I bought this based on how much I’ve liked the previous games by Klei Entertainment and the good things I’ve read about it. I don’t think I’ve ever tried a turn-based stealth game either. Unfortunately it didn’t quite sink in for me that this is really a kind of rogue-like game and my personal gaming history has taught me that I simply don’t have the perseverance for this type of gaming experience. When I make gains in a game, I prefer to keep them instead of trying and failing over and over again. Invisible, Inc. really does play like that which is why I shelved it in short order.
My wife and I no longer climb much for recreation as I’m too lazy to train for the level of fitness required but I still retain a interest for what goes on in that milieu. Combine this with the fascination that most people have for the goings-on at Everest, and you have the explanation for why I wanted to watch this documentary by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom.
The MCU films are the only franchise that can reliably draw me to the cinemas and Doctor Strange is only proving that my faith is well founded. Bringing this to the screen was always going to be problematic as this is a character that was difficult to portray even in the pages of comic books. As many writers have noted, magic in theory can do anything, so how you do define meaningful constraints on what Strange can do in a way that the audience can understand? This film chooses to solve this in an interesting way: magic is visually spectacular but in the end magicians seem to mostly fight in melee like the rest of the MCU characters.
Akira Kurosawa made this in 1980, at the age of 70. The legendary director would go on making films nearly until he died in 1998 but this together with Ran in 1985 are considered the last two films that are truly great. Apparently after a string of commercial failures, Kurosawa had such difficulty raising money to make new films that he attempted to commit suicide in the 1970s. Kagemusha was made possible only when Hollywood directors who are great fans of his work helped him raise funds for the film.
So this game was free on Ubisoft’s platform for a month recently so I took the chance to snag it. I’ve actually had this on my Steam wishlist for a while now, ever since Tom Chick named it as his game of the year a couple of years back. As is the norm for Chick, this was an unconventional choice and he was duly lambasted for it but I remember being intrigued as he called it the best CarPG ever made. What I didn’t realize is that in additional to its RPG elements, this is also more akin to an MMO than any single-player game. It’s an online-only game that requires you to log onto the servers and you’re constantly sharing the game world with other players. Playing it was certainly a novel experience for me.
Brian De Palma is an American filmmaker of the same generation as such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Cuppola but this is the first time a film of his has been featured here. His most respected film is probably the 1983 remake of Scarface. We probably should get around to watching it but I’ve always put it off because we’ve watched the 1932 original twice and liked it so much. This one seems to be only slightly less well known but I’ve found its quality to be all over the map.
There once was a time when I paid enough attention to Disney films that each of their releases was a major event on the calendar. The Hunchback of Notre Dame came at the tail end of this period for me, arriving as it did when I was busy in university. This meant that I never watched it and was barely aware that it existed. Apparently the same held true for my wife as she had never watched it as well, which was why she asked for it to be added to our list.
