Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.

My claim to a brush with celebrity is that I used to know Michael Rooker, who played the guy who got pretzeled.

That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.

The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.

It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.

I mean, this looks fine to me:

Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.

I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.

I posit that ratings in a franchise like Star Wars are a downstream reflection of previous material. Part of Andor’s low ratings I think are a reflection on the other shows that came out and weren’t good. It creates an environment where so many viewers check out. I’d say that Disney reducing the amount of Star Wars shows it puts out and giving the shows to properly talented creators to make unique high quality projects should be the takeaway.

I really hope the executive takeaway is “let individual creators have unique takes and expand Star Wars” and not “All Star Wars should now be dark and depressing and grim.”

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.

You don’t have any problems with it cycling? I’ve heard really big cans on tilt barrel handguns can cause problems with the weight of the can interfering with barrel movement.

What’s the can model? Do you like it?

A paintball filled with capsaicin or something similar. Technically many of the guns are sold purpose made as pepper ball launchers, but they are literally rebranded .68 cal paintball guns and compatible with commercial paintball gun parts.

I see two in the photo. Along with what I presume is a 37mm break open launcher.

Yes, they are repurposed to fire pepperballs.

The last Black Ops I cared about was 2. I could almost feel the developers of that one screaming that they wanted to break out of the COD mold. It actually had a lot of cool, if underbaked ideas. There were the sidemissions where you commanded an NPC squad ala Brothers In Arms, there were the pre-mission loadouts where after beating a mission set in the past you could go back and load up with future guns, there were multiple endings driven by choices in the missions.

There was a lot of stuff going on in that game which if it had been given a longer development cycle than the COD treadmill, and more freedom to stray from COD mainstays could have been something interesting. All of the above features could have really been pushed and refined beyond the small implimentation they ended up as. BO2 also tied the setting back to the cold war era roots, which makes it far more interesting that the cutout metal angular girder future design that is just the most generic looking thing ever. Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare was forgotten for a reason and it’s disappointing that Black Ops ended up eating all its aesthetics.

None of this matter of course, since no matter how many story trailers they release or how much people like me talk about what could make single player good, in the end the series is kept alive by tweaked out multiplayer addicts so I suppose it is all just a waste of time to think about.

objective

MEDIA APPRECIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, GOOD NIGHT!

Black borders on white text please. I beg you.

First, we have to agree on what a plot hole is.

My definition of a plot hole in a story is something that simply can not happen given the existing rules of the story, or something which could only happen in an unexplained and if not literally impossible than at least so unlikely it is practically impossible way that defies everything else we know about the story.

This would be an item inexplicably jumping locations, a character having knowledge they could not possibly have, or a character or item being in two places at once. Things like that which gnarl the story.

What it isn’t: A character making a bad decision, a character acting unusual (even to the point of acting out of character- that can be bad writing, but not a plot hole), a character forgetting something, a plot contrivance, an unlikely coincidence, something being unrealistic but consistent within the context of the story.

I commonly see poorly written scenes, or scenes where someone thinks a character was acting irrationally, or scientific or legal or other plot points that are intentionally written to serve the story described as plot holes.

With that description, I’d say quite a great number of works of fiction don’t have plot holes.

Here’s my pitch: The story and aesthetic of Fraiser, the gameplay of FEAR.