Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I feel like the few things I can vent out of my mind recently are all spoilerish. How much should one protect people from spoilers, though, when they probably won't even see the source material? Hmm... Well, here there be potential spoilers, anyway. With some newish access to Netflix, I was easily able to get caught up on the latest (6th?)season of Voltron: Legendary Defender. I like the show and the development of the setting and characters for the most part. This season has some major ups and downs. On the one hand, it's getting to explaining and elaborating on a good number of things that were hinted at before. Lotor and Haggar's histories and perspectives lose some mystery. Keith and Krolia get to explore details of their past via (very convenient) time disruptions. We get a little bit of a love triangle going on. We find out what's up with Shiro. We get some Altean reveals. And even if it took up basically a whole episode, I enjoyed seeing the group playing Mon

Let's see, what did I say already about The Forest ? Decent, but not outstanding, survival and building gameplay with horror aspects. Poor breadcrumb direction/story delivery. The story endgame gets very linear once you head through a cave at the bottom of a giant sinkhole/crater. I actually got into it before I planned to - I was trying to build stairs down, which was taking a very long time, but a misstep led to falling down. Hugging the edges, I managed to survive and creep down from ledge to ledge safely. Thankfully, I had collected the required items beforehand (climbing axe, rebreather, keycard) or I would have had to find my way back up rather than being able to just commit. This path feeds you some more information about what has been going on with the island. It's still only bits, but enough to piece things together. It leads to the missing son, a boss fight (which is extremely hard to kill compared to anything else in the game), and a choice that determines the endi

I watched a playthrough of Agony , which... eh... the visual style and concept of a romp through "Hell" caught my eye, but seeing the game in action was beyond disappointing. The gory images become little more than a sea of red and black, the story has little heft to it, and the gameplay itself looked 99% dull and boring. I'm happy enough to skip that one myself. I've been playing The Forest , still on a bit of a survival kick. It mixes in horror-ish elements and generally looks good on paper. In practice, I find the challenges of the survival game format drag it down. Building is functional, but not great. Item crafting strikes me as counter-intuitive even after using it for a while. Mostly, though, the game is pretty terrible at motivating me forward. The player survives a plane crash on an island, seeing some native-type person take his son from the wreckage. Since then, after 20-or-so in-game days, I've seen a couple drawings that indicate the kid might sti

*yawn* Dog sitting is okay. Having a cuddly pup (not that she's really a puppy anymore) around has a certain appeal, though I fret perhaps overly much about not understanding what is wanted at any given time. I could do without the seemingly-random barking at something at near 3 am and I'll be glad to sleep in my own bed, but it made for an interesting change of pace. And I got in some entertainments over the weekend. It's hard to avoid spoilers in some cases, but I try... Solo: A Star Wars Story was not a movie that I wanted or felt any need for. I kind of wrote it off early, though trailers got me thinking "this might be an okay action/heist movie in the Star Wars setting." That turns out to be a good summary in my book. It's fine. There's some good action and decent characters. Nothing truly transcends to greatness, but it's an enjoyable-enough ride of a movie. From my perspective, a lot of the worst bits of Star Wars stem from trying to "f