Ben X

I agree Bjorn!

\o/

I've watched around 5 episodes of this. It has a fair amount of charm, but it lacks the sharpness of Tina Fey's shows which it hews closely to, and a fair amount of the humour falls flat. Still enjoying it enough for the moment to keep going...

Well, Ben, yes I would. By the end of the first season, they've given a bit more depth to the characters (and White Josh's personality basically gets retconned from the original 'lol he's so stupid', which was a good move) and a lot of them get held to account for the crappy ways they've been acting, and they all started making decent life decisions and acting like adults. Also, perhaps I was just getting used to it, but the songs and direction of them seemed to improve. It may be that they realised they could get away with music video rather than musical a lot better with limited set-ups etc. There was still a bit too much humour where it feels like the actors were ad-libbing on set after watching Anchorman a few too many times, but generally it was getting funnier. Having said all that, I'm watching the second season now and they're having to manufacture new drama, so it's back to the characters acting like teenagers and making really stupid decisions and plans. I think the main problem this show has is the jarring mix of storyline tone ranging from cartoon caper through tween soap opera ("my bff has other friends as well as me!") to adult drama ( ). Seinfeld worked with no redeemable or 'straight-man' characters and Arrested Development really started to work once Michael moved away from that role, because they had their tone nailed down; with CXG I flip between getting frustrated that the characters are learning life-lessons that they should have figured out ten years earlier, and getting frustrated because I'm watching a load of damaged people hurt themselves and everyone around them because of their debilitating psychological issues, either one of which could work on its own with the requisite balances but end up clashing with each other. Anyway, obviously there's still lots of great and interesting stuff about this show because I'm still watching it and posting about it, but it really needs to figure out what it is and whether that can be sustained in an ongoing series.

I'm thinking one of the few things they won't have trouble recapturing from the original film is Ford's performance as Deckard...

What do you mean by this, Roderick?

Yeah, I keep forgetting to take photos, but it's fun trying to get live shots before the splicer's ripping your face off. Houdinis are especially tricky. The good thing about Big Daddies is that if they don't have a Lil Sis with them you can leave them alone and they just pad past you. I followed one around for a bit and he wandered over to a vent hole and started banging on it to try and call a LS to no avail. It was really cool.

Ah, of course, I know Rosie the Riveter, I should have put that together! In Time Gentleman Please we had a wartime female factory worker character called Rose, except she was named after the phrase "English rose" and based visually on another woman in that article, yellow cap and all:

Baby Driver was cool and fun and exciting, but it had already left my thoughts by the time I got home.

Well, I'm still working my way through this, though I haven't spent tons of time on it. I was feeling a little under-powered for how far through the game I feel, but then I checked a walkthrough and it seems I'm only about a third of the way in. Mainly, I'm looking forward to opening up a ton more slots to put all my current plasmids in, especially the hacking ones to make that less risky. It's a shame that the Little Sisters are the only way to get Adam, they don't occur that often. Also, I'm sure I took one Big Daddy down who had an LS with him (her? Some of them are called Rosie, so I'm not sure if there's some lore I'm not privy to where they're actually female) but then once I'd killed him she was nowhere to be found. At least BDs are a bit easier to take down now, as long as I don't get cornered.

Just watched this. While there were lots of great performances in it (especially Daniel Kaluuya, whom I also really liked in Psychoville) and the satirical elements were really interesting and well-done, I was a little let down by the more genre elements. Despite knowing nothing about the film before watching it (except who the director and lead actor were and that it was a horror that also dealt with the African-American experience), I had worked out that Speaking of that guy, he felt really out-of-place here, in a similar way to Johnny Depp's character in Tusk. He also felt like a black comedy character-type that we see a lot of, but I can't figure out how to describe that type. The kind of guy I'd expect Anthony Anderson to be playing. EDIT: oh, re. the reasons

Thankfully, Dan's pitch (LOL) is not that but rather "this is a good game, with some jokes in it." Here's Kotaku saying "Kickmen is a clever, cheeky, strange interpretation of “the wonderful game” by someone who doesn’t give a damn about making a soccer game, and is all the better for it."

I've got some armor-piercng rounds (although I'm not sure about the machine gun as the nomenclature there isn't as specific iirc), but they didn't do a hell of a lot of good. TK helped against the one who threw mines at me, and now I've got the hypnotising apples which at least allow me to get a free first shot in.

Ep 4 was where it started to pick up for me - all the random weirdness starts to coalesce into a story. Having said that, it does continue to meander and go slow, but I found there was something more to hang onto. Overall I enjoyed the season and will watch the next one. (You should at least get to the end of episode 5 so you can see the series debut of the actor whose name you may have noticed in the titles but who does not appear before then).

I think this but, y'know, bad-on-purpose and incredibly well-made (including the VFX like you say). Honestly though, it's really only Dien and Richards who are soap opera-level actors; the rest of the cast do a brilliant job of giving heightened, pulpy performances without just 'acting badly' or overcooking it. It's not like you've got ten Zorgs in there. Erkki, have you seen any of the other Romero zombie films? Night/Dawn are the shining towers (and the reputation of the latter may be why you were expecting more from the former), but the others still have some great scenery-chewing and flesh-munching.

Ok, thanks both, good to hear I'm not the only one! I try to reload rather than vita chamber when I can because it pisses me off to lose all my Eve and health (if I died before losing it all because I didn't manage to heal), but yeah when you get a Big Daddy plus ten splicers and a couple of turrets it becomes necessary to Brute Vita!

