I knew nothing about this game — I think no one did — until I saw a tweet by its creator, Mike Bithell, and that’s all I needed. I loved his previous games, but this is completely different: a short (about two hours) text-based adventure game that tells a very intriguing story about a robot detective. I love the way it’s presented, and the story really was fantastic. Can’t recommend this enough. I really hope he keeps making short game experiments like this.
And so I thought it was… OK. I liked it enough to binge it over the weekend, but I can’t say it’s really great. It started off with a godawful boring episode that had me at a point where I didn’t know if I even wanted to continue. It did get better, but it also acted as a reminder of how the Netflix Marvel stuff has never lived up to the promise of that first season of Daredevil. I loved it so much, and I remember thinking that I would rather have stuff like this than Marvel movies. Then came all the series that I haven’t liked — Jessica Jones and Iron Fist I really disliked, Luke Cage I liked the first half but then thought the second half was a bore. And in The Defenders, you basically have Daredevil who is just so much more interesting — including in the acting and action department — than everyone else. Iron Fist is still just a dink — although he fights a little better than in his series. Jessica Jones is just so unlikable again, until maybe just the last episode. And Luke Cage, in terms of his character, is just boring. What I did like about his series was what was happening around him, definitely not him. So the series was OK, but it definitely felt like a TV movie, and not like the blockbuster meetup we were all probably hoping for.
I’d love to visit the upcoming Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku, opening in October — not only to take in her work, but the building itself looks quite nice. You’ll find more details in this Spoon & Tamago post.
On a related note, here in Montreal we live near the Musée des Beaux Arts, and this summer they’ve set up an outdoor collection along Sherbrooke street, and we’re lucky enough to have a piece by Kusama near our place (pictured below).
Spoon & Tamago takes a look at the beautiful Tohoku Standard shop, located inside the PARCO2 department store in Sendai. It was designed by my buddy Keiji Ashizawa, part of his Ishinomaki Laboratory project.
Using Perfume to sell Panasonic washing machines (the track used, “Everyday,” is coming out as a b-side single soon). Via Tokyo’s Coolest Sound.
Reading this piece from The Japan Times sure made me miss having access to gachapon machines — I never bought tons, but it was always fun to get one once in a while, especially when there was a new series of something I really liked. It’s a shame we don’t really have access to these in North America.
Splatoon 2 is a blast. I liked the first one a lot, even though I stopped playing online after a while, but when this came out for Switch, I was ready to dive into this gameplay again, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I imagine I’ll eventually drop off from playing online as I did before — and I’m really disappointed that there’s no split-screen two-player mode, as I was quite looking forward to playing it at work with colleagues — but for now there’s a lot of stuff for me to still take in (the campaign, Salmon Run, etc.)
I started playing this over the past week — it’s part of this month’s PlayStation Plus offerings, which was finally the excuse I needed to get around to playing it, but it is in fact something I’d been wanting to play since it came out (almost two years ago now, man). I found Just Cause 2 to be pretty fun, but the game in this genre that I really loved was Mercenaries 2, and that’s what it really reminds me of. I’ve played a few hours now, and I am having a lot of fun with it — sure, it’s dumb fun, but sometimes that’s what you want, to just move around a giant map and make shit go boom. It can be a bit janky at times — I’ve experiences slowdowns quite a few times when there’s a lot of action on the screen — and I do find it frustrating sometimes when I’m in the process of liberating a town, and it takes me forever to find that last element or two that you need to destroy to complete it. I can’t really say if it’s going to keep me engaged enough to get to the end, but for now I’m having a lot of fun with it.
A few weeks ago I finally got around to playing this, renting it from our studio’s game library. I played about 20 hours (was at Chapter 10) before having to return it. I liked it enough that I do want to rent it again to finish it, but it’s definitely far from being a phenomenal game for me. It took me quite a few hours before really finding the fun — I found the early hours to be a chore when it came to travelling, and I’m just not a fan of the combat system, finding it to be too chaotic, to a point where I never feel like I’m in full control of what’s going on (I’d prefer some sort of menu-based combat system). Also, although the interactions between the main characters can be fun, I don’t like their design at all, and that kinda turns me off. But, despite all that, it’s an absolutely gorgeous game, and I loved being in that world, and discovering it bit by bit (and the travelling does get much easier eventually).
No Man’s Sky just isn’t for me. I finally gave it a try this past week, and although my first night of playing (over a couple of hours) was pretty engaging, when I sat down the following evening to play some more, and I realized that I was just entering in a loop of going to a planet to gather resources (an activity I don’t find to be particularly fun) to then sell them and progress, I just didn’t want to play anymore. I still think it’s a neat game, and I dig the art direction and the idea behind it, and it’s quite possible that it gets much more interesting once you progress more, but I just couldn’t convince myself to care enough to get back into the act of gathering resources in order to progress.