Masters Of The Universe (2026)

I was expecting this to be a moderately enjoyable romp, but it was just a terribly written overlong mess aimed at ten year olds who haven't seen all the movies it's knocking off. Especially Thor Ragnarok, down to individual shots and even the end credits. Nothing makes sense, it's all really clunkily executed and the tone is all over the place because it doesn't understand why movies like Ragnarok or Flash Gordon or Highlander or Shaun Of The Dead worked so it ends up feeling like Batman & Robin or Sonic The Hedgehog except with a weird amount of sex jokes in it. It doesn't even really understand what was good about the original cartoon, to be honest.
Not that I think the cartoon was a masterpiece that must not be strayed from or anything, but there's a reason it's stuck around in the popular culture.
The end credits song is by terrible joke glam rock band The Darkness, which sums the whole thing up, really.

Rating: rubbish.

Thank Goodness You're Here! (2024)

I started, played about 20 minutes and very much enjoyed it. Thankfully I was prepared for it to only have the lightest of gameplay, so my expectations were calibrated correctly. Only slight annoyance is that I don't want the subtitles on but also if I miss a line of dialogue from someone there's no way to get the information I missed. This might end up not being an issue at all, though, seeing as the main way to get through the game is just to walk around and click on everything. I'd prefer to understand what it is I'm solving by clicking on everything, though!

(This turned out to be a total non-issue!)

Finished, it was great: legitimately very funny; wonderful animation, acting, and general presentation; not very much there gameplay-wise but it still made time to put fun little platforming sections in. My only sliiiight niggle was that while most of the time repetition was used to great comedy effect, there were one or two points where I groaned a little at having to go through the same tunnel or walk around the same hub again, even at less than 3 hours total play time. But they did keep on dropping new content through most of the game, and before it became a problem there was that truly excellent ending. I love how the game became an ode to interactive entertainment, just squeezing all it could out of a very limited interaction space.

Rating: some minor issues around light gameplay and repetition, but overall funny, fun and gorgeous.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023)

I've now started - great presentation and rolling out of the opening narrative, looks gorgeous, tons of detail. Bit frustrating that my impressive-for-2022 PC doesn't seem to be able to run the game maxxed out, but I guess they're future-proofing it and I'm getting what would have been expected at launch. Gameplay seems to be very much an Ubisoft so far, but because it's being all Na'vi rather than some modern-day bloke running around with a gun, things aren't as clear so I'm doing some of the fumbling around that I expect more from immersive sims than from an FPS sandbox. Having said that, I think I did pick the less intrusive UI option for full immersion so it may well be my own fault. I don't want to be a total pinkskin and give in and fill my screen up with little icons, though. Also, I feel a little underpowered and having to scrabble around constantly for arrow sticks and stuff, and there's a ton of crafting and cooking systems that I'm not sure if I've misunderstood. I guess this is typical RPG opening act stuff though, and it does at least fit with the story of me being a Na'vi raised by the humans and then suddenly flung into the jungle with no cultural knowledge.

Now trying to tempt myself back into Frontiers Of Pandora. I've been told that I should at least keep going until I get an ikran (the pterosaur things) as that really opens the game up. I also think I might need to get myself into the mindset of playing it an hour a day and picking away at the foraging and crafting and stuff. I didn't realise it would be so heavy on that stuff, it's like No Man's Sky level. I also keep giving up on NMS for similar reasons - tons of systems that I can never remember if I take a break for more than a week, which is something I often do because I've never really had that habit of regular gaming. I tend to just pick up an 8 hour game and play it start to finish over a weekend. But the lack of  manual saves is a huge barrier to that because it demands committing to the game for a certain, unknown length of play session. Apparently you can force autosave with the fast travel system, but it's not ideal. I guess modern AAA games are getting to a level of complexity where manual saves aren't feasible anymore...

I gave it a little go, and watched some videos about crafting, and I might jump back in tomorrow. It's not great when learning to play a game feels more complicated than learning to make games!

Continued with Frontiers Of Pandora, did some crafting and got some small quests. It does lend itself to lovely moments, it's really cool to be climbing up a tree and spot a weird bug, then check out the wiki and find out about its survival techniques and place in Navi culture, or to go hunting a deer type thing and realise that they herd around the big hammerhead rhino things intentionally for protection so you have to try and get one wandering off from the herd. But also, the menus are still nigh-impenetrable and there's a huge amount of faff around the simplest of things like getting food for health. Also, the weapons are all extremely underpowered and tricky to aim with right now. I hear that once you've levelled up a lot then you can have great fun slaughtering camps full of sky people, but for me the promise of 'the game gets satisfying later' is never really enough. If this were a Far Cry game I'd probably have given up on it by now, it's only the Avatar trappings that are encouraging me to stick at it.

Okay, I uninstalled Frontiers Of Pandora. Hopefully I'll come back to it some day when I'm more likely to be able to regularly sink a couple of hours into it over an extended period, and I'm a little more prepared for the crafting and upgrading system that is this game. Also maybe when I've got a big enough hard drive that 80GB sitting there not getting used much isn't quite so irritating.

Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

SPOILERS BELOW

 I'm apparently 10/15 chapters through and it's pretty disappointing, The impression I got of it beforehand was average gameplay, good political storytelling; I agree with the former, not the latter. It starts off like any gung-ho Modern Warfare bullshit, fair enough I think, you've got to set this up to undercut it, but then it doesn't stop being that for like the first half. And even then it's just a couple of decisions of exactly how shitty a soldier to be, which considering I'm already going around stomping on people's necks to put them out of their misery doesn't feel meaningful. And it's academic, as the decisions are so badly signposted that I barely realise I'm making one, how I'm supposed to or what it is, so I accidentally ended up being a war criminal just because it was incredibly unclear how not to be. The storytelling is really unclear too, there are a bunch of characters vying for power but you never meet any of them and they all sound the same, so I had no idea which was which, what they were doing or whether they were good or bad or ambiguous. I often die because of bad communication, like it's told me to run through a sandstorm when what it means is proceed carefully through a sandstorm. There's also the annoying thing of having two weapon slots and letting you choose whether to swap your current one for any lying around but not telling you anything about them, so because I'm not a gun-humping dickhead I have no idea what these micro-decisions mean either. I know pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher and that's it.
It's a real shame, because the whole Heart Of Darkness take sounded really interesting, but the only thing I've taken away from it really is 'shooting windows so baddies get swept away by sand is cool'. If I hadn't heard ahead of time that it was supposed to be doing commentary I don't think I even would have realised it was trying to.

Got to the end, pretty frustrating. For one thing, fucking Fight Club? Come on. And it didn't work anyway because of the aforementioned problems that I didn't know who anyone was or what was going on so the twist meant nothing to me and I couldn't follow which bits had been real, and it seemed like maybe I could have made choices to affect it but also I'm not sure when the game was being 'clever' and giving me no real choice and when it was being bad and giving me a real choice very unclearly.
I like the general concept of 'do a Bioshock to interrogate Modern Warfare type games, with a bunch of Apocalypse Now (and unfortunately another movie) thrown in', and the setting of Dubai with all the ultra-modern hotels and stuff against the harsh sand and violence was really striking, but the storytelling was muddled to say the least and the gameplay was solid but unremarkable and it got to be a trudge by the end of it on both fronts.

Send Help (2026)

Really disappointing. The structure is all off, it's always two steps behind where you expect it to be, stuff is really obviously signposted and then later treated as if it's supposed to be a massive twist, it flip-flops which characters you're supposed to sympathise with and seems to be going for a War Of The Roses, Death Becomes Her, Wild Things type feel but just can't get there. Also it's a bit frustrating to see so much CG in a (non-fantasy) Raimi movie, it really lets the air out of a bunch of moments.

Rating: frustratingly flawed

Hoppers (2026)

I enjoyed it! It loses focus towards the end, and there's some muddled messaging about protesting and everyone being good deep down, but overall it's fun and inventive and it looks just fine.

Rating: good

Discworld book series (1983 - 2015)

The Colour Of Magic

I've read this book a few times, and the first time I must have been pretty young because I was blown away by the structure at the start of the book with Rincewind and Twoflower escaping a city fire, then telling the story of how they met, until the story finally explains the fire and then catches up with the storytelling. It still works very nicely, actually, and this time I was also impressed by the way that he starts out describing A'Tuin, then seguing to the Krull scientist, then seguing from him to the distant city fire and getting into the story proper from there. It's very slick and it makes it all the more satisfying when Rincewind and Twoflower actually get embroiled in the expedition to determine A'Tuin's sex which had previously seemed to be merely a frivolous piece of introductory worldbuilding.
But as most people have noted here, the episodic middle section of the book feels far too loose and driven by various contrivances and dei ex machina (if that's the correct plural!), such as the gods happening to be playing a game, or the luggage showing up very time Pratchett needs to get the duo out of trouble. He doesn't have the knack that, say, Douglas Adams has of making these ridiculous contrivances feel utterly logical and justified. I would have much preferred events to be driven by the Patrician having sent a bunch of assassins and such after them or something like that. (The Patrician instead disappear from the story as abruptly as that magic sword.) As is, it feels a bit too much like Pratchett confessing to the reader that he just wants to get onto the next funny bit. And honestly, by the end of it I was a bit tired of the two characters getting into a scrape then Rincewind shrieking and Twoflower remaining calmly enthusiastic until it was over. I think the book could have stood to be 50 pages shorter.
But all that aside, there's still so much good stuff here. The world-building alone, with all the clever stuff about how direction would work and how fields of magic cause stuff like sunlight trickling over the disc like syrup and being farmable, is fantastic. One other thing I did really like about it was the sense of magic being this volatile, massively dangerous and unpredictable force and something any sensible person stays away from.
Looking forward to Light Fantastic and then rewatching that awful David Jason adaptation!

