Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD and Dyspraxia
Trigger Warning themes of sexual assult are discussed
We give our thoughts on Perfect Blue 24 years after release and ask does it still hold up well
We also discuss in light of how difficult it was to get a blu ray how inaccessible some Anime is getting for European audiences
“HALLOWEEN ENDS”Halloween Ends is the third and final entry in the new timeline sequel trilogy that has been directed by David Gordon Green, with previous entries being Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021)- and if you read my reviews of those, you’ll see that my opinion was a lot more favourable than most of the general audience and critics. I think one of the things that those two films did well was that they kind of did away with a lot of the complicated plot lines and mythology that the series has been rooted in. If anything, I felt like those films managed to recapture the original feel (not completely, they failed in a couple of regards, but I thought that the effort was certainly there).
David Gordon Green’s latest entry is supposed to be the last of the franchise, and while the film will end this continuity, if this is the last Halloween film we ever see, I will definitely be surprised.
Normally, this is where I would be describing the plot, however, reviewers are under strict instruction from the production studio to not give away any spoilers and to not talk too much about the plot. I feel personally bound by those rules, which is really annoying.. From the start of this film, once you see the opening sequence, you know that you can’t talk about this film’s plot without giving away most of the film.
Halloween Ends really doesn’t work for me. I think David Gordon Green had a very good idea of where he wanted to end the franchise, but he didn’t really know how to get there. The middle portion of this film is very much all over the place. I get what the writing and direction of the film is, but as a whole, I don’t think it works. The ending of the film is actually really good, I thought that part of the film nailed it.. But the middle of it just ruins all of the good will I had!
I really didn’t think Halloween Ends nailed the scare that it’s going for, and makes some of the mistakes other films in the franchise made.
Pretty much all characters that survived the previous two films have returned, and this one features Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode. While she’s great in the role, once again, Jamie Lee Curtis hasn’t really made this character her own. The writing for this film has failed her miserably, we only get some of what we had from the previous two films right at the end. Again, I get what they were going for in terms of closure of her character arc, but the film only feels half-interested in that. It’s more contemplative with her relationship with her granddaughter, Alison (Andi Matichak). But again, that just feels like it’s repeating themes from the previous films. It’s one of those films where I kept saying ‘Yeah, we get it!’. I did kind of like Alison’s character arc, which I can say is to do with her surviving and getting over trauma, but I don’t think the way they executed it really suited Alison’s character that we had come to know from the previous films.
As for the kills, well, they’re kind of boring and uninventive! There was nothing that really impressed me here. The previous films had some very impressive sequences, particularly the one-shot take in the 2018 film or the fireman stunt in the second one. Gordon Green is actually really good at directing scenes like that, so I don’t see why he’s put less effort in for this one.
I also noticed that the film has quite a shorter running time and doesn’t hit the two hour run mark, which makes me feel like the middle portion of the pilot was sped up to get to the point that we’re all expecting.
The final nail in the coffin for me: it’s predictable! Too predictable. There is nothing about this film that will surprise you in any way. Nothing to do with genre tropes, but you will know every sequence that is coming next, which one of the dumbass characters is dying next (and they’re way more dumb in this film), and exactly what to expect. And as for the theme they’re going for this time, I think it’s an interesting idea, but it’s not well executed in this case- you’ll know what I mean if you go to see it.
“THE WOMAN KING”The Woman King is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood with a screenplay by Dana Stevens who worked in collaboration with Maria Bello to develop the story. The Woman King has certainly been a very controversial film since its first trailer came out, though the reality is that I really wanted to see how the final product turned out. Since it’s all well and good to comment on a trailer, it’s another to actually go out and see the film. When I was looking up the history of this story after the fact, you have no idea how hard it was to not find Youtube videos that were made by people who you should really question before watching.
My opinion is that while the film does omit some portions of history, from what I could gather (I may have missed some facts but I was desperately not to click on right-wing think pieces written by people with bad faith arguments) the film doesn’t omit too much but there is definitely some problematic elements that have been taken out for the film. It does paint the nation of Dahomey in a much better light than how history has judged some of their actions. But as I mentioned, I’m definitely not one to comment on this and my research on this wasn’t exactly extensive.
Judging as a film alone, I think it’s fine. To be fair, the film does say it’s ‘inspired by true events’, whenever you see those words, you know that they’re going to be playing a little fast and loose with the story.
The film takes place in Western Africa in 1823 and tells of the kingdom of Dahomey being under siege from the kingdom of Oyo and concentrates on the nation’s first warrior women known as the Agojie, who through tough and rigorous recruitment are formed to defend the kingdom.
Led by Nanisca (Viola Davis) under the command of King Ghezo (John Boyega), the film itself concentrates on four warriors in particular, Nanisca, her confidante Amenza (Sheila Atim), trainer and big sister figure Izogie (Lashana Lynch), and probably most importantly, the new recruit Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) who joins the group after being sold by her father after she rejects another possible husband.
The film itself has a few intertwining plot lines, Nanisca is confronting a portion of her past, Nawi is trying to find a new family and is dealing with a potential romance that is introduced later, but the central conflict is always there. The central performances are always there, especially from Viola Davis- and I really hope that she gets an Oscar from this performance. I also really thought that there was an excellent supporting performance from Thuso Mbedu, and I hope she gets nominated for Best Supporting Actress because she’s excellent in the role.
Despite the claims that it downplays the slave trade, it’s definitely present in the film, especially towards the end, and there are a few scenes that are very hard to watch. I think that the criticism comes from the fact that most of the slaves are being traded by members of another tribe and it’s less concentrated on the fact that it was propagated by white people. In fact, one of the things I found surprising was that there weren’t really any British or American characters in the movie. The slave auction that takes place towards the end features two Brazilan characters, one playing the major role is Malek (Jordan Bolger) , who is half-Dahomey on his mothers side and is travelling to Africa because his mother’s dying wish was for him to see her homeland. He’s the character who has a romance with Nawi. I thought that the chemistry was kind of there but I thought having this kind of romance in this type of film felt rather tone deaf..
I’ve also noticed some criticism has been said about the film not having any consistent accents, and the ones on display are a bit of a hodgepodge of different regions in Africa. I will give the actors credit on this one, because I don’t think anyone was expected to be completely perfect and you are going to be limited to which talent pool signs up for the film and auditions for it.
Apart from the great central performances, which from a character standpoint do tell a touching story, where this film really succeeds is from a technical standpoint. The soundtrack is amazing and includes an excellent film score. The costume design and set design are also amazing. I was also amazed at how well the action was filmed in this movie, the cinematographers really understood how to convey action in this film, and as a result there aren’t too many cuts and you can establish a good timeline of what’s going on.
If there’s one thing I think holds The Woman King back, it’s the runtime. It’s two hours and fifteen minutes, and I felt that a few scenes went on for too long. I felt that that exacerbated the fact that the film didn’t give itself enough time to tell all its different subplots, to an extent that a couple of them got thrown to the wayside. I can’t say this is a perfect film. As a character piece and a story, The Woman King is really good. The action and cinematography are great, and the soundtrack is great also.
The controversy surrounding the film did make me slightly nervous reviewing the film, and if I got anything wrong I apologise! If you’re happy to say that the film is inspired by true events and not a reflection of them, I think that the film does well, because from what I could gather, there is stuff that was omitted that perhaps shouldn’t have been, and I wonder if that will affect the film in awards season.
Another thing I liked about the film was that this was kind of a film aimed at getting Oscar nominations, but it doesn’t feel that way watching it. You can feel that this was definitely a passion project for people in the film, Viola Davis in particular feels like she is giving her all- unsurprising because she was a producer.
“DON’T WORRY DARLING”Don’t Worry Darling is the next directorial effort from actress turned director Olivia Wilde, and has a screenplay written by Katie Silberman, both who previously teamed up for Booksmart (2019). I actually really liked Booksmart, it was a way better film than I expected it to be, considering that the trailer made it look like Superbad for girls- I think that that film was done in by its marketing and is a much cleverer film than it was made out to be.
Don’t Worry Darling is a film that has made a lot of headlines before it’s release, mainly surrounding two aspects: the director Olivia Wilde’s very public separation from Jason Sudeikis, as well as the firing/resignation (depending on who you believe) of original lead Shia LeBeouf to be replaced by Harry Styles. There’s been a lot of speculation surrounding how Styles landed the role.. Olivia Wilde insisted on a public statement that she fired Shia LaBeouf, which he denies and states that he resigned instead. The film has also had a disastrous marketing push- Florence Pugh, who plays the lead character in this film, has done practically no marketing for this film- the only appearance I could find was at the premiere.
There is of course a plot twist down the line, which you may have guessed from the trailers, so it’s hard to discuss the whole film.
The film is set in a sort of idealised version of the 1950’s, or perhaps a ‘Californiacated’ version of it. You have a seemingly utopian community that is led by a sort of radio host/CEO/cult leader, Frank (Chris Pine) and all of the men in the community go out to work with him making “progressive materials”. The main story surrounds Alice (Florence Pugh) and her husband, Jack (Harry Styles) who are living together in the community. After Alice’s friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) attempts suicide following a mental breakdown, she begins to start peeling back layers of the community and realises that there is something very wrong going on.
First off, if you have some very young One Direction fans begging you to go see this film because of Harry Styles, this is not the film to take them to! This film has an R rating in America and a 15 in the UK for a very good reason. There’s not a lot of gore or nudity, but one of the early scenes does involve a quite graphic depiction of oral sex.
I think that the film itself is meant to be a very pointed take on incel culture, it’s definitely very aggressively pointed at people who think that the 1950’s were some sort of utopia of everyone getting along.. Though obviously, you know from the start that something is up. The community is quite creepy, for example the women take regular ballet classes as a sort of conformity training, which is run by Frank’s wife, Shelly (Gemma Chan) who turns in a very good creepy performance in this film. There’s lots of imagery to do with eyes and irises.. Everything feels weird throughout the film.
There’s some decent ideas here, the problem is that the film isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. Put it this way, when we get to the plot twist (the main one that the film hangs on) my attitude wasn’t “Oh, that’s happening?” it was “Oh, I got it right.”.
The problem is that the film borrows quite a bit from other movies that make the twist feel a lot more predictable, which is a shame because it’s not a bad twist- it doesn’t contradict what we’ve seen beforehand, but it does raise a few questions by the time you’re done with it. It also kind of feels anticlimactic to an extent.
It does lead me to believe that the twist was one of the big reasons why Shia LaBeouf was cast in the lead role originally. Nothing against Harry Styles, he delivers an okay performance (nothing as bad as some people have made it out to be), but there’s a few things that are a bit off. You can tell that he’s not quite ready for a leading role at this point in time. For one thing, there’s a lot of points where I felt like he was attempting an American accent but that it got dropped part way through the production, which was a smart decision if true. There’s a lot of material that he seems to be struggling with. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt considering that he’s been asked to do a very hard task and he doesn’t quite have the tools to do it at this point in time.
Florence Pugh, however, is the best part of this movie and nails the centre performance. She, unlike Styles, is an American in this film and does the accent well. Again, she nails every scene she is in, and gives an absolutely fabulous performance.
I also quite liked Chris Pine’s performance. He definitely struggles to move out of his persona at times but he can deliver a good creepy performance. Apparently his character is based on some incel icons, though according to Olivia Wilde her main inspiration was the controversial professor Jordan Peterson. While I definitely saw a bit of him, he feels like a more controlled version of Alex Jones or Donald Trump to me- selling the idea of a utopia that doesn’t actually exist and trying to bring you back to a time period that you can’t truly go back to because the world has moved on. Although he definitely has Peterson’s intellectual sense of entitlement.
If there is one thing that I can say is really brilliant about this film, it is the set design, the costumes, and the production in general. This is a great looking film. I really think that it should be nominated in several technical categories at the Oscars because it does a fantastic job on everything from set design to even the sound effects and design.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the soundtrack, however. It’s trying to do something quite creepy but it feels like it’s borrowing from other films and not quite having the same effect. I thought that it had a very similar soundtrack to Get Out.
(available for Nintendo Switch only)
Splatoon 3 has finally made its way to Nintendo Switch after being announced in February of last year. It’s no surprise that Nintendo wanted to have a new Splatoon title, considering how huge the franchise is in Japan and worldwide- evidenced by the fact that it sold 3.7million in Japan alone on its opening weekend, which is an insane sales figure.
I picked up the game but I’m coming from the perspective of being a casual Splatoon fan. I occasionally would hop online to play the previous game but it eventually got to the stage where I was only playing it anytime it was on the Executive Producer Squad play test session of Good Vibes Gaming (one of the perks you access when you’re on a particular tier of their Patreon) so I had a good amount of people to play with and a good back and forth conversation with other players.
