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Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>
Fri Dec 10 04:08:23 PM +0330 2021
Most of my gemlog material lately has been devoted to games I'm playing and shows I'm watching. (Or movies.) I've played a lot of games and watched a lot of stuff lately, so I thought I would write a quick short-as-possible post about it just to make sure that I'm still keeping in touch with Gemspace.
I was playing and reviewing all of the Final Fantasy games in the Pixel Remaster series. They are great, but while I was able to steamroll through all the early games in the series in a matter of days, I somehow got stuck on Final Fantasy V, seemingly out of boredom. It is a great game, but I think I just got tired of being overloaded with Final Fantasy, plus I have been trying to 100% the games which is getting progressively harder as they get more complicated. I don't know why I care so much about getting all the Steam achievements, but since I was able to do it easily for the first games, I thought I would keep up with it. I even replayed half of FF3 to complete the bestiary.
FF5 is getting a little more complicated with trying to figure out what is missable and what isn't. Early on I focused on getting all the blue magic early on, which I don't know if that was really necessary, but whatever. Hopefully I'll get back to it soon.
The first game I started playing after the Final Fantasy series was a bit of Neverwinter Nights for the past week or so. I had bought the enhanced edition on GOG on sale some time ago, and the game holds up surprisingly well in spite of its dated graphics. I actually got a lot of fun out of playing the main campaign, even though for the most part is some kind of tedious dungeon crawl. The character and story writing are one of the positive highlights, which is to be expected of Bioware RPG's of this era.
NWN was actually the first commercial game I ever bought for Linux back in 2005. I still find it a worthy addition to any Linux gamer's collection.
I do still play Minecraft sometimes. All the press surrouding 1.18 got me to pick it up again a few months ago, but at the time I was playing 1.17 which introduced some foundational changes to the game, but not the highly anticipated world generation changes in 1.18. It felt like mostly the same game I had always been playing, and this time around I explored some other aspects of it I used to never pay attention to, like fishing, fox breeding, underwater exploration, and so on. Normally the way I play the game is very boring, but I got pretty far in my last world.
Now that 1.18 is out I had the obligation of checking it out. Yes, the world generation is really different. In truth, it's a bit disorienting for a game that has changed little in a decade. Now I have to explore and relearn basic tasks like how to find diamonds. If you haven't played Minecraft in a long time, this new release is a good time to try it again.
This is what we are watching now, which is currently airing until the end of the month. The entire first season is eight episodes, which is short for me, but at leat it won't occupy too much of my time that way. It's already renewed for future seasons, and it feels like it's already going to be a hit.
I read the first two Wheel of Time books when I was a teenager and liked it well enough. I was curious to see how Amazon would handle a filmed adaptation, and so far it has exceeded my expectations, which weren't super high to begin with. Seems like they are doing a fine job, and while the first episode didn't draw me in, by about episode four I felt like yeah, this is starting to get good.
What seems to be going on is that the show is vying for and possibly going to succeed in being the next big fantasy hit in television. The great popularity that the genre enjoyed starting with the now-ancient Lord of the Rings films and then the unbelievable fandom of Game of Thrones has shown to be an enduring phenomenon. With Game of Thrones ended and on a sour note at that, fantasy fans have been hungry for the next thing, which I think contributed to Netflix's The Witcher being a surprise hit along with things like the Castlevania anime adaptation.
Amazon wants Wheel of Time viewers to consider this their next fantasy fix, with the first episode pulling a couple cheap stunts (in my opinion) to scream to new viewers that this is the next Game of Thrones and Witcher and whatever rolled into one. People who grew up with Harry Potter and/or Avatar: The Last Airbender, or even Twilight, are all going to find something in it to grab on to.
So is it finally the holy grail we've been waiting for? The one fantasy franchise to rule them all? I guess we'll have to watch to the end of the season to find out. I personally hope it succeeds ecause I'm enjoying it so far. Perhaps in a later post I'll try to dissect what about it appeals to me, but really it's just for entertainment, so I'm not saying it's perfect or brilliant or anything like that. It's more just an hour of television that I can enjoy.
That being said, by comparison I am inclined to say that it qualitatively edges out previous fantasy series I've seen. I think it's just slightly better than Game of Thrones was (which, to be honest, was terribly overrated), and better than the first season of The Witcher, which I did really enjoy. I also think it's better than Shadow and Bone.
Wheel of Time has the long-term potential to beat Game of Thrones at its own game because it is working from finished (and arguably good) source material, whereas Game of Thrones started with good but unfinished source material and, when the show extended beyond the books and into the realm of letting the Benioff brothers write the story, crashed and burned. Wheel of Time ostensibly will not have that problem because it is grounded in something like fourteen finished books which I believe are fan-approved and time-tested.
Only a few episodes into this. I like it. Too bad the show's been canceled, but I'll happily watch the rest of the first season. I didn't watch the anime it was based on (although I saw the movie so long ago I can't rememer it), so that probably allows me to enjoy it more. This live-action rendition should be considered a fun experiment. It does seem to be unfairly panned.
I finally got around to watching this a couple days ago. It was better than I expected, and possily the best mafia movie made in the past many years. I thought it was better than The Irishman by a long shot. I don't know how it would come across to someone who has never seen The Sopranos, but I think it stands well on its own as a film. Well done, I say.
This is the second to last film I saw, and it was reasonably interesting. I don't recommend it to everyone because it's kind of a silly movie and not really a cinema classic, but I feel it was a worthy effort. It reminds me of The Truman Show, which I think was a great and classic film. This one is not so serious, and it's more of a comedy. It intentionlly references the film The 40 Year Old Virgin, and I can see the connection. The whole virtual world movie thing has been done before like with Ready Player One. I can't say which one is better.
In spite of the fact that Free Guy is kind of a cheap comedy, it does briefly touch on some interesting philosophical questions about the meaning of life and even some theological matters. Somehow the film manages to go slightly beyond its potential, but what stops it from being a truly great film is how much it crams into a short space, so there is little exploration of its most interesting facets and ends up feeling like a rushed experience.