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Just stumbled randomly onto this, and I don't think I've been as excited about this many upcoming videogames all at once since the mid 90s. A number of these sound like they're right up my alley, and even the ones that are more narrative-driven are doing so in a way that feels a lot more correct for a video game than just a linear story.

Just subbed to that guy's channel. I think I've bumped into him a few times before randomly due to his surplus of No Man's Sky videos, and the fact that I was mildly interested in that game in the months before that game was released. So it's nice, for once, that I watched a video from a guy once and youtube has since kept insisting I watch more random videos from that guy.

Doctor Strange:

Pretty good. I'm not gonna lie and say that I was much impressed or anything. It's not bad, but it also didn't really feel like it was going above and beyond, aside from the fun they were clearly having with the effects shit. There's some clever shit in there, tho.

But as usual, they didn't really give me a reason to be emotionally connected to anyone in the movie. They gave me a reason for Dr Strange to be sad about shit, and they gave other people reasons to be sad or attached to other people, but they didn't give ME a reason to give a shit or get attached to anyone. Stuff happens, and then people do things, and then crazy CGI shit happens, and then the movie's over.

I liked how they defeated the bad guys. It was a clever sort of comic-booky kind of ending, and it beat the hell out of just... well... beating the hell out of each other. The movie is kinda worth watching to get to the ending. For once, the ending of the movie is probably the best part of one of these movies. Usually they sorta drop the ball toward the climax. I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed this movie purely for the cleverness that it had going on, even though the characters are just sorta not there, really.

Worth checking out.

Are they perhaps talking about the Space Jockey / 'Prometheans' (as people are apparently calling them), and not the Xenomorphs? I ask because the Xenomorphs having dicks makes no sense at all, given the way they procreate. Maybe a tucked away barb or something that protrudes whenever they are needed to fertilize, but that shouldn't happen too often, and you'd need a queen and drones for that to happen.

Ant drones don't have big floppy penises or red rockets hanging out all over the place. Hopefully they're talking about the Prometheans (ugh... that name...).

Looks like it.

I want to see what wins for Best Animated Feature and Short. Those are generally the only two categories I give a crap about. Sadly, I've only seen two of the nominations this year for feature, and while I liked Zootopia I'm always a little upset that we so rarely have a decent animated drama win over the general-audiences talking-animals stuff.

Arrival's strengths are not its plot, but instead its filmmaking. They made the fuck out of it. There are various aspects to the plot that make absolutely no sense at all, but the way the scenes are stitched together is top-level shit.

I am currently watching The Bourne Something...

uh... So I've got it in the player right now, and I can't actually think of the name of the movie.

Oh, "Jason Bourne"

It's fucking dogshit. I actually love the Bourne films. They're sorta guilty pleasure flicks, but they've got decent action and aren't stupid or anything so they're fun to watch.

I have to find out what the fuck happened here. The movie is intriguingly terrible. Like...  some of the worst shit I've seen in a movie in a good while. I mean, a fight just started, and I have no fucking idea why. There was no reason for this dude to just jump Matt Damon, but he did for some reason.

And somehow this bitch hacked a cell phone and used that to magically delete the files on a laptop that it wasn't connected to?

There was an early scene where hacker woman was hacking things, and some other lady was trying to counter-hack her, and she typed "run tracking algorithm" or something and little blips with faces and bios started popping up on some other computer, and then some kind of facial recognition thing happened and that's how she discovered who was hacking them or something. None of it made any fucking sense at all.

They do the "enhance!" thing where a blurry low-res photo becomes a crisp HD image. There's some internet startup company that the government is bullying into giving them everyone's information, but the company hasn't even launched their product yet, but they're already huge and making these huge announcement things on a big stage telling people that they're information will be secure, and that's like the entire announcement? "Your information will be secure with us forever!" Like...  is their service just a 'store all of your most important personal information in the cloud' service or something? What the fuck do they actually do, besides store personal information that they secretly give to the government?

The government has access and can track everyone with no problem in any country on the planet, but as soon as the action sequence ends because the cops show up, I guess they have to turn all of that shit off to be fair about it? They just let him go, even though they could easily just keep tracking him with all of the cameras and shit, including cel phones and shit as well, apparently.

The dialogue is the most fucking retarded shit I've heard in a while. The covert CIA guys have to fucking hold their arms up to talk into mics that are apparently wired into their sleeves? Bourne gets a thumb drive with some data on it, and the thumb drive is this giant black stick with the word "ENCRYPTED" written in big white letters on it.

