Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 So I finally got around to playing through Dispatch over the weekend. It's been on my radar for quite a while, though the episodic releases made me hold off. Story and characters - I kind of love 'em. There are plenty of things I could nitpick about the world building, but it's sound enough to suspect disbelief for the 8-ish hours of run time. There are few choices that really seem meaningful in the end, but the overall trajectory of the story works. The characters are pretty flavorful and can be memorable. There's some good emotional beats woven in too. I can be more critical of the gameplay, though. The (optional) QTEs and dialog/story choices are there, but don't make for much of a game. The 'game' consists of the dispatching shifts and little hacking minigames. The latter works to break things up a bit without being very notable.  The dispatching... actually has a fair amount of depth built in. Characters level up with XP to get better stats that you as...

When I watched the pilot for Hazbin Hotel , I adored it. It had a good balance of serious vs. silly. The musical nature worked. The characters were appealing. And I suppose I could say it has an irreverent edge that drew me in too. The series was one of the few bits of entertainment I would say I truly anticipated and even was the final nudge to get me to subscribe to Amazon Prime. The first season was pretty great. Some of the voice actor changes were a little off-putting, but grew on me. The season was filled with banger songs. Really, I loved it all around, I think. The second season didn't quite hit with me in the same way, though.  Releasing two episodes (of eight) a week was a detriment in my book. The first two episodes were largely showing fallout from perspectives of Hell and Heaven, without moving things forward much at all. The next four then set up the stakes, explaining a few things and revealing others, but they felt moving a little fast and left me thinking "tha...

 Having just recently rolled credits on T he Outer Worlds 2 , I can safely say I found the game... fine. For every bit of praise, I probably have a caveat. The shooting and traversal mechanics work well enough for a first-person-centric game. There are plenty of opportunities to use the game's skills throughout, but how meaningful they are is questionable. Most objectives usually have multiple solutions, whether its pickpocketing a passcard, hacking a terminal, finding a hidden route, or just blasting everyone at a checkpoint. I generally feel that's good design, but to fall back on a point immediately, the differences don't really feel meaningful 99% of the time. The skills are also tuned in such a way that if you want to be able to pass checks throughout the game, you can really only invest in about three. Even a minor dip in something else can cut you off from a few endgame check (not that it would gate you out of anything particularly important). I can see ups and downs...

 Kind of what it says on the tin. I quite like the ideas behind it, blending song and fame in as elements of fending off invasion from a demon world. There's a good energy to the movie and characters. The music is solid - I say this as someone who appreciates K-Pop beat, but is a long way from a connoisseur. The overall story works pretty well, touching on (if only lightly) themes of friendship, acceptance, fandom, and redemption. The demonic tiger and magpie duo are cute and fun as hell for all their fairly brief appearances.  My only criticisms are generally about missed potential - things that weren't bad, but left me feeling like they could have been much better. Overall, the movie felt rushed, with an intro that has visuals but is still telling more than showing and an ending that wraps everything up neatly only if you don't think much about implications. The animation and cartoony vibe sort of go with that, making the movie feel like "just a kids' show" ...

 Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon was in early access for a while and full-released just recently. Many people have called it some sort of new inheritor of the Bethesda-style open world crown or something. I'm less than convinced of that, though it's pretty good. It's got the first-person (with third available) gameplay in a large sandbox down well. I found combat and movement felt better to me than Avowed. Like Avowed, the map is made up of large zones (3 in this case) rather than fully open like the most known Bethesda games. Interiors/dungeons are still loaded separately. Spells being largely treated as weapons is fine, though feels a bit less magical. There's weapon/armor/potion/food crafting. There's weapon/armor upgrading (though not spells apparently). There's fishing. There's even in-game sketching. A lot of those systems aren't required or used as much as they could be. In fact, my biggest complaint about the game is that everything feels like it t...

I haven't watched an MCU movie in a while. I missed... let's see... Quantumania, Eternals, Marvels, and Falcon & Winter Soldier at least. I suppose I've just been a bit burned out on them or something. But, I decided to catch Thunderbolts*.  I worked pretty well. I wasn't taken out of it. I don't find anything that bothers me about it. I liked some of the characters and the interplay. But there wasn't anything that quite pushed it over to great either. The group had a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy vibe with anti-heroes coming together to support one another in a quasi-family. But they also kind of copied the "losers" speech from the original GotG movie, which feels a little cheap. The team being made up of a bunch of people who "shoot and punch things" is a little lackluster for a superhero movie. They're not terribly super or heroic. We have three peak-human supersoldiers, a hyper-trained assassin (and Yelena carries the movie and ...