Messages

Sorry, didn't think it was that revealing except for one sentence in there.

Yes, that's the sentence that needed the spoiler tags.

Damn, I forgot how amazing the Shadow of The Beast 2 score was. The Game Over theme is amazingly haunting (and has stuck with me because I heard it a LOT as a nipper)! I've only played the first Witcher, but I remember really enjoying the end credits song and letting it play out (same thing happened with The Evil Within recently, there's a great licensed Gary Numan track in that game).

I'm possibly a bit bias (I develop, arrange and implement music in videogames for a living) but I think videogame score is every bit as important and deserves every bit of the respect that movie soundtracks receive, so am always keeping an ear on that aspect of games as I play and there are a few scores I'll listen to a great deal once the game is done.

The Mass Effect games are probably my favourites, they did an amazing job on those. Some of the collaborations with Clint Mansell on the third game still tug on my heart strings pretty hard when I hear them now, and hearing that galaxy map music is like slipping on a comfy pair of familiar slippers. The Halo games have some really memorable stuff too, although I thought the implementation of the music in those early Bungie ones could have been a lot slicker and more organic. Monkey Island is totally timeless (as are a lot of the Lucasarts games, love Fate of Atlantis too!).

More recently the Hotline Miami games sound fantastic and do a great job of not coming across as repetitive given how long you can be stuck in a level (with one quibble though - I wish they'd found loop points for the tracks instead of just letting them finish and start up again. Hearing a track end and then just start up again - with some awkward dead air in between - is one of my pet peeves). Oh and Wolfenstein: The New Order had some cracking tracks.

Currently playing through Rise of The Tomb Raider and been hugely impressed with the way their dynamic music is implemented - they're using midi to generate percussion pieces procedurally on the fly based on factors in the game and it works brilliantly I reckon. Fantastic way to change intensity during animal encounters and combat. Great game too!

Read a while back about a parent who was introducing his son to gaming in a chronological fashion - giving him old consoles at a young age and seeing how his gaming interest/skill developed. There's a blog out there somewhere with his findings!

[Dead Space 3]

Me and my brother always try and keep a co-op PC game on the go because it means we can play online when we get a chance (he's in Vancouver and I'm in Scotland so the time zone difference makes it tough!), so just finished playing through Dead Space 3 together.

Played it on 360 when it came out and found it terribly frustrating, partly because the combat really wasn't balanced for a single player and partly because the first two games were absolutely stunning so the fact this one is just sort of a bit good was pretty disappointing. Suffice to say, it was way more fun when combined with catch up chats with my brother and made for some fun japes and a lot of intensely panicked shouting.

Still a huge drop-off from the first two in every regard, but a decent co-op horror shooter by any other standards.

Up for some Oscars, including Best Film. Just for such an out there action movie to get a nomination is amazing, if it won it would be quite unusual and special.

Finished Halo 5 last night and really, really enjoyed it. I've been really late to seeing the fuss about Halo games, but I think I was just playing them wrong because the way I usually play shooters (pretty slow and cautious) doesn't really work in Halo because it's more about the chaos and being overwhelmed and always keeping on the move. Once it clicked with me it's actually pretty exhilarating and the new movement stuff they've added in this makes it really badass because you can zip around and clamber and dash and groundstomp. Great fun!

It's got really epic set pieces too, like this ace one where you're on a huge floating robot thing and running down it towards the ground that's miles away, while it's moving and trying to shake you off. Looks beautiful, really took my breath away - https://account.xbox.com/en-gb/gameclip/184cf3b6-61bf-45b3-b01b-46d8f883fefa?gamerTag=Superbeasto&scid=03a80100-9ff3-46ea-be76-e00e7fe465df

Not a clue what was going on in the story though. Looked like big epic things were happening, but the Halo storyline has been unintelligible for a really long time and this is no different.

Had mentioned to a friend that I'd been after a copy of Space Hulk for a while, and by serendipity someone from his board game club decided to sell theirs the next day for a very reasonable price. Chuffed, haven't played it in over 20 years I think but remember it being fantastic.

The other upshot is that to go and collect it I went and met the guy at the board game club and had a look around and am now thinking of going along regularly. I'd known about the club but nerves and social anxiety meant I hadn't been comfortable just turning up, but the people I did speak to were really friendly and it seems like it could be a great way to get some regular gaming done (I manage to get a session organized with friends very rarely which is frustrating).

Figured I would share the link here in case it's something other Glasgow boarders might be interested in or don't know about - http://www.g3gamers.co.uk/

Speaking of TFA, one friend of mine went to see it and someone in the cinema had come along specifically to shout out spoilers to everyone else. Not even just chatting about it and being overheard (which is disrespectful enough, and pure absolute dickery) but actually waiting until everyone had sat down and the film had started and then shouting the spoiler at the top of his voice.

[The Hateful Eight]

Yes, it's the Arrow Blu-ray.

They do indeed have a knack for putting together great packages for their releases.