I definitely had some issues with Splatoon 2, since it didn’t really feel like it was a significant update from the first Splatoon, which wasn’t even that old at the time. There’s some people complaining that there still hasn’t been enough time between 2 and 3, even though there’s been more time compared to 1 and 2. Splatoon 2 came out in 2017 so we've had a 5 year gap!
Anyone saying that Splatoon 3 is just a £50 DLC clearly hasn’t actually played the game. This is definitely a significant update that was worth making a new game for. There’s a lot of new content and while it does stick to the main skeleton of the previous games, it feels like it was made to take advantage of the Switch hardware. Though I will also say that it’s not really a graphical update- there’s not a major leap in terms of visuals, but it does look better (although that may be due to playing it on my Switch OLED).
The servers for 1 and 2 are still up at this point in time, so on that basis, is there enough here to warrant picking up Splatoon 3?
● Multiplayer Gameplay
The multiplayer is still great here. For one thing, Salmon Rush (the PvE mode) is no longer restricted to certain times of the day- you can play it 24/7. They’ve also added more to it! There’s some new bosses in place, including a new superboss that requires multiple playthroughs to unlock but provides an excellent challenge and comes with a brilliant set of its own unlockables, which adds an extra layer to the game. The main multiplayer map modes are here as well, you have the Terf Battle, which involves getting the majority of your colour ink on the battlefield before the time runs out, but there’s also Rainmaker and Tower Control here as well. At the moment, the game has a good mix of new maps and returning maps from previous games, although a few are missing here. Fans of Moray Towers that made it into Smash Brothers will be upset to find out that it’s not here. However, Nintendo has promised that new content will be delivered down the line and they are known to keep their promises when it comes to Splatoon. Plus, unlike many of their other multiplayer games from recent memory, this one feels like it’s coming in with a lot of content and doesn’t feel as though they’ll be filling in the gaps in future.
If you love the multiplayer of the old games, you’ll like this one. All of the weapons that you liked are back, but more are going to be added in the game. There are new kinds of weapons- a bow and arrow as well as a katana like weapon known as the ‘Splatana’. I wasn’t a fan of either of these, I stuck mostly to the blasters and paint rollers as usual.
● Load Times
Splatoon 1 and 2’s biggest issues were that the load times weren’t great. Splatoon 3 vastly improves on this! For one thing, even though you can’t skip the broadcast explaining the multiplayer maps at startup, you can now put it in the background, turning it into a radio broadcast instead of a television one. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but that really makes a big difference! I get into games way faster now compared to the previous games.
● Card Game
This is a new minigame that was added and while I didn’t think that I was going to be massively into it, I surprisingly have enjoyed it a lot more than expected. You collect the cards through levelling up your merchandise level as well as performing tasks in the single player content to build your own deck. While there is a lot of trial and error to it, once you get the hang of it, it’s a really awesome game and provides a lot of challenges as you go along. You can challenge the residents of Splatsville as well as ghost versions of other players. However, online multiplayer is not available for this at this point in time. If it had online multiplayer I think that I would spend even more time on it, and as a whole, I think it’s an excellent minigame for your downtime.
● Single player
Single Player has never been something that I’ve really enjoyed about Splatoon games but this one has excellent single player! I think that this is a real improvement from the other games. It does sort of fall into a repeat from the second game, but this one has some excellent courses and the boss fights are also brilliant. I thought the game wasn’t going to do much for me and that it would just be something I would complete for the review, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I did every single course in the game except for one that was extremely difficult.
● Amiibo Support
Splatoon 3 really gives you some excellent content for your Amiibo support. It’s only focused on the Splatoon line of Amiibos, so you won’t get much of the benefit unless you’re like me and have collected almost all of the Splatoon Amiibos. I found that I got some brilliant gear to start my game out, one of the Amiibos came with Samurai armour, for example. I don’t know what the newest Amiibo that comes with the game will get you, because at the time of this review it hasn’t been released to the public yet. Plus, the Amiibos can be part of your photo mode as well. Put it this way, I wouldn’t say that it’s essential, but if you can get them, I would recommend doing so. The Inkling Amiibo from Smash Brothers is also compatible with the game, though don’t register it to be a part of Splatoon 3 as you might lose your Smash Brothers data. I believe you can scan it without rewriting the data.
● Soundtrack
It’s a Splatoon game, the soundtrack is excellent. The only minor complaints I have is that I’m not a huge fan of the new version of ‘Splat Attack’, since I don’t think that this one hits as
well as previous versions. While I don’t think it’s my favourite version of ‘Calamari Inclination’, I think that the game has a good version of it also. The new songs are really good, I think my new favourite one is ‘Anarchy Rainbow’, which is a shame because it only plays when a Splatfest is on.
● Splatsville
I think that Splatsville is improved from the first one, that one just felt like a Hub area that only existed for the sake of the multiplayer. Splatsville now feels like a completely lived-in place, there’s a lot more to explore this time. But there’s not that much more in it this time. There’s only the shops, the multiplayer hub, and the card game table. I would have liked some more random sights on the way, like recreational areas or some interesting places to explore. It feels like it serves its function but I would have liked it more.
● Connection issues
I haven’t gone a single day playing this without some kind of connection issues, and I have pretty good WiFi. I know it varies from person to person and it wasn’t the fact that my connection was failing, but there was always one person that would disconnect from the room and the game would be forced to restart.
I think that the game struggled for the amount of players during the Splatfest that happened during the review. During the deserted island Splatfest, I found it almost impossible to get into a tri-colour challenge (the three-team battles). Now luckily for that one, I wasn’t on Team Fun, since the team that’s in the lead can’t pick tri-coloured battles, as I discovered when I was in Team Scissors during the Rock, Paper, Scissors that was done for the Beta test. When I was Team Grub for the desert island test I found it almost impossible to get into a tri- coloured battle, I did barely any and I was selecting them constantly! It often booted me out of the lobby or put me into a normal match.
I hope that the development team is working through these issues. Luckily, I haven’t had issues that bad that I’ve had a temporary ban from the game, and majority of my games went well with no issue.
Splatoon 3 is a massive step up from the last two games. I think that it’s really worth jumping in. I wouldn’t say I’m an avid Splatoon fan at this point but I’m definitely more into the games now than I was before since the game is more user friendly. The menus are better, there’s more to do, the content is very enjoyable, and the game just overall feels like it’s a much more streamlined product. The connection issues have dampened my opinions slightly, and I would like them to update with more content soon, but as a whole, I really liked this game. If you haven’t got into this game series yet, this is the entry you should do so with.
Final Score 9.4/10
And now Elliot’s review
When it first came out I was not expecting to love Splatoon nearly as much as I did. It was one of the first games I got for my Wii U and quickly became an addiction to me. It has since become one of my favourite Nintendo franchises – only being beaten by The Legend of Zelda – and one of the few multiplayer exclusives that I play and thoroughly enjoy. So as you would expect I was incredibly excited when Nintendo announced Splatoon 3 in their February 2021 Nintendo Direct. More information would be slowly released throughout the next year and a half and was eventually released on 9th September 2022 for Nintendo Switch.
Splatoon 3 takes place five years after the events of Splatoon 2 in a new location called the Splatlands, a desert land inhabited by both Inklings and Octolings. The story told in the single player mode is very similar to the previous games in the series. Just like the previous games the Great Zapfish has been stolen by a race called the Octarians, and are tasked by Craig Cuttlefish (who everyone calls Gramps) to take on the role of Agent 3 and stop DJ Octavio. However, after battling and defeating DJ Octavio you learn that it was not him who orchestrated the theft of the Great Zapfish this time. Not long after learning this, the ground beneath you cracks and you fall into the chasm, later finding yourself in Alterna, a snow filled land that has been riddled with some kind of fuzzy ooze. Missing your Hero Suit and Gramps, you must now wander through this mysterious land in order to find both Gramps and the Great Zapfish. Honestly, the story isn’t really that important, it’s more just background for the single player portion of the game, which we’ll come back to in a bit.
In comparison to Splatoon 2, the game’s graphics haven’t had any major improvements. The character models have been slightly changed – the body proportions are a little improved and they have more pronounced necks – but outside of that the game looks pretty much the same. This may sound a bit like a complaint but I don’t actually mind this, Splatoon 2 already looked very good with little to improve upon in my mind, so this game looking just as good is honestly a plus for me. The main difference in presentation is more aesthetic. Some of the stages and main hub feel a lot more rundown than they do in any of the previous games, which definitely adds to the desert setting and the lore they’re trying to imply – which is supposedly that the aftermath of the last Splatfest caused this destruction. Music is very much the same as the previous games, in battles the music is very upbeat and loud, which works very well with the punk vibe that the game’s going for. When in Splatsville however, their music is a lot more softer, but still retains the upbeat sound that the rest of the music has, while also throwing in a couple of Japanese wind and string instruments to go more with the game’s aesthetic.
As mentioned, the story almost exclusively takes place in the Single Player Mode of the game. In this mode you’ll go through the barren snow lands of Alterna, completing levels across each of the sites. Throughout these sites you’ll notice some kind of ooze halting your progress, your little buddy can eat the core of these mounds of ooze however they will cost you a certain number of Power Eggs in order to do so, though these Power Eggs are easy to obtain as you’ll get a decent portion of them every time you beat a level. As for these levels, they very much mimic the ones from the previous Splatoon games, essentially obstacle courses that you’ll have to shoot your way through. These courses will require you to use a variety of Weapons and mechanics to surpass them. In my mind at least, these can act like glorified tutorials to teach you how to best use these Weapons or mechanics and can be used as practice in multiplayer. The one downside, for me at least, is that after a while they can get awfully tedious. Most of these aren’t that difficult and those that are border on the edge of being too unfair.
The main portion of the game, and the area where you’ll be spending the most time is the Multiplayer modes. The main Multiplayer sections are accessible via the Lobby, with its main attraction being the Turf War. I’m sure that if you’ve even just heard of Splatoon you’ll know what the Turf War entails. You and three other players will work together against another team of four to cover a variety of stages in ink over a three minute period, whoever covers the most ground (quite literally) wins. There are twelve stages total in the game – seven recurring and five brand new – only two stages at a time will be available but they will swap out every couple of hours, and you’ll quickly find your favourites and your least favourites. Unlike the other Splatoon games, there isn’t a stage in this game that I disliked, all the maps are very open with few linear pathways, which I found to be a problem in the previous games.
As well as regular Turf Wars, you can also take part in Anarchy Battles. These take the place of ranked battles from the previous games, where teams of four take place in games that are different to what you’re normally used to. Instead of gaining levels, you increase in ranks starting from C- and going all the way up to S+. Your rank will change depending on how many games you win, with the risk of losing rank if you lose too many. You can play this in one of two ways, you can play an Open game which works pretty much the same as normal games would, or you can play in a Series where you’ll play a number of games with complete randoms (in other words, no friends allowed), with the goal of winning five games in a series and avoiding losing three.
When it comes to Anarchy Battle modes there are four in total. The first being Splat Zones, where there’s a small designated zone in the centre of the map that you have to fill with your team’s ink, the team who keeps it for the longest wins. While this mode is a lot of fun, it’s probably the least chaotic. If a team has the space filled for a really long time it can be very difficult for the other team to win. Though those games don’t happen too often, and the game still has less predictability and most multiplayer games do.
The next game is Tower Control, which is honestly my favourite. The aim is to stray a tower with your ink and have it automatically follow a path further into your opponents territory, go through checkpoints and reach the goal. The reason why I love this one is because of how unpredictable and chaotic it can get, it’s super easy to take the tower so it can constantly fluctuate with who’s in the lead. It’s honestly a lot of fun.
Thirdly is Rainmaker. There’s a weapon in the centre of the stage called the Rainmaker, that your team has to obtain and bring over to the goal in your opponent’s turf in order to win. Take the chaos that Tower Control has, ramp it up dramatically and you have an accurate depiction on how these games can get. Because it’s the players having to carry and use the Rainmaker it just leads to the entirety of the other team to just gang up on you. The only issue I really have with it is the same with Splat Zones, if your opponents get too far with it it can be really difficult to take back the advantage. Really fun outside of that though.
The final mode is Clam Blitz. Where players have to collect clams spread around the map and try to score them in their designated goals. I’ve only played a few of this mode, and I can confirm that this is my least favourite by a large margin. For starters, teamwork is really less of a factor in this mode, because everyone is collecting their own shells there’s less opportunity to work together compared to the other modes. Second, this is easily the one that’s most likely to end because the timer runs out. It just gets really frustrating after a while and out of all the modes in this game, it’s the only one I find myself avoiding.
Outside of that, not only do you get into games much quicker, but when you’re waiting in the lobby there’s a small practice area in the Lobby so you can practice for a small time making the wait a lot less boring.
