Quintus

He called them songs. 
 
Get out. 

It starts out so promising but goes nowhere I hadn't been countless times before. Didn't finish it. 

I don't know Star Wars half as much as I should like; and I like less than half of Star Wars half as much as it deserves.

Forget Super 8 and even Tintin - this re-recording of a gaming musical masterpiece has just gone straight to the top of my most wanted list:
"And on the subject of audio – everything has been remastered – sound effects beefed up and remixed, but more importantly, we took Marty O’Donnell’s industry-changing soundtrack and gave it some deep, smoove loving, with a re-orchestration and brand new recording with the Skywalker Orchestra. So the perfect melodies, the movements and the themes are intact, but just glowingly more rich and lavish (and expensive). Anyone who’s heard the similar project with Halo Legends will know sort of what to expect, but expect it to be better."
Source
The original, Halo: Combat Evolved of ten years ago is widely regarded as one of gaming greatest soundtracks, and damn - I cannot wait to hear the Skywalker Symphony players do it justice in the upcoming anniversary of the score and game remastered re-release. Such a sumptuously traditional sci-fi score, choca-bloc with stirring themes, eerie melodies and brilliant action music - it's one of my all-time-favourite pieces of score of any medium.

Gia.

Just watched the finale. This was such a fantastic end to the season, MacFarlane is a genius. Not only was the plotting unexpectedly audacious and rip-roaring, but the brash and un-bogged down approach to what would normally be standard logistical issues (for anal fans) in shows like Star Trek, felt like the thrilling pulp antidote to it all here. Let's just say they took more of an Indiana Jones "making it up as they go" approach to sci-fi dilemma here than one would typically find instead in an episode of Star Trek.
 
And the set-pieces, the special effects! It was so much fun to see The Orville gang whizz through their own spectacular homage to the original Asteroid Field - with musical accompaniment that unabashedly locked its own sights on Williams' famous barnstormer but with a dialled up to 11 voice of its own, it was the stuff of pure feelgood cinema and I was loving it - yet this was actually made for the telly!
 
Any lover of dominant and swashbuckling symphonic scoring style owes a debt of gratitude to The Orville and Seth MacFarlane for keeping the dream of great, loud neo-romantic soundtrack scoring alive in 2019. For this show is the last bastion of its defence and its right to exist! Hyperbole? Sure, I'm having fun typing this shit, but I'm also serious when I say that once Star Wars is finished, we'll only have Joel McNeely left still doing that sort of thing with any sort of conviction. But I'm sure he'll be giving it absolute death whenever he does! Hats off to the guy as far as I'm concerned.
 
The Orville, when it really goes for it, when it's firing on all cylinders, I think it really comes together to make something pretty bloody special. When its expertly and lovingly crafted working parts are humming along during those lively highlights, during those funny and exciting high sci-fi adventure sequences, I think it's better than next gen Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy combined. It's cinematic TV magic.

What an outrageous waste of everyone's time and resources. This was the beginning of the rot settling into Jackson's artistic integrity as a director.

The replacement Donna was fine anyway, plus she was cuter, always a bonus. They could have had her in the new series. 

It isn't a great movie, but it's entertaining in a trashy extravaganza sort of way. Michael Keaton made a great first time blockbuster Batman. I saw it in '89 at the cinema, the summer that my parents separated. 

Who wasn't?

This must be the expanded release list. I preferred the OST version with half the items. It was a much tighter and wasn't reliant on filler just to hit the shiny twenty number on the sleeve.

I think games should be as long as they need to be. 

Thanks for the tip, Lee. I confess to not having seen one second of it, but it appears to me, to be a sort of sexed-up Downtown Abbey.

I think games should be as long as they need to be. 

Bridgerton... I honestly don't know how people watch that shit. What I have seen of it was agonising. 

I think games should be as long as they need to be. 

For me it never doesn't have the effect of making me hoard my best kit, without ever using it. I'll keep using my lower tier stuff while saving my stronger more powerful weapons for some big tough encounter which never happens. Right now in my inventory I have swords which blow all of the other items away, and I've never used them.
 
I think it was a bad direction for BOTW to go in, at least for me.