They'd passed under my radar a bit but my mam got me a Hellraiser blu-ray set for my birthday (The Scarlet Box) and it's an incredibly lovely package. Hardback book, art cards, posters, lovely presentation and fantastic extras. If they put that much care into their other releases then I'll need to check them out.

Saw The Hateful Eight at the weekend (digital, our local weren't showing the print). I loved it, but I should probably say that I've always been a big Tarantino fan so I'm aware it won't be for everyone. It looks fantastic (he really uses the added width of the aspect ratio brilliantly, even if it did occur to me that the blu-ray release may be more black bar than picture), sounds amazing (the sound design is impeccable and the Morricone score is stunning, including some very good use of in-world ambience and instruments) and the performances are excellent all round.

One thing I didn't expect was how much it riffs on John Carpenter and Sam Raimi. The way the cabin is shot and the way the violence and gore is heightened to the point of slapstick ludicrousness is total Raimi, and there's at least one distinctive shot of Russell just walking across the room that seems to be lifted straight from Evil Dead as an out and out homage, like it's Tarantino tipping his hat to it and acknowledging the influence. And I guess you can't do a movie about paranoia in an isolated snowy location without The Thing springing to mind, but the movie plays on that overtly with a couple of sequences and the occasional Kurt Russell line seems to have put in playfully as a reference to that movie (I could be wrong but I think one or two lines are direct lifts).

There's a lot to love, and I only had very minor quibbles, main one being the constant use of the N-Bomb. Not because I was offended, because it's all very appropriate to the period and the characters and the racial tension is thematically a huge part of the movie. I think it was more just that hearing the same word in almost every line started to grate on me. At times I thought the idea was to repeat it to the point that it became amusing, and at first the brazen use of it leads to some genuinely funny exchanges, but as it wore on it just became a bit irritating. Maybe any other word used as heavily would be just as annoying, or maybe that word itself was indeed making me uncomfortable and maybe that was entirely the purpose (it certainly serves to froth up a real anger at some characters). Not sure, but it definitely had me wincing after a while.

Other than that though I had a great time. I'd like to see the 70mm print if it comes to Glasgow, but I have heard that it's 20mins longer and I'm really not sure if it's a film that would benefit from that on a first viewing. It's a long film as is and I'd love to see the extra content on my next viewing, but personally with the cinema seat I was squashed into I was quite happy with the shorter edit. I worry that the extra 20mins might have caused it to sag and drag for me. Will be a different matter when it gets a home release and I can watch it on a couch without my knees being slowly crushed into powder.   

From your description I had absolutely no idea what movie you were talking about.

Back when I was a student I had a job at Sky taking customer services calls. The Sixth Sense had just come out on their box office service and I still remember a particular couple calling up to book it. The guy booking it had already seen it and as I'm processing it I hear his wife in the background asking him what it's about and he replied [spoiler]"It's really good, Bruce Willis plays a ghost who makes friends with a young boy"[/spoiler].

It always stuck in my mind as a great example of how some people just don't have the sense to identify what is and isn't appropriate to include in a synopsis. Not being able to describe a film without giving away the surprises is very lazy thinking, and I've always thought reviewers and critics who can describe and dissect things without giving that sort of thing away should be applauded because clearly it's a skill not everyone has.

I know what you mean - this is for 2-4 players and I doubt we'd be able to get a group of 4 together regularly enough to do it either, board game sessions with friends are way too sporadic for us to do most campaign-style games! I think we can commit to doing a couple of 2 player games a month and getting through it that way mind you, my one worry is that we'll be getting a bit of a diluted experience for not having a full team. Will see how it goes and report back!

Kermode gave it a shout out in his latest video blog, saw it at a festival and described it as a very divisive film that half the audience loved and half the audience really, really didn't. He was one of the people who loved it.

The fact it's so marmite makes me even more curious to see it to be honest.

[Pandemic Legacy]

Got another board game as a wedding gift, Pandemic Legacy. Have played a couple of vanilla games of Pandemic using it just to learn the rules, as it advises doing that before you embark on the 'legacy' part of it, which sounds reeeeeeally interesting.

Basically it seems you play it as a campaign over 12 months, the decks are designed to be drawn in a very specific order over the course of that campaign and as you play the rules and conditions will change permanently. You'll be told to put permanent stickers on the board, to rip up cards never to be used again and there are chunks of the rulebook which are blank as those will be filled with new rules as the game goes on. Characters receive scars and traumas from month to month and can be perma-deathed (cards destroyed and everything).

Never played anything like it really, should be very cool.

Well, the unthinkable actually happened. After revisiting Revenge of The Sith and really, really enjoying to a surprising degree, we watched A New Hope a couple of nights later. Loved it as always (it's quite a special experience watching something that is that ingrained in your consciousness from all those childhood viewings), but everyone present agreed that they'd enjoyed RoTS more and I agreed.

Not saying it's objectively better or anything, but certainly on those particular viewings I got more of a kick out of it. At any rate, Empire is up next and will obviously blow them both out the water.