for a decent "final" fight where the hero has to almost completely prevent the villain from touching him with his hands. I say "final" fight because then there's a really odd section tacked on the end. Once the initial personal story ends in tragedy, the protagonist, now during colonial times takes up a literal drunken fighting style and goes the route of "Chinese fighter takes on allcomers in East vs. West fights" (as already seen in Fearless and Ip Man) in order to redeem himself. There's a neat touch in that the "God of Wushu" reappears in disguise but it all makes for a very weird contrast to the rest of the story.

"WASH MY COTTON SOCKS, I'M IN THE NUDE!" Like a new-wave version of northern soul.

And another Jet Li great Fearless If I recall, when I first watched this 10+ years ago, I was a little disappointed. Possibly because it was sold as Li's last "martial arts epic" which I guess it kind of is, but I was probably hoping for some huge fight scenes or something. I think the main difference this time, however, is that I got to see the director's cut, which has nearly 40 minutes of extra material, which helps to both bookend it and flesh it out, so it really feels more like an "epic". You get modern-day scenes, featuring Michelle Yeoh that really captures the spirit of the film. It's a compelling "historical" tale of Huo Yuanjia (a real life figure who was actually the master/surrogate father of the Jet Li character in Fist of Legend, mentioned above) who was a martial artist in the last days of the Qing Dynasty and tells his story from childhood to death. It's not an action-packed extravaganza but what fight scenes it has are generally superb (except for maybe the O'Brien fight) and it's essentially the tale of this man's misguided pursuit of martial prowess leading to his downfall before he learns the "true meaning" of wushu and does his country proud. In some ways, you could say that a lot of Hong Kong martial arts films feel like Chinese propaganda, but at least this is a good personal story.

You can say that there were development problems with D1, sure, but there was also a sign that they'd "righted the ship" given the time span between then and when they'd began working on D2 in earnest. Already, it seemed like they had some great writers on-board once you took a look at "The Book of Sorrows" from The Taken King. Given that it was mostly a separate "live" team (plus, some other new studio, if I recall) watching over D1 with a larger team already working on D2, I was hoping that they'd be doing more to address long-term fan's concerns. It might not look like it from the outside, but Bungie are usually pretty receptive to community feedback and seem like they want to learn from it as much as possible. But, yeah, I hope that it's more a case of wanting an "accessible" story for newcomers before they take them on a ride involving the various mysteries of Toland, Osiris, the Vex, the Awoken, Rasputin, the Nine etc. There really is so much potential for interesting stuff there. That said, I also learned that the third subclasses, introduced in TTK, won't be in D2 at launch. Each new piece of news dampens my enthusiasm...

These aren't exactly new (or new to me), but I've been "upgrading" some of my favourite films from DVD to blu-ray and in case anyone's interested in martial arts films, these are some classic Jet Li entries. Both are fight-directed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping (basically, look up any film with amazing fight scenes and chances are he did them), with the first directed by him fully. Tai Chi Master (also known as Twin Warriors) The first of the early Yuen Woo-ping films that got him noticed by Hollywood sees Jet Li as a shaolin temple pupil growing up alongside a more rebellious kid he's introduced to at the start when eventually his impetuousness gets them expelled. From there, they embark on different paths. Jet Li's character gets mixed up with freedom fighters while the "bad" one joins up with the governor's army and gradually becomes SUPER EVIL. It's got an odd sort of tone that goes between slapstick and seriousness but it pulls it off, and it has lots of incredibly creative fight scenes... even though high definition makes the wire work super obvious on some occasions. Fist of Legend A remake of Bruce Lee's "Fist of Fury" but actually a more thoughtful story than "murder everyone" in which Jet Li's character returns to the martial arts school where he was raised after hearing news of his master's death in a duel with a Japanese fighter. He soon discovers that his master couldn't have lost without foul play and works to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, there is tension due to the backdrop of the First World War with Jet Li's character even having a Japanese girlfriend who is not accepted by his school. Again, it has some brilliant fight scenes and does a good job of remaking the original but changing it in positive ways. For example, taking on the Japanese school is an impressive fight but actually has purpose (this is where Jet Li discovers his master couldn't have lost fair and square) compared to the Bruce Lee version where he goes to return an offensive sign (and literally make them eat it) and beat everyone up. Not that the latter isn't also cool to watch. Oh, and if you have these films on blu-ray you don't have to put up with the terrible dubbing.