Re: Zelda Breath of the Wild 
 
It's a smashing game, really relaxing to wind down and unload to in the evenings, I've enjoyed it a fair bit; it is exceptionally rare for me to play and complete a game of this size these days, so it clearly got a lot right. It's utterly beautiful, too, in parts: for example, I was spellbound by the visual atmosphere of the Lost Woods and the hidden little village in its centre - but one stunning locale in an enormous world choc full of rich visual style, it really is a marvel this sprawling expanse that they created, even by modern open world design standards. Very cool stuff then, and from a 2017 release on an underpowered and forgotten console system.
 
I was thinking, it must be quite heartbreaking for the graphics artists working on these Nintendo platforms to see their originally superior high fidelity work eventually stripped of pixels in order to make the games run on underpowered hardware. I appreciate that Zelda adventures hold a degree of visual charm despite their low res, jaggie-edge final forms, but after playing Breath of the Wild in 4K OLED with nary a shimmering staircase polygonal edge in sight (picture perfect crystal clear fidelity), well it really just makes the artwork shine, a huge appreciation being felt for the talent and craft behind it. I've always loved good graphics and visual flair in games, and Breath of the Wild is probably brimming with a not insignificant amount of unnoticed polish in that regard. It's almost a shame really. Maybe one day they'll remaster it - they could literally just up the resolution and send it out and people would assume the thing had received a full overhaul. 
 
But it's not all good, and certainly isn't the greatest game ever made™, not by a long shot. I'd argue it isn't even one of the best ever. Because there are some baffling design choices going on in the background, and I of course think they're worth calling out:
 
The Master Sword is absolutely pointless as a central quest reward, it's a crap weapon and I think an insult to the legendary weapon's status as seen in past instalments. In BOTW's disposable weapon setup, the Master Sword is redundant. This irony of the one unbreakable weapon in the game also being entirely disposable is... regrettable. 
 
Horses aren't fun and feel like an afterthought which were shoehorned in the result of there being an expectation to see them in a Zelda game, particularly an open world one. Simply, they just handle badly. I've played a Battlefield game which had better controlled and more exciting horse riding. Shame on you Nintendo! I ended up leaving mine at the stables. 
 
Combat is remarkably very sloppy. Bomb spamming isn't fun fighting mechanics, but it feels necessary in many encounters, with weapons breaking very quickly (a controversial design choice, it turns out) and slash timing that demands highly exact inputs for a broadly mainstream game of its type. Early game, being near one-shot by enemies doesn't feel like Nintendo and feels more like Bethesda or even From Software. Much time is spent pausing and unpausing the action, but more on that later. Enemy lethality early on and even later can be like a cheap, arbitrary challenge. Dodge timing is promoted as a core aspect of the melee combat, but using these attack evasion moves is not intuitive nor particularly satisfying, in fact they'll get you killed where simple turtling or circling/backflipping will keep you in the fight. I'd say that overall I didn't much enjoy the fighting in this game. That's just... bizarre? 
 
The inventory system is woefully bad. If it weren't for Skyrim before it, I'd even go as far as calling item management in BOTW an industry worst. Quickly locating and retrieving items in the UI is an absolute shitshow. Exaggerating much? I don't think I am, not when you compare this inventory system to countless other games on the market. For example, why did Nintendo feel the need to reinvent the radial wheel? We're talking about CONSTANT gameplay pauses here; just selecting healing (food) during combat is terrible for gameplay ebb and flow and I find it shocking that this happens in a Nintendo game, let alone a marquee Zelda release. 
 
Elixirs are pointless (or food is, depending on your "poison" of choice in the game). Because food and monster ingredients appear to perform the exact same function as each other and so what happens is you end up with a load of junk to endlessly scroll through, half of which essentially has no purpose but to be sold to merchants. They could have sped up inventory management by focusing on one or the other, instead of offering all this superficial choice under the guise of it being some sort of deep crafting system. It isn't, although I admit I found the cooking animation charming. 
 
In addition, inventory tabs are also very unintuitive in the way they are laid out and labelled. I was regularly pressing the wrong button in search of a particular screen. 
 
Constant rain. I see enough rain in real life and would have preferred to largely escape it in a lush world full of rolling valleys, but I frequently couldn't appreciate the sights due to it constantly pissing down and the drizzly atmosphere greatly dimming and obscuring vision, and the spectacle. It makes for a miserable mood, as open world games go. At its worst, prolonged heavy downpours have the effect of making the nighttime feel doubly as long - when it's actually 12 noon. I almost modded the rain out, but I ultimately settled for "preserve the artist's original vision", even if it intrusively sucked. 
 