All Weapons from previous games make their triumphant return with the inclusion of a couple of new ones. The ones you’ve likely seen more coverage for are the Stingers, these are bows and arrows that you can either fire rapidly to cover a wider space in sacrifice for distance, or you can charge them up to launch a stronger shot that goes further. To join them are the Splatanas, these work a lot like the Brushes, as you tap the fire button rapidly to swing the weapon and spray ink or you can charge it up for a more powerful swing. As well as Weapons, there are also a number of Special Weapons that return from previous games as well as some newcomers. These act as special attacks that you’ll have to charge up, simply by spraying your ink over, to use. Some of the more notable ones including the Crab Tank, this will summon, as the name would suggest, a tank that you ride with a rapid fire attack that will get faster the longer you use it and a single shot attack that will cover a large amount of space. Another one is Tacticooler, a beverage cooler that the other players can run, doing that will give them a small buff for a small amount of time. You’ll unlock more weapon combinations as you level up so feel free to experiment, the more you do, the more likely you’ll be to find your favourite combo.
If you need a bit of an edge in combat, or you want your character to look a bit more stylish while you’re battling in Turf Wars, the Threads have made their glorious return. Not only do these make your Squid look all the better, they also give slight benefits to you in game, like charging up your special weapon quicker or allowing you to carry more ink for your main weapon. All of these Threads look really cool and you’ll find benefits no matter which combination you decide to go with.
The final major game mode is Salmon Run. You work in (of course) a group of four as you fight off creatures called Salmoniods, survive over the course of three waves and collect Golden Eggs from the bosses you defeat. At the beginning of each run you get a random weapon out of four that will change at the beginning of each wave as well as a random Special Weapon that you keep throughout the run and have a limited number of uses of. As said the main goal is to fight the Salmanoid Bosses that will come in at random. Each one has a very specific, yet uncomplicated, way to kill them and will drop three Golden Eggs that you have to collect in order to reach the quota required for that wave. These bosses are a lot of fun and will be the most likely hindrance that will kill a run for you. This mode in general is a lot of fun, being able to work with other players for once rather than having to work against them is a breath of fresh air, the matches never feel too short nor do they outstay their welcome.
Of course, Splatfest makes its glorious return as well. Splatfest is an event that happens on occasion where players pick between two teams, depicted by answers to a question (mostly which of these things do you prefer), and players on both teams fight one another to prove that their choice is superior. Unlike the other two games however, this time the players have to pick between three choices, and at times it can even lead to three-way matches (sadly I wasn’t able to take part in any and I don’t want to delay this review any further). At time of writing we’ve had two Splatfests and I can happily say that I’m eagerly awaiting the next one.
The only real downside that I can really think of with this game is that people, at time of writing, are reporting numerous communication errors, which leads to you and other players disconnecting. While personally I haven’t experienced this as often as others have, it is still annoying when it does happen. The only other one is that, if you’re already not a fan of the game, or you’re looking for this game to have any major differences, then you’re not really gonna be getting anything out of it. Just like with Splatoon 2, this game is more of the same with some improvements and a few additions. While personally this isn’t an issue for me as more of the same is pretty much what I’m looking for, if you’re wanting anything more you’re gonna be disappointed.
As mentioned Splatoon is one of my favourite game franchises, so it was pretty much inevitable that I would end up enjoying this. It’s more of the same as the previous games, but that’s all it really needed to be as it still holds up as one of the best multiplayer games that exist. If I had to point you to any game in this series that I would recommend then it would be this one. I fully recommend that everyone pick up this game and give it a try, especially if you’re a fan of any of the previous Splatoon games.
9.5/10
“PINOCCHIO (2022)”Pinocchio is the latest remake to come from Disney Studies and this time is written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who you might recognise for directing films like Back to the Future, The Polar Express, and one of the films I liked in recent memory- The Walk, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Zemeckis is a director I really like, because even when he makes flops they’re at least interesting flops. His failed attempt to get motion-capture animation to take off in Mars Needs Moms (which I wasn’t a fan of), or his adaptation of A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge as well as all of the ghosts- which I am actually a defender of, since it puts in a lot of details from the book that other adaptations miss out, thought I will also grant that there’s a lot wrong with that film.
When I heard he was taking on Pinocchio I actually thought that the fim stood somewhat of a chance, since he does know how to direct special effects, what usually goes wrong is that it’s not a good execution of said effects.
Pinocchio, though, has not gone to cinemas, but straight to Disney Plus. Fortunately, unlike the last film I can remember that went to Disney Plus in this way (the live action remake of Mulan) it doesn’t charge extra to view and is part of your subscription. However, I’m reminded of another film that was meant to get a cinematic release and was instead sent straight to Disney Plus, Artemis Fowl, which was a disaster.
I personally believe that there is a level of studio mandates that interfere in these projects, which has come into my reviews of these live action remakes, because I’ve described a lot of these as ‘toothless’ and bare-boned imitations of the original films. So it’s no surprise that Pinocchio has that quality as well.
The plot is identical. We have a situation similar to Beauty and the Beast (2017) and the Lion King (2019), although at least it’s not a complete shot-for-shot remake of the original. There’s certainly elements of that since there’s not a lot different here,except for when Pinocchio is taken by the Ringmaster, Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston), he befriends a puppeteer named Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya) but her role might as well be nonexistent. She’s barely in the movie and impacts virtually nothing. In fact, I think she’s only in 3 or 4 scenes in the entire movie. Other than that, they added a couple of extra songs- both of which are from the Coachmaster (Luke Evans) who takes the kids to Pleasure Island. You’d think that Luke Evans would have learnt his lesson after being written terribly as Gaston in the Beauty and the Beast remake.
That’s all that I can think of, there’s not really much else.. There’s some elements that have been removed, the kids aren’t smoking anymore and it’s clarified that they’re drinking root beer, which I don’t understand why that contributes to them being bad.. It feels like they should have cut that element entirely instead of making it more confusing. This is practically the exact same film, except for some references that will probably age terribly that Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key) makes. Frankly, they waste the talent of Keegan-Michael Key.. he deserves a better movie than this.
The plots pretty much the same, Geppetto (Tom Hanks) creates a little wooden puppet and makes a wish upon a star, the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) grants his wish and makes Pinocchio come alive, when he is then played by Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who feels very miscasted in this role when you first see him, though he eventually comes into the role as the film goes on). Jiminy offers to be Pinnochio’s conscience, which leads to Pinocchio being led to join a circus by Honest John, hijinks that you remember from the original film ensue.
A couple things I liked: the kid playing Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is very good in the role and sounds a lot like the original voice actor. I also can see that Tom Hanks is trying his hardest in the role despite the fact that it’s hard to separate his persona with the character that he’s playing. It does just look like it’s Tom Hanks dressed up as Geppetto. There’s a small change that implies that he creates Pinocchio due to loneliness, perhaps from his wife dying or the implied death of his son- which never really goes anywhere after the wish is granted.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t great as Jiminy Cricket, but it does get better later on in the film. He does a great impression of the original voice but it’s almost too good, I wonder why you’d even hire him for this role when you can’t even tell it’s him- there is a good way to strike a middle balance between the actor and the character, for example Idris Elba’s performance as Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic 2.
That’s all I have for positive notes because this film is a dumpster fire. The jokes don’t land, the plot feels like it’s taken out all chances for Pinocchio to be bad, in fact, he’s never really allowed to cross any sort of line. The film nearly gets him there, but it makes you wonder why Jiminy is there at all, since he seems to have a conscience already.
The plot is really toothless and has terrible jokes that don’t work. The effects are terrible! Tom Hanks gave a good performance considering that most of the time he’s performing with CGI animations that don’t work at all. Pinocchio is at least decently expressive but there’s definitely an uncanny valley effect there, because the puppet they make in this is made to look exactly like the puppet from the original film.. It doesn’t look great with updated animations. Even all of the animals are animated! None of them look convincing. Figaro, the cat, is a particularly bad effect. I was staggered that they couldn’t find a trained cat that looked like the one from the original to do some of the parts. I know that the cat does extremely cartoony things in the animated film, but that’s not something that you necessarily need for this. The cat doesn’t really do much of anything that would need it to be CGI.
What’s more, all of the clocks look terrible, especially considering the fact that they all reference Disney films of some sort.
The film looks so fake.. I’m just constantly seeing the CGI backdrops that are put in place, and as a result I had trouble getting into the film and analysing it for what it is. It feels like a lot of the morals of the film aren’t here anymore. Pinocchio never really pays for the consequences of his actions, because he’s not really done any bad actions! He does slightly bad things, in fact after the first sequence with Honest John he actually makes it to school only to get kicked out because he’s a wooden boy.. Which I thought is a really odd reaction to a talking puppet, but I digress.
The only effect that I kind of liked was Monstro, who actually looks a bit out of place for this film- they’ve given him a sort of Lovecraftian angle to him, but as a result, he looks like he should be in a video game like bloodborne or Elden Ring, not a Disney movie!
I also think that this film was hit by serious budget and editorial mandate issues, because it doesn’t really have an ending, it sort of just stops. It’s quite a short film, it only runs for about an hour and twenty minutes. The film also kind of changes the ending and I really don’t think that it works at all, especially considering it didn’t seem that the film was going for that up until that point.
I seriously can’t believe that Robert Zemeckis directed this. He’s had some flops, but you at least usually get a sense that he had some competency in the process. I don’t get that feeling at all in this one. Most of his care and attention to detail isn’t really in this film.
What’s more, it’s dull! It’s so dull!! That’s a big common thread that I’m seeing with a lot of these live action remakes. I’m seeing live action stars failing terribly to recapture the past in a way that someone at the Disney studios should be saying, ‘Guys, this clearly isn’t working’!
Pinocchio is a dumpster fire of a movie, I really hated it. It seems to have completely missed the original point of action and consequences, and doesn’t really do anything well. The acting is okay, but everyone is terribly written, the effects are crap, and this has clearly been put in front of a Disney exec who could tell they wouldn’t make the money back, so they just stuck it on Disney Plus. It left a ton of things unexplored, and this is a waste of time. If you have subscribed to Disney Plus already, don’t even waste your bandwidth on this one. The entire Ducktales reboot is on Disney Plus, go watch that instead, it’s better for your kids. At least with that, they’re getting good quality entertainment.
(available on PlayStation 5, PC version in development)
The Last of Us Part 1 is a remake that Naughty Dog has been working on to essentially bring a new version of the game to Sony’s newest console. It has had a very quick reveal trailer to release, when it was shown at the end of Summer Games Fest in June to now a release in September. The game’s announcement, however, has led to a very mixed reaction- and I don’t think that it was due to the mixed reaction that The Last of Us Part 2 got. Mainly because of the fact that we were being asked to pay £70 to get The Last of Us Part 1 again when it hadn’t been that long since the PlayStation 4 remaster- which is currently still available with the backwards compatibility, it’s also free as part of your subscription to PlayStation Plus. It also seemed like (with the exception of a graphics update) that there was nothing new in this version.
Your opinion on The Last of Us and Sony’s other games in general might impact how excited you were for this announcement. However, whilst Sony has changed how their games are developed and marketed in recent years, there are definitely a lot of fond feelings for the game still. This games’ development has been down for two reasons- it’s an extra piece of merchandise to be purchased to coincide with the HBO series, which has been delayed until next year, and to give Naughty Dog a chance to really learn the hardware of the PS5. If I’m to make a comparison to other games the one I would find the most similarities to in terms of a remake that came out around a similar time and also had a remaster, only had some new content and had features missing- I would talk about Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition on the Switch, which I really liked when it came out (and I still do!) So I’ve been comparing this to that game. What were my thoughts on buying this game again and at the same price- in this instance I did purchase The Last of Us Part 1 Remake but did not get the digital deluxe edition that gave me extra content- and I wanted to ask myself: considering I already have played the game on PS3 and owned the remaster of the PS4 version. Is this one worth spending £70 on if you own a PS5, and should PC owners go out of their way to play this when it releases?
Since this is a remake, I won’t be discussing this game as if it was a new release. Much like my review of Super Mario 3D: All Stars, I’ll be talking about what the new features are in this version. If you want my thoughts on Last of Us Part 1, I think the story’s pretty good, it’s a good-looking game, it’s not incredibly challenging because the AI doesn’t function as well as I would like, but as a cinematic experience game, I do think that it works very well to this day. The story of Joel and Ellie is still one that I enjoy and have fond memories of, so the core game is still very good. But I did actually wonder what it would be like after the major gameplay changes in Part 2 now that we’re moving back to Part 1’s core gameplay.
Despite the fact that a lot of people claimed that this was just a simple graphical polish and not really much of an update, I can confirm that they are entirely wrong. You can tell while viewing this game that this is a from-the-ground-up remake. There are brand new models for every single character, and as a result with the PS5 technology they’ve managed to deliver some excellent facial expressions and have really allowed the performances to be looked at in a new light with the improved cutscenes. Especially considering the fact that these cutscenes are now made with the in-game engine, and because of the PS5’s incredible loading times, the move from gameplay to cutscene is almost seamless.
