bengurney.bsky.social
A dumping ground for my thoughts about video games or whatever movie I just watched.
75 posts
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Glad it's not just me who watches that scene sometimes. Something genuinely touching about seeing that guy's inner life find its voice through love for a pig.
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It's a good morning for new music as I'm catching up on Lauren Mayberry's solo album as well. She's definitely carved out a sound and lyrical style that are distinct from her stuff with CHVRCHES. I like it!
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The level scaling is absolutely the worst thing. If Bethesda don't think to fix that they truly are cooked.
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Oblivion was incredibly innovative in its time, but the way most of its ideas were implemented sucks ass in hindsight. The idea of a remake that completely redesigns the dated (or just poorly conceived) gameplay elements is cool, but I suspect Bethesda will opt to just rerelease it with new graphics
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I am also reminded of Lindsay Ellis' excellent compilation video
youtu.be/CameSDK-2m8?...
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I am reminded of Ted Neely's 2006 performance where he genuinely pulled it out of the bag on the night after (so the story goes) opting not to do it in rehearsal. Incredible stuff. youtu.be/0rEVwwB3Iw0?...
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Also fun to now understand that the impetus for Fury Road must have been "what if the last half hour of Mad Max 2 was the whole movie".
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While the shift to post-nuclear apocalypse in the second movie was a fantastic decision, I like the dystopia of the first one. To the viewer it is obviously an unsalvageable society, but it's weirdly plausible how most people are still muddling along and working amidst all the anarchy and murder.
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IMO the platonic Gollum (hah, what a concept) should just be a really fucked up guy. In other words plausibly human (well, hobbit). I think Jackson made him a little too monster-like with those big eyes and the uncanny valley-ness of CGI in general.
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I liked a lot of what it was putting forward, but the pacey action gameplay often felt at odds with all the reading and the listening. Like I feel like I'm having two experiences here and am having to put one of them on pause every time I want to listen to an audio log.
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Civ VI is my favourite in the series to date, but I do miss some features like that from older games (which sadly don't seem like they'll be in VII either). It was really neat when you could see the game map as a globe after discovering the world is round!
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Civ V had an amazing feature (which was omitted from VI) where you could completely customise your civ's nomenclature inc. all nouns, adjectives etc. so that the game would correctly refer to them as the Fartanese people of Fartland who speak Fartish. I miss that. 😔
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"Cool" in the sense that I thought talking to SmarterChild on MSN was cool when I was twelve. I don't want SmarterChild to write my emails or the novels that I read.
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I'm sure we'll have a good laugh in ten years' time at how a bunch of tech bros invented a cool word guessing machine, named it after an unrelated sci-fi technology, and then promised it could become god if you gave them enough money. And all the tech giants went for it!
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Every day I have to send an email with an attached spreadsheet. Every day I get an annoying pop up asking if I want to upload it to OneDrive instead. No!!!
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The one occasion I did decide to politely let them introduce themselves and then feign interest in their service they reached the point of asking me for my details so they could follow up with a sale and I had to tell them I'd just been humoring them the whole time, which is worse!
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I feel bad about it every time because it's just customer engagement staff doing their job, but their job is to start a conversation that you can't get out of politely and then argue against every reason you have for not buying their service. Best to just shut that down before it starts. 🤷
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Which does raise the question of what I actually WANT to see on a social media feed... I dunno. Important news, incendiary takes about old video games, cool art, pictures of people's pets?
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Went to bed tilted last night because I couldn't eat more Yumblies than Mr. Vile lmao
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And the graphics are great! The visual style reads super well—a shrewd decision given the technical limitations of the time.
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I'd say most fifth generation console games have a bit of obvious design clunk when viewed in hindsight, but Banjo Kazooie knows exactly what it's doing and does it very well. There's little I'd want to see changed for a modern update.
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BUT despite these gripes, the movie works as a whole. My expectations were low and have been exceeded by far. I'm thinking we're back??? Musicals on the big screen baby yeehaw.
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In general, the new additions to the script were redundant and bad. Elphaba doesn't need a bear nanny to give her a personal stake in animal rights—she has Doctor Dillamond. We don't need a new song to explain the Grimmerie—it just is. I don't need to know why the bloody yellow brick road is yellow!
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And it's so annoying how they chose to break up the flow of Defying Gravity to cram in that "profound" moment of Elphaba reaching out to her child self, completely killing the momentum of the music right when it's supposed to be building to an explosive finale.
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Having said that everything from the Emerald City onwards is a bit of a whiff sadly. The cameos from Chenoweth/Menzel are EGREGIOUS, Jeff Goldblum is sleepwalking through his scenes as the Wizard, and there's that awful bit of guff with the hot air balloon that wastes a few minutes of screentime.
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The production design is absolutely gorgeous. When they get to the Emerald City and the doors open to reveal an honest-to-goodness set built inside of a soundstage, instead of some big CGI city stretching off into the distance—perfection.
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Cynthia Erivo absolutely crushes it as Elphaba, no notes. Ariana Grande is magnetic as Galinda but is choosing to play her as somewhat self-aware, which is not my preference; I think the character is funnier and has a more compelling arc if at she's never had an introspective thought in her life.
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When I was
A young boy
My father
Had what he called the bean jar
It was a jar of beans
He said son when
You're naughty
I'll take one
And when the jar is empty
The world will cease to be
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I reckon about 80% of the train journeys I've taken here in recent memory have involved a cancellation and significant delay. It's bad!
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I watched The West Wing this year and oh boy does Rob Lowe's character get written out in a hurry.