'Spacey'

Wow, the difficulty ramped right up as soon as the first Big Daddy appears! I don't know if there are any clever techniques for downing those guys, but it took me ages, especially with the stun move the first one was using. I finally used a combo of electro plasmid, machine gun, and running away. Thankfully the game has now introduced Adam so I've been able to open up a ton of plasmid slots. (I'm being nice to the Little Sisters - apart from geeing the Daddies on in fights, they haven't done anything to harm me.) Actually, that reminds me, I saw an area below me with a Little Sister in it and forgot to go back to it. I'm not sure I can remember where it is now, maybe near the interrogation room... It's still great fun, though, and the vita chambers let you brute force your way through if you're really struggling. Really the only thing that's hampering my enjoyment is that things often get too hectic for me to plan cool uses of my plasmids, set up traps etc.

I do agree with a couple of criticisms but that post (they haven't called it a Wot I Think so I guess they're not classing it as a review) is so negative, nitpicky and petulant that it's hard not to read it as an upset football fan's one-sided rant. I'm obviously biased, but this lengthy screed with not a single positive thing to say about the game doesn't match up to my experience. Other people here may hate it too, though, and that's fine! EDIT: I may as well link to a positive review, though. Dan's tweeting more of them, obv: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2017/07/21/behold-the-kickmen-is-an-accidentally-good-football-game/

Audio setup seems to be fine. A quick google shows that a few people had this with Bioshock. I'll just try turning the other stuff down to 1 and see if that helps! Turns out DOOM was only the first two "campaigns" free over the weekend, which is pretty much what the demo gives you anyway, so that was a waste of time. Never mind, back to Bioshock all the sooner!

Ah, nice one, thanks! I already got the classic version free on gog, but after I started this playthrough. Maybe I'll have a quick jaunt back in time to that one before I play the special edition...

It's released! I've now edited the launch trailer into the OP. Anyone who fancies taking a punt on this for the price of half a pint of lager in an expensive London boozer, please buy a copy ASAP so it's close to launch and pushes it up the charts! EDIT: it is currently 10% off!

Wow, Bioshock is fantastic. It gives the sensation of being overwhelmed by this bizarre, horrific city you've been plunged into - loads of visual effects, towering architecture and scripted moments of disaster - but doesn't actually overwhelm you with mechanics etc. Everything's been tutorialised really nicely and I'm already having fun with the RPG-lite stuff - using your plasmids in various ways, hacking security to friendly mode, exploring big non-linear multi-room spaces, crawling through air vents (although I'm annoyed I had to give up my fire plasmid before I realised there was another iced-over door I could have explored. Hopefully I'll get more slots and be able to come back). The presentation's great as well, from the art deco design to the unnerving enemies and the friendly-hacked drones that bob and buzz around you like something Alyx Vance might hack together out of a car engine and a ventilation fan. Really the only thing I can complain about is that no matter how low I put the volume on everything else, I still can't hear Atlas' instructions if anything else is going on. A lot of games seem to have this issue, I've found. I always have to put music volume down to at most 40%. Even the old Lucasarts adventures did it. EDIT: oh man, DOOM is free to play all weekend, I think I'm going to have to put Bioshock down for a few days to blast through that...

Yes. No multiplayer. If this game is huuuugely successful, Dan will likely do a multiplayer/console/everything-else-people-have-been-asking-about remake/sequel.

Ah ha ha! Well, considering I made it all the way to the end of CoJ, I most definitely have more patience than that cat. So yeah, finished. After the boss-fight there was another boulder pushing puzzle and an annoying final bit where it wants you to use your quick-draw mechanics rather than the usual ones, but doesn't tell you, so you have to sit through an unskippable 1 minute cutscene over and over to get back to the 2-second gap where you have control, until you figure it out. Call Of Juarez: Cool Ideas, Fluffed. I'd love to play a tightened version of this game, hopefully Gunslinger is that game. The villa condensed down everything good about the game by sticking to the shooting and providing a relatively open, well-designed level. Other stuff I forgot to mention - jagging and pop-in are fairly heinous and the writing is pretty dreadful. Tropey but not in a fun way, and so long-winded and repetitive. The overlapping characters shtick was fun throughout, though, even if it was a cheap way to use a bunch of levels twice. Alright, onto Bioshock! Excited for this. I know the big narrative twist already, but never mind. At least, I know the gist of it, so please don't go into any more detail than what I know: ACTUALLY, in my (unsuccessful) search for features on CoJ, I noticed that Bound In Blood got a demo, so I think I'm going to download that from Steam first and have a go. Sounds like they've tweaked at least a couple of the mechanics from the original game, like bullet-time and quick-draws. (I also found out that the guy who plays Reverend Ray is Gul Dukat from DS9 and, more excitingly, the Mars security guy in Total Recall who shouts "THEY'RE ALL CONNECTED!" and has a brief pock-faced character actor stare-off with Michael Ironside.) UPDATE: looks a bit nicer though the Chrome Engine - which apparently was a bit controversial at one point for some reason - is now making shadows and heat shimmer look ugly. Has modern auto-regen health, confusing HUD damage-reports and the new cover mechanic and quick-draw mechanic are fiddly. Hope Gunslinger is better than this, frankly.