Chris Brown-DeMoreno

This so one was so bad it might have turned me off to horror sequels in general but certainly reboots, remakes, or otherwise the return of legacy characters. I think there's a reason the majority of the Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween movies were all terrible: The original movies were classics with a story to tell while everything after them are the products of some studio that just wants to make more money. Halloween (and even the reboot confusingly also named Halloween) had a story to tell; the story of a girl named Laurie and the evil that invaded her life. The original was about survival while the reboot was about redemption. Michael should have died in that trap room but the need to milk this for all it's worth gave us Halloween Kills, which made no sense, and Halloween Ends which somehow makes even less sense than that. Even while you're watching this movie you're trying to figure out where plot points and every even somewhat intriguing idea if smothered in absolute stupidity so much so that whatever quality might be there doesn't even register. Why were we following this Corey character so closely? Hard to say because I was to busy wondering why Allyson was so obsessed with a guy that she knew for like 4 days. There's no good reason any of them are still in that town but reason is given and....fine. Its justifiable at least. but that reason gets spit on when she's ready to throw it away for a dude who's done nothing but throw red flags in her face. I guess that really justifiable reason stops mattering because he said so. But the worst part is how little Michael Myers there is in the movie. I think he kills like 3 people out of the dozen or so that die. Why is that even a thing in a Halloween movie featuring Michael Myers? Who thought that was a good idea? And when he finally does something it lasts for all of 5 minutes before the climax. This was a terrible movie and an even worse way to say goodbye to the iconic Laurie, a grandma who spends most of the movie at home, in the background worried about her granddaughter and not hunting or fighting the evil that everyone knows is still out there. Putting an end to Michael Myers should have been the focal point of this movie not whatever the f*** this actually was.

It would be unfair to give it anything less than 4 stars because it is a good game; not a lot of bugs, controls well, and has a good narrative but it's about as boring to play as I expected. The developers took one of the coolest teams in comics and instead of allowing you to play as one of the more unusual characters like Rocket or Groot or even as the much more fun looking melee characters in Drax or Gamora you're stuck playing as the regular human with guns. Where have I seen that before? It's nice that you can issue commands to the others and they'll execute some sort of scripted ability but that's about it. The rest of the gameplay is running around and shooting. It's a good thing that this boring gameplay is packaged nicely otherwise this could be a bad game. The voice acting for Star Lord is terrible though. Or maybe it's the writing. I'm not sure. He sounds like a 16 year old trying to do a man's voice, constant teenage whining and all.

Following years of demand for a Battlefield: Bad Company 3 that has still yet to materialize, the CEO of EA once said that he didn't understand what it was that players liked about those games. Looking at the state of Battlefield 2042 it's clear to me that EA doesn't understand the Battlefield fan base at all. As odd as it may sound to say I can actually forgive the bugs and glitches; things like hit registration, imbalance, and performance. I think those can and likely will be fixed. BF4 was the same kind of disaster but they fixed that eventually. No, my problems are with the core aspects of the game that wont be changed, the most egregious of which to me is the replacement of the simple classes with Rainbow Six: Seige style specialists. While there are 10 of those compared to the old 4 classes (or whatever they were called) customization actually seems more limited. Then there are unnecessary changes to the control scheme, the fact that destruction is somehow more limited than it was in decade old Battlefield games, and those lame weather events that are only really cool the first time you see it. Battlefield has basically become gimicky rather than fun based on some solid gameplay. My heart goes out to anyone who put money down on this game.

I'm officially a fan of Housemarque after this one. I felt the exact same way about Resogun back in the day as I do this. IMO, Resogun was a must buy for every PS4 owner. Easily one of the best PS4 games, period. While I can understand how the difficulty of Returnal might be a turn off, I've been surprised how many of my friends who usually hate this much challenge are happily banging their heads against this one because of how much fun it is to play, live or die. This studio has a bright future.

The game gets points for the story, visuals, sound, and overall presentation but everything about controlling your characters and combat has an oddly clunky feel to it. On its own it's not necessarily bad but that compared to more polished games like Ghost of Tsushima, even simple things like walking around or jumping feels dated in Marvel's Avengers. What's worse is that if you've played Anthem, regardless of how you feel, it's quite obvious how Square Enix has failed to nail the feeling of being Iron Man. This is quite bad in comparison to how controlling s character in Anthem feels. While I would still recommend the game, I simply cannot do so with high regard. It just feels off. I'm certain it's something you can get used to and will largely ignore as time goes on but that's not necessarily an excuse for it feeling so lousy in the first place.