This is also a really great looking game for the PS5. I wouldn’t say that it’s the best, but if you play this game in fidelity mode and have access to a 4K monitor, it looks fantastic. I would actually argue that you would play in performance mode for 60 FPS or Performance Plus which allows for 4K 40 FPS. I think having the extra performance works out a lot better this time. Plus, even when I was playing the game in performance mode I was still amazed at how good the game looked. It’s not a game you need 4K, but it definitely helps.
The Last of Us Part 2 had some excellent accessibility features, and all of them are back for this game plus some more. As a result, a lot more disabled gamers will be able to enjoy this game! These features now include some brand new autism-friendly features which do a very interesting job in how they work- mainly using the PS5 controller’s excellent rumble to help convey a lot of what is going on in a scene. It’s an excellent option, and what’s more, even if you’re not disabled there’s a lot of features to help streamline and customise your experience. Once again, you can change the difficulty.
As a result, this is probably one of the most accessible PlayStation games out there right now, and is definitely the most accessible Naughty Dog game to date.
I must be honest- I haven’t been mentioning about haptic triggers in a lot of PlayStation exclusives recently because I’m getting kind of numb to the effect, because most of the studios don’t know how to use the effect to a good degree. Naughty Dog has definitely shown that they know what they’re doing with it, although they don’t reach the heights of games like Demon Souls, Returnal, the Spiderman games, or even Ratchet and Clank: Rifts apart, but this is some of the best usage of it in a while. I’ll definitely be making a lot of comparisons with this one and the upcoming God of War: Ragnarok.
I don’t think that they’re that amazing, for example, the famous giraffe petting scene that was highlighted in a lot of behind the scenes and featurettes did not really match up as well as the developers thought they were going to. They did an excellent job all things considered. You just won’t notice the difference between different guns or melee weapons as you would with some other PS5 exclusive games.
The frame rate is pretty good if you’re playing the game in performance or performance plus. Fidelity mode I noticed significant framerate drops with some of the scenes I was involved in, particularly an early one that involves you being in an environment with lots of spores around. It was to an extent that I barely played this game in fidelity mode, the frame rate drops were just so significant that I couldn’t last too long playing it that way. Give me a good framerate over that much fidelity any day of the week.
I’m not someone who hates 30 FPS, I think that it’s perfectly fine if the game is built around it, but it’s very clear that this game was built around 60 FPS, hence why I played this game almost entirely in performance mode.
More specifically, this section is about the fact that we’re essentially going backwards from Part 2 to The Last of Us Part 1. Part 2 really, in my opinion, made significant improvements to a lot of it’s gameplay features, the environments were quite open, and the enemies could be quite challenging, plus there was a good variety in missions. As a result, it really felt like The Last of Us Part 2 had innovated the gameplay of Part 1, especially considering that with the open environments there were more ways to explore and more ways to look for collectables.
Plus, there’s a few enemy varieties that you’re now losing, for example, there’s no guard dogs anymore so you don’t have to worry about them picking up your scent and leading another group to come and kill you.
The core gameplay of Part 1 is just fine, but it’s hard to go back to the more linear environments. Admittedly, it doesn’t have the problem I had in Part 2 where I sometimes had trouble finding out where I was meant to be going. But it definitely feels like the gameplay, while perfectly fine and enjoyable (in fact I enjoyed it so much I played it for about 2 hours every day while reviewing it), is starting to show its age a bit. Especially considering that if there is another game in the series, which I don’t suspect that there will be, it’s going to show its age even more. That being said though, there’s not that much inherently wrong with it- it just didn’t feel particularly innovative.
The new content is not too significant if I’m honest. For one thing, it doesn’t charge you extra to get the left behind DLC, which I’m very thankful for. Though, that isn’t new content and it’s also not a great increase on your game time, only another 2-3 hours.
The main new content this time includes things like ‘permadeath mode’ and ‘speedrunner mode’ which certainly add a little bit onto your time, but to be honest I really didn’t enjoy permadeath mode. It means that you have to play the game and not die once- which is certainly a challenge for a lot of die-hard fans, but it’s going to sting if you get very close to the end and you get ambushed by a bandit.
Speedrunner mode is very self-explanatory. It’s essentially a timed run. I’m not really into my speedrunning so this didn’t do much for me. In both cases I had already done a playthrough and didn’t feel like doing a new one. The Last of Us for me is a game that I do a playthrough when another one comes out and I don’t revisit it otherwise. I’m not really someone who wants to play it over and over again.
You can also change the costumes for the characters, but I wouldn’t call that a significant change in content. As a result, the new content is fine, but it doesn’t really add that much to it, and is pretty dependent on how you play games in general.
Despite the fact that Naughty Dog promised that the AI had been improved this time, I was still surprised how dumb they could be at times. In Part 2 the AI did a very good job actively challenging you, but in Part 1 it’s not a challenge and I didn’t struggle at all. I was playing on a lighter difficulty than I normally do for time purposes, but it was getting to the stage where the area was providing so little of a challenge that I upped the intensity of the AI, but it still didn’t make too much of a difference and they still made dumb decisions. I had moments where Ellie was walking right in front of them and they didn’t do anything at all. My experience could have been affected by the fact that I didn’t turn up every aspect of the difficulty, but I have seen other reviews that have commented on the AI’s deficiency.
This is a real gripe for me. I’m not too bothered by missing multiplayer, but charging more and taking it out does feel pretty dumb and does sting because this game is significantly more expensive than any other version of the game. More importantly for me, though, there is no new core content. I would have liked it if maybe they added a new chapter to the game that tied Part 1 and Part 2 together, I wouldn’t even need it to be that long, just one or two hours.
It’s very clear that this game is completely the same as the original. There is nothing new here, there’s not many new surprises or new things to find. I did notice a new scenario where Jack and Daxter and Uncharted were on the wall of one of the university dorms, but maybe I missed that in my first playthrough and that had always been there. Other than that, I really didn’t notice much of a difference. This is pretty much the game that you played the first time around.
Is The Last of Us Part 1 Remake the best way to play this game? Yes, it is. The graphical updates and accessibility features do enough. I think that it’s a very good-looking game and while the gameplay may feel a bit regressive after the sequel, it’s not bad gameplay.
So if for some reason you’ve never played the last of us, this is the best way to get into it.
Do I think that it’s a significant update from the PS4 version? Not as much as Naughty Dog would like me to say it is. Though I do think on many levels it has been a major update to the game, particularly in the graphics department. When you look at some of those side-by-side comparisons of the PS4 vs. PS5 you will notice a big difference in how much better it looks and the fact that this was clearly made from the ground up that couldn’t have been done with previous technology.
Do I think that you should buy this if you already own the PS4 version? Let’s put it this way, I don’t think that you should rush out and get it. I don’t think that you’re getting much that you would have got outside of the PS4 version. If anything, I think that this version will suit people that have never played the game.
Did I enjoy my time with it? Yes. Did I really enjoy my time with it? No. It is still enjoyable in many regards, but while I think that this is the best version of the Last of Us, I feel like I’m numb to it in many ways. The fact that this is the third time I’ve played this game, I think I’m ready to call it a day with this game. I’m probably never going to play another remake of this game if they make it. Plus, the fact that there’s no new core content feels very off. When I heard a couple of years ago that there would be a remake,my mind went to a lot more interesting places than the final version that we received.. Especially considering that they could have tied the events of the two games together more or reworked the models or performances to suit the HBO series. But as it goes, there’s not much new here. It’s definitely a good game, and if you’ve never played it, this is the best way to play it.
The gameplay is still there and the story is still good.
FINAL SCORE: 8.2/10
“THE FORGIVEN”The Forgiven came into film festivals last year and is both written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, and based on a book by Lawrence Osbourne. I haven’t read the book, so this film will be judged alone. I also therefore have no idea what changes and omissions happened when adapting the book into a film.
The film itself has been released to rather limited screens. I only managed to find a screening for this film because I happened to spot it at the Picturehouse Cinema in FACT Liverpool. This all might be down to the fact that this film wasn’t expected to make a large profit, and despite the star studded cast of Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, and Matt Smith, the film has a few things going against it. Mainly that the film festival crowds gave it a very lukewarm reaction, and it doesn’t have a very high score on Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic either, floating around the 60% mark. Which baffles me because in short, I really liked this film!
The movie takes place entirely in Morocco and centres around a couple known as the Henninger, private doctor David (Ralph Fiennes), and his wife, failed children’s author Jo (Jessica Chastain); who are incredibly dysfunctional. They’re spending their holidays at a long weekend party with David’s old school friend, Richard Galloway (Matt Smith) and his eccentric boyfriend Dally Margolis (Caleb Landry Jones). Whilst driving at night slightly drunk, he accidentally runs over a boy selling fossils to tourists. They take the body to the estate where the local officials are contacted, only for the boy’s father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) to demand that David accompany him to his village to pay respects, and to repay him for the accident. David thinks that he will have to begrudgingly give him a thousand euros, so he agrees, but as he comes to learn more of the troubled way of life in the middle of the desert, he begins to feel guilt and fear.
The film really keeps you guessing about what Abdellah’s intentions truly are. This film has lots of incredible performances including Jessica Chastain and Matt Smith, but the standout performances are definitely Ralph Fiennes and Ismael Kanater. I would go as far to say that Ismael Kanater should get some award nominations for best supporting actor. He does an excellent job playing both a potentially antagonistic force to David, as well as a grieving father. He can really deliver raw emotion!
Ralph Fiennes also delivers a similarly excellent performance. I think if his performance had been underplayed that his character arc would not be believable.
The plot itself also does a very good job telling its story. It really is a tale of two stories; David travelling to the Moroccan village as well as the party setting which is run and attended by (for a lack of a better words) the biggest arseholes on the planet. One of the things that I don’t like about films like this is that they will take these rich drunk, drug fuelled, morons hiding behind intellectualism and pretend that they are eccentric renaissance people. When in reality, if you actually met them at a party you would have to hold back every urge to slap them in the face.
This film does an excellent job dressing down the phoney-ness of what they cling to. If there’s one thing that this film is really about, it’s privilege, and how people laude that. They are fundamentally incredibly racist, but they don’t see that in themselves- they use their intellectualism to justify their racist beliefs, to such an extent that they will say in full view of the Moroccan natives that work for them ‘you people’ or ‘those people’. Normally I can’t stand films with tons of characters like this, but the film does an excellent job showing how bad they are and contrasts it with the other plot that is going on, which really takes the edge off it. For example, Matt Smith does an excellent job playing this role. He really channels a similar character to what he played in ‘Last Night in Soho’ although this time he’s a lot squirmier.
Likewise, it does a good job of giving Jessica Chastain something to do. It’s very clear from the outset of the film that David and Jo’s marriage is very rocky at this point, and she now wants to use this opportunity (while being encouraged by Richard and Dally) to have an affair with one of their handsome American friends as a way to recapture her youth. Again, they are very good at using their intellect to justify their awful actions. If anything, the Moroccan cast delivers the best performances in the film in my opinion. The film does really challenge a lot of people’s opinions.
The thing that really surprised me about the film was that it opens and closes quite differently to most modern cinema. It goes for a more ‘classic’ feel, which you might have experienced if you’ve seen films like ‘Ben-Hur’, mainly because there’s complete credits at the start of the film and no closing credits. It also ends on a still that just says ‘The End’. I’m not sure how that’s going to play with modern audiences but I thought that it was very interesting. I am personally not someone who hates the idea of closing credits, since I think that if you do them right, they can look great- I’m particularly reminded of the first two Kung-Fu Panda films’ that had excellent closing credits.. But I actually found it interesting that there was a film that was bold enough to go back to this style of film editing!
The cinematography in this film was excellent and got top marks from me. I really thought that it was great!
“BEAST”The Beast comes to us from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who’s directing credits consist of an episode of the series Trapped, as well as the Denzel Washington & Mark Wahlberg film; Two Guns (if you didn’t see that, don’t bother- it’s not very good).
This film is essentially a safari horror movie. The plot line involves a lion going rogue after his pride is killed by poachers, and so he starts lashing out at every human in sight. Meanwhile, American doctor Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) is on holiday with his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) to visit their uncle Martin (Sharlto Copley) following the death of their mother, to reconnect with her homeland. However, during the safari they discover that a poaching village was wiped out by a lion, and they end up getting trapped in their jeep whilst being hunted by the lion.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s quite a by-the-numbers creature feature. It doesn’t help that there’ve been a lot of films quite like this already. It reminded me a lot of the recent shark movies that have come out like 47 Metres Down (2017) and In the Shallows (2016).
