Posts

Posted on

I Have Finally Finished Red Dead Redemption 2!

It only took me eight months and eighty hours, but I finally did it. I finished the main story for Red Dead Redemption 2, and it was quite the ride. While my brother did it in only fifty-eight hours, he missed many of the side stories. Honestly after looking around, to get most out of the narrative you need to invest at least seventy hours. Which is crazy to think about. My only problem with this is that a lot of the middle feels like they are stretching it out. It is not filler per say, but we all know what is going to happen, and they force you to play through every beat of it. An editor should have gotten out the red pen.

In this day of people wanting games to last forever, I can see why they left everything in, but I didn’t do any of the hunting, fishing or gathering quests. Just ones with a story, and I know I missed a couple of those too. It is a shame that a lot of people will feel some fatigue or just never make it through to the conclusion. Had the story been forty hours with all the extras, I think this game would have been even better, and people would have been given the time to explore a bit more. The way it is now just feels indulgent. Like giving people a whole cake instead of just a slice, and then giving them a smaller cake at the end for dessert. It’s a lot of cake, and most people will probably not have the stomach for it.

If you can make it to the end, it is rewarding, and it dumps you off in a great place before the start of the first Red Dead Redemption. It then lets you roam around and do whatever you want in the game world. Even see all the locations from the first game, but that is up to you. Again, it is a little indulgent to add areas to the game map you don’t even need to visit in the campaign or its epilog, but go for it if you want to. For all of you that haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe get some coffee, but keep pecking away at that cake. You will be happy once you finish it, and the little cake at the end too.

Posted on

Hands On Xbox Game Pass For PC!

During Microsoft’s E3 briefing they launched the new Xbox Game Pass for PC. Much like Game Pass for Xbox, you pay $10 a month, (currently $5 a month during its beta period) and you get a collection of games that come and go from the service much like Netflix. Also like Netflix, all original Xbox Game Studio Games get added to Game Pass day one and will not leave the service. Since I already have Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold, I got to combine those two services and upgrade to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Which includes Game Pass for both PC and Xbox, and Gold. I have a little over a year before I start paying anything (I had a whole year of Gold and a couple months of Game Pass, so it gave me credit for all that), but once I do, it will be $15 a month for all the Xbox services.

That is all well and good, but if the service is not any good, it is a waste of money. So far it seems like a winner. You need to have your computer on the latest version of Windows 10 (1903), then you need to download the new Xbox beta app, and then you will see a list of games that you can download and play. The new Xbox app is a big upgrade over using the Microsoft Store for finding and downloading games. All the games are organized in a much better fashion, and it has a sleek way of showing you the games you have installed on a little left hand bar, that way you are never more than a click a way from playing your games. Unlike say Steam, where if you are in the store you need to click on your library tab and then scroll through a bunch of uninstalled games to get to the game you want. Now, to be fair I have hundreds of Steam games and there are less than a hundred games thus far in Game Pass for PC. How sleek it will be a few months or a year from now has yet to be seen.

There are some annoyances however. For one, once a game is installed it is added to your Start Menu, but if you don’t ‘own’ the game, you need to first launch the Xbox app, and then start the game from there. I am guessing that is so it can make sure your Game Pass subscription is up to date, but if that is the case, why add Game Pass games to the Start Menu at all? Also, there need to be more tabs in the new Xbox app, like a built in way to check out Achievements, or search for Xbox Groups. In order to do that you need to open up the Xbox Console Companion App, but I would rather just use one app if I could. The new Game Bar helps a little with this, but I would apricate a more complete solution.

All in all, Microsoft has another winner on its hands. It has found a way to bring a lot of value to gamers, and an odd way for gamers to get around the Epic Store. A lot of Epic’s ‘exclusives’ are now on Game Pass since Microsoft bought Double Fine and its publishing arm, and all games for the Xbox are already on the Microsoft Store, so Epic can’t do anything about a game company selling the PC version on that same store as well. Loopholes are fun aren’t they? It is also an easy way for friends to insure that they have a lot of games in common if they want to play together. They can both just look in their Game Pass library and pick out something that sounds fun.

I am not sure how much I will use Xbox Game Pass for PC, my PC is a little long in the tooth, but since it is included in the services I am already paying for, it is a nice bonus. Game Pass also let me see if my PC is up to the task of running Metro Exodus, it mostly is, but it has a few little hiccups. If you are a PC gamer, I would say it is something to be aware of for sure, though you may want to wait a little bit for the roster of games to fill out and for the Xbox app to get a few more features. Then you can get your money’s worth out of your one month $1 trail period.

Posted on

Go, Go Godzilla!

Somehow the Toho/Legendary/Warner Bros Monsterverse has made it three movies. I never thought it would make it this far, but I am glad it did. I have loved the Toho monsters ever since I was a kid, and these movies have brought them to life better than I could have hoped for. The latest movie Godzilla: King of Monsters is both the best and the worst of the franchise. If, like me, seeing these giant beasts on screen is something you have been pining for, King of Monsters gives you the most kaiju action ever, but if that is not your bag, there is not a lot to the rest of the movie. King of Monsters is all kaiju all the time, and some annoying people making bad decisions.

Godzilla: King of Monsters takes place five years after the first Godzilla. The world is still reeling from the destruction of San Francisco and Las Vegas. Monarch, the secret monster finding organization, is wrestling to keep control of its operations and not be absorbed in the military. The military wants to kill all the kaiju, but Monarch wants to study them and learn how to live with them. A few dumb things happen and bada bing bada boom monsters are destroying the place.