So, there was this admission that came out recently: Bungie admits it didn't know what Destiny's Darkness was, and it won't be appearing in Destiny Which is surprisingly candid and actually pretty disappointing. Even if they are going to explain whatever it is, it just undercuts the whole "ten year plan" and gives me a distinct Mass Effect/Dark Energy vibe. It just makes me feel like the game's story is going to be treading water for the third year now. "Another huge threat comes along and you have to stop it... but this time you lost your powers!" as if that's supposed to keep people interested. Don't get me wrong, it'll probably still be fun to play with friends, but it feels like so much squandered potential. When you look at the lore in the grimoire cards, it's extremely well-written and intriguing, but that barely carries over into the game. Maybe there'll be some interesting surprise but I'm not holding my breath. The more I learn about the game, the more disappointing it sounds. Firstly, we see that it's just the Cabal's turn in the spotlight as the big threat. Then it turns out, we're just getting slightly redone classes, all of them now with similar "roaming" supers and even more restrictions on how you spec your character (although, the circle/B button skill is a nice addition). At this point, I think I'll have to see how I feel after the beta.

Bad Moms It has Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn and they are bad moms.

Chloe got a nice butt. Australian accents are sexy. /endcontribution Seriously, though, I've really liked Laura Bailey in everything (Nier, Tales from the Borderlands, inFAMOUS: Second Son, Saint's Row, etc.) except Uncharted, where she should not be playing that character. Also, I like Claudia Black.

Yeah, I think it's case of what's best for the party. As soon as he couldn't definitively answer that question about gay sex early during the campaign, they lost that liberal credibility. And if you'll allow me to majorly digress, not even the "second referendum" stuff was a draw for them. Partly, because I think most people have resigned themselves to the fact that we must now leave the EU, despite the fact that we have no fucking clue how that's supposed to work. It's a tangle of elements and certain aims are incompatible with others while "no deal" is the stupidest fucking thing ever. Meanwhile, all we get are sound bites about a "Red, White & Blue Brexit" and a Brexit department made up of the stupidest, most corrupt politicians going (Liam Fox, seriously?!) who managed a 100-page document in 11 months and I bet 18 pages of that is getting a letter-by-letter "BREXIT MEANS BREXIT" in there. People want more controls on immigration, etc. (even though the UK isn't part of Schengen) but that clashes with remaining in the Single Market and freedom of movement. And politicians bandy about this idea of retaining "access" to the single market when EVERYONE already has "access" to the single market, it just carries a much higher cost than being part of it. Not to mention that failing even to guarantee rights for EU citizens is already driving away tens of thousands of workers and students, both absolutely vital parts of the economy. And then there's the idea of "we'll be free to make trade deals with other countries" except that then requires leaving the Customs Union, which still subjects you to the ECJ for trade stuff and then requires a hard border in Northern Ireland. And even Labour has endorsed leaving the single market even though that's sure to tank the economy and make every single public services funding aim an impossibility. It just boggles my mind that this massive framework of stuff was put down to a simple YES/NO vote and no one else is really taking a stand that there needs to be a second decision on this. The first referendum could've broken this down into different aspects as regards to the ECHR, ECJ, Single Market, Customs Union and then people would've been forced to actually Google "what is the EU" before voting. If there's anything the last few years should have shown people it's that the Tories are absolutely not "a safe pair of hands" but a group of well-off, self-interested charlatans.

There was an inkling of a character levelling system in Syndicate and a whole four unique skills for each Frye twin which sort of set them apart; Jacob was better for scrapping, Evie was better for stealthing. You also had things like certain low-level gadgets not affecting higher level enemies until upgraded and there was a "noise" system related to kills and running. I could see them trying to build on that and allowing you to somewhat specialise your character for being super fast and sneaky, or good with the bow, etc. but a stealth-kill not actually killing would be weird. Might seem better to make the kill take longer, or make tougher enemies harder to sneak up on (like certain Last of Us ones?).

With Farron, specifically, it was regards to his views on homosexuality being a sin. When it came to legislation on same-sex marriage, etc. he would acknowledge the shared party view rather than his own. However, I think it was shown that he actually acted in a way that hid what he was really doing. I can't remember the specifics but the surface appearance about how he voted on certain LGBTQ rights (viewable on https://www.theyworkforyou.com/) made him look golden but someone did some digging and I think he was further abstaining or voting down subsequent things. The same could be said of Corbyn, whereby he was against certain things like Trident but would accept the wider party view. On the subject of religion, May is a vicar's daughter and kept banging on about her fucking faith before the election. God guided you well there, Theresa.

Wait... Eagle Vision literally comes from eagles?!

Having watched that gameplay, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about Anthem. I was pretty much sold on the flying like Iron Man stuff for starters, and if there's the ability to really customise your "Javelins" and there's some real distinction between classes, I could see myself enjoying it. Plus, I'm with Eleven in preferring third-person. Only real turn-off at the moment is that it's another "ruined" world. I think a varied, planet explorer setting would've been so much cooler.

Listening to the Jade Empire soundtrack and reminded how great Jack Wall really was. Just listen to this villain theme, soooo good.

I would say The Old Republic might serve as a guide for the MMO-like structure, with Mass Effect-like combat. Given that no one remembered TOR, that probably doesn't bode well.