For me Stray was a disappointment. It's not that it was necessarily a bad game as for what it was it was fine albeit incredibly mediocre. The story was nice and the gameplay was average at best but outside of the novelty of playing as a cat there's just not a whole lot to like about the game beyond what you'd expect of a polished game in 2022 and by that I mean the visuals are good, the frame rate largely solid, and there aren't a lot of bugs. The narrative isn't anything revolutionary either. If you've played video games, watched movies, or read books you'll recognize this story. It's actually what I expected. The disappointment for me comes from the cat gameplay. While you do get to run around as a cat you unfortunately don't get to do a lot of cat stuff outside of a few seemingly random instances or where the game wants you to do cat stuff in service of progression. For example, early on you'll be prompted to do that thing cats do where they subtly nudge something off an edge. While you can knock things over by just running into them, you're only able to do that specific action where they decided to put that prompt which are few and only when its done to progress something, like knocking a box over to find something inside of it. Expect something similar for anything you might think you can do as this cat. Even worse, the narrative isn't even about the cat. It's about some little robot that you find and the cat is just there to usher the robot from place to place and learn about its history. I won't call it bad or state that you shouldn't play it but I do think that the expectation you might have of the gameplay won't meet the reality.

*May contain spoilers* It's a high quality Netflix series but it's not perfect....with the exception of the casting which I have zero gripes with. My one complaint is that the show doesn't do a good job conveying the passage of time. As an example, between the time Geralt meets Yennifer and the time they have sort of a breakup they talk as if months or years have passed but this all occurs within the span of two episodes: They are intimate at the end of one and are splitting late in the next. It's a bit jarring and is indicative of a lot of what I see in the show. Ciri's buildup is slow and is well developed. Yennifers is much less so but still developed well. The introduction to Geralt is equally well built. But the interactions between these characters and the way time passes between these interactions feels awefully short, likely due to the budget and number of episodes in the season. The narrative and acting are great but it all feels too fast and sudden. I want them to slow it down for Season 2 and spend more time building on these character relationships before Earth shattering events occur. While it's fine from a narrative standpoint, it just doesn't feel impactful when we've spent so little time with the characters together. I frankly didn't even care that Geralt and Yennifer split....and I should.

As always Kojima has crafted a bizarre yet oddly intriguing narrative that I haven't yet had enough of. Unfortunately as a video game it fails for me on the most basic level, especially early on. There's far too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay and what there is, while relaxing in small doses, is actually kind of boring. If not for my desire to dig more into the story, I'd put this thing down. I'm sure it gets better but that's not an excuse for a poor early first impression.

Starfield is an incredibly mediocre game. Had it not come from Bethesda, a company with a built-in fanbase who adore the RPG elements they are so good at, this would be generally reviewed much more poorly than it currently is. The shooting is bad, the UI is awful as many things are burried in an obtuse menu system, and while there's certainly a lot of space to explore it must be noted that most of it is barren and lifeless; its like touting that you have a huge house but after buying it you could only afford to decorate the living room. What's the point of all these planets, and outer space, if there isn't much to do in most of it? While they certainly nail the RPG elements, the game they build around that stuff is just OK. The biggest sin however is the near complete lack of ship-space exploration. You can fly around in space in your ship but you never feel like you're going anywhere. They went for "realism" in that every planet is astronomically far away from the next. So much so that it's borderline impossible to simply fly from one to another. That's realistic alright but is it fun? Even worse, when you are in low orbit near one you still cant just fly down to it's surface. You need to go through menus to land (and take off) and watch a cutscene. It's incredibly shallow. If you're a fan of Bethesda games you probably already know what you're getting and have decided to be fine with that. If you're not, or want more out of your game than just roleplaying, pass on this one until you can get it at a discount.

This is one of those games that's actually hard to review. You'll see a lot of people praising the visuals and gameplay and people deriding the cutscenes but the reality is somewhere in between and will depend heavily upon what you like. The biggest issue for me and the one that I want to try to paint the clearest picture of is the cutscenes and most specifcially the pacing of them. This game has so many cutscenes. Too many, in fact. It feels more like I'm watching an interactive movie than playing a video game at times and this for me is really frustrating. It's not just that there are a lot but how they are used: There will be dozens of instances in the main scenario alone that you watch a cutscene, watch another cutscene, walk your character forward for about 10 seconds and then trigger another cutscene. This sequence may happen repeatedly. You can opt to minimize this if you force yourself to explore but you'll quickly find that these maps (which are not open world) are very small and linear. There's just not much to find in this world that isn't part of a quest and if you're trying to take all of the side-quests, be prepared for A LOT of cutscenes, many of which play out just like I described above. It doesn't help that the combat is mind-numbingly easy with the exception of a handful of boss fights. This will depend on your skill to some degree but when I say EASY I say it because the AI is so poor a lot of the time. At one point, I earned a skill that allowed me to block (as an alternative to dodging). It has a special ability ifyou perform a precision/timed block and I wanted to try it out. I went out into the field found some enemie and stood there doing nothing while I wated for them to attack. They didn't. At least not in any way that you could consider challenging. Instead, they danced around me for seocnds at a time doing nothing before attacking once and then going back to dancing around me. You'll get to points where the enemies will hit harder, and some are more aggressive than what I'm saying here, but by and large you're fighting mindless fodder who are just distractions for the one or two enemies that will actually do something. If that's what you like, great and it's not necessarily bad except for the fact that this means non-boss fights are exceedingly brief and if you're not deliberately going out of your way to find combat you'll quickly find yourself in yet another cutscene as there's little to do in between them.