(no subject)
Aug. 24th, 2020 06:16 pm• A belated addition that I left off some earlier round-up post - Terminator: Dark Fate had caught my eye with the promise of a tall buff woman supersoldier wrecking shit in the name of protecting another woman, and I caught it on sale for a doable $3. Happy to say that it did provide the one thing I was there for! It is otherwise a fairly average addition to the Terminator mythos, and while I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it I've done worse things with my time. Just wish Cameron had better resisted the urge to craft a rebootquel that, as is the fashion, completely undermines the in-universe successes of the movies that came before. Our future is evil robots and that's that, apparently.
• And on the theme of buff women wrecking shit, I also watched The Old Guard. The summary of my post-watch discussion with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
syntheid would be "great characters! some cool concepts and fight scenes! wow that plot hinges entirely on a number of unexplainably bad decisions". Thumbs up on that undeniable gay, though.
• My trashy military series re-read involved me flicking through a few favourites and then jumping ahead to the two new books that had been released since I last paid it any attention. Not going to be new favourites, boo. As much as I like a number of the newer characters, it's becoming gratingly obvious that the series has gone on longer than it needed to and the writer is struggling to find things to do with the remainders of the old cadre. Sudden, gruesome, and unfair deaths are the name of the game, of course, but there's shooting the dog, and then there's shooting the dog so hard it retroactively obliterates entire arcs. On the upside, I had to quirk a smile over how present women are across every echelon of the hierarchy these days, which is a marked change in a series that didn't have a single female character of note until book three. It's still very A Man Wrote This, but good for you, dude. That's growth, or at least a better editor or ghostwriter or something. (Heh. Ghostwriter.)
• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was one of my Steam summer sale purchases, and I wish I liked it more because the aesthetic is choice. It's such an interesting little concept too, putting you in the skeletal shoes of a cursed drifter planting and harvesting stories as part of their pact, and the tales themselves are colourful and inventive. Alas, they forgot a core rule of video gaming, which is that it should be fun to play. WtWTLW just isn't fun enough to demand more than a couple of hours out of the player, and I have a pretty high tolerance for walking simulators. Ah well. At the very least, the music is very enjoyable.
• The Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, was well aware it didn't need to be any longer than it was, and for that I am especially grateful because I struggled terribly with motion sickness throughout. No the game's fault, really; I remember having similar issues with The Stanley Parable, so it must just be something about the engine they use. I liked it overall, and I think I've come to like it more in the lengthy aftermath than in the immediacy of playing it. There were some interesting points made and it was a good choice of medium for them, allowing the writer to explore these ideas without straying into the preachy.
• Still chugging along through A House of Many Doors in the meanwhile, albeit at a less frenzied pace, to collect all my dangling plot threads. I've found the City of Glass, aided a tentacled abomination in romancing a polluted river, fed a god-corpse to the Lord of Crows, become a Poet-Knight, accidentally facilitated two coups and deliberately started another, and no consequence has left me underwhelmed yet.
• Spiritfarer has been released! I'm not allowed to purchase it until I clear a few more off my to-play list, but it looks like such a darling of a game? It's from the same studio as Sundered so has the same gorgeous hand-drawn art style, but seems a far gentler story as you take the role of a ferrymaster to the dead, and any game that has "care for your spirit friends!" as a selling point immediately has my keen interest.
• And on the theme of buff women wrecking shit, I also watched The Old Guard. The summary of my post-watch discussion with
syntheid would be "great characters! some cool concepts and fight scenes! wow that plot hinges entirely on a number of unexplainably bad decisions". Thumbs up on that undeniable gay, though.• My trashy military series re-read involved me flicking through a few favourites and then jumping ahead to the two new books that had been released since I last paid it any attention. Not going to be new favourites, boo. As much as I like a number of the newer characters, it's becoming gratingly obvious that the series has gone on longer than it needed to and the writer is struggling to find things to do with the remainders of the old cadre. Sudden, gruesome, and unfair deaths are the name of the game, of course, but there's shooting the dog, and then there's shooting the dog so hard it retroactively obliterates entire arcs. On the upside, I had to quirk a smile over how present women are across every echelon of the hierarchy these days, which is a marked change in a series that didn't have a single female character of note until book three. It's still very A Man Wrote This, but good for you, dude. That's growth, or at least a better editor or ghostwriter or something. (Heh. Ghostwriter.)
• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was one of my Steam summer sale purchases, and I wish I liked it more because the aesthetic is choice. It's such an interesting little concept too, putting you in the skeletal shoes of a cursed drifter planting and harvesting stories as part of their pact, and the tales themselves are colourful and inventive. Alas, they forgot a core rule of video gaming, which is that it should be fun to play. WtWTLW just isn't fun enough to demand more than a couple of hours out of the player, and I have a pretty high tolerance for walking simulators. Ah well. At the very least, the music is very enjoyable.
• The Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, was well aware it didn't need to be any longer than it was, and for that I am especially grateful because I struggled terribly with motion sickness throughout. No the game's fault, really; I remember having similar issues with The Stanley Parable, so it must just be something about the engine they use. I liked it overall, and I think I've come to like it more in the lengthy aftermath than in the immediacy of playing it. There were some interesting points made and it was a good choice of medium for them, allowing the writer to explore these ideas without straying into the preachy.
• Still chugging along through A House of Many Doors in the meanwhile, albeit at a less frenzied pace, to collect all my dangling plot threads. I've found the City of Glass, aided a tentacled abomination in romancing a polluted river, fed a god-corpse to the Lord of Crows, become a Poet-Knight, accidentally facilitated two coups and deliberately started another, and no consequence has left me underwhelmed yet.
• Spiritfarer has been released! I'm not allowed to purchase it until I clear a few more off my to-play list, but it looks like such a darling of a game? It's from the same studio as Sundered so has the same gorgeous hand-drawn art style, but seems a far gentler story as you take the role of a ferrymaster to the dead, and any game that has "care for your spirit friends!" as a selling point immediately has my keen interest.
