Raithe

Forbes - Why its a bad idea for games like ME Andromeda to have piecemeal embargoes Some interesting thoughts from Forbes, which include:

Okay, having sat down and played about 2 hours of ME: Andromeda now... I am strangely getting deja vu feeling for the original Mass Effect. The whole opening sequence, first planet/mission on a linear track (with mild exploratory stuff), and then finally reaching the point it will start to open up and branch out galaxy wise. Is very much the whole Eden Prime / Citadel run through until you get your title as the special one. And not to put any serious spoilers to it, but yes, you do become special for... reasons. The graphics seem to bounce from quite lushly nice planetary stuff and then bizarrely odd facial looks (as shown by old tired face Addison). The combat is more pew-pew but with motion , so more the bounce around and dodge fire rather than just hunker down behind one piece of cover. The enemy will move and try to flank you and throw grenades and pull stuff like that rather than just come single file down a corridor. Once you try interacting with the UI in the sense of accessing the inventory menus, the codex, the journal, then it all gets a bit messy. Its very layered rather than within a few clicks. And while you get the "Your codex has fresh entries" exclamation mark showing up, it doesn't always highlight where the damn things are in the file structure, so you can end up clicking back and forth a whole heap of times to find that new one. Haven't had much exposure to the inventory management or research side of things yet. Just mostly the grabbing stuff and holding it because you can't do much with it during that opening. Also, no quick save button. And you cannot save the game during any Priority Missions. Which is basically the entire two hours of the start. It will do some autosaving, but beyond that, you're screwed. Once you get outside of anything titled a Priority Mission, you get saves as normal. The dialogue and writing are the typical space opera cheese fest of ME, so your mileage will vary depending on how entertaining you can find that. Haven't made up my mind about the new dialogue choices yet, have to wait and see how they pan out over time I think. On a certain level, they are very much more the subtle variations and tones rather than outright differences. The rational response compared to the emotional compared to the professional or the general humorous attempt. I think the differences will come out when you have npc's that (hopefully) react differently to the tones you take rather than what you're actually saying.

Heh. I remember the writing couple of Ilona Andrews talking about how their urban fantasy series kept turning up in the romance section just because the protagonist was a female. There's no actual "romance" as such until about the 3rd or 4th book and even then it's pretty comparable to other non-romance urban fantasy worlds where the principle character happens to click with some other person in the ongoing meta-story. But they got so tired of it happening they just threw their hands up and sat down and wrote some specific urban fantasy romance. But as was pointed out in that article, the classic science-fiction genre of 40 years ago was a serious blending of so many different genres, sometimes within the same story. It's only been in the last couple of decades that so many seemingly artificial "lines" have been drawn between one type of science fiction and one type of fantasy. Still, yes, it would be nice to do a search for Vampire stories or the like and not end up buried in cover pictures of bare male pecs and synopsis about some strong female who apparently ends up yearning for some bad boy vamp.

Amazon draws genre lines Amazon has warned romance authors not to list their books in the science fiction, fantasy, or children's categories.

Wheel of Time game was an oddly enjoyable First-Person Shooter when you got down to it. Wing Commander Prophecy was an interesting attempt.. I ended up getting the Gold Edition when it was pretty much impossible to download the rest of the game as they intended you to. Dial-up connections just didn't let you get the free expansion pack as they'd planned due to the large file size.

Heh. Well let's see: Along with a host of others. Hm, Vampire the Masquerade Redemption, The Collectors Box for Baldur's Gate II, System Shock, Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos, Star Trek Next Generation: The Final Unity, Call to Power II, Master of Orion II... this could take some time to work through. Heh. And a collection of 3.5 install disks for Windows 3.1 - Windows for Workgroups.

Heh. Military Sci-Fi author posted this: Which swiftly saw these as replies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwu8XNTGX5o

Because it's that time of the year...

In some ways it sounds like they're taking everything as a personal disappointment. It almost has a feel of someone's personal faith being shattered by the priest turning around and mooning the worshippers, rather than purely a game review...

Because some politicians do seem to go to these sorts of places.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ev4HY6BUbY

Gamespot - ME Andromeda File size revealed, Preloading begins for some

Sorting some things out and realised I have a box taking up space.... and it's full of games from the mid to late 90's. All in their boxes - the classic "big" game boxes before dvd slip cases became the norm. Most of them with cd's and floppy discs in and in pretty darn good condition. The likes of the original Aliens vs Predator, Imperium Galactica II, FF VIII and more... Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. It just seems sacrilegious to just dump them all in the rubbish, yet they're really too old to be taken down a charity shop.

Office Christmas Party. Nothing stunningly out of this world, but pleasantly funny with a few good chuckles. Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T J Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon along with a whole lot of faces you'd recognise but not be able to name, playing the parts of an office branch threatened with closure and mass firing just before Christmas and the office party they throw in an attempt to land a big client. Things, as might be expected, escalate wildly out of control.

Eh. Well I've got Origin Access at the moment, so I'll give the demo a try and possibly comment on it here when it's out later this week.

To be fair, one half of the visual design of Avatar looks interesting, the other half does seem very..animated Ferngully approach. It's got some "nice" cgi, but I wouldn't really say the visual design was glorious (at least in my mind of thinking). The way they approached it and all the lifeforms (apart from the space smurfs) came from a six-limbed biological background was interesting (if not great science), and those sorts of touches from a purely aesthetic viewpoint were nice to see, but once you step past the "gee whiz next level CGI!" of it all, it falls somewhat flat. Jupiter Ascending is in some ways similar to 5th Element, although 5th Element has a better story, in that all the design choices work, and don't come across as glaringly CGI porn only. The costume designs, the background sets, the starship aesthetics... The whole look and feel connects together and has a certain impact to the eye and brain.