TwinIon

Hit me.

I agree completely. I loved going through as much as possible and reading each little bit that I would find. It's very much a linear game, but it was almost always open enough to not feel constrained. Even when things were going well enough for the protagonists, there was always some melancholy to be found in the wreckage of the world left behind. It's a incredibly well constructed game that is just so completely fleshed out.

71% on Metacritic Despite not being particularly fond of the recent installments, the Jurassic franchise is one that has always held a special place in my heart. I've also been known to fall prey to the allure of a few building simulators. Sim City 2000 was one of my first real gaming obsessions, and I put more than my fair share into roller coaster tycoon. So with even middling reviews, I jumped straight into Jurassic World Evolution, and while it's a game with some very notable flaws, I got my money's worth. If you have been known to fall prey to that "just one more turn" mentality, you'll be familiar with the kind of addiction that JWE tries to instill. There are a set of systems built into the game to insure that you're always working towards something. You always have very concrete goals that you're constantly working on, in addition to the general desire to build a bigger and better Jurassic Park. There are three different factions that you'll need to appease as you build your park: Security, Science, and Entertainment. Each faction will offer quick "contracts" that can be as simple as building a specific building or incubating a specific dinosaur, or slightly more general in needing to reach a particular park rating or guest count by any means. Each contract completed will raise your profile with that faction. Each faction will also have one mission with a set of more difficult requirements to fulfill. All of these systems mean there are constantly things to do. You're always working on multiple things at once. You can choose not to do contracts or missions, but there are various rewards for doing so, and they synergize into a very pleasant feedback loop that keeps you hooked in the game. The game isn't about building a single park either, but a series of them across different islands. Each time you start with different challenges and have new missions to complete. The island progression means there's a real sense of advancement in the game, beyond just building a better park with more dinosaurs. You'll want to get each park to five stars and complete the missions to unlock everything the game has to offer. While those gameplay loops are very satisfying and well done, the core gameplay of actually building the park is not quite as successful. There are limited options for types of buildings you can create, and their effect at times seems minimal. There aren't difficulty sliders as far as I could tell, and it's actually quite easy to appease the guests, even given the limited feedback you receive. I found that a lot of my optimization was unnecessary. At a certain point, I was building things better for myself, not because it seemed to affect my score in a meaningful way. As you build out your park, you'll undoubtedly come across the single most frustrating part of the game: dealing with the terrain restrictions. Each island is rather small and has more elevation changes than it often appears to have from a mostly top down viewpoint. Buildings have to be placed on mostly level ground, but it's often very unclear why a certain building can't go in a specific spot, even after leveling the terrain. It's very frustrating that it doesn't show you what part of the building is having trouble; the whole thing turns red, and you get a very general error. The other major frustration is the system of dinosaur comfort. When dinos are too uncomfortable, they'll break out. Give them too little green space or too little forest, too many or too few of their species or others, or not enough food or water and it's just a matter of time before they break out of their pen, no matter what fence you have. It's annoying that you can't see these limits before incubating a dino, so you might release a single one when it's only happy when in a group of 3 or 5. Getting just the right amount of space for larger dinos can also be a real pain. It seems to be a system of what the dino can "see", not what is available to them in their pen. So if you build a large enclosure with plenty of the forest they crave, but they are in a big open field, they might stay there and break out before wandering over to the forest. It's an opaque system that can really frustrate, especially when you run out of space. Aside from building the park, managing comfort, and researching new dinos, you'll spend a lot of your time sending out rangers to refill feeders. In the least satisfying busywork of the game, you're constantly told when a feeder runs out, and to tell a ranger to go refill it. There's a cost to refilling the feeder, but the rangers can't get hurt and they can't accidentally let a dino out, so there's not much thought that needs to go into it. You just have to select your rangers and tell them to replace the feeders. In a big park, this can become rather tiresome. You do have the ability to manually drive a ranger jeep, and some contracts will require you to. It can be a good bit of fun, even if the driving physics were clearly not at the top of the developer's priorities. You can also pilot a chopper that is used to tranquilize a dino when it needs to be moved. As I mentioned before, the game is rather easy. After you get a park off the ground, money is rarely a concern. The first hour or two of a new island you have to watch your budget carefully, but after that I almost never needed to think about my income. I quickly racked up a few million in reserve and couldn't spend it fast enough. Even after forgetting to let guests out of storm shelters or losing a few dozen guests to escaped raptors, my income would recover so quickly that those issues were hardly noticeable. That last bit of optimization to get a perfect 5 star rating can be a little illusive, but for the most part the game is firmly on the easy side. Overall I think it's a rather poor building simulator that is packaged in a compelling theme and visual package with a set of systems designed to keep you playing. For me, that was enough. I enjoyed moving through the parks, getting better at building and finding better strategies for park layouts. After about 40 hours I'd completed the primary missions and gotten five stars on all the islands, and I haven't felt any real need to go back and play in the sandbox mode, or even finish my plans for a few of the islands. Without concrete goals pushing me forward, the limitations and frustrations of the actual building sim take center stage, and even a game full of dinosaurs can't overcome that.