This film is not great, if I’m honest. For one thing, the comparisons to Jurassic Park that I saw after watching the film are rather apt. There were a couple of scenes that looked to be straight out of Jurassic Park, but as a whole, I noted more similarities to the noted shark movies. This film is also really boring. I didn’t help that there aren’t many characters which essentially means that there won’t be that high of a body count- especially considering that they had to fill a 93-minute runtime which means that they have to save some on-screen kills- most of the kills are done off-screen!
Since the lion showed up earlier than I expected you know that the characters have a lot of plot armour to begin with- especially considering that the daughters’ character arcs surrounding the death of their mother haven’t been fulfilled.
More than that though, some of these characters act really dumb. They put themselves into environments that put them at risk for not very good reasons. And that’s what this film essentially boils down to; Idris Elba versus a lion. Side point- the special effects aren’t great, the lions range from pretty good to ropey and aren’t always incredibly convincing.. Obviously they wouldn’t get a real trained lion to put through this as it would be too dangerous but, Life of Pi effects – this is not.
As for central performances, well, they all did fine. Idris Elba did well, and Shartlo Copley is good in pretty much anything he is in, and I think the two young actresses did well. This isn’t exactly a film you need to bring an A-grade performance to.
The cinematography really did my head in for this film, it was really weird! I don’t really blame them for the shots of real animals that they tried to get, since those are pretty difficult to do. But the biggest issue that I had with the film was for the way some scenes were shot. There’s a lot of parts that are shot at night in very dark environments- likely as a way to cover up some of the lesser special effects. But it also has another issue- the amount of times that they used long one-shot takes. It has a very similar issue to the way long shot takes were done in the Phantom of the Opera movie (I would recommend watching Lindsay Ellis’ video of that movie adaptation to know what I mean). The point of that kind of shot in a movie like this is to heighten tension and show how dangerous the situation is- but that doesn’t happen in this movie. There’s no jump-scares in this movie and that would actually be a good use of that take. These long takes don’t do anything like that, they just seem to be there because it looks really cool and it shows off the sets that they had. They’re also very hard to do and often look really janky, and that’s something that this film falls into repeatedly.
While the film doesn’t overstay its welcome, it still doesn’t feel like much happens in this movie- it should have maybe been a short movie or a TV special. It doesn’t help me that it’s so by-the-numbers that I found it really boring.
The Beast does an admirable attempt to do an anti-poaching message but as a whole it’s quite a boring and lifeless film with not much happening in it, some rather weak uses of long takes and some character arcs that aren’t as compelling as the writer and director think they are.
In this podcast we discuss our favourite and least favourite duels throughout the first incarnation of Yu-Gi-Oh
“NOPE”Nope is the latest film written, directed, and produced by Jordan Peele, director of such films as ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’. This review was meant to come out way sooner but in the UK the film’s release schedule was changed a couple of times and as a result received a later release date than expected. It happened to come out not only a week after I attended a music festival, but the same weekend that I was at London Anime and Gaming Con.
But this was one of the films that I was desperate to see. I am a huge fan of Jordan Peele’s first film ‘Get Out’, and it also helps that he is again working with the star of that film, Daniel Kaluuya.
The film’s trailers really didn’t give away exactly what the film was about- it gave a slight idea to what was going to happen, but all we knew was that the film was about a group of horse trainers for Hollywood that have been involved in the business for generations, and that there is something in the sky that everyone is afraid of. Other than that, the film’s trailers were very cryptic. As a result, there will be no plot synopsis and this review will be very short! I am very sorry but I do not wish to spoil this for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Especially considering that while this review is late, it will still only be coming out 2 weeks after the film’s opening weekend. Not everyone has had time to see it, and I think that this film is best if you go into it knowing very little. This has made the film very hard to review and talk about!
I will say that the cast is great. Daniel Kaluuya is once again brilliant in his role as horse trainer; OJ, who is feeling the pressure of having to take over the business along with his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) following the death of their father (Keith David) from a freak accident.
The film actually keeps a very short cast. There are not too many characters in the film, the other characters consist of camera technician, Angel (Brandon Perea) who aids the family with installing cameras on the ranch, as well as a child star-turned western park owner, Ricky Park (Steven Yeun), who is also dealing with his own trauma that we see through flashbacks in most of the film. Again, I don’t want to give away too much since it does tie into what’s going on.
As for the effects in this film, they’re actually pretty good! There are actually some very good effects in place. Without giving too much away, the team does a very good job merging what are obviously practical effects that have been brought on to set with the computer-generated effects. They’ve also done a great job animating some of these effects at night, something which is particularly hard to do!
As for the plot, I thought that it flowed quite well! It’s actually a pretty broken up plot that is divided into multiple segments. It becomes clear why they divide into segments as the plot unfolds. It gives the sense of the film feeling sort of episodic in nature.
As to be expected there is also some social commentary. Jordan Peele really understands that the best horror films are the ones that dive into human nature, and this film is no exception. I will say though, that he is very subtle with it, and it did take me a while to catch on to what the film was about. But once I got it, it made the film a lot better. Though that being said, I am willing to admit that I might have been a bit stupid and it is plain for others to see.
Obviously, it’s a Jordan Peele film, so there’s a plot twist. I will say though, once again, unlike M. Night Shyamalan, he’s really good at them. I didn’t get the twist in this one like I did in the first five minutes of ‘Us’. But I will say that it did enrich the film! I would like to point to one of Overly Sarcastic Production’s episodes of ‘Trope Talks’ (you can find it on YouTube) about plot twists. Since their opinion on what makes a good or bad plot twists tends to correlate on my thoughts also. I think that this one kind of works. There were some negatives, I think that some of the flashbacks don’t really get into much detail, and I’m wondering how a lot of audiences are going to react to a rather downplayed performance of Daniel Kaluuya. I think that some people are going to say that he’s playing it slightly half-arsed, when in reality, this is one of his best roles to date! I really hope that he gets some awards nominations off the back of this performance. You really get a sense of the weights of what is put upon him, his regrets, fears, in most scenes that he’s in. I’m really growing to believe that he’s one of the best actors going right now.
I’m also wondering how the length of this film is going to play out with a lot of people. If you’re one of those people that can’t stand when films go on for longer than two hours, this film is not going to be for you. It doesn’t go on much longer, it’s only 2 hours and ten minutes including credits in total, but if you’re impatient about getting to the plot twist. Sorry, but you’ll have to wait a while. The pacing of this film is really good but it certainly plays it slower than your average horror film.
Jordan Peele unsurprisingly does a great job at injecting humour into this film, but the comedy is always to a point and never distracts from the horror going on around it.
(available for Nintendo Switch only)
Live a Live has been developed by Square Enix, and in the case of America and Europe has been published by Nintendo. It’s another game that Square Enix has used its HD2D engine to recreate the sprite work of early Square Enix RPGs to give them a modern feel. We’ve seen this with earlier games like Octopath Traveller and Triangle Strategy. Square Enix, however, didn’t want to just create new spiritual successors to their previous games, they also wanted a chance to remake some of the classics. We first saw this with the announcement of the Dragon Quest 3 remake, and we’re now seeing this again with Live a Live.
Live a Live was a Super Nintendo RPG that was never localised outside of Japan. This remake is the first time many of us have been able to play the game (legally, at least) there were many emulations online with fan translations but this is the first one that you can legally purchase.
The game is a little different to other Square Enix RPGs, in fact, in many ways Octopath Traveller borrows a lot from this game. Mainly due to the fact that it’s focus is on a series of characters with their own individual stories. Though unlike Octopath Traveller, these characters are vastly different and they have their own self-contained stories with their own cast of characters.
The gimmick with this RPG is that there are several stories throughout time. You have pre-history with a young caveman named Pogo, the Edo Japan period storyline that involves a Shinobi warrior carrying out a stealth mission, an Imperial China storyline that has a kung-fu master searching for a successor to carry on his work, a Wild West story where an outlaw named the Sundance Kid rallies a town to defend themselves from a group of bandits, a present day storyline involving a fighter travelling the world to fight the various strongest fighters in the world in order to learn their techniques, a near future storyline which involves a psychic kid protecting his orphanage from an evil military organisation, and a distant future storyline involving an AI named Cube who is trying to save a spaceship he’s on along with his crew and creator after things start to go wrong.
There is an extra unlockable story after the fact, and while I won’t go into detail about it, I will mention that it’s there because if you bought this game from the Nintendo Store and got the free gift you also receive a set of character cards and the 8th character is on there, so it won’t be too much of a surprise.
You’re not just getting the exact same thing every time. While they each have a similar battle system, each one of these storylines takes the gameplay in a slightly different direction.
Obviously, I’m experiencing this for the first time. I haven’t played an emulation of the original, so for me, this is almost a brand-new game. So, I’ll be judging it by itself. But from what I can tell, this is pretty much the Super Nintendo Game done in the HD engine and there isn’t much new put into it.
I’ve already mentioned what the basic aspects of each individual story are, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed them! Despite the fact that each of them vary in length and none of them really go on for more than 3 hours (in fact, some of them are incredibly short, I reckon you could probably beat the present day storyline in about half an hour if you’re competent enough. I’m obviously not, so it took me a bit longer). There’s a lot more to do in these storylines if you want to seek them out. But as they go, they’re all pretty good and none of them felt very lacking. I certainly feel like the present day one could’ve done with a bit more.
I think my favourites were the Imperial China storyline, the prehistoric storyline, as well as both the near and distant future storylines. They all had really good stories. I’ve heard many people say that the near future one is their favourite, and I can definitely tell why. It will be especially appealing to anime fans, as it’s the most anime-like story of the bunch.
Obviously, because the stories are so short, I won’t go into much detail about the important moments of them because I feel like you should experience them for yourself. What I did like, though, was how they managed to connect all of the stories together. You have to put a little bit of effort in but the connection between them is really interesting. I would also really recommend getting the true ending if you can. It doesn’t take up too much effort but maybe look up a guide just in case.
I really should have put gameplay in the mixed section just for what I believe a lot of fans will react to for one simple reason: Some of the storylines don’t allow you to grind for certain characters. In fact, some of the storylines actually have minimal battling. Though I will reassure you, each storyline does have battling at least once.
For example, anyone who played the demo will know that the distant future has very little battles, and a couple of storylines had only one or two. Some storylines don’t have character growth and experience. The good news is that you’re equipped to deal with most of what’s going to come at you.
The gameplay revolves around a grid-based system, you have a certain amount of movement before your opponent gets to move which is shown by a metre below the health bar of each character, and when they reach the top you can make a move or an attack. So you might want to think about that when moving a character from one tile to another. It does sound a bit like I’m suggesting that this is a bit like Fire Emblem, but if there’s any game that it really reminded me of it’s actually the South Park RPGs, particularly the Fractured But Whole. I felt like the gameplay of that game has definitely taken inspiration from Live a Live.
Attacks also come with certain types, with enemies having certain resistances and weaknesses to them. So, targeting enemies’ vulnerabilities can definitely put you at an advantage. There’s also charge attacks that both you and your enemy can take, but if a powerful enough attack is taken from either side, the character doing the attack can be interrupted.
The battle system itself is very fun and addictive and it’s probably why I enjoyed the storylines that included more battles rather than the visual novels. Though as I said, the distant future is definitely in the latter camp and that still worked really well.
The weakness aspect to it isn’t as prominent as in Octopath Traveller, which borrows a very similar system, but I will say that this game does have an excellent battle system, just be aware that enemies weaknesses aren’t the be all and end all.
The art style actually recreates the Super Nintendo Game (from what I’ve seen of it) really well. But man, the HD2D engine is getting better and better each time it’s used. This might be one of the best if not the best this engine has made a game look. It’s also interesting to see this generate more types of environments. We saw a bit of that with Octopath Traveller and Triangle Strategy certainly expanded on environments, but they were both kind of limited in that sense since they had to still replicate a rather mediaeval environment for their settings. Because Live a Live has to deal with so many different time periods, we’re starting to see more interesting ideas of where this engine can take games, and it looks great in pretty much all of them.
I have to reiterate something that Modern Vintage Gamer said in a podcast, that I think the budget for this game was a lot more than any of us expected, because it is such a good use of what Square Enix has been working with for quite a while now.
The sprite work is once again, also excellent. I really enjoyed how this game looked. This is probably one of the best-looking games of the year with how they took something that already looked great and just made it better. I’m really interested to see what Dragon Quest 3 will look like in this engine.
Live A Live is definitely a contender for soundtrack of the year. That’s all that really needs to be said. The songs do tend to repeat, but they are really good. Some of the highlights include the Imperial China theme, some of the background music of the Wild West storyline line, but there’s also a few more standouts. There’s also Megalomania which is the final boss theme in every storyline, and it sounds great, it gets you so pumped for the final battle. And yes, it is the song that Toby Fox used for his classic Megalovania in Undertale.
