Cappuccino Kid

Dull, humourless fantasy. I’m sure there are hundreds of examples in gaming history, but the worst, and most prominent, modern examples are Skyrim and Dragon Age. I still remember the opening words on the back of Dragon Age Origins, text that is literally meant to sell you the game. And what did they go with? “You are a grey warden”. Fucking hell. Just call the whole game “Beige Janitor” and be done with it.

Finished this last night, and it’s left me with mixed feelings. Firstly, the series doesn’t really seem to have a proper ending. I appreciate this is real life, so you can’t expect everything to be tied up neatly by a certain point, but there’s no effort made even to summarise the point both cases have reached and indicate what might happen next. The whole thing ends so abruptly I was searching around afterwards for another episode. More significantly, I found that the longer the series went on, the more doubts I had about Avery’s innocence. Dassey’s innocence is, to me, pretty much beyond doubt, and I also fully believe that much of the evidence against Avery was tampered with to one degree or another. But the issue I had with Zellner’s case was the same I have with almost any conspiracy theory: it requires a degree of planning and intelligence on the part of the conspirators that is far beyond any capability they have demonstrated. To take one example: her theory that they broke into Avery’s trailer to obtain the blood samples. How did they know he’d leave blood behind? How did they manage to wait unseen for him to go out, but then be so close that they could get in so quickly? How come they had the correct equipment for removing blood, and were able to do it so successfully, when even Zellner and her blood expert struggled to work out how to get the blood out the sink? All the scenarios presented by the state and the defence seem to require significant leaps of faith, so my feelings were much more ambivalent at the end of this than they were at the end of the first season.

I’ve not really got far enough into this to form a proper opinion yet, but one thing that struck me in the first few hours is how it obviously draws inspiration from other recent big games. In the past, Rockstar games have generally felt to me like they were developed in a vacuum, but this seems to have several very clear points of reference. The stamina meter feels like it was directly nicked from Breath of the Wild, the hunting-vision is very Witcher 3, and the big missions have a distinct whiff of Naughty Dog about them. None of that is necessarily bad, but it does remove the feeling that Rockstar games have previously had that they were somehow magically dropped into the world fully-formed.

I think I might be the only person who remembers this. It was basically two separate games united by the theme of rollerskating, but the monochrome isometric one was where it was at. This was ace; really nippy and smooth for the time. Plus bonus wah-wah in the theme tune.

To balance all the (correct) observations about how much the combat derives from that Arkham games, I'd point out that Spider-Man 2 also had pretty much the same "press dodge when the icon flashes over your head" mechanic. When I first played Arkham Asylum, I distinctly remember being surprised at just how much they'd taken from that game's combat. So, y'know, what goes around comes around.

Is it just me, or is it a little glitchy? Nothing dreadful, but things like slight dialog skipping and characters suddenly teleporting a few inches to one side mid-cutscene. I'm playing pre-patch, as it's taking forever to download, so hoping that will sort it.

I've never even played a Smash Bros game, but now all I remember of my life is Smash Bros.

It's ok everyone, the Treehouse is about Smash Bros as well!

Only half-way through this week's TCGS, and it's a delight. The combination of Elmo's apologies and Sean's return is lovely. I've always enjoyed Jon's podcasting, but he did feel slightly out of place here. Especially as he seemed to be edging closer to shouting "It's political correctness gone mad!" with each passing week.

It is Grace and Glory. But even though I got past the boss fight immediately before that (in the collapsing colosseum with the hourglass) relatively easily, I don't feel like I have any idea how or why. I just used spammed PKP, and occasionally PPKP, until it was over. I've replayed the first proper couple of levels several times, and feel like I'm mainly in control of what's going on. But the later levels just feel random.

I really don’t understand this game. I don’t mean the plot (although that is incomprehensible), I mean I literally don’t understand the basic mechanics of the game. i know you’re meant to dodge, and do combos, but aside from on the most basic enemies, I have no idea when you’re meant to dodge, or what combos you’re meant to do. I thought I was vaguely getting the hang of it, but I’ve now hit a wall of such combined incomprehensibility and difficulty that it’s clear I was fooling myself and getting along with about one combo and some button mashing, which will no longer cut it. It’s just utterly bewildering, to the extent that I genuinely have no idea whether it’s genius or complete shite, or what I should or shouldn’t do to progress any further. It’s not even that I don’t like it, as I don’t feel like I understand it enough to form any sort of judgement.

I had that one too, in a silvery grey rather than the black. It worked great with my original ZX Spectrum +, but when I upgraded to a Speccy +3 it needed a slight retune every time I switched the computer on for some reason. It lasted me a good 15+ years, from the mid-80s right through to the new millennium, only getting replaced when I bought a new telly to go with my PS2.

Well, that was pretty poor. I like Chris O'Dowd, but I have no idea what he's doing in this film. It's like he's in an episode of Red Dwarf, and the rest of them are in a (rubbish) version of Event Horizon. Its only reason to exist is to explain where the Cloverfield monsters came from, and the answers it gives are both entirely uninteresting, and inconsistent with the world-building of the original film.

To elaborate on this slightly: don't be afraid to use every dirty trick in the book to defeat enemies. Don't worry if everyone else is telling you that you should be running around in your pants, parrying and roll-dodging bosses' attacks. It's perfectly ok to circle around a pillar for 20 minutes, always keeping them on the other side, occasionally stabbing them with a very long spear. Those bastards would do the same to you if they could.

That doesn't really solve the inconsistencies between the two films though.