Watching the trailers at E3 this year reminded me that I never actually played through The Last of Us. I somehow missed it entirely on the PS3, and it was one of the first games I bought on the PS4. I played it up to a certain point and then lost track of it. I think it said my last save was November of 2014. Turns out, it's a pretty good game. It's impressive how well a game that is essentially from 2013 holds up in every respect. I had no doubt the story would be powerful and well told, and that those would stand the test of time. I was more skeptical that the game mechanics would feel sufficiently "modern," but it turns out that not a lot has changed in the last 5 years. There really wasn't anything that struck me as feeling particularly old fashioned in the way that some trail-blazing games do in retrospect. The progression and crafting systems are simplistic, but perfectly functional for the type of game it is. The graphics too, still look pretty good. They're notably not the best around anymore, but by and large this is still a very good looking game that is littered with astounding detail. Sure, you can see where some models could use a few more polygons or another pass or two of texture, but it's still perfectly capable of instilling the necessary empathy and horror. If there are any of you that, like me, somehow missed out on The Last of Us, it's still very much worth a play through.

I've heard nothing but good things about this one. Looking forward to seeing it.

I like the new Xbox theme, and I'm not sure if I'm alone, but I don't like the font. It feels too light to me, making it hard to read.

I thought she said paleo-veterinarian, but I could be wrong.

Sticking with the same avatar.

Trade wars are good and easy to win.

Even thought I'm not a fan of 12, I can at least understand why people love it. It's a deconstruction of the heist genre and a meta commentary on making sequels in general. It doubles down on the more esoteric aspects of the genre and actively rebels against what made 11 work so well. It's an audacious thing to do, and I'll give Soderbergh credit for trying, even if I didn't love the result. Ocean's 8 is not that. It's much more like 13 in that it obviously wants to re-create each beat and success of 11, but consistently fails to do so, and fails much worse than 13 did on almost every level.

Incredibles 2 is going to be a real beast. If a $150M opening weekend can't slow it down, I don't expect anything else to either.

