Showing posts with label Alan Wake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Wake. Show all posts

Sunday, 27 December 2015

Life Is Strange: "The Ideal Ending"



I've been thinking about Life Is Strange a lot lately.  And not just the last episode, which made Sonic Boom look like a finished product.  The world and the characters and the details still swim in my headspace.  I have good memories of it.  There are things I would have preferred to do differently, but I'm also weirdly proud of a lot of the decisions I made in it.  While this series does absolutely crap the bed in its' finale, I must begrudgingly admit that it doesn't kill the entire project.  It doesn't retroactively make the entire game that came before it pointless and stupid, like The Walking Dead games did.

But I do find myself wondering what I would change about the game itself.  The first episode feels like it was written by martians trying to impersonate humans, based only on descriptions they heard over their space phones.  The last episode is malfunctioning filler.  And the reveal of the Big Bad Guy is spoiled so early in the game, I resented the characters not figuring it out sooner.

And then there's the last big choice in the game.  As it is, it's fine. It stopped me in my tracks, the way that Geth mission choice in Mass Effect 2 did.  But I think the options I wanted weren't there.

End-Game Spoilers below the break:  You've been warned.




Saturday, 26 May 2012

Sony, Ladies And Gentlemen...

Sony patented a thing where they could literally halt your game, at any given moment, right when you're trying to have fun... so they can show you an unskippable commercial. Remember how stupid and out-of-place that Verizon commercial was in Alan Wake? Now image it happened right when you were in the middle of an important fight or something.


I want you to understand something. I mean to really stop and think about this for a moment: These guys are still employed, but the people who made Kingdoms of Amalur are all out of a job now. That is the world we live in.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Tuesday, 26 April 2011

Grand Jury Prize 2010

After my "Ten Favourites" list, I decide on 'an alternative to 1st place', just as a special mention. Got the idea from Roger Ebert's Best Of lists. He calls it the Grand Jury Prize, which he based on the way film festivals go about it. And I am nothing if not unoriginal and completely lacking in imagination.

In 2008 I chose Braid.
In 2009 I went with Tokyo Magnitude 8.0.

Here's my choice for 2010, and why: