The Jabberer

Another day, another failed platforming challenge. At least it looks pretty as I'm falling to my death for the fifteenth time on this specific jump... Overgrowth was one of those games that was on my radar for a while in my teens, it was just..."there" so to say (mostly in the form of youtube videos). I saw some gameplay a while back before it finally dropped off my radar, but when I got it as part of a Humble Bundle I was quite excited to try this hairy and strange-seeming fighting game. Now, after completing the four included campaigns I'm perplexed in how I feel about Overgrowth . I like it at times, but at others I feel indescribably bored, even though I've only clocked roughly five hours into it. It's a relatively solid game, but it feels limited by its design, primarily in terms of the gameplay, but I'll get to that eventually. The story of Overgrowth isn't particularly present, if that makes any sense. There are three campaigns of varyi

On top of looking pretty darn cool, Galaxy in Flames  features my favorite thing  in 40K on the cover: an Imperial Titan, a giant version of the knight. Yes, there are friggin' knights in this setting! To finish my Thanksgiving break backlog is the first trilogy of Black Library's The Horus Heresy , which I retroactively decided to review all three since they are essentially a single arc (and apparently after the next book things are a lot more fragmented). Truth be told, I did not expect to be so captivated by these first three books (in a series of at least forty more and counting) whose entire appeal rests on the condition that you already know the broad strokes of the lore or none of it, but god are they compelling.  In what amounts to a three-act Greek tragedy (or the first act of a larger story for the committed), Horus Rising , False Gods , and Galaxy in Flames  tell the story of the the turning of the charismatic Horus Lupercal, hero and beacon of human supremacy i

Combat focus is nearly essential to survival in my opinion. Blammo indeed! Continuing with my backlog, the last game I was able to complete during my Thanksgiving break was Prey (2017), a game that I had tried playing a few years before this but couldn't really get into. A survival-(sorta)-horror, Prey is generally not within my wheelhouse, but the lure of space and feeling that I didn't give it a chance proved to be too tempting. It's a game that I haven't really seen before, one in which player choice is everything and you're always on the clock, there's a few hiccups here and there, but on the whole it "just works". It was a game that I very much enjoyed playing despite its challenge, so let's get into it, just like old times. Never thought I'd encounter body horror that would make my skin crawl, but here we are. Those needles go into your eye by the way... Prey 's story is all about the simulacrum, or copies of reality, an

Nearly every action setpiece ends with some sort of dramatic finish, be it jumping to a helicopter or running from a plane.  I rarely play as women in video games, though it's mostly due to the fact that when I play roleplaying games I prefer to play as or be a variation of myself. Jalbert the Captain, Iago the Ranger, Lawrence the Cleric, the list goes on. Even when there is only visual differences (like in Prey, the review coming after this one), I identify with male avatars time and time again. Thus, the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider was an exercise in leaving my comfort zone, and despite the uncomfortable connotations of that statement, I had an enormously fun time stepping into the shoes of Lara Croft for the first time. The gameplay is snappy, cinematic, and engaging; the story, while not the deepest, is full of emotion and everything you'd love to see in an adventure film; and the game itself remains quite beautiful at times about six years after its release, so let&#

A sort of King Solomon's Mines for the modern day. Does it succeed in that regard? I don't know, I'll have to reread that one first. Continuing on the subject of things I finished over the break, I finished Michael Crichton's Congo . The author himself really needs no introduction as even more than a decade after his death he remains a pillar of popular culture, especially science fiction. He also wrote Westworld , much to my surprise, though that's neither here nor there, this is about Congo . Congo was published in 1980, and seemed to be one of his less widely acclaimed books judging from the little information I could find on Wikipedia. Personally, I found Congo to be a rather fun book to read, though I also found it to be somewhat unimpactful. It's a largely grounded story that felt taken out of the computing frenzy of the eighties (apart from things like lasers and automated turrets), while likewise maintaining a brisk narrative pace with few pauses

Nothing makes me happier than advancing with the heavy assault gun, I love to hear this puppy roar and light up the darkness, until it jams of course. So I had a pretty productive Thanksgiving break, and to my surprise I was able to finish a good number of things, though a review wasn't among them. The first game I managed to finish was one that I had on the metaphorical shelf for a while, and that was  Space Hulk Deathwing  (the Enhanced Edition). It's a rather unique game among the horde-based shooters, mostly due to the fact that you and your squadmates are less outmanned and outgunned and more the big guns. To me it evoked the beginning sequence of the Marines arriving in  Aliens , complete with motion-detectors and quiet tension punctuated by intense bursts of gunfire, though without the memorable lines. It's a game that feels good to play (in addition to being gorgeous( and by and large is satisfying to triumph over, but at the same time its difficulty, AI, an

Two weeks ago (I have a big backlog) I was able to catch a showing of Parasite , a Korean foreign-language film from Bong Joon Ho, and it blew me away. I'm generally someone who sticks to spoken English film, but the things I heard about this film were too good to pass up on. Seriously, the hype is earned, it's a masterful film, similar to The Lighthouse in that regard, though Parasite goes about this in a drastically different fashion than the former, and I'll preface this review by saying that Parasite is the more accessible one. It's a film that morphs through different film types throughout its runtime, though with a constant undercurrent of dark or bleak comedy. In case you haven't already guessed, it's a film that I very much enjoyed, but it's also a film that's best to go in blind, so with minimal spoilers let's get started. If I deserve to be poor, why does this complete ditz and utter fool of a woman deserve to be at the top? You can e

I managed to catch Dr. Sleep with a friend a while ago, and it was pretty ok. It fundamentally changes the story of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , which is not necessarily a bad thing, and it does end the same way as Steven King's novel, so it's somewhat interesting to me from that angle. It's Steven King, so don't expect sunshine and rainbows, especially for unlucky kids (a point that I appreciate from time to time in the horror genre). It's not anything mind-blowing or even particularly notable (even to me and I love The Shining ), and it does have some good bits but the sum total is a pretty forgettable experience with some glimmers of what could have been. It's an interesting reversal from The Shining as Danny sees the message in reverse in the mirror, but in all honesty the most surprising bit of this scene is that such a marketed scene took place more than halfway through the film. To be entirely honest, I was biased agains this film's st