The Light Fantastic

Just (re-)watching the Color Of Magic adaptation now (the one with David Jason). Apart from feeling a little cheap [edit: I went elsewhere than YouTube and found some 1080p blu-ray versions in the hopes of alleviating this a bit, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to direction, cinematography, costume etc rather than fidelity], it has that h2g2 movie feel to it where the subtle humour and clever narrative structures have been replaced with bum jokes and actors mugging. David Jason is an interesting choice - he's about twice the age Rincewind should be and doesn't match the scrawny, scrappy image I have in my head. They do tie the age change in to his feeling of a wasted life due to the Octavo spell, though, which works, and Jason certainly has the ability to play a perceptive fast-talking coward with a sarcastic streak, though a few minutes in he seems to be going with 'bumbling'.
I didn't like the 'wizzard' on his hat the first time I saw this, seemed like another ham-fisted Garth Jennings-esque bit of dumbed down characterisation, but apparently this does actually get introduced in later Rincewind books (I don't think I saw it mentioned in TCOM or TLF..?). Hopefully it comes off a bit smarter when Pterry does it! I think they still could have been a bit more subtle with it.
Finished the first half of the adaptation. I'll watch the second half now as well, but yeah this is pretty terrible. It's aiming for a sort of mash-up of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings and lands somewhere around Carry On Columbus. I think really the tone they should have been aiming for was something like Iannucci meets League Of Gentlemen, and an episodic tv series format probably would have served it much better than the two tv movies they went for. But even outside of the general tone: stuff like the editing, the score, the writing, the costumes and make-up is all really clumsy and cheap. And again it reminds me of the h2g2 movie (and stuff like the Watchmen or Sin City movie) in the way   that they make these weird, pointless little tweaks all over the place that ruin jokes and cool moments. I guess this is what happens when you give the Discworld series to the Leon The Pig Farmer guy.

I agree with most that this is a bit of an improvement on TCOM - any extreme good luck is attributed to the Octavo spells protecting Rincewind, most bad luck comes from the Unseen University hunting them from afar (or just from Twoflower being a wally), which all ties into the story a lot better than the god stuff; they add a couple of people into their party as they go (Cohen and Bethan, who also get their own character arc), and make some allies, there's an antagonist in Trymon and an overarcing plot thread in the star, all of which serves to make it feel less episodic and more like a full story.
I actually really like the magic shop stuff, it's a cool idea in itself and I also love the correct explanation for why these shops exist. It's one of the things that stuck with me through the years. I also like that it gives the luggage a bit more of an origin story than just 'it came from Twoflower's continent where everything is expensive and fabulous'. (Another thing that had stuck with me from reading this as a kid was the seemingly unsolvable cliffhanger (or cliff-faller, I guess) of Rincewind falling off the disc into space being resolved by the spell simply shifting the entire disc down and to the left a bit. Brilliant!)
And the true threat of Trymon being his cold dedication to admin, bureaucracy, and power for power's sake, climbing the corporate ladder simply because that's what you do, was very interesting.
Probably my one issue with it was that the final confrontation with Trymon boils down to him and Rincewind rolling around having a schoolyard scrap. I would have appreciated something a little smarter there (from both Pterry and Rincewind!). Also, I guess I'm not a massive fan of Cohen conceptually - he feels like the last vestiges of the 'parodying fantasy tropes' stuff from TCOM.
Final thing, not sure if I had just forgot this or I realised it for the first time here, but the two books that combine to make a single story have titles  that both refer to the same thing - Octarine - just phrased differently, which is a very neat meta flourish.

A Stroke Of The Pen

Honestly, these felt like warm-up exercises, or stories he was telling to his kids (lots of comedy sound effects) after they gave him random prompts. Like whenever the slightest whisper of an idea popped into his head (several after a couple of glasses of sherry at Christmas, apparently - what if Santa quit, what if Santa was ousted, what if 'my true love gave to me' meant 'my true love sent to me via the Royal Mail') he'd just start writing for an hour or so until he ran out of steam or realised that it wasn't a very good idea after all and then wrap it up in a couple of sentences, bung it in the post to the newspaper editor and never think about it again.
I got to Dragon Quest ('what if dragons were reasonable!') and gave up. I was going to ask on here if there were any other particularly Discworld-relevant ones, so I might flick through the Quest Keys one.