You Can (Not) Redo

After stumbling across this trailer, I realised I'm looking forward to the last two Rebuild of Evangelion movies more than the first two; as the story is diverging more from the TV series, there seems to be more of a point to the whole exercise.

I've still not gotten around to watching 1.11 and 2.22 back-to-back, so I'll have to rewatch them before sitting down with 3.0.

I have to admit, though, as cool as Asuka looks with an eyepatch, there's something about it that reminds me of Nadine from Twin Peaks.

Netflix

After months of speculation and even longer desperate hope, American on-demand video provider Netflix has finally launched its services in the UK. It faces an uphill struggle to gain a foothold on this side of the pond, facing off against the Amazon-owned LoveFilm (which also provides physical DVD, Blu-ray and game rentals), as well as on-demand TV and film services provided by Sky, BT and Virgin Media. And those are just the legal alternatives.

They've made a brave stab at it - apps have launched for Android and Apple devices, as well as all three current home games consoles. Their catalogue, guaranteed to grow quickly in these first few months, is already significantly better-stocked than LoveFilm's offering, which consists mostly of independent and older films.

A larger, high-quality selection of content is a strong opening gambit, although the service at-launch is not without its flaws. The interface on the Netflix website and the Xbox 360 app are both extremely poor, and although slightly better on the PS3 it's still very difficult to find content. You can search for something if you know you want to watch it, but there's no guarantee it'll be in their library yet anyway. Finding something new is almost impossible, as there's no way to drill down into categories, and although there's a "similar items" when you start watching something, you have to start watching something before that option pops up.

The PS3 at least lets you flip through the episodes in a series without having to start the first one, while the web and 360 interfaces only show that option once the show starts.

I'm not sure what they were thinking with the 360 app, though - it's a confusing vertical list of horizontal lists, presenting you with just cover images (which awkwardly expand into a screenshot when you hover the cursor over them for a second). It vaguely uses the same idea as the new "Metro" interface, but it's not consistent enough. The biggest problem is the inability to sort titles, and I'm not entirely sure what governs the order they're presented in. Presumably the date they were added to the service, but wouldn't name or the original release date make more sense?

And would a favourites/want-to-see list be out of the question? Something like LoveFilm's (or Netflix US' DVD rental) queue, that lets you add stuff you're interested in that can then be used to give you more recommendations, or just provide quick access to things you'd like to watch.

The lack of options within the apps is another stumbling block; initially, your video quality is set to stream the lowest bitrate version of the film, but there's no indication where to change this option or even that you can. You've got to go onto the website and update the streaming quality from there (along with any parental controls or language preferences); while it's good that all the account management stuff is in one place, does it really have to be in only one place?

Once I'd bumped up the streaming quality and found something to watch (The Usual Suspects), it actually worked really well. The film started playing in as-near-as-I-could-tell HD within a few seconds and stayed in HD the entire way through, with no skips or lag - a near-miracle on our internet connection, which sometimes struggles to buffer an entire YouTube video. I also watched the start of Battle Royale to check out something with subtitles, and was surprised to see they were using soft subs rather than the hard subs my original DVD version had. A couple of titles (Battle Royale and Avatar: The Last Airbender) started off streaming in quite poor, low-quality video, but after a minute or so they bumped up to at least standard definition and stayed there for the rest of the time I was watching them.

Overall it's a promising start, but I hope they take some time to make the experience of finding films easier. Right now, it's too hard to stumble across something new, but too much effort to search for something specific that might not be there anyway.

At this point I don't think I'll keep the service beyond the first free month, but I'm going to try and get my theoretical money out of it. Maybe it will change the way we watch films and TV, although since most of the stuff we watch is as-it-airs US TV, maybe not.

The Last Of Us

Honestly, I'd be more interested in a post-apocalyptic game that doesn't rely on monsters. The Road was so depressingly effective (and so effectively depressing) because it was just about society falling apart, without needing a zombie infestation to cause it.

It would make a better game too, in my opinion, to leave the zombies behind; the use of (mostly) inhuman monsters as enemies in this seems like a cheap way to get around the "lead character as murderous psychopath" problem that the Uncharted series has started to run into, and doesn't actually leave the unnecessarily combat-heavy gameplay behind.

If they're really serious about driving storytelling forward, Naughty Dog need to commit to pushing their themes through gameplay, not just cutscenes. The problem with the story in Uncharted 3 is how most of the stuff you play seems non-canon for Drake's character; all the murdering is just something you do to keep you entertained as you move from point A to B.

There's such a disconnect between the flawed-but-fundamentally-good guy you see in the cutscenes and the remorseless gunslinger you actually play as. If that dichotomy isn't resolved effectively in The Last Of Us then I don't think the story is going to have the resonance Naughty Dog are hoping for.

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Another Uncharted 3 post

There are many moments in Uncharted 3 that exist to drive the fiction to a place of resolution, and they are barely played at all. It's nearly impossible to screw up the key moments in the game by making a wrong turn or messing up the timing. Those moments leave players with only the most rudimentary control: While running from deadly spiders, press down. While moving through a tight crevice with a claustrophobic friend, press forward. While fighting a giant while being sucked out of a plane, hammer on X – sometimes press Triangle. You're in control, but Uncharted is directing your every move, like your dad teaching you to hit a baseball off of a tee for the first time."

