Taste of Thomas

For most of the runtime I was thinking: "wow, this is clearly the best Bond film (I've seen)". A lot of the Daniel Craig films are not very memorable. I couldn't remember whether I'd seen them all, but while watching No Time to Die, I felt that there were a lot of stand-out scenes that weren't just generic action/dialogue. The ending is very bafflingly awful, and I'm very bothered by it. They spend the film really giving James something to live for and then at the end he kills himself through sheer foolhardiness. Why doesn't Nomi choose to be the person who stays behind to open the blast doors? She's a secret agent. This is literally her job. She's his replacement at MI6, but she takes his family to safety, and he finishes MI6's mission, and no one tries to stop him!!! James only came out of retirement because his life wasn't eventful enough, but on the journey he found out that he's got a child with a woman who he's mutually i...

The design of boss fights in many games tends to fall into one of two gameplay patterns: 1. Prescriptive Formula Interactions with the boss are limited; a narrow sequence of moves are required to defeat it. For example the boss may only takes damage at specific times or on specific parts of it or when hit by specific moves. Typically, a prescriptive boss will have multiple phases. Each phase changes the required approach or just ramps up the difficulty of executing the required steps, giving the fight some variety. e.g. In many Zelda games, the boss won't take damage until you exploit its weakness, causing it to go into a vulnerable state, where it can take a maximum amount of damage before becoming invulnerable again. The boss's weaknesses can change throughout the fight, usually in a specific sequence. Usually the solution to prescriptive fights is made plainly obvious. The Zelda series regularly uses big eyes as weak points. It does it often enough the games can rely on play...

I can't recommend it, and I say this a huge fan of the base game. The DLC, while having similar elements to the base game, as a whole package fails to land in the same way. I enjoyed some elements, hated others, and felt like not finishing it a few times. The premise is strong but the execution weak. The ending is quite strong but can't save this flawed DLC. I understand why the DLC is less polished than the original game because it took much less time to produce and was probably conceived much later. I expect that they will modify certain things in accordance with feedback like they did with the base game. (spoilers ahead) (go play Outer Wilds) A Strong Opening The introduction to the game was incredible. Getting out of my space ship to read the tape by the satellite brought back fond memories of trying not to die in space and the sense of dread that being alone in the void brings. The Stranger coming into view for the first time and the reveal of its inside were both incredib...

The first time I played Bayonetta I tried to not mash buttons and think deliberately about the moves I was making, but I must admit I wasn't thinking very hard about the choices I made. Looking at my combo usage, there are a few that I used over a hundred times and lots that I used less than ten times, and not much in-between. After I finished the game on normal, I tried to play on hard but got my posterior handed to me. The game defaults to hard as soon as you finish your first playthrough which I feel is a mistake. Platinum's games tend to have high skill ceilings; it's impossible to get the most out of the game's systems on the first playthrough. Playing Bayonetta on normal for a second time would be an elevated experience. Years later, while longing for Bayonetta 3 and expecting it not be released soon if ever, I played Bayonetta on normal again on a new save-file, but this time I was armed with knowledge I'd found by watching YouTube videos, and I had a total...

This is a written version of a talk I did a couple of years ago before the release of King of Cards. There's more than one way of giving a game multiple levels of difficulty. A lot of games opt for a simple difficulty slider that affects damage and health numbers of the player and enemies. However, it's well-established that this can be a flawed system when trying to optimise player fun. It's much easier to balance a game and get a good difficulty curve when designing around only one set of these constants. I will now break down my experiences playing the first three games in the Shovel Knight series and how they manage variable difficulty. No game in the Shovel Knight series has a way to choose a nominal level of difficulty, but choices a player makes in the games can affect their difficulty. Shovel Knight I found Shovel Knight very hard. The character has very limited reach in only a couple directions with his shovel and a lot of his magic items didn't feel useful eno...

Pickle Rick was revealed to the public in the Season 3 trailer for Rick & Morty. The trailer depicted Pickle Rick among scenes of the typical kind of antics we had learned to expect from the show. And so, with a lack of true context for Pickle Rick, fans interpreted him as something intended to be amusing. This, however, couldn't be further from the truth. The true context wouldn't be aired to the public until 125 days later, at which point the damage had been done; there was no chance for Pickle Rick's true meaning to permeate the zeitgeist. In the eponymous episode, Pickle Rick is not played for laughs. Firstly, his family is completely unamused and deems it sad that Rick would do something so infantile to undermine his family's attempt to seek long-overdue family counselling. Secondly, the setup and execution of Rick's revelation that he had turned himself into a gherkin were anti-climactic in the sense that Rick's level of energy and excitement is comple...

I liked it. I went in to it knowing that it is considered a disappointment compared to Opposing Force. It doesn't have all of the enemies or weapons from the games that came before. But it is very short, clocking in at three hours for my playthrough. The game felt like the easiest of the three with ammo being abundant, health being about as common as in the original, and quick deaths non-existent. Even though for me there wasn't much novel, the pacing felt very good, never giving you a chance to get bored. There are more military character models; the enemy engineers can break through doors to attack you; there are new puzzle elements. Nothing in this game feels like a dud, except that the military AI seems to be worse than usual with them sometimes running away from me in broad daylight. The game is consistently quality whilst not having as many exceptional moments as HL1 and Opposing Force. Blue Shift probably has the best Xen levels of the three, showing us new ideas...