Slartibart Fast

The outdated futuristic experience. I've put in 150+ hours into this, but have uninstalled today (without finishing the main questline) after an escalating series of bugs and annoyances. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt when it came to mind-numbing storytelling and weak characters, because I really enjoyed the gunplay, space battles, weapon designs/customisations and ship building. I actually didn't mind the fast travel too much initially either, but eventually it breaks the immersion completely. There's plenty to do, but not a lot of variety and many things seemed pointless - like cooking: there's basically no need to develop your cooking skills, as med kits are plentiful and waaaay more beneficial than a carefully crafted meal. It won't take you long to realise that this is a re-skin of Skyrim or Fallout. The constant fetch quests and "Go here, talk to this person, then go back and tell someone what the other person said" work in a historic fantasy or the post-apocalypse. But here, in the 24th century, no one has WhatsApp or even a phone - so you are doomed to endless fast travel and long walks (without decent maps). I found myself tabbing through the conversations just to get to something interesting. You will also come up against many, many restrictions: you're over-encumbered; your ship is too big (or contains too many modules); you can't have any more crew members; you can't sell your stuff because the vendors have run out of money; you can't be a real pirate because a) bounties will cripple you financially, and b) the loot you steal is miniscule anyway. The bugs are also an issue. Here are my experiences: a dead colonist falls from the sky every time I unlock a new power; I constantly get the warning that I'm trespassing, regardless of where I am (and regardless of how many times I try the tricks people suggest to remove it in Reddit); my robot friend is always sitting on the roof of my ship (instead of inside where he should be); after ~100 hours of game play I started getting error messages saying I'd run out of space for save files (again Reddit didn't help me). After 150 hours, it all started to wear pretty thin. So I tried to blitz the main questline to complete the story. After wandering around a boring NASA launch site (with just a handful of enemies I could easily overpower) I clicked 'OK' multiple times on the 'Save File' error messages (which had become a habit) and "saved" my game like normal. The following day I logged back in to find that my save file didn't work and now I need to go back to Earth and do the NASA mission again. Instead, I clicked 'Uninstall'. I might come back to this in a few years, when the modders have (hopefully) fixed the game. What a shame.

Decent film for a Monday night. Predictable, but it moves fast enough to keep you engaged. McConaughey is a quality actor who tends to do bad films (imo) so it was good to see him play an interesting character here. Would have loved to see more of Marissa Tomei and William H Macy, but they were playing bit part roles unfortunately. I feel as though it could have done with a few more scenes to setup the connection with the 2 crimes: we seemed to go from 0 to 100 real quick on that. Then at the end I felt like credits could have rolled 5 minutes before they did. Better editting could have made this a 4 star or better.

I fell asleep, but I was quite tired. The start didn't grab me. It seemed a little contrived and I asked myself a few times: "Why would that person do that?" Some good actors who seemed underutilised too. Overall 3 stars, average.