twmac

I finally got round to watching Tomorrowland and I seem to recall it getting quite a few negative reviews. I don't really understand why, it is probably one of the strongest kids films I have watched in quite some time (Inside Out and Zootopia are on the list). The plot kind of reminded me a little of the premise to Bioshock but kept fairly clean, Clooney does Clooney and is out shone by the kid actors who do a great job. Has any one seen it? Would be curious if it is just that I recently watched both X-Men Apocalypse and Batman vs Superman and now my standards have been sufficiently lowered.

So, I have started watching 'The Americans' because of the recommendations here and on Twitter. I am wondering if it was the hype but I have watched 4 episodes and am now a bit deflated. The problem with this show is that any tension that exists for the primary characters is almost non-existent because it is a series with a run. When Keri Russel's character talks about being afraid of being found out it has no impact because I know there are 10 more episodes of the season left. So the series rests on the strength of its tertiary characters - the ones that you know could actually be in jeopardy. This meant that I found it an uneven run. I didn't care about the central conflict of most of the episodes but really cared about Viola and her son who get dragged into it just becase she happened to be a cleaner in an important office. There are some great performances in there for sure, I like both the FBI agent and the two 'Americans' but I'd almost prefer it if the tone had been comedic instead serious. What I did enjoy about the podcast was Danielle's take on communist equality. I travelled through Vietnam recently and you can buy a lot of reprinted communist propaganda against the American invasion and occupation. They are really pretty and what struck me was that women are very predominantly featured in almost every poster. The thrust is that communism is in everyone and they need to resist American with every inch of their fibre. It is a very attractive propostion and a powerful one. Weirdly - Vietnam (followed by Cambodia) is probably has some of the most overt, institutionalised sexism I've seen in a while. Men will sit and drink at the table and the women will stand on the periphery. At one hostel I was invited to join in the drinking and when my partner showed up and joined in all the men were not so much shocked as bemused (like 'what are these crazy westerners doing?'). So, yeah, the equality of the communist message seems limited to motivating both sexes to die for the cause but as soon as that is out of the way - there is still a hierachy at which women remain at the bottom. ADDING: Sorry Rob, I don't think 'The Americans' is the best TV on at the moment, not even by a long shot.

To add to te Co-Op stuff. I played Dark Souls II on day one and it was before people had figured out a lot of things. I sort of 'ruined' a lot of bosses by identifying where they were and then putting a summoning stone down and waiting for people to pull me in. I then would experience them in the safety of another person's game (I couldn't lose souls) and get used to their patterns before I took them on myself. The thing is I got hooked on that element and sometimes would sit patiently at good spots and then walk people through them and help them as much as possible. There were two bosses in particular (The Smelter Demon and the guy who jumps around all the place with a bug that crawls into his eye) that I must have jumped into over 30 times just to help people out long after I had any interest in fighting them myself. As a random happenstance of this - I ended up joining a guild that, when I wore a specific ring, would instantly summon me into lower level players' games as long as they were wearing a corresponding ring and were being invaded. The way this worked is that the invader would be levelled 'fairly' (around the same as the invadee) but I wouldn't be. So some level 30 troll would run over, spec'd for PVP only to find a level 70 guy waiting for him alongside his intended victim. I actually became obsessed with this stuff and considered it my duty to help the lower level guys. The number of times I would get messaged by people over Xbox Live to thank me for my help - made my day everytime.

Onedollarwilliam - I just sent this to some people who worked on that project - I imagine that, despite of the emotionally draining experience of the project, they are going to like the video as much as I did.

That multiplayer BETA did the game no favours. However, after talking to a bunch of different people - it sounds like it is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Can't wait to get my hands on it in the coming months!

I thought this was a universal truth? I mean Goldblum is adorable and everything but Laura Dern has better lines, delivers them with aplomb but without over egging it, and manages to look cool even while rooting through shit.

