Category: Rant

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David Fincher Is Directing World War Z 2?!!!

World War Z hasn’t held up well.  It was an okay action film that turned zombies in to insects, so while Brad Pitt has been pushing for a sequel, I have been hoping for the opposite.  That all changes now!  According to Variety David Fincher is close to signing a deal to direct the sequel.  David Fincher is one of the greatest directors working.  I mean if Alien 3 and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are your worst films, you are pretty good, and if anyone can make World War Z work it would be him.

I guess Brad Pitt has been begging him to do it for quite a while now, and Fincher has finally given in.  I just hope that he can bring something new to the very tired zombie action formula.  A zombie thriller perhaps?  Maybe there are threats of a new zombie outbreak and people are desperately trying to find its cause?  Man that could be a good film.  David if you are reading this drop me a line so we can talk story ideas, and don’t let Brad write it.

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Mass Effect: Andromeda Probably Doesn’t Review Well…

I am quite a bit further in to Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I am still having a great time.  Much better than the reviews and people who played the early trial would have led me to believe, so what caused this discrepancy?  I think it is the way reviewers have to play games, and the part of the game the trial members were locked in too.

In order to review Mass Effect: Andromeda before the embargo lifted, reviewers would have had to play the game for like eight hours a day or more just to see most of the content, and then because they need to review everything, they would have had to play all the crappy filler missions too.  That means they would have had to sit through every poorly written dialog tree, and encounter every bug the game has to offer for a full work day.  That wouldn’t be great.  I am surprised under those circumstances the reviews are as good as they are.

Meanwhile the user reviews on Metacritic are even worse, but when you read them, they all pretty much come from people who only played the ten hour one planet trial.  Again, the trial forced players to play only the worst part of the game.  Eos doesn’t even get good until the second time you visit it.  EA should have just skipped the trial, or allowed people to get as far as they could in ten hours, so they could have gotten to the good parts.  Locking people in to the worst part of the game did not help sell the game.

Listen, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a flawed game, but still a very fun one provided you can play the good parts and skip everything else, and there are plenty of good parts.  The people that gave the game its review numbers were not allowed to do that.  We as gamers are, so while your results may very, I think Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth playing, but I am not saying the reviewers were wrong.  They were just forced to play the worst this game has to offer.

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Can You Have Too Many Micro-Transactions?

A Reddit user recently posted that in order to unlock all of For Honor’s gear it would cost you over $700, and in order to unlock it all without money you would need to play one and a half hours a day for about two and a half years.  He obviously thought that was too much.  Now I am not defending For Honor, but fighting games generally have tooooons of micro-transactions for different outfits and whatnot, and you generally only unlock the stuff for the characters you play.  Also, all this gear is purely cosmetic, so the purple samurai will not fight better than the default gray one.  Still, two and a half years and $700 are big numbers for a game that you already paid $60 for.

My question is, is this a bad practice or not?  Honestly, I am not sure.  On one hand I love getting random little unlocks for playing games.  They are like little achievements, but on the other hand it is frustrating to never get what you want, and all the people that fork over the cash look awesome.  Overall I tend to be okay with it if:

  • The gear is purely cosmetic.
  • They are not always advertising it to me.  I already bought the game once don’t sell it to me again.
  • If there is still a “free” way for me to get what I want for my character.
  • Or if the game fails the first three criteria, the game needs to be free to play and that is how it makes its money.

For Honor fits the first and third of my criteria, but where it fell flat with me was that it was always trying to get me to fork over cash.  I hate that.  Save your adds for the TV.  At worst send me a note that you are having a sale, but then never mention it again.  Trust me, we are all aware that we can spend real money for checkered hats.  For Honor would have done better launching for like $30 and then skipping the single player campaign.  Then market it as a fighting game, since that is what it is, then they could have charged whatever they wanted for cosmetics and no one would have cared.  Not only that I think it would have been a hit.  Oh well, maybe it will serve as a warning to other games.  We shall see.  For me, it worked out anyway since I didn’t buy the game.  What do you think about games with a lot of micro-transactions?

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No One Needs Wonder Woman More Than Warner Brothers!

So I know this came out Saturday, but I was rather busy yesterday, so I am going to talk about it today.  Is that okay?  I hope so because you really don’t have a choice.  The trailer above is very good, but Warner Bothers has a great marketing department.  The trailers for Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad were also good, but the movies themselves were lacking.  Warner Brothers needs Wonder Woman to not only be a hit financially, but critically as well.  As a mater of fact they would probably take less than stellar box office returns as long as people really liked the film, like they did with Batman Begins.  People tend to forget Batman Begins was a flop compared to its massive budget.

Warner Brothers needs to prove it can make good movies so they can keep up in the franchise arms with Disney.  Disney has the upper hand, but mostly because Warner Bros keeps bungling their releases.  Right now Warner Brothers needs a hero, and that hero is Wonder Woman.

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Amazon Is Gearing Up To Take On Valve’s Steam With Twitch!

I am sure most of you are aware that Amazon bought Twitch for almost $1 Billion three years ago, but I was always curious as to why.  I was even more confounded when Amazon Prime members like myself could use Twitch ad free if they linked their two accounts.  I love not seeing ads, but it didn’t seem like a move that would help Amazon’s bottom line, but then they launched their Banner Saga promotion, and finally this is all making sense.

In late February all Twitch Prime members could download The Banner Saga through a new app called the “Twitch Launcher”, and for every download the game got Amazon would give a dollar to Stoic, the game’s developer, for The Banner Saga 3.  Then on top of that if you actually played the game through the Twitch Launcher the devs would get yet another dollar.  Amazon did the same thing again in early March (AKA now) with The Banner Saga 2.

This may seem like Amazon is just being nice, and I am sure that Stoic is thrilled to have the extra development funding, but to me it looks like Amazon is gearing up to sell games through Twitch.  It makes sense.  The audience is already there watching the games, so why not have a little “buy now” button over the stream of the game that they are playing, and then the game loads on to the Twitch Launcher and boom you are playing it yourself.

Giving away a free game or two is a great way to get that app installed on a ton of PCs.  That way the audience is all ready to go.  Not to mention it will have all the hooks built-in, so streaming the game they just bought back out on to Twitch will be easy.  It is a self advertising loop, and one where Amazon gets to keep all the profits and not share them with Steam.  It is just amazing it has taken three years for this to take shape.

I for one am excited.  Steam needs the competition.  The Windows Store is starting to gets some major games, but gamers don’t trust Microsoft, especially after the Games for Windows fiasco, and GoG, while great, doesn’t get a lot of AAA titles because of their lack of DRM.  That just leaves the publisher based game stores like Origin (EA) or UPlay (Ubisoft), but they are mostly just places for those publishers’ games, and gamers like being able to keep all their stuff together.  Amazon is just the type place gamers would go, and with Twitch, Amazon has the brand recognition.  Amazon and Steam can keep each other honest, and Microsoft and GoG can be there to fill in the niche gaps.  Sounds good to me.  What do you think?