The thing is, the previous films in the series made by Greengrass weren't terrible or anything. They were kinda shakey and had some questionable dialogue and plot stuff, but they weren't fucking retarded like this. They have an action scene during a fucking shit-on-fire-everywhere riot, and they're just casually driving vans and cars and motorcycles and shit through police lines and through crowded streets at like 60 MPH like it's no big deal.

Jesus, this movie has gotten even worse in the few minutes I've been writing this.

And the "Iron Hand" thing. They may as well start a new covert black ops project and call it the "Illegal Assassination" program.

"I installed some malware into her laptop and I can track her when she uses the files next!!"

God this movie is just the fucking worst. Like, I haven't felt the need to do a blow-by-blow write-up before the movie is even halfway through since that one movie about the black gangster dudes that decide to start a turf war with asians over land that they want to build a WalMart on. This movie is THAT BAD.

There is no fucking way in hell I would recommend this movie to anyone with half a fucking brain. It is upsettingly bad. I know this was sort of an incoherent rant, and the paragraphs are sorta jumbled with sentences sorta randomly strewn about with no rhyme or reason, but that's pretty much what watching this movie feels like. Random nonsense that is hard to understand.

Watched Deepwater Horizon:

It was a Peter Berg movie. To me, the defining thing about Peter Berg's films is that they are totally forgettable. Not that they're all terrible, but that he does absolutely nothing interesting. I wouldn't even call it workman-like. It's near-workman-like. He's not quite there. It's like watching a competent, bland Youtube creator make a big-budget movie.

The movie isn't terrible or anything, but it's not that good, either. Berg has the same notion as a lot of big-budget popcorn-flick directors to try to appeal to US audiences by just shoving in shots of flags for no reason. The saddest thing about this movie is that J C Chandor was originally going to direct it and was working on his own version of the script alongside the NY Times writer that the script was based on, and they were both apparently really happy with the resulting script. Shortly afterward it was announced that Berg was taking over and Chandor was leaving due to 'creative differences'.

I would liked to have seen Chandor's version of this film, but I'm certain that the 'creative differences' were due to Chandor wanting to make an actual movie and the studios just wanting to have some focus-tested broadly appealing safe tentpole movie. Which sucks, cause Chandor's version would most likely have been memorable in some way. This version will be totally forgotten.

It's not terrible, tho. it's just half-assed. There are a few attempts to be schmaltzy, with guys going above and beyond and risking their lives to save their buddies, but it's all done kinda blandly. Not gritty and realistic, but not like 'movie' style, where music swells and you watch a dude struggle to his last breath to do the thing that's gonna save his friends, and the friends in harm's way and then realizing they're alive, but then realizing that their friend died to save them... Like a big dumb movie is supposed to do to get the idiot audience members all weepy and shit. It's trying to be that kind of movie, but Berg is and always has been fucking terrible at it. The only thing worse than a Micheal Bay or Roland Emmerich is a guy like Berg who endeavors to be that and fails miserably.

Bottom line, tho, is that it's not unwatchable and has its moments, but at the end of the day it's just bland and forgettable.

EDIT: Nice Guys:

It was pretty good. I guess I generally don't have a lot to say about movies that I like, cause the ones I like a lot I never tend to write big-ass, multi-paragraph posts about how much I like them. Maybe I'm too negative.

I didn't like the part where he finds the body by the tree. It felt like Gosling fucked it up and decided to go big for the blooper reel but then they actually put it into the movie. Aside from that, I thought it was a pretty great flick, though I don't think the two of them had the best chemistry. Clever script, tho. That Shane Black fella sure can write a movie. It's weird that it wasn't set during christmas, tho.

That's interesting. I've always wanted to see it since I found out it was a thing, especially after Life Is Beautiful came out and was pretty great. I've wanted to see if Lewis was maybe on to a similar sort of plot concept or if it was a very different take on a similar sort of subject.

I assume the version you saw was not available on the interwebs? If not I guess I'll have to wait until 2020 or 2025 or whenever it's supposed to become publicly available via the library of congress.

Still playing catch-up from last year, I saw Sully:

I liked it quite a bit, but it left me wondering if a more straight-forward narrative wouldn't have worked better since he focused so heavily on Sully himself and the way he was thrown into this crazy post-incident limelight and scrutiny. I felt like we should have gotten to know him a bit more as a character pre-incident so we could have something to compare with the post-incident version.