Story wise, there is not a lot here, and that hurts the movie. I think the producers heard the complaints that there wasn’t enough Godzilla in the first Godzilla, so they amped it up a bit. Which is good for people who just want monster destruction, but bad for people who want involving story. Though why those people would come to a giant monster movie is beyond me.

There are a lot of actors in this movie, and they are all fine. They are given one note to play, and they all mostly play it well, but they are not the stars. Godzilla and his kaiju crew are, and they are amazing. The CG doesn’t hold up all the time, but for the most part everything looks great, and the fights are epic. While the trailer promises a ton of monsters, the movie focuses on four: Godzilla, Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan. If there was someone else you were expecting, you may be disappointed.

It is hard to fault a movie about monsters for focusing on the monsters. Though, because of this focus everything else suffers, but for kaiju fans there is a lot to like, and I think this movie will find its audience. I don’t think it is as big as Warner Bros was hoping for, but it will be remembered fondly. Still, out of the three movies in the Monsterverse: Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, and King of Monsters, King of Monsters is probably the weakest if viewed as a complete movie. If viewed as a way to see giant monster destruction, it is the best.

Posted on

Microsoft Kicked Off E3 2019 With A …. Well It Kicked Off E3 2019!

Microsoft had the first big press event of E3 2019, and it wasn’t a bad show. I mean it had Keanu Reeves, but there was nothing mind blowing about it. Its job was to remind everyone that even though Xbox Scarlet comes out Holiday 2020, there will be tons of games to play until then. Xbox Game Pass for PC launched, and for $15 a month you get everything (Live Gold, Game Pass PC, and Game Pass Xbox) which is nice. Battle Toads will be a thing again, and of course Gears 5 comes out this fall. Gears 5 will be the only big Xbox headliner this year.

The real big news was Microsoft bought Double Fine Productions, which I mean, holy crap, but they didn’t have anything new to share. Just that Psychonauts 2 will still come to all the promised platforms and to Game Pass. The news behind the news is that with that purchase Microsoft now owns all the founding members of game financing and profit sharing site Fig.co, so Microsoft probably owns Fig.co as well.

I think that means we are once again seeing the death of independent game studios. It happened before in the ’00s when EA bought BioWare/Pandemic in 2007 and Bethesda/ZeniMax bought id Software in 2009, and the same reasons for selling out then are being expressed now. Back then it was too expensive to create AAA games without being part of a mega-publisher, and now it is too expensive to create top tier independent games, let’s call them AA, without being part of something bigger. Games are too big and gamers expect a lot, and unless you have tens of millions of dollars at your disposal it is impossible to get those games made. Due to the finical risk publishers are in turn looking towards their own studios to make those games instead of taking a risk on funding outside talent, so to survive you need to find someone who will buy you and not change your studio, and for now Microsoft is saying that is what they are going to do.

On that somber news, I look forward to playing what was shown at this year’s show, and getting an Xbox Scarlet next fall. The show will not be remembered as anything special, but it did its job. I will not lack for games for the next twelve months.

Posted on

Good Omens Mostly Lives Up To Its Title

I was beyond excited to learn that Niel Gaiman himself was bringing Good Omens to life on Amazon Prime, and he mostly succeeds. Still, it wasn’t a perfect interpretation. There are pacing issues, and there is a lot of stuff from the book that is in the show, but it isn’t given enough time to breath or land properly. It is worth watching, but it doesn’t quite live up to its source material.

If you have never read Good Omens, then you should. Immediately. Sure, that would make this summery paragraph useless, but it is better for you if you have read Good Omens and then waste a couple seconds reading a pointless paragraph then having not read Good Omens. It is a classic. A lot of people like to say ‘modern classic’, but I don’t want to qualify it. However, you will not be reading it in the next couple of minutes, so here we go. An angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), have been on earth since the beginning, and they have grown to love the world and its inhabitants, so when it is time for the apocalypses to begin, they will team up to stop it.

Since one of the authors of Good Omens, Neil Gaiman, took it on himself to adapt his co-written book to screen, I feel like he tried to stay too true to the source material. It all feels crammed in without the space or care it needs. The show either needed to be longer to let everything happen more naturally, or Gaiman needed to get out the red pen and narrow the focus a bit. Which is what the BBC radio play did, and it was fantastic. Now, this series was never going to live up to the book. The book combines Terry Pratchett’s amazing humor and wit with Gaiman’s lyrical and fairytale like prose. It was an almost perfect chimera of the two authors’ strengths. The show on the other hand, tells the story, and is quite charming, but it can’t quite reproduce what made the book special.

What makes Good Omens truly worth watching are the leads. Sheen and Tennant are amazing. They have one of the best on screen friendships I have seen in quite some time, and any time they are together, the show starts to sing. However, any time they are not on screen the show gets a bit hoarse, so it is good they have so much screen time, and that is not to say the other actors are not capable, quite the contrary, but these two’s chemistry elevates everything.

Good Omens the TV series is good, but coming from a book that is superlative, and then a BBC radio show that was excellent, good doesn’t quite feel good enough. Especially right now when there is so much excellent TV to watch, so in the end, I still recommend Good Omens. It is worth watching for Tennant and Sheen alone, but honestly, you should read the book, and if you have done that, find a copy of the BBC radio play. Then finally watch this mini-series.