I forgot how much I like these Choose Your Own Adventure style Telltale Games. It didn’t help that the last one I played was the weakest release in the series. Given the “meh” taste that one left, I may not have picked The Expanse up, but I recently finished reading the books and I wanted to linger in that world a little longer.
The Expanse video game is a stand-alone story of Camina Drummer before she joined Fred Johnson, serving aboard a ship of Belt scavengers. They discover the location of what could be their biggest score only to run afoul of space pirates, suffer inter-crew drama, and the usual space opera fare. The plot doesn’t really tie-in to the grander themes of the series and books. It feels more like one of the many Expanse novellas. The stakes aren’t as big, but it was an entertaining story nonetheless.
As far as the “game” goes, the choices weren’t quite as dire as other Telltale games. Usually these games throw in a difficult “choose who dies” moment at the end of the first act. We didn’t get that here. In fact, one of the later episodes almost felt choice-free and was more like a non-violent version of Dead Space‘s haunted ships. I didn’t mind it so much, but that sort of sequence would have more appropriate in an RPG. But still, there was enough interaction here to keep it engaging through to the climax.
Like half the movies that come out these days, it’s a sequel that nobody asked for. I did enjoy it for the most part. It’s probably been around twenty years since I watched the original but the characters still felt familiar and it was good to learn how they all wasted their lives for the past two decades. Although it does lean into the “member-berries” a bit more than it should—to the point where they show brief clips from the first movie every so often.
The story of The Expanse has come to an end in a mostly satisfying way. The final book isn’t quite as exciting as the last two, but we finally get a sense of what the inter-dimensional enemy can do and why. They actually manage to tie in plots that, at the time, seemed like unimportant tangents. Overall, a great series to read.
Resident Evil 7 is a stark departure from the most recent games in the series where the emphasis has been on action. This a return to the more pure survival horror roots of the franchise, but as played from a first-person perspective. This means lots more pure horror atmosphere in which the best strategy is to conserve ammo and run away when you can.
The story draws a lot more from Texas Chainsaw Massacre than from the generic bio-weapon zombie plots of the past (I would have preferred if it dug deeper into the mythology of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken). Only in the last act does it start to tie in with the other games in the series. Most of the time you are trying to defeat a family of evil rednecks in order to save your (possessed) wife.
The early parts of the game, when I didn’t really know what to expect, were genuinely creepy. It’s loaded with jump scares that are even more effective from a first-person view. But, in the end, I was never a huge fan of the old-style Resident Evil. I really just want to blast monsters and not continuously be searching for ammo.
At its worst, the game can be more stressful than fun. But once I got a handle on my inventory and the game world opened up a bit, I started to enjoy it for what it was.
I’ve been ending the year with a little bit of a John Woo fest and The Killer is one of his best. Nowadays his style has been adopted by just about every action director so these films don’t have quite the punch as they once did. Still, you gotta love the gritty characters and storytelling against that backdrop of slo-mo squib blasts.
My twenty-something daughter swears this is the greatest cinematic series ever committed to film, but to me it’s just a slightly better than average kid’s movie with a couple of moments (mostly thanks to Jim Carey) that will appeal to adults.
This the first Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen if you don’t count that Dune documentary. It’s the tale of a boy who grows up in the circus, sees his mother violently attacked, and then gets caught up in some seedy murders as an adult. It’s all very operatic, yet cheesy. I can see why the director is touted as a visionary, but it feels like a bit of a mess. And yet, the climax had me. I actually felt for the characters as the story wrapped itself up nicely.
I swear this is the last of the Lucky Stars movies I will watch. For the first ten minutes I thought that this one was going to be the one. The opens with Jackie Chan action stunt work and I thought, “Finally, they are going to tie the two stories together in a meaningful, action-packed way!” Nope. Action ends and it’s back to an hour of pervert antics as Sammo and crew are hired to find Jackie with, surprise surprise, a sexy female partner who all the middle aged dudes want to grope. I’ll admit there was one laugh-out-loud joke involving ordering Japanese food, but it was obviously a live-action retelling of one of Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless Jokes. Like every other entry in this series, it ends with some decent fight sequences but it’s too little, too late.
Blake Stone was based off the Wolfenstein 3-D engine and included many graphical and game play improvements. The floors and ceilings are textured, there are many more enemies, a automap, and you can move back-and-forth through levels. All that is great but those were baby steps compared to the seismic shift that Doom brought to the genre. “So what?” You might ask, but realize that Doom was released a week after Blake Stone. One could say the game was doomed from the start, har har har!
Taken on its own merits the game is still okay especially when compared to Wolfenstein. It’s fast-paced and offers a little more variety. It still feels more like navigating a maze than exploring a world. Each episode is book-ended with some flavor text but it doesn’t ever really amount to a story.
The game is best approached as a leisurely time killer more akin to an iPhone game than an epic PC experience. There is some challenge at the higher difficulty settings but that comes more in ammo management rather than tricky enemy A.I. I didn’t hate it, but it is not an essential retro FPS. Rise of the Triad is a much better bridge between Wolf 3-D and Doom.
Wheels on Meals is a 1984 Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movie that is a precursor to the horrible Lucky Stars films that would follow. Fortunately, here the action take precedence over the uncomfortable comedy. It’s the story of two skateboarding food truck vendors in Barcelona who get caught up in Sammo’s investigation of a female pickpocket. The stunts are nowhere near as crazy as peak Jackie Chan, but the ending features so pretty good martial arts work.