Music isn't up to the legacy of the series. Lacking in variety, I found it to be tedious, with simplistic piano ruminations making up the brunt of the experience. Now don't get me wrong, there are nice cues in here, but come on they are few and far between. Yes, I get that the sparing use of music and its frugal instrumentation is intended to bring an air of "the lonely wild" to proceedings, but I don't think it worked that well. "But the heavy thematics of past titles wouldn't suit the lonely bygone derelictions of this Zelda world!" Nonsense, there are tracks that sound like those classics in this game, and when they play they suddenly bring the world alive. But they are fleeting. For my money, the musical design in BOTW is counterintuitive to the overall sense of place and journey across its vast lands. The score is oddly quite small in scope. I bet others would reword that as "more personal", which I understand but don't agree with. 
 
Blood moon is an underutilised mechanic. It literally has no effect on my behaviour or approach, I never saw or felt its influence at any point in the game. More redundancy, very strangely in a Nintendo title.
 
And a final criticism... 
SHRINES ARE NO REPLACEMENT FOR DUNGEONS. God they're dull. However, the Divine Beasts were... alright. I liked how they played their part in the threadbare story's lore and the grand climax when they were ready for the final assault, that was very cool. But still, please bring back proper dungeons in the next game. I've left about thirty five shrines in BOTW unexplored, many of them discovered but left untouched on the map. I don't need the hearts and they're too boring to be bothered with now. 
 
With all that comprehensive negativity, then, how come I still played this game through to completion? Well in the end, it's the old case of the "sum of its parts"  total package: the game undeniably has a sort of mystical abstract appeal that while not that difficult to pin down, is not something I'm going to bore you with further in an attempt at flowery waxing lyrical about. About how it all just seems to pull together, as a complete adventurous package, flaws and all. Ultimately, there's just something highly compelling about picking away at this massive world's delightfully playful and extremely sophisticated open world physics based sandbox. It's a chill time to be had. 
 
Sorry for distilling the experience down in a way which might seem rather soulless and technically obsessed, but my angle with finer games is you can never have the magic without a lot of nuts and bolts, and I've always been appreciative of both. After all is said and done, I think of Breath of the Wild as being a good Zelda game, but not the best in the series, or in the adventure genre at large.
 

 
 
 

Ahh shiiit, ya got me - I haven't even parried. 
 
Now put your fuckin' hands in the air. 

I'd actually endeavoured to maintain as much personal optimism towards this even as fans began to break ranks upon the release of the first promo shots and then teaser trailer. But every time I see or read new material, I just feel like they're going out of their way to raise the ire/eyebrows of the more "traditionalist" point of viewership out there that really just wanted to see a bloody good fantasy epic set in Middle-Earth and literally does not give a fuck about woke distraction - the tiresome new equivalent of those really annoying tits and arse scenes in Game of Thrones. It breaks my immersion. 
 
I'm convinced now that a part of the agenda behind this whole venture is to stir controversy, even if it costs them viewers. 

It's going to be a checklist TV series on a faux epic backdrop which does to Tolkien what George and Steve did to Indiana Jones in that episode of South Park. 

I'd actually endeavoured to maintain as much personal optimism towards this even as fans began to break ranks upon the release of the first promo shots and then teaser trailer. But every time I see or read new material, I just feel like they're going out of their way to raise the ire/eyebrows of the more "traditionalist" point of viewership out there that really just wanted to see a bloody good fantasy epic set in Middle-Earth and literally does not give a fuck about woke distraction - the tiresome new equivalent of those really annoying tits and arse scenes in Game of Thrones. It breaks my immersion. 
 
I'm convinced now that a part of the agenda behind this whole venture is to stir controversy, even if it costs them viewers. 

Quite simply, Thor, they are exercising their right to free speech, and as long as they remain within JWfan rules, they are entitled to do so, no more, no less.
Over the years, JWfan has attracted a few JW haters, but they have all had the good grace to leave, after a while.
I'm not trying to defend Bayesian (I'm sure that Bayesian is more than capable of doing that), and I will go on record by saying that I am not a Zimmer hater, but to try to elevate film music (film music, for cryin' out loud!) to this sort of social level, is pure hubris.

2:23.... Awkwaaard 😂