So, I feel like I only come on here to whine about something I don't like that I have watched so before I do that I thought I would recommend: Hush - It is a home invasion film with the main twist being that the victim is deaf. Really tightly scripted, great performances and they do some good stuff with the sound near the end. Sisters - I can't wholeheartedly recommend this film but Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are just so damn likeable that I still enjoyed it.Maya Rudolph gets a thankless role in that film. Joy Ride - Such a weird film, directed by John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction) and written by JJ Abrams, it is pretty standard horror/thriller. The acting is solid and the pacing is spot on. You end up enjoying the quiet periods more than anything else. There are two huge plot holes in the film but otherwise it falls into the Jeepers Creepers category of solid, entertaining schlock. So, I just watched Civil War. I ended up really enjoying it with only the Black Panther coming off as a bit bland with very little script to work with. The problem is that I ended up thinking about it a whole hell of a lot today and the main thesis of the film is really unpleasant.

Am I right in understanding that the levels are now open ended or is the game still on rails? I played through the first three games on PS3 and I don't really rate them. Uncharted had terrible controls that were floaty and unsatisfying, the platforming had no stakes in it. Sure it looked pretty damn good but dying never felt like a big deal, the game just strapped you back into the roller coaster and off you went again. It got worse at the end with zombie bit because the game felt ill equipped to deal with it. Some thrid person shooters can do this when you feel like the limitation to beating the game is you the player. In Uncharted it felt like I was fighting the controls instead. There were also too many on rails driving sections that were just tedious. Uncharted 2 was a huge step as the controls were better but that second level with the stealth was atrocious and almost put me off the whole game. The platforming continued to be completely pointless except as a show piece for their art. There are also some points near the end where the game 'CoD'd' me: I got dumped in this arena in the snow and there were a number of guards patrolling, I snuck through them and got to the exit only to be spotted and killed, I tried stealth again and the same thing happened. It was then that I realised I had to kill all the guards or else I auto-failed the mission. The ending has a great punchline but the shoot out up to that point is tedious, it succumbs to pretty much the same stuff the first one did, only with more annoying NPC enemies. Uncharted 3 actually seemed to regress, I can't put my finger on it but felt like the aiming was worse than 2. To be honest I don't remember much of the game outisde the fist fight in London. The game looked kind of shit, the platforming had become even more redundant (die on a jump get teleported 5 feet back) and I don't think I could told you anything about the plot or the characters. So, no, not really excited about Uncharted 4

Hey, My card has died while I am in the middle of Thailand and I am lucky that my partner has access to money so I am not completely screwed but I am facing a long and painful discussion with my Bank on how to send me my new card as I am not going to be in the UK for some time. However, it has been floated to me that rather than waiting for up to six weeks for my new card to get here and being almost entirely dependent on my partner I could try and get a Pre-Paid travel card. A top-up card but with foreign currency. I looked into Travelex that do a card where you buy money on their flat rate and then you can just pull out money. Problem is that there isn't a Travelex store anywhere in Thailand (closest place is Malaysia or Singapore). Anyone had any experience with these and any suggestions on companies like Travelex that might have the same sort of offer?

That is a good start - I will check for that. Thanks for the advice!

Loved this game a few months ago when it came to the XBone. I hope the sequel also makes its way to the console.

I strongly recommend The Deer God. Very chilled out, very pretty game where you run a long being a deer.

I am very fond of Binary Domain - but the only subtlety comes from the dialogue between the two Japanese cops that get thrown into the middle of the plot for no reason: http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2012/04/binary-domain-review/ I kind of agree though, I reckon that developers should focus more on environmental story telling instead of going 'Yeah, chuck some dialogue in there'. I also love Spec Ops: The Line, if you read some of the interviews at what is being implied in the game - I had a totally different read on the situation so, yeah, there is subtlety in there.