50% on RT $150M opening weekend Just as the dinosaurs themselves were reverse engineered from bits of left behind DNA, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feels reverse engineered from a trailer. It's a film that moves breathlessly from action set piece to action set piece, but seemingly without thought or reason. The driving force for it's two hour run time is never narrative or character, but a brash and brainless commercialism, focused almost entirely on creating brief, trailer worthy moments. If you've seen the marketing for this fifth installment, you've likely seen some of these shots: A T-Rex standing triumphantly on another carnivore, volcano exploding in the background, Chris Pratt's Owen Grady staring down any number of dinosaurs or jumping through the open mouth of another T-Rex. These shots are often impressive, well framed and scored, and for the briefest of moments, reminiscent of the awe this series is constantly chasing. The failure then, is everything that must precede and follow those moments. At virtually no point in this film does a character make a critical decision that feels identifiably human. The villains are transparent and necessarily insidious. It's not enough that their hubris and greed be their downfall, they have to go out of their way to kill innocent people and imprison little girls. The heroes though, are even worse. Save the volcano at the beginning, every disaster that we witness throughout Jurassic World 2 is directly the fault of our heroes. They put themselves in ridiculous positions without any clear motivation, they actively make every situation more dangerous for themselves and everyone around them, and when things get out of control they do nothing to neutralize the situation, preferring instead to make disasters into catastrophes. With Jurassic World, the long mishandled series had a clear idea for a compelling premise. Even though I will always bemoan the execution of that film, I can credit it for that. With Fallen Kingdom, the franchise reverts back to the issues that plagued the first two sequels to Jurassic Park; lacking any worthwhile ideas for where to take the series next. Fallen Kingdom then compounds this with a complete lack of character drama, the thinnest possible motivations, and the worst plotting this series has yet seen. Fallen Kingdom is certainly in the running for the worst in a franchise with more than a couple terrible entries.

Another good thread:

I've been using it for a while. I probably do save some money, since the monthly fee is less than an average ticket around here. Mostly though, I see more movies with it than I would without it. I don't have to feel bad about going to see Tomb Raider in theaters because I didn't really spend any extra money to see it. I also am just a little bit more likely to see smaller films, just because it feels like "less of a risk." I'm not sure I'd have gone out of my way to see Mother! or The Rider, but since they were available at my local Movie Pass theater, I found the time and was very happy I did. For me the worst part of it is that the two theaters near me that I'd very much prefer don't accept it. I also really wish I could buy a ticket online with it. There's a couple theaters in town that Movie Pass works with that way, but not the one near me. It's kind of annoying that you now have to take a photo of your stub, but not that big of a hindrance. I'm also not a fan of the surge pricing they're about to introduce. I don't often use it during times I expect will have surge pricing, but if it does show up I'll be unhappy about it. The big question with Movie Pass is how long they'll be around. They're running out of cash, the stock in their parent company has nosedived, they're getting more competition, they might need as much as $1.2 Billion more capital before they could be profitable, and their new business model of buying stakes in movies and boosting the attendance seems doomed to fail. The whole thing is a scam being temporarily and artificially propped up by venture capital. If it survives the year I doubt it survives the next. At least by then there will probably still be other options.

If it does, it'll probably be a year or so removed from the console release, and I'm unlikely to wait.

I'm no economist, but it seems like the current growth is rather precarious.

As with a lot of this stuff, it sounds like this is a case of "well, what will the next judge think?"

On the actual topic of the freaking Space Force. What is it exactly that Trump thinks we need to do up there that we're not already? I'd love to hear what the Air Force thinks about all this. Besides, what are we going to do, build a new division of the armed forces that we send to space on Russian rockets?

Good lord. The problem with EMALS isn't necessarily that it's a bad idea, and now that it's mostly ready it absolutely shouldn't be abandoned. The problem is the whole stupid notion of concurrency; putting a system into production while it's still undergoing significant design changes. Maybe that idea works fine for some systems, but for something so massive and so obviously critical to the mission of a carrier, it's a ridiculous proposition.

IANAL, but my understanding is that if a cell phone provider gives this data away without a warrant, it then can't be used in court. For location data gathered from cell phone towers, you would need to convince a judge and get a warrant in order to use that info. Someone please correct me if that's not the case. What is less clear after this ruling is exactly how broad it is. The court went out of their way to specify that this is a narrow ruling, but they also seem to limit it to location data, which itself is rather broad. So this ruling might be very specific to only data scraped from cell towers, or it could mean a warrant is required for any kind of persistent location tracking, regardless of the third party doctrine.

It certainly looked reminiscent. Wouldn't surprise me if it's true.