The other song I want to highlight is Go Go Steel Titan, one of the songs from the near future storyline, which unlike the original game they have added vocals this time to turn it into what is essentially a 90’s anime opening. It’s also sung by the same vocalist who did Cha La Head Cha La for Dragon Ball Z! And he sang it in both English and Japanese.
The great thing about this game is that when you beat a storyline you unlock all of the songs for the jukebox in the main menu, so you can listen to them to your heart’s content, and I would really recommend doing so.
The length of Live A Live is a bit of an interesting one for me.. Some of the storylines don’t really go on for long enough in my opinion- the present day one is pretty much over as soon as you get started with it, I barely got a chance to get to know the main characters before we were fighting the final battle, and I think that the Wild West one could have used a bit more time. But most of them are pretty good, and generally the length is alright; you’re looking at about 20 hours from start to finish, and maybe a bit more if you’re going down the completion-ist route.
However, because there’s a lack of random encounters in many environments, you won’t be doing too many things like grinding to extend the gameplay, at least not in the early portions of the game.
I also think that some people may think that the length is a bit short for a full-priced RPG, especially considering that this came out only a week before Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which is pretty much guaranteed to be an 80 hour+ RPG. If you get the true ending, this is a one and done experience and I’m not sure you would want to go back.
Though there are some benefits to going back and doing things differently, in fact during my playthrough I actually kept a save file separate so that I could go back and do things differently if I needed to. That being said, I did get the true ending which is so good, I think it may be a while until I come back and replay this game. Nevertheless, I also will say that by the end it was starting to drag a little bit.
I don’t want to give away too much because it relates to the final portion of the game, but I think that the final portion does have a bit of a difficulty spike. Basically, the game kind of gets you ready for the final fight rather organically in each storyline, you can pretty much just follow the story and you’ll be well equipped to deal with almost everything it throws at you. The final portion of the game, however, doesn’t really allow you to do that- there’s definitely a lot more thought involved, and I don’t think that the game properly prepares you for it.
This is a slight nit-pick since I actually did enjoy the final segment, but the final boss is also really difficult and you are going to have to do some of the extra stuff so that your characters are of appropriate strength to deal with it. I would really recommend potentially having a guide for the final segment because there’s a few optional stuff that is a bit cryptic. That being said though, some of the guides that I found weren’t so useful, and at the time of release there of course wasn’t very many YouTube guides.
The final portion does have a few things that drag, but overall, it doesn’t sour the game for me.
Live A Live is a really great RPG. I think that the battle system is great, the soundtrack is great, and the storyline is really good even if a few of them are a bit underdeveloped. Overall, the game works really well. Although there’s an occasional difficulty spike, it’s never off putting, and I really enjoyed my time with the game. It’s a bit shorter than I was expecting, but in all honesty I still thought that it was a great experience playing it and I’m really glad that this game now has the chance to get the recognition outside of Japan that it deserves.
If you like good classic RPGs, this is definitely one for you. Though with the gameplay changing up each time (e.g. the near future replicating Megaman and crafting only being properly used in the prehistoric storyline) you might find that each segment is a bit lacking from what you would expect in an RPG. But I think that this might be good for people that aren’t really into RPGs since you get a bit of everything concentrated into each storyline.
There’s not really much else to say about it, it’s really good and I highly recommend it!
SCORE: 9.5/10
“WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING”Where the Crawdads Sing is the latest film from director Olivia Newman, who previously did the straight to Netflix film; First Match (2018) and is based on the bestselling novel by controversial author Delia Owens. When they say bestselling, they really mean it! The book sold 12 million copies! I am not one of those 12 million, so I’m reviewing this as a film. One person who really did love this book was Reese Witherspoon, who immediately used her production company to turn it into a film and has a production credit.
The plotline centres around a young girl named Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who is known to the locals as ‘the marsh girl’ who is ostracised by her deep south town for her lifestyle of living off the land. She is later implicated in the murder of local quarterback, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) and is later put on trial for his murder. Most of the film is flashbacks of her life and the events leading up to the court case, whilst being juxtaposed with the court proceedings. A large portion centres around her romances with both Chase and her first boyfriend Tate (Taylor John Smith).
I’ll say one thing immediately, this has to be one of the most horribly marketing movies I have seen all year. This film’s trailer made it out to be like this was a suspenseful murder mystery about prejudice. Those elements are here but this film feels more in tone with a romance novel you’d pick up in a WHSmith’s. I’ve heard comparisons to a film by the likes of Nicholas Sparks, and I think that that would be accurate.
I will however say some nice things about the film, it’s shot well and it has a great central performance by Daisy Edgar Jones. The downside is that the film’s narrative betrays that. I think that way too many people have been way too kind to this film, I thought that it was actually really bad. Let me just say that since it has a limited amount of time that the love triangle has to resort to what I would refer to as ‘Titanic love triangle’, (going back to a Lindsay Ellis video on the film Titanic). When you have a limited amount of time to tell a story with a love triangle, it often boils down not to ‘who will this person choose’ but ‘will they get away from the bad one’. And the film is not subtle about making Chase look like a bad guy.
It also didn’t help that some of the warnings for the 15 certificates in this film did give away elements of things that were going to happen in the movie. But trust me, if you don’t really like stereotypical love triangles, you won’t enjoy most of the second half of this film. The murder mystery was also something that was surprisingly pushed to the back, it doesn’t come up much in the flashback, and the film seems rather disinterested in the court case. Weirdly, the courtroom scenes are some of my favourite parts in the film! Probably due to the fact that I’ve watched and enjoyed a large amount of Law and Order and videos from the YouTube channel Legal Eagle, so I’m trying to spot all of the legal inaccuracies in the film. I’d have to see if a legal professional would make a video on this, but it all seems pretty accurate.
That’s not to say it’s historically accurate, though. Considering that it’s set in the deep south in 1969, it’s surprising that the locals are not depicted as being incredibly racist. A lot of this film takes place in the 1950’s, and granted, it’s not as if I desperately wanted that to be in the film, but I think when doing historical pieces like this that we need to be reminded of the abhorrent parts of our history so that we can spot its similarities to it today.
But what I really, really disliked about this film was that it was SO long, and yet it still felt half empty! It really is clear to me that this should have been a mini-series. It would have had more time to tell its story, especially considering that I expect large chunks of the book have been left out. There’s not a huge amount of character development in their place, either. I really didn’t enjoy that a lot. There’s lots of characters that disappear for large portions of the film , and many of them are not really set up to be suspects in the murder mystery because again, the film doesn’t seem to be interested in that!
But while I thought that this film wasn’t that great, the thing that pushed me over the edge of disliking it was the ending. The ending to this movie is really, really bad. And it contradicts many elements of the moral and message leading up to it! The ending really made me hate this. And it made me hate the film overall. It actually kind of made large amounts of the film pointless and it contradicts a lot of things that we were told during the film. If they wanted to go with this ending, they should have set up more to do with this particular plot point.
In this podcast we decide which show is Better Berserk 1997 or Vinland Saga over 5 categories
TRIGGER WARNING: we do discuss sexual assault in relation to the plot of Berserk viewer discretion is advised
12:26 Best presentation (animation, music and art style)
24:00 Best side cast
41:22 Best protagonist
52:32 Best antagonist
1:04:04 Best story structure
“THE RAILWAY CHILDREN RETURN”The Railway Children Return is essentially a sequel to the 1970 adaptation of The Railway Children; what could easily be described as one of the most influential British films. It’s on countless lists of best British movies and has received many accommodations. The Railway Children Return is a very belated sequel, coming 52 years later. I suspect this was a film that was meant to come out in 2020 to coincide with the original’s 50 year anniversary, but was pushed back due to the pandemic.
The strangest aspect about the film for me is the fact that it’s directed by Morgan Matthews, he’s a very odd choice to direct this while he has a lot of directing and producing credits; they are mostly for TV and documentaries. The most dramatic job I’ve seen him do was directing the Autism drama; X plus Y, which got renamed to A Brilliant Mind for international audiences.
The Railway Children Return takes place in 1944 during the evacuations. A group of kids from Manchester, Lily(Beau Gadsdon), Pattie (Eden Hamilton), and Ted (Zac Cudby), are taken to the Yorkshire countryside to be part of a new family. The mistress of their new school, Annie, is played by Sheridan Smith, who is also the daughter of Bobbie Waterbury (Jenny Agutter).
When the child of the family, Thomas (Austin Haynes) shows them a secret hideout, they find that it has been occupied by an injured American soldier, Abe (Kenneth Aikens) who is fleeing the American military police after he was attacked during a racially motivated assault. The kids now want to get him out of the village and to Liverpool so that he can take a freighter back to America before the MPs catch him.
Even though this film is technically a sequel, they may as well have just called this ‘The Railway Children But Slightly Different’. This is a film that really isn’t keen to do its own thing- it has so many call-backs to the original thing, and not just Jenny Agutter being a recurring cast member. All of the children kind of fall into similar roles to how they were in the first film. There’s so much likeness to the original that I’m surprised that StudioCanal didn’t just remake the Railway Children. It’s not as if it’s too soon since the last adaptation! Even the climax to the film is remarkably similar. It surprised me how much this film didn’t want to stand on its own.
It does give some interesting aspects of WW2 history particularly the stationed American soldier’s annoyance towards the British of how we didn’t segregate pubs like they did in America at the time, and in fact this choice actually resulted in bar fights. It’s an excellent choice because it does slightly modernise the story, in fact, Abe and his story arc are probably the best things about this movie, aided by an excellent performance from Kenneth Aikens. And I will say that the film does an accurate job being a period piece, the film is set during the fifth year of the second World War and the film touches upon the idea that the war isn’t over, but things are starting to go in the way of the allied forces. This is particularly true of Uncle Walter’s character (Tom Courtenay) who has a position in the government.
I’m not normally a fan of this very gentile type of film that is aimed towards a largely middle-class audience. Though I will say that the Railway Children is a good movie, mainly because it has some substance, particularly on the angle of racism. While it does lean into the idea that racism is an institutional problem and not an individual one, it never quite goes the whole way, and actually kind of contradicts it slightly at the end of the movie. There’s certainly a lot of darker elements to the film, for example, all the children’s fathers are fighting during the film, though there’s only so many things you would expect from a WW2 movie in here. There is a bomb dropped part way through the film but that’s about as tense as the action gets outside of the climax. I also am quite cynical to think that the American characters are put in there to try and aim towards an American audience. Though while I am being quite cynical on that front, I will say that the film really paints the Americans as the bad guys in this. While yes, the British weren’t segregating pubs like they did in America, we weren’t exactly saints on this front either. I kind of found it interesting that this film almost puts racism down to being an American issue.
If you’re going out to see this film, I will say that it is remarkably short! With credits it comes in at an hour and 35 minutes, and I got a sense that a lot was cut from this. While the film does feel like it has a fully complete story, it also at times feels like some parts of it have been gutted of content, or that it is racing to the finish time. I was surprised at how quick I was out of the cinema! If your plan was to get out of the heatwave to stay in an air-conditioned cinema, this one won’t keep you in that long. It also makes me think that considering the production values of many of the scenes that this was aimed to be on British television but failed to find a network provider. I could see this being pitched to the BBC.
I have been quite negative about this film, but I do think overall it’s okay. The central performances are pretty good, and it tries to be a decent modern interpretation of the Railway Children. But it is so caught up on doing call-backs to the original movie that it lacks its own identity. If you liked the original, there’s no reason you won’t like this, but I was staggered by the short length of the movie which really by the end felt like it just stops rather than ends, and I felt like it was confused in its messaging at some points.
“THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER”Taiki Waititi returns to direct the newest entry in the Thor franchise, which now marks the first time that a Thor movie has had a returning director. I was really pleased to hear that Waititi was going to return to direct, since Thor: Ragnarok was one of my favourite films prior to this. I thought that he brought something to the project that previous directors hadn’t been able to. Thor is one of the only major Avengers to not really get a send-off in Avengers: Endgame. Though that being said, it did feel like the Russo brothers had finished his character arc at the end of the movie- so I wondered what was planned for this one, especially considering that Natalie Portman was returning to reprise her role as Jane Foster a.k.a The Mighty Thor.
I personally thought that it was a good idea to bring in Portman again, her presence has definitely felt missing in the MCU over time. I thought that it would be interesting to bring this part of Marvel’s history to the forefront, though I also wondered how much bad faith criticism was going to show up online from people who didn’t realise that Jane Foster as Thor was something right out of the comics.
The plot line of the film mostly revolves around Thor (Chris Hemsworth) alongside Korg (Taika Waititi) and the Guardians of the Galaxy after they get a distress call from King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson). They return to New Asgard to find that many of the Asgardian children have been kidnapped by Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). They receive help from the new Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman) who has managed to re-join Mjolnir in the hopes that it would give her the power to save her from cancer.