So yeah, highly recommend.

I didn't watch many movies from 2016, so I could probably just list all of them and what I thought of them:

1) The Witch - finely crafted flick that starts out hitting lots of home runs for me and then ends up wiffing a few toward the end. Really good overall, tho. I mostly admire the balls it took to stick to the period dialogue and the really slow pacing through most of it.

2) Deadpool - I loved it completely. It physically hurts me to know that Rob Liefeld is probably making serious bank off the royalties.

3) Zootopia - Also loved it.

4) Triple 9 - Hated. The best scene in the movie is a ten minute long raid that contributes nothing at all to the film until the last ten seconds. You could cut it out entirely and not lose anything except an exciting scene. The rest of the movie is similar. You could probably cut it down to 20 minutes and get every plot and character beat in there.

5) Criminal - Pretty decent until the third act. I liked Costner's character. He's a complete bastard for most of the movie and is not likable at all. The film uses him to its advantage for the first half, having him do one horrible thing after another. But then he kinda starts to flip and he becomes a better person. It's a halfway decent arc. But then the plot has to end and the movie goes completely off the rails, including a third act where the movie flat-out tells you how it's going to end ten minutes before it ends. No joke.

6) Green Room - This is possibly my favorite film of the year. Absolutely bleak and depressing and violent. The really great writing. The film doesn't give a shit about the way you feel about its characters, and will coldly kill whoever it feels like whenever it feels like, usually in very undignified and horrifying ways. Does a lot of really smart things early on to get you to like all the characters and make them feel real. Great flick.

7) Jungle Book - Better than I thought it was going to be. Reasonably watchable family-friendly entertainment.

8) ID4: Resurgence - Boring and stupid. They made the wrong movie. Most people said that Judd Hirsch's plotline with the kids on the bus should have been cut out, but I think they should have just made that the whole fuckin movie. It's the only moments of the film that feel kinda real. The scene where the fighter-pilot guy watched his mom die feels bullshit. The scene where Hirsch asks about their parents and no one says anything and then the older one kinda starts crying... Those sequences were so much fucking better than the rest of the flick.

9) Legend of Tarzan - half art-film, half tentpole CGI action movie with cartoon animals. There are a few really good moments in the movie. None of them involve Tarzan.

10) Kubo & The Two Strings - much dislike. One good thing I can say about it is that it didn't bother to explain some of the shit that it didn't need to. A lot of movies would have had all kinds of exposition for backstory on how the kid came to be able to animate the paper with his little Japan-banjo (I forget the name of the instrument...), and magic and folklore, and they didn't bother to explain all kinds of japanese shit except for the lanterns. A lot of movies do that stuff. It's annoying. That's all the credit I'm willing to give this movie, tho. It's pretty, too.

11) Uh... That's it...

I saw ten of the movies that came out in 2016. And that's what I thought of them.

This year will be different. I'm going to see as many movies as I can.

Kubo & The Two Strings:

It was OK?

So, like...  This movie got fucking amazing reviews and word-of-mouth. "OMG bro, the movie is like, really fucking amazing looking and has a really awesome, kinda bittersweet story about loss and life and shit... It's SO FUCKING GREAT!!! A++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN!!"

But, like... It was OK?

I mean... I didn't really like it a whole lot. I liked it OK, tho. Lemme fuckin tunnel into this one a bit, cause I can sense that no one's on board with me, here...

So the pacing of this movie sucks. A lot. It opens well enough, but it's trying to cram a fairy-tale-type epic quest adventure sort of plot into a little 100 minute movie (and a number of those minutes are credits). It has this kinda break-neck pace that a lot - A LOT - of modern films suffer from. Bad movies, too. This movie is actually trying to not suck, tho, so it isn't really that bad, but it's doing itself no favors with the pacing.

Because the movie is trying to be this really emotional flick, but it gives itself absolutely no time at all for character-building and to nail its themes and shit. The monkey just shows up, and is just accepted immediately. There's a "WTF, A MONKEY" sort of scene later, but everything is so fucking rushed, and it comes AFTER the initial intro of this character, and it feels so fucking forced and wrong... And then they rush through that fucking scene.

