Matt Edwards – Google

As Bad As It Gets. You've seen this sort of thing (done a hundred times better) before: Curmudgeon gets dragged (no pun intended) into the 21st century. Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood coping with life after his wife has passed away and foreign neighbours move in next door. As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson is forced to come to terms with his unsociable nature while looking after his gay neighbour's dog. Both perfect movies IMO. In 'Otto', Tom Hanks uncharacteristically hacks his way through the curmudgeon role, growling and calling everyone an idiot in a surprisingly ham-fisted, unsophisticated movie which seems to be attempting to depict his grief and depression after his wife passed away, and his decision to end his own life, but with a sense of humour that completely misses the mark. All things of course are fodder for comedy, but it just hasn't been done well enough here. In this movie, ironically, having foreign neighbours is shown to be a constant annoyance; one is insufferably irritating and high maintenance and the other is inept to the point of an apparent mental health disability. The other neighbours are just as annoying and the quality- or really the tone- of their portrayals have no business in this movie; they're more like caricatures played for cheap laughs in a children's comedy. Another 'woke' own goal (aside from depicting Mexicans as irritating and useless) is the depiction of the African American neighbour, a woman who's supposedly been taking care of her husband with Parkinson's for years while maintaining a well-cared for house, but who simultaneously doesn't know how to bleed a radiator (the Mexican neighbour can't even *say* "bleed a radiator"). So, having 'diverse' neighbours has been portrayed as a non-stop ordeal, but some things have been portrayed as perfectly OK and rather wonderful. Suicide, for example. Hanks's periodic attempts to kill himself correspond to changes in the movie's tone that make it look as though hanging yourself from a ceiling or gassing yourself to death in your car can actually be very clean and painless experiences. Everyone over a certain age having Parkinson's or a 'genetic' heart disease is totally normalised in this movie too. Shoehorning trans ideology half way through the movie is, frankly, insulting to everyone. Essentially Tom Hanks hates everyone, including his irritating Mexican neighbours even when they try to build bridges with him by making him food, he'll maintain his anti-social façade. But he's instantly accepting of a person who'd been throwing marketing material onto his lawn for years, *once it is revealed that the person is trans*! Remember good films that explored the lives of trans men and women? This isn't one of them. This has a little box-ticking segment as a pose and nothing more. Shame. Overall, this is a dull chore of a movie which I honestly couldn't finish.

I'd love to see this game get a complete overhaul, the potential here is huge but it's simply a bad beta experience at best. For me, not worth the £2.50. The story is compelling, the graphics generally adequate (Xbox one x), the voice acting is tolerable. But the game itself is just... terrible. The developers seem to have mistaken "doing things" for "gameplay". Those two things are not the same! Let me see if I can describe the problem. Let's say you're hungry. You can go in to your inventory, select a food item and eat it, and now you're less hungry according to your stats. Well, you've definitely "done something" but was that a fun bit of gameplay? No. You've got to escape your village, and a soldier is after you! You can either a) run away a short distance or b) get killed. You've definitely made a choice of sorts, but was that gameplay? No. You can't sneak around the soldier thereby expressing your sneaky roleplaying preference, you can't fight him, expressing your fighter roleplaying, he just kills you immediately. You walk down a fairly steep grassy hill, trip a little, so now you've got two "sprained ankle" icons next your health bar. This game is full of "doing things that don't add up to a game". Games are fun, doing things is dull. Yes, the clunk factor is incredibly high with this game, the menus and maps are dreadful, the icons that appear next your health bar are often indecipherable, the fast travel is tediously slow (?), the sleep timer animation slows down to an infuriating crawl as you approach your final hour of sleep, the controls are a mess and it's buggy as all f. and anything that resembles gameplay has been rendered difficult..I actually quite liked the lock picking, very tricky, but it's supposed to be. At least it's a game! But I could tolerate all of that if it wasn't so bereft of fun gaming mechanics. Watching a sleep timer is not gameplay, watching a fast travel animation go on for minutes at a time is not gameplay. One of the most egregious errors made developing this game was the save system, and is what made me finally uninstall after three days of trying to play it. You can buy a potion to save the game (to make it more realistic 😂) or go and find somewhere to sleep, so I found a camp but I'd be woken up every time I tried to sleep there, I then wandered round for half an hour trying to find somewhere else to sleep - JUST TO SAVE MY PROGRESS. No game play, nothing happening, no compelling quests, just wandering about trying to find a way to save the game. Wasted potential.