My favourite game type in Titanfall was last Titan standing. The last online shooter I got into was Gears of War so I was surprised how much I enjoyed this one. My problem is that I had no friends with an Xbox One at the time so I was playing with randos that makes it a lot less fun. I didn't realise how much I thrive on communication - I played one game with a co-worker and we topped the leaderboard (it was probably the only time I came first in the non-Last Titan Standing matches)

I didn't like Red Dead Redemption - but then the last Rockstar game I didn't think was utter pish was probably Manhunter. I am saddened to hear that they are going to make another one and that I am going to get constant Facebook updates about this game up to and after the game is released. Oh God, Twitter.

I just 'finished' Freedom Wars. In the beginning it was the best sequel to Lost Planet 2 and the closest thing I could imagine to an 'Attack on Titan' game. There are so many things to learn about the combat (I've not fully mastered all of it) and there are a ton of layers to it despite the limited number of enemy types. You can grapple hook on to these giant enemies and either try to pull them to the ground or you can jump onto them and try and amputate limbs or weapons attached to them. The first 40-50 times it is really exciting but the problem comes with the crafting system. As you level up your guns and stuff you need more specific components from certain types of enemies, but the problem here is that how and which level will provide that for you is fairly impenetrable. I ground through one 45 minute level only to find that I had not picked up the Carapace: Will O'Engine Mk I but instead collected a lot of Carapace: Will O'Engine MKII, so I went to a different level and accidentally got Marksmen: Will O'Engine MKI and not Carapace ones. What are Carapaces? They come from a type of enemies not called Carapaces. There are T-Type and S-Type enemies that are more commonly known as Ramosas and Paradoxas but the game freely exchanges those two terms without explaining. So, yeah frustrating but not enough to break me until I got to the final boss, a three level series of fights that you can fail and have to redo. The final boss is deeply frustrating and I ended up going online and begging some over powered dudes to help me beat it in about 5 minutes. So, you can keep on playing to lower your freedom level (the plot is that you are sinner that has to do missions to try and earn your freedom that lowers your years of service - you start at about a million and I finished up with about seven hundred thousand years still to serve) but the levels now feel so hard and your AI so stupid that the only way to realistically do it is to go online. My connection in Thailand is simply not reliable enough to do that at the moment so I guess I am going to give up. That said - still a really fun game until that final chapter and I really wish there was a comprehensive guide out there for when you get frustrated.

The club scene shoot out was the best of a bad bunch. The one in his house is ripped so hard from the end sequence of the terrible Ahnohld film Raw Deal that I barely paid attention to it as I was too busy comparing it to that.

Watched John Wick after being told by people I trust that it is a solid action film that will entertain. Well it wasn't. The plot is paper thin, for obvious reasons, gangsters kill someone precious to John Wick so he murders them all. The thing is, if the action sequences were good then that would be all that it needed. The action scenes are really poorly shot and there is no sense of space or how it is that John Wick is moving through it. An example is a shoot out amongst some parked cars. The cinematographer just doesn't seem to know what to do and it all feels flat. All the guy had to do was copy Heat and it would have been okay but instead he copies Batman Begins (camera so close to the action that it feels amateurish) and ends up being a yawn fest. I really don't know why people rate this film when there are better, dumb, recent action films. American Ultra, The Equalizer and Kingsman are all better in the genre.

So, I finished Danganronpa a couple of days ago and I am really unhappy with the game now. My main complaint is the utterly illogical final trial. The best murders you figured out most of it on your own and so the trial where you have to present evidence felt fairly natural and it is you going through the paces of convincing everyone else of your point of view. The last trial makes no sense and the game actively does not present you with enough information before the trial to be able to figure out what is going on. So, it came down to me selecting evidence with no context for why I was doing this and why this was the 'right' evidence just so the game can explain to me afterwards what it all meant. This made the whole thing a series of tedious clicks and button presses with each new reveal not really being exciting at all. Also this game has some of the worst Anime tropes ever. I have no tolerance for it at the best of times and in this game there are just too many moments that feel like bad Anime filler where the main character will have a flashback of a flashback and allow the game to re-use the same portions of art and dialogue. It makes the final 3 hours of the game drag on for way too long and I was so happy the game was finally over. The weird student management mini-game that unlocks after the full game is finished is kind of fun.