The opening scenes have such promise, too. The first real scene of the film is where Kubo wakes up and goes through his morning routine, and it's gloriously mute and takes its time to breathe a bit. There are precious-few scenes like that in the film at all. They don't dwell an ANY moments for more than a second or two. We got plot shit to take care of, mother fuckers! We can't have our character sit there and mourn some shit for a while, or sit there and admire some pretty scenery, or sit there and be amazed at some really amazing magical shit that's going on. Fuck all that noise, bro, we only got like 40 minutes to have three fight scenes and two quest items and some back story and some important PLOT TWIST moments to cram in there! We gotta keep the pace marching right along!

I mean... the pacing genuinely kills this movie, and it's all in the characters and the kinda poor writing. Was anyone honestly surprised by the "plot twists" about the characters? I mean, they fucking telegraphed that shit for THE ENTIRE MOVIE up to that point. It was kinda pathetic.

But then they meet this dude, and the monkey doesn't like or trust him, and then ONE SCENE LATER all three of them are acting like they've known each other for fucking years and being all sarcastic and ... 'informal' with each other. Too comfortable and weird. They should have fleshed that relationship out with a lot more getting-to-know-each-other shit.

The "we have to find a bunch of shit" plot was also really cramped and smooshed together and some of the beats made no fucking sense at all. I think they were trying for comedy in a couple of beats, but it just came off as really weird and stupid. And there's a weird fascination with eyes that they put way more emphasis on than was necessary. The plot points came out of nowhere, and the 'trials' that the characters go through to get their hands on the magical doodads have no thematic relevance to the characters or their relationship or any other aspect of the story. Just things to have happen for some reason. They don't even spend much time looking for them. They just kinda stumble onto them by accident the whole time.

I was just really disappointed by the whole thing. I will give them the cinematography, which is pretty as all hell. Laika is obviously very good at the technical aspects of photography and staging and animation.

But, I mean...  It was OK?

It was OK.

EDIT: I take it back... It's not OK. The more I think about it, the less I like it.

First version with something that happens. You can scroll the 'map'. Choppy-looking as fuck right now, but I just hacked it in through the 'event' code, not through actual game code. I have to write a proper 'camera' system, but I can't really do that until I start getting entities in, cause it'll be mostly tied to the player.

Drawing a 100x100 tile grid (10,000 tiles), but culling them down to around 240 or so. When I'm not recording it manages to get itself up over 1000 FPS, so I guess the drawing is about as optimized as it's gonna get for now.

Need to rewrite the tile object to support animation and give it a few more variables, but after that, the tile code will be more or less finished and I can flesh out the map code a bit and generate a nice little testing area to start working on more interesting stuff.

Using a tileset I found on the interwebs. It'll look more pretty maybe tomorrow. Probably not by much, tho

EDIT:

I was working on some animated tile / sprite stuff, and I think I stumbled upon a really interesting way to generate tilemaps programmatically rather than adding things my hand. That way, I can use a basic txt file (like xml or something) to define a bunch of tiles by name. The game would store these as a tilemap, with the references to the texture coordinates of each tile. You could add the tiles and keep track of stuff by name, as well as set up their collision areas. It would require a bit of a function to load all of the bits and store them, but you'd end up with a tilemap object that would store a big-ass list of tiles. You could then use a similar method to define the actual map, by referencing which 'tilemap'(s) you want to use (so that you could, for example, have themed areas that would have different types of ground, grass, rocks, decoration, etc, but you'd still be using the same tiles for certain elements.

Honestly, I think I might be leaping a bit too fast before I plan this shit out a bit. I thought I had a solid idea on paper, but it's one of those things where I keep thinking of ways to improve stuff.

It all boils down to data storage and retrieval and how easy it is to manipulate that data. I'm inclined to sorta rewrite the 'world' I've got thus far, as an object which does absolutely nothing except store and retrieve the data for various aspects of the game. IE, not at all object oriented, but instead a more data-oriented approach. Still using classes, but where the class methods would be mostly used to gain access to data references that would in turn be handed over to plain-old functions.

I really need to sit down with some paper and plan out the way I'm storing data (again), cause I don't want to sit here recoding shit just to alter the tilemaps / maps / animations / etc. I need to have systems to load and reference that data automatically. Then I can pretty easily make and alter the tiles, maps, animations, sprites, etc without having to recompile or rewrite the texture coordinates for each tile or frame of animation if I decide to change something later.

I would spend all of my time just doing that and not writing the game's systems...

So I guess that's what needs to happen first.