I’m going to stress this very potently: I really, really liked Thor: Love and Thunder. In fact, at this point it may be my favourite Thor movie. That’s not to say it’s perfect, while there is an attempt to give Gorr a believable motivation, I do get a sense that a lot of his backstory and character were left on the cutting room floor- I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an extended cut that had more for the character. I think Bale gives an excellent performance in this morale, and the effects do him well. They actually make his character very frightening at times.
One aspect that I think this film did very well at was the core relationship between Thor and Jane Foster, especially considering that she gets a pretty proactive role this time around. I was surprised that the main character role is kind of split between them, I thought considering that Marvel is moving into a new phase of their films that they would want to put Portman front and centre, but while she doesn’t take a back seat to Hemsworth (who proves that he is born to play this role), she certainly isn’t as much at the front as I expected her to be. That being said, they did an excellent job with her character arc. Her attempts to find anything that can help deal with her stage 4 cancer.
I will stress that I did read the comics for this character, but not for this movie. I did it for Thor: Secret Wars 2015 since I believed that the character was going to take a very big role in that event (spoiler alert, she doesn’t really, in fact no one really does except for the Fantastic Four. the more I think about that event comic, the worse it gets). I think that this film does a better job with the character than the comics did! I think Waititi did something the comic writers never did- they looked at the characters and then looked at what story they could tell, whereas in the comics it feels like they focus so much on the character that they have no idea what kind of story they want to tell. I remember the comic series not really having many engaging storylines- especially considering that they went on for ages before revealing that Jane Foster was Thor.
I think that putting Jane and Thor’s love story at the forefront of the film was a very good choice. It reminded me a lot of the comic Thor: The Mighty Avenger, which I recommend checking out. Out of all of the MCU films I felt like this one was the only one closest to the comics in many ways. It actually feels rather weird considering how much the MCU films do their own thing.
Waititi brings his tone and directing style to these films really well, we see that with a repeat of the thespians gag again, with another funny cameo in there. Including one cameo later on in the film that introduces another character that I really got a chuckle out of. The humour in this film is very good! It does edge into being overpowering and some of the gags don’t completely work, like Storm breaker being jealous of Mjolnir. I especially liked some of the earlier stuff with Guardians of the Galaxy, it really makes me want to rush Marvel and James Gunn into making GotG 3 later, especially considering that all of his DC projects have been shelved.
I also felt that the film did a very good job with the action scenes. There’s not too many this time around, but they do work very well. It also does a very good job shooting scenes in dark environments, something that I’ve noticed a lot of recent films are struggling to do.
I did, however, think the film came to a hasty resolution. It does feel like the film speeds up too much during the last portion of the movie, but as a whole, it’s decently passed. The soundtrack is really good! Waititi is very clearly a huge Guns n Roses fan, one of the main child actors even names himself after Axel Rose. but no one tell Axel Rose that; he doesn’t need anything more to inflate his ego.
I have heard some complaints about the new costume for both Thor’s in this movie. I think Thor getting the brighter costume this time around is to make sure he has a more distinct colour scheme than Portman’s Mighty Thor. The Mighty Thor costume is more accurate to Marvel’s original costume design, and I think that they wanted the two to be more distinct so that it didn’t seem that Jane was cosplaying. The original Thor costume, while not terrible, I think that the bright colours don’t entirely suit a character like Thor. They went more over to the blue side than silver this time.
If it sounds like I’m being a bit too nit-picky, it’s because I’m trying to be fair about this film! I really came out of the cinema gushing about this film. The one thing that this film has in spades is heart. It feels like everyone is giving their all in this film, and there really is a core to the film that I think really benefits the overall movie. It feels like a passion project. And while the ending does raise a few questions about the future of many characters, it really does feel like a nice bookend. I don’t think that there will be a fifth Thor film, and I think that that’s fine.
Thor: Love and Thunder has great humour and great character moments and a great (if not slightly underdeveloped) villain. If you liked Ragnarok, I think you’re getting a lot more of the same good stuff this time around, though I think that this film is superior to that one.
At the time of writing this, I’ve owned the new tiers of PlayStation Plus for one whole week, and I’ve decided to give my thoughts on the service at launch. It’s definitely not because I needed to fill in some gaps after I went to a Guns n Roses concert on the weekend so I didn’t have time to go and see the new Minions Movie…
In all seriousness, I did really want to talk about the new Plus service. PlayStation had a Plus subscription service for a while, but they weren’t offering many benefits for it. It was basically a way of charging you for online multiplayer, but the perk was that every month there were free games that you would be able to keep as long as you were subscribed. There were a bunch of games that got added to the service with the launch of the PS5, to get people into the previous generation that was going to be expanded within the PS5’s lifetime. Though, this was not the big competitor to Xbox’s GamePass that people were expecting. PlayStation now have attempted to address this issue as well as their lack of legacy content with a brand new tiered system to the PlayStation Plus.
There is PlayStation Plus: Essential which gives you all the benefits from before, PlayStation Plus: Extra, which gives you a whole collection of PS4 and 5 games that will rotate in and out of the service, and PlayStation Plus: Premium which gives you access to all the previous tiers as well as a whole collection of PS1, PS2, PSP and PS3 games (though, PS3 games will be only available through streaming of PlayStation’s Cloud Gaming service, due to the issue of emulation for PS3)!
I need to discuss a few aspects about the service and I will be making a few comparisons to Xbox Game Pass, which I’m also subscribed to. But to get started, I need to look into what each of the services are offering at this point in time. PlayStation has ensured that lots more games will be coming to each tier of the service, what we have currently is just one aspect of what we can expect of this service. So, if a PS1 game you want isn’t here yet, it may come to the service later down the line.
I went in with Premium so that I could test out the emulation quality that was being used for PS1, PS2, and PSP games on the PS5. But before I did that I also checked out the PlayStation Plus: Extra. A premium subscription will set you back £100 a year, Extra is slightly cheaper but you’re only charged monthly and you can cancel your service at any time – you’re not required to have a full year’s pay out at once. This comes out at around the same cost as an Xbox Game Pass, hence why I’m going to be looking at the value for money between the services. Looking at PlayStation Plus: Extra is where a lot of comparisons come through. Extra comes with a lot of games from the PS4 era and there’s a lot of excellent entries here. Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut, you have, Spiderman Remastered as well as Spiderman Miles Morales, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and even some of the third party selections are great, some Resident Evil games including the first remake! Ubisoft have even done a partnership deal, so Assassin’s Creed fans will get some excellent content.
PlayStation Extra has an excellent selection of games. However, if you’re like me and you’ve been heavily involved in the PlayStation ecosystem particularly PS4 & 5, there’s not much here that you probably didn’t already own, for example, I rarely found many Sony first party games. I didn’t own the Director’s cut version of Ghost of Tsushima, which I was tempted to pick up (though I haven’t at this point) but as a whole, there’s not much here. Some of the games have already left the service! Persona 5 has left, but this is likely due to a licensing deal since that game will be rereleased on PS5 at the same time it comes to Xbox and Nintendo Switch. While PlayStation could work out a deal with Atlas to bring those games back to the service, along with Person 3 & 4, Xbox have already paid a lot of money for those games to go to Game Pass on day one. Atlas might not want to make another negotiation for fear of breaking a deal with Microsoft.
This is all speculation as of right now, but my point still stands that the people that will get the most out of PlayStation Plus Extra are people that have bought a PS5 and don’t own all of the PlayStation exclusives, or even newcomers to the console. From that standpoint, the choice of games here is great.
Here’s the biggest problem with comparing it to Gamepass. You won’t be getting PlayStation first party games being added to service on the first day of release, which is something that Xbox has been doing. For example, Xbox’s biggest game on the horizon right now is Starfield being developed by Bethesda, which will be added to the service on day one. If you are subscribed to that service, you can download it from day one at no extra cost! PlayStation are charging more for their games right now, first pass games on Ps5 cost £70, and that means that PlayStation sees real value in their games. As a result, games like The Last of Us Remake and God of War Ragnarök, that will come out later this year, will not be placed on the service. In fact, more recent first party games won’t be placed on the service either. Grand Turismo 7 not being on the service actually baffles me considering that the live service nature of that game might bring a lot more people onto that game if they felt like they weren’t paying the premium to purchase the game only to be charged yet again for the micro transactions. It probably would also bring a lot more acceptance for the necessity of having to always be online to play that game’s single player features.
That’s not to say that PlayStation isn’t offering any day one releases. Stray, which comes out in a couple of weeks, is going to come to PlayStation Plus, Extra and Premium on day one, which is an excellent deal since people have been really excited about this game since its reveal.
The only games I spotted that were coming to the service that are PlayStation exclusive are Returnal and the Demon Souls Remake, which are probably the best titles to have on the service, but not all of the PlayStation 5 exclusives are on here. But that could change over time- I suspect that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart will be included down the line.
Now that’s just PlayStation Plus Extra, what do you get for Premium?
This is the one that I was most interested to check out, since I have owned every PlayStation exclusive that has come out so far.
Let’s talk about the game selection at launch later, the first thing I want to talk about is the Cloud service. All PS3 games are Cloud streamed, this is due to the fact that PS3 games are really difficult to emulate and get right. I actually heard one developer saying that a PS3 emulator would be so powerful that it would be locked to PS5 owners since a PS4 couldn’t handle it. We don’t know this for sure, since PlayStation doesn’t currently offer a PS3 emulator. I did try out a few PS3 games on the cloud streaming, and I wanted to compare this to Xbox X Cloud. I did try out games like Sonic Generations, as well as some of the God of War games. They were on a whole alright, but I thought that the streaming quality was not great on the PlayStation. Comparing this with X Cloud, I tried out Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is a very demanding game, and amazingly, with the exception of some graphical hiccups I couldn’t really tell I was playing a streaming version of the game. With the PlayStation ones, there was a little more input lag than I would have liked. I found myself making severe errors on Sonic Generations, which is a game I know very well. It’s especially not great considering that the Xbox 360 version is backwards compatible and comes with Auto HDR and non-existent load times. I can’t recommend playing the streamed version on the PlayStation. That being said, the streams are fine but they’re not the best way to play these games.
I was disappointed to find one of my favourite games, Metal Gear Solid 4 isn’t on the service due to issues with Konami and some of their copyright deals with these games.
The games being offered here are good! There’s a lot on the service, and PS1 definitely gets the most love. There are games like Syphon Filter, Worms Armageddon, Tekken 2, and they even managed to get the licensed Toy Story 2 game which is a real underrated gem of the PlayStation library.
The PS2 selection is more interesting. It does come with a bunch of new games, though it does also include some of the emulated games that already existed on PS4 like the Jack and Daxter trilogy for a start. Some games included are Ape Escape 2 and Wild Arms 3.
The PSP has the least amount of entries at this time. Though some of the PSP are included in the Premium tier, these are the PS4 remastered versions of these games with games like LocoRoco and Patapon 1 & 2. The only PSP game I found that wasn’t a PS4 remaster was a game called Echo Chrome, which is an interesting puzzle game to say the least, but I really had some trouble trying to figure out what I was doing on that.
With regards to the emulation quality of those games, it’s fine. The emulation quality is pretty good for the most part, and they came out with a lot of options for how they looked visually and how they played, particularly with the PS1 games. The PS2 came with fewer options, but I still enjoyed a few of them. The Jack and Daxter games especially look great, but these were emulations that were designed to take advantage of the PS4’s graphics anyway.
PS1 games come with a lot of quality of life features, like save states and rewind features, which all come in handy- especially with some of those games that offered very few options to save your game, particularly with Wild Arms, which I played a lot to test this service.
Compared to the PS1 mini, there’s a few things they got right and a few things they got wrong. Unlike that service, you get a whole bunch of save states which comes in handy considering that the PlayStation mini console only offered you one save state per game. However, the problem they took over was that some of these games are the European PAL versions and not the American NTSC meaning that some of these games don’t run at the correct framerate. I had trouble figuring out which was which at this point, but some of them do still have the issue. But Sony has said via Twitter that they plan to offer the NTSC versions for most games going forward and most games that use the PAL version will receive the NTSC versions in updates.
Trophies have also been added to certain games, but not all games contain them. APe Escape has trophies, but Everybody Tennis did not.
As for the selection at launch, there’s an interesting mix of Sony first party and third party games, but some of the choices I think are a bit weird. There’s some notable missing games here, for example you don’t get any of the notable Castlevania games that came to PlayStation here..
I do like the fact that they brought Resident Evil Director’s Cut to the service, but then you get a choice like Tekken 2, which to me seems like a weird choice considering that PlayStation does have a ROM for Tekken 3 lying around – it’s in the mini console. Tekken 2 is fine, but I would rather have 3 get the treatment than 2. They’ll probably want to get the Silent Hill games on the service, so they will have to work out a deal with Konami for them.