Even as a big fan of VR, I think this is for the best. A new Xbox will be out in 2 years, and even then it's not clear to me that VR needs to be supported. I think the PC is really the best place for high end VR experiences, but the real mass market for VR will almost certainly be stand alone headsets. The ones that exist now aren't where they need to be, but give them some more pixel pushing power and inside-out positional tracking, and those will be what drives any real VR adoption. Microsoft is still in catch up mode, and they're better off building the best possible system and the best set of traditional games to sell it than spending too much time or effort building out their own VR system. All that said, if they could find a way to partner with Oculus or Vive on their next gen headset, that might make sense to me. Take those PC experiences and make it plug-and-play with an Xbox Next and that could be a win for all involved. I don't imagine MS seeing such an agreement worthwhile, but it might be their best option to have a place in the VR landscape.

66% on RT $42M Opening Weekend Ocean's 8 is a film that is better than Gary Ross's very poor Steven Soderbergh impression thanks to some dynamite casting, but it's ultimately unable to overcome the many issues that the writer / director brought to the table. On the surface, it's all there. Great cast, jazzy soundtrack, cool caper, and interesting characters. It's a recipe that Soderbergh managed brilliantly in Ocean's Eleven, but even he wasn't able to recreate it in his own sequels. It shouldn't be a surprise then, that Gary Ross falls even flatter in his attempt to cook up the same magic. Ross is completely unable to match Soderbergh's pacing or use the soundtrack to similar effect. This is a film that is completely centered around a high fashion event, but it's never able to be as effortlessly fashionable as Soderbergh's remake. It completely mistakes what, why, and how Eleven was so cool. Ross's poor impersenation didn't end at Ocean's Eleven either. The villianless structure was reminiecent of Magic Mike XXL and the end of the film directly echos Logan Lucky. In each case, Ross took something interesting and made it less so when grafted into Ocean's 8. All that said, Ocean's 8 isn't a complete disaster. While the sum is less than that of its parts, many of those parts are unquestionably worthwhile. In particular the leads have excellent chemistry. I could watch Bullock's sly Debbie Ocean and Blanchett's disinterested Lou run petty schemes and cons for hours. Hathaway perfectly embodies the image obsessed actress archetype, and Helana Bonham Carter's perpetual fish out of water routine works very much in her favor here. The rest of the cast is solid even if not entirely put to the best use. There are small joys sprinkled throughout the film, the kind that could have made a good movie great, instead of a poor one mediocre. The heist itself is interesting, but ultimately a failure in the ways that count. By never introducing a real foil for the ladies of crime, the stakes are kept to a minimum. That can be overcome given that there's still something of a thrill in the act, but the bigger issue is one of satisfaction. Regardless of how the heist itself ends, what the mark was or the reward, a successful heist film will leave you satisfied with the work. Inception's payoff is ultimately a single phone call and a business deal not going through, but there are both stakes and a real gratification in what they accomplish. That isn't present in Ocean's 8. Ross tries for it, but it feels hollow and ham fisted. He knew what it was he needed to do, he just wasn't good enough to get it done. In a film full of professional lairs, it's a shame that it's the director that couldn't make the disguise work. Given the rather reasonable box office performance I'd be happy to see another entry in this franchise, but I really hope they find someone else to put at the helm.

I really enjoyed it. Everything with Jack Jack was hilarious. The action was really excellent and inventive. Sure, there were some things that were repetitious from the first film, but overall I still really enjoyed it. I haven't really unpacked the themes of the film, because it certainly seems to say a lot at different times, and I'm not really sure it all comes together in a satisfying way.

Between Rian Johnson's trilogy and the Benioff and Weiss trilogy, I don't expect we'll run out of Star Wars films anytime soon. What I want from Disney here is simply to raise the bar for what gets greenlit. If someone has a great take on a great story in the Star Wars universe, then by all means, make the movie. What they don't need to do is go through the OT with a fine tooth comb and make origin stories or spinoffs of everyone and explain everything just because we heard someone talk about it.