A more detailed examination from Kill Screen of what Penny Arcade's Tycho referred to as "Dragon's Lair 2012"

Fable 3 capsule review

In the bag, as of last night. What a miserable chore of a game. It's got absolutely no soul, which I think was the only (vague, non-specific and ultimately quite useless as a metric) thing that rescued the previous games from this third installment's tedium.

I liked the first game, preferred the second, but this one felt like a cash-in sequel farmed out to a different development team.

Charted

Finished the Uncharted 3 campaign last night (final playtime clocked in at just over eight hours), and I think I'm ready to call this one as "not as good as Uncharted 2". I don't think there are any spoilers in this; I've been as vague as possible and have avoided mentioning any locations or plot points wherever possible.

It's technically better than the previous game in a lot of ways, and the dialogue is just streets ahead of anything else I think I've ever played (although the plot is a bit too similar to, and it shares a few too many set-pieces with, the previous game), but some of the mechanics just don't feel right and the design doesn't feel as polished as I was expecting.

I'm also pretty sure that the combat in this game is garbage. As it progresses, more and more of the gunfight environments feel (as Minx pointed out) like multiplayer arenas, with so many paths for enemies to flank on that you can't just dig in to plan out your strategy, or even just to regain health. A lot of the areas seemed really dark to me, too - I'd often lose sight of the floor in the gloom, or run into an obstacle I couldn't see when trying to escape one of the armoured bastards later in the game.

Another issue I had with the environments was how huge they are; the ship graveyard in particular sticks out as the best example of this "problem". They've obviously been designed to look EPIC, but the downside is that it feels like it takes forever to get through them. Uncharted 2 had a lot of similarly-themed locations, but I always felt like I was progressing through them quite quickly. In Uncharted 3, I felt like I was in that shipyard forever.

Generally I thought the shooting mechanics were decent enough, apart from some of the bullet sponges you're up against in the final third of the game - but to make things a bit frustrating when shooting, aiming has an "assist" that slows the reticule down when you're close to an enemy. Which is fine against static bad guys, but slows it down so much that you can't catch up to a running target.

Coming from Arkham City really underlines how poor the hand-to-hand stuff is, too - I think Rocksteady have made the gold standard in fisticuffs, and it's a shame Naughty Dog didn't rip it off a bit more directly. The "counterattack" prompt in particular is shonky; several times I've hit the button while the icon is still on-screen but failed to block or dodge the attack that triggered it.

This seems like a big list of complaints, but I think I enjoyed more of the game than I didn't. There were a couple of sections that frustrated the hell out of me, but never to the point of rage-quitting. I think part of the problem, for me anyway, was the amount of time I spent with Uncharted 2 - the vast majority of my time with it was playing on lower difficulty levels with unlocked weapons and one-hit-kills, so maybe my expectations were wrong. I think being in basically the opposite position from Gar (I loved the last one, and had big expectations) might explain why I'm relatively disappointed.

I'm glad they sorted out the final boss fight, though. The first and second game both had, in my opinion, unfairly-designed showdowns with the Big Bad, but they've done something different with this one - and while it still felt a little unbalanced it wasn't anywhere near as frustrating as the Lazarovic fight at the end of U2.

Drake's Deception

Man, Uncharted 3.

Be warned: if, like me, you consider someone's vague, general opinion about a videogame to be spoilers for that videogame, LOOK AWAY NOW.

I'd been on something of a blackout re: Naughty Dog's latest installment, avoiding everything I could - especially reviews. Some blogs endeavoured to defeat my embargo by posting articles with provocative headlines like, "Uncharted 3: totally awesome".

I didn't want to risk knowing anything about the game going in, so even that little morsel was irritating to see. One non-specific article, ostensibly about upcoming releases, posted what I consider to be a genuinely spoilerific image as the story's lead image.

But in the end, I needn't have worried. It's great. The writing, somehow, is even better than the second game. Combat's still a necessary evil rather than a fun thing to do in its own right, and the puzzles can be a little obtuse as a result of the limited way you can interact with the environment.

But those characters? I would follow them everywhere.

Man, Uncharted 3. Way to make it so hard for other videogames to be as great.

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Piñata

This seems specifically designed to traumatise children. "Beat Winnie the Pooh to death if you want chocolate!"

Norwegian Ninja

Based, allegedly, on a true story.

Asda are selling a prison for levitating children!

Fountainhead 2

From a softer world

Ché Guevara finger-puppet

Found in a shop full of weird toys and books in Edinburgh.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Undead Gamertags

When I originally set up my Xbox Live account, I couldn't get my first choice gamertag. Someone had already claimed "aniki" as their own at some point during the original Xbox's lifespan, but as far as I can tell they've not used it on the newer machine. I could have added a string of numbers, and in fact ended up with "aniki2121", but that seemed kind of pointless - and I've never liked online names that stray from the alphabet.

So I took a line from a Yoko Kanno song, The End of All You'll Know, and used that instead.

In the last few days, Microsoft have announced that they're starting to free up unused tags. I've considered, briefly, trying to claim my original choice, but I've grown kind of attached to demondownload (I've been using it as the title for every blog I've had for years) and I think it's got a better ring to it than "aniki", as far as online handles go.

That, and I don't want to spend 800 points on the name change.