Sony might run into a bit of trouble going forwards since a lot of PS1’s definitive library did come from third parties! For example, the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games will probably now never make it on here because as of next year they’ll be part of the Microsoft ecosystem due to their acquisition of Activision and they’ll likely be on Xbox Game Pass.
There’s also other games that feel missing here. Part of it does feel rather unimpressive, since many of these games have not been ones I’ve gone back to a lot. I did play a lot of Tekken 2 multiplayer with friends and Wild Arms was really enjoyable to go back to, but there’s some bigger games that I think need to come to the service down the line. I’m certain PlayStation is working on bringing some of these games over, but it’s going to require a lot of deals with third parties. Right now, they seem to be on good terms with Capcom, and they might be able to get the Resident Evil games.
To summarise, while I think the selection is slightly lacking at launch and I think that Game pass has some better features, I do think that the service will get better and will become worth it. There’s a lot of great games coming to the service and you will also get discounts for buying certain games with your subscription.
My advice would be to take a look at the selection of games that are included at each tier and figure out what suits you best. If there’s not PS1 or PS2 games that you really want to play, you might as well save your money until they’re out. There’s no issues with the emulation of them so don’t worry about that, it’s a great way to play them. But that doesn’t extend to the PSP and PS3 games at this time.
More games are coming to the service down the line so keep an eye on it in case they come out with something that you want. If they get the Metal Gear Solid collections, they really need to make a big deal out of it as I imagine it would be a big pull to the service.
However, right now, there are some issues. I think that the service will improve down the line but at the end of the day, PlayStation are liking their legacy content, there is good reason to get these games back. But that being said, the cynical part of me thinks that these games are being put on the service just to entice people to join as PlayStation moves more towards the live service market. This has been particularly apparent with their acquisition of the studio Bungie that make the Destiny games, who will aid with the creation of these live service games.
It’s also weird to me seeing how many of these games were made by Sony Japan who are now gone- really makes you wonder how experimental Sony will be in the future, will they make games like Patapon and LocoRoco ever again? You can really tell that the Japan studio gave bold experimental ideas to Sony that were crucial in PlayStation’s success. But that’s just the cynical part of my brain that is kind of trying to be fair to some of the naysayers, but from what I can see, most people are enjoying the service overall. I think that the emulation quality is really good, but the selection of games could be better. Though I will be keeping an eye on the service down the line, and I may even do a follow up to this in a year’s time to see how the service is a year later.
Sonic Origins (available for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X & S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Playstation 5 version used for this review)
Sonic Origins had a very weird marketing cycle. It was announced last year for the 30th anniversary of Sonic Central, but went radio silent for ages, only showing up in a random tweet with a trailer, that also announced the DLC for the digital deluxe version (which is the version I used for this review). In summation, it’s a collection of Sonic 1, 2, 3, and Sonic & Knuckles, and Sonic CD. Sonic 3 & Knuckles have been bundled as one game, as they should be.
This collection is below full price, which is a good deal for what is essentially 4 games in one. But most of these games are largely purchasable elsewhere, apart from Sonic & Knuckles, which is hard to get due to copyright issues in the soundtrack of the game.
This is a collection of very old games, and it’s not as if much has been done to them, though various changes have been made. I’m going to review this in a similar way that I did Mario 3D All Stars, so I’ll be less commenting on the game itself and instead how the collection plays, considering that these are available in a few other methods- for example if you have the Nintendo Switch online expansion pass, you’ll already have access to Sonic 2 as part of your subscription.
Everyone knows that I’m a huge Sonic fan, so I’ve already bought these games countless times. I fear how many times I’ve bought Sonic 1 & 2. But I’ve also played quite a few collections, and the one beloved Sonic collection that this will be compared to instantly will be Sonic Mega Collection Plus which was made for the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube and contained Sonic 1, 2, 3, Knuckles, 3D Blast, Sonic Spinball, and Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. And that is an interesting comparison to make, since they both have museum features, concept art.
However, if I was to give my opinion on all of the games in question, I would say they all still hold up. They’re all excellent platformers and I really recommend them. Sonic 1 is still a bit rough around the edges since it was still the team figuring out what they wanted to do and places they wanted to grow, and I will say that Sonic CD has some weird level design, but I will say that these games are great, and this collection has not ruined them. We’re not dealing with a Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition fiasco, which is one of the big reasons why I purchased the original emulations of Sonic on steam, just in case this turned into a total disaster.
While these aren’t fully translated versions of the mobile phone versions created by Christian Whitehead, who would go on to make Sonic Mania, they are virtually identical. The only one that required a remaster was Sonic 3 and Knuckles, which is being developed by Headcanon.
So what does the collection get right and what does it get wrong?
The game offers you several ways to play from the menu. You can select any one of the games and you can also select Story Mode, which puts all the games together back to back, playing them chronologically (starting with Sonic 1, Sonic CD, Sonic 2, then Sonic & Knuckles) and now they each come with a newly animated introduction cutscenes as well as an ending for when you beat each game.
Full disclosure, I actually also purchased Sonic Origins on Nintendo Switch to play the Story Mode since I planned to play the Story mode on the PS5 mode on a livestream. I did enjoy playing the game in story mode but I was relieved that I didn’t have to beat the game in order to play any of the games individually.
Both games come with two modes and a few ways to play it. There’s a boss rush, which allows you to take on all the bosses in each individual game, mirror mode, which allows you to play the game in reverse (a real challenge if you’ve played these games a lot and you have muscle memory for a lot of the levels). But the main two I’ll talk about are classic mode and anniversary mode. Classic mode is when you play the game as originally intended, nothing is really altered. Anniversary mode means that you gain some slight updates, like adding the spin dash into Sonic 1, which actually kind of breaks the game, as well as all 4 games get the drop dash from Sonic Mania, which comes in very handy.
You also get a lot of what was in the mobile phone ports, like Hidden Palace being put back into Sonic 2, as well as the ability to play as either Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles in various games. It also marks the first time that you can play as Knuckles in Sonic 1. I did try this out, and personally I thought he played alright, but the level design clearly wasn’t intended for him- though he can break the game in quite a few areas. Marvel Zone is more tolerable in areas due to his gliding ability. He also makes getting out of the water in the Labyrinth Zone a lot easier.
Anniversary Mode’s main gimmick is the removal of lives, you get infinite continues and instead of lives you can build up coins. The coins can be used to buy extras from the museum area, but more importantly, you can spend a coin to have a retry of any special stages where you didn’t succeed, which is where I unlocked Hyper Sonic for the first time ever in Sonic & Knuckles. A lot of people have said that they feel like the challenge is removed from the Sonic games when you take the lives out of the mix, which is something that I was worried about too but I surprisingly found that the challenge was not absent, especially considering that I could be stuck at a checkpoint for ages with very little rings to defend myself, which made some boss fights a lot harder than normal. It really allowed me to appreciate all of the individual levels since I had less fear of having to get back to where I was if a continuation wasn’t available. I think that the ability to continue in special stages is fantastic, since the special stages really require memorisation and you could actually learn to get better as you go along. I think I actually learnt more through doing that and as a result I was getting better at the harder stages as a result, I even defeated a few of the harder stages on my first go if not the first few.
If you don’t like the idea of it and you want the challenge back, the classic mode is there. But I think that the Anniversary Mode is great for newcomers, especially young kids who have been wanting to try out some of the old Sonic games after seeing the movies. And in fact, anniversary mode introduces some of the best quality of life updates for these games in my opinion
The museum is great, it really has some cool concept art images and various parts of the soundtracks include several remixes made throughout the years. For example, you can get some of the remixes made in the Super Smash Brothers games.
On the videos front, it fortunately does not lock several of them behind the coins that you collect in the game, especially for the ones that you can watch for free on YouTube like the Sonic Mania shorts and clips from the Sonic Symphony Orchestra. You don’t get the whole show in here as it only does the melodies of the games featured in this collection. If you want to see the whole symphony, the soundtrack is available on Apple Music and Spotify and you can watch the show on YouTube. I would really recommend it, it’s probably one of the best symphony concerts for a game anniversary that I’ve ever heard.
You could say that the coins do warrant you to play the games over and over again, but if you’re decent at the game you’ll earn plenty over time. And if you purchase the digital deluxe version, you start the game off with 100 coins anyway- but I would recommend saving those coins and not buying too many things in the museum until you’ve done most of the games, since you want to save those coins for repeating special stages.
While I think that the museum could have had more things in it, like behind the scenes documentaries, some of the concept art and backgrounds to look at were really great- and it does feel like it was a real celebration of the history of the franchise- if not it’s complete history, it’s at least it’s most recent.
In classic mode, the games are kept in their 4×3 aspect ratio with borders, which can be turned on or off- if there’s one complaint I could make, it’s that there could be more design choices for these borders. However, if you play the game in anniversary mode the game comes in full widescreen. Despite my own concerns about the widescreen display, the games do not feel stretched out, they’ve been matched to widescreen almost perfectly. Sonic 3 & Knuckles looked particularly good in widescreen, and I actually think that you can see a lot more of the colour and the well-crafted design of these games when you see them in widescreen. I did briefly play this on the Switch OLED and the OLED screen made these games look amazing. Considering I played a bit of Sonic 2 on the Megadrive collection that comes with Nintendo Switch Online, you really can tell the difference when playing this game in widescreen for this collection.
Mission mode is added to all of the games, which gives you a small section of each level that gives you a simple goal and you can get a ranking based on how quickly you complete this goal, with S rank being the top tier. This actually was a really interesting way of playing the game since some of them were really challenging, and my obsession with being really good at Sonic games meant that I spent a lot of late nights trying to get the S rank- some of these are not easy!
The challenges consist of beating bosses with no rings, adding a bottomless pit to a boss fight, using Knuckles to beat a certain number of enemies while gliding. There’s a bunch of interesting remixes to levels.
If you really are looking for a challenge, these are great ways to do it. But if you’re a completion-ist, getting the S rank on all of these is going to drive you insane.
This comes in anniversary, classic, and story mode. Each checkpoint gives you an auto save, so you can quit the game and start it right where you left off. This is one of my favourite things about this collection, since it allowed me to play these games at whatever pace I wanted to. It also helps that in the PlayStation 5 version using the trophy hunting features, I could actually start up whatever games I wanted to from the PS5’s starter interface without going through any menus.
Auto save is another reason why I think in some cases this is the best way to play these games.
I put this one into a mixed section because it wasn’t something I noticed a lot myself, but I felt for integrity I should say that some of the pixel art that was used in this has not been brought up to the level that people would have liked and there are some visual inconsistencies. I noticed it myself with Knuckles in Sonic 1, he really doesn’t look like he belongs in that game. But, it could have looked a lot worse. I will say that if you see a side by side on YouTube or have a very keen eye you might notice this point, but I think that the average player won’t notice these aspects of the game.
Again, I’m putting this in for integrity reasons since a lot of people have found some bad bugs in the game. I only came across one serious one, which was with the time trials on the PlayStation, when I tried to look at my time records it actually caused my PS5 to crash, making me do a force reset. Luckily my PS5 was fine, but I felt like I should point this out. I did still feel as though I should bring this up because I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints online.
One of the reasons that Sonic 3 & Knuckles had trouble being put in collections is mainly because of the soundtrack issues. The soundtracks in all of these games are amazing, however, 3 of the levels required new songs to be put in since many of them have copyright issues with the estate of Michael Jackson, who has now been confirmed by the Sonic co-creator did take part with the creation of the soundtrack in Sonic 3, though he remains uncredited. The reason why he left the project is still disputed, some claim that SEGA fired him after initial allegations came out, others claiming that he wasn’t happy with how Sega Megadrives sound chips made his music sounds, there’s still no official word on that mystery.
3 stages in Sonic 1 required new music to be put in place, and they used new recordings of the prototype versions of the songs. Those songs don’t sound bad, they’re certainly not as good as the songs that ended up being in the game, and considering what Michael Jackson has been accused of, I’m actually appalled to say that, but the prototype songs are fine. But these new recordings sound terrible! Something must have been going on with the sound engineers. They’re luckily not too distracting and they improve as you go on- but it would have been better if you just put the Steam prototype versions in.
Sonic Origins is an excellent collection of games. I don’t really understand people’s negatives around the game, because I’ve been absolutely adoring it! This is going to be one of my go-to ways of playing these games. I think that there are some valid criticisms arounds some of the pixel art and some of the soundtrack that had to be put in to avoid a lawsuit.
But man, this collection is so good! I would really recommend it to be a great way to get younger kids into Sonic since the anniversary mode gives it a lot of quality-of-life features that improve the game. Old school fans might find some issues with these ones, but I found it to be a great collection. I kind of with the museum contained a bit more, but as a whole, it’s a great collection
Final Score 9.4/10
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