Didn't Eno also do the opening to the Dreamcast boot sequence? If so, guy's a genius.

I finally watched Cooties (a film that got mentioned on here a while back). It starts off a lot gorier than I had anticipated and the film has no problem with child on child violence. However, by the end it has lost a lot of its initial meanness. I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers but overall the film is okay there are just better films in the genre and ones with 100% less Alison Pill.

Just finished Tearaway on the PS Vita. Thoroughly charming little game that was light on challenge (rightly so) but big on using the Vita's features. Am about halfway through Danganronpa and I am very mixed on this - I guess I am enjoying it but I hate the trial mini games as the touchscreen doesn't seem to do what I want it to half the time. Also, it can be anime as fuck, people repeating the same lines over and over. People having flashbacks of people repeating the same lines over and over. At least the logic behind each of the murders is sound, well except for the second one that just left me rolling my eyes.

Was on a plane for 14 hours today so I watched a bunch of films. Gone Girl - Don't want to say much about it as I managed to go in unspoiled and I think that made the first watching really good. Rosamund Pike is phenomenal in it. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - This is a film that felt very ambitious from a block buster perspective. It was wordless for a long period of time and relied on CGI apes to convey the story. It also gave the characters time to grow that allowed for the over the top final act feel like a natural conclusion. It managed to throw in some commentary about racism in there for good measure. Was this film successful? It was the only film I didn't fall asleep during. The intern - Robert Deniro's twilight years have recast as an old, lovable fuddie-duddie. This film is messy from a narrative perspective but its heart is largely in the right place. Deniro is a widower looking to fill a hole in his life so he ends up interning at a start up company and befriending the younger staff, including his boss played by Anne Hathway. It is saccharine as shit but there are moments where the film gets pretty feminist, Deniro expresses admiration for Hathway's drive and advises her to do what makes her happy even if that means focusing more on her job. The Drop - This film made me sad that James Gandolfini is dead. Very straight forward thriller about people crossing and double crossing people over paltry sums of money. Every one in it is solid. Fantastic Four - I was expecting this film to be a car crash because of the reviews. There are bad parts to it (Doctor Doom just doesn't seem to translate well to film) but overall the cast is likable and the actors play off of each other well (Michael B Jordan is watchable in pretty much everything). It is better than any of the other FF films. I would even say that as an origin story it is better than the first X-Men film too. I am perplexed at what it was that made everyone dog pile this, I guess I am not a huge fan of the comics so maybe I am missing something there.

To clarify, that is no criticism of loving Viva Pinata. It is just that you could have got an X360 and played it for maybe 60 quid. Also, heads up about the Elite controller - there are some weird things with the triggers that I have been noticing when you change the settings.

Please tell me that this isn't a mistake and that you bought an Xbone to play a port of an X360 game? Megadrive - Altered Beast and Ghouls n Ghosts were my favourite arcade games. I got a shock when I discovered Altered Beast is actually garbage. Dreamcast - Crazy Taxi, Power Stone and Soul Caliber NeoGeo Pocket Colour - When I saw Samurai Showdown II on it I could not resist Xbox - I went to a Lan party where there were 4 consoles setup so that we could play 16 player Halo. I lost it, the twin sticks on the Duke just made sense to me and I couldn't believe (after playing a lot of Quake III on the Dreamcast and Goldeneye on the N64) that an FPS could work on a console so well. I bought one about 2 days later. Xbox 360 - I was really resistant to buying this because everyone just seemed to regret purchasing it in the first year, nothing apart from Dead Rising seemed appealing (and I wasn't going to buy an HD TV to play it). Then Gears of War came out and I got the chance to play it. PS3 - I really wanted to play Yakuza 3 and 4 as well as Tokyo Jungle Xbox One - I wasn't interested at all, the lineup looked garbage and then I saw Dead Rising 3 running and I took a co-worker's unwanted pre-order off his hands.