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Becoming Nobody (2019)
Mediocre documentary about western guru
Not a bad movie but not much more than a retreading of all those "vaguely eastern" philosophies that any westerner living (or becoming alive) after the New Age movement of the 70s west has heard before. Again, it's not a bad thing - sometimes you need to hear those things again and sometimes there's a hidden gem that particularly resonates with you.
Perhaps the director should have decided to lean more into making either a documentary of eastern philosophies or a love-letter to Ram Dass. The middle-of-the-road approach doesn't particularly deliver in either aspect, seems superficial and may, in fact, be a detriment to the man himself, even though the guy manages to exude a fair amount of charm and charisma despite the movie's shortcomings.
Stellaris (2016)
1% strategy, 9% clunky UI, 90% busywork (but entertaining for dozens of hours)
I'm currently going through my first match of Stellaris, at 40 hours in and I've only found out about this sub yesterday so this question couldn't have come on a more relevant time for me - and this has been posted only 10 minutes ago too! Plus, I've been thinking a lot about Stellaris as a player, a long-time strategy fan and an hobbyist r/StrategyRPG game developer. Here's my thoughts on it.
First off, is it worth your money? If you get it on sale, it's definitely a yes. The bottom line of everything is that I've been playing it for 40 hours, well into late-game for a single match that isn't even over yet. I got the base game for dirt cheap on the Steam sale last month and I can't argue with the value I've got for my money so far.
Stellaris is a very ambitious 4X that runs great on my low-end machine even on higher graphical settings. There is ton of mods, a crazy degree of replayability, an active multiplayer community, the game is still being developed, there's tons of DLCs for it and many more to come yet since the developers are actively working on it and just came out recently with a major 2.0 overhaul (really how many commercial games get to see a 2.0?)! No one in their right minds can say Stellaris is a bad deal, in any way possible way you look at it.
However, this post isn't asking about "is it worth it" or "is it a fair deal for you buck" but rather "would you recommend it?" Another good question would be "is it worthy of your time" (especially considering a single match will most likely go on for dozens of hours)? Although I have got my money's worth and I plan on finishing this match and maybe even play another one down the road, I don't think Stellaris is worthy of my time.
My first of two major gripes with it is the UI doesn't work. Sure, it's not so bad it prevents you from enjoying the game but they really should have approached it in some other way. It's very inconsistent with most things acting like you'd expect them to but then others not working the same way (right click actions on systems, clicking on notifications, ships won't heal for a period after combat but the game doesn't bother to let you know...). Some of the UI makes me really think "has anyone at all been testing this game that such an obvious mistake has gone through" (like clicking on a governor's death notification which is the only one that doesn't bring up a screen - as a programmer that takes 1 minute to fix).
Add to that the keyboard use and it's even more of a mess. I'm a r/Starcraft2 player and I can easily keep up with 60APM at least. I have no trouble learning, remembering and using a keyboard - be it for a fast-paced RTS game or to learn half a hundred IDE shortcuts for each of the languages I code with for work. The problem with Stellaris is that the keys are badly designed: stop is H; pressing Esc one too many times brings you to the game menu which also pauses the game so you need to Esc again and then Space to unpause (trust me, you'll do that a WHOLE lot of times in Stellaris); the Function keys are a mess, with F2 corresponding to the first visual icon that you'll need to use a lot throughout the game, which makes it awkward to look at your icons and not know immediately which button you should press.
To sum the UI up in a bite-sized sentence: it took me no less than 10 hours to get familiar with it and now, 40 hours into the game, it still sucks.
The sound design is a problem too. The music is OK and even good but there's too few tracks to sustain dozens of hours of gameplay, I eventually turned the music off because I was tired of listening to the same melody a hundred times in a row. The sound effects are extremely annoying - some of the loops are infinite and as short as a few seconds so if you're not moving your map around a lot (and Stellaris you never are, even during most wars) it means you'll be listening to the same 5-second loop for however many hours you sit down to play the game. That's just stupid. There's an "ambience" volume slider but for whatever reason those short ambient noises that keep repeating forever are not governed by that one but by the "sound effects" slider instead, so you're either stuck with them for hours on end or you can choose to play the game without any sound feedback...
Finally my major gripe is the core game design. It's just not strategic, sorry. The game can be challenging but it's never smart. Once a situation comes up, you just make a plan and follow through with it. Good strategy games will always throw things your way so you need to adapt and overcome so that you can get your original plan back on track until it's completed. Stellaris is not like that: you identify an issue, you make a plan to solve that and then the next 2 to 5 hours is nothing but busy work to see that plan to fruition, the game is not dynamic enough to offer anything but busywork until that plan is done and is not respectful of your time while at it.
Stellaris is astonishingly complex when it comes to the detail, complexity and number of options when it comes to the busywork - and it will, without a doubt, keep you entertained for a very long time until that plan and objectives you envisioned hours ago comes to fruition, however that is not good strategy gameplay, despite being entertaining (sometimes a bit boring and repetitive too but OK, we're 4X fans here, we can take it). You take a much much much simpler game like r/Advance_Wars for example: it does a much better job of being truly strategic - the battlefield is dynamic and your long-term plans must always adapt themselves to the current situation if you want to win. A lot of other 4X games do that too but Stellaris doesn't. In 40 hours of gameplay, I have had maybe 5 times where I needed to come up with a strategy. If you understand the game well enough you then devise what you're going to do to handle the situation at hand (which takes maybe a couple minutes) and then you proceed to do several hours of busywork to get it done. It's literally 1% strategy and 99% busywork. Wars are a bit more involved but also symptomatic of the same issues. And it's not like I'm a Stelarris veteran and I already have everything figured out on my head either - this is my first match and still the game lacks strategy! Sure, you can always put the game on the fastest speed available but that doesn't diminish the amount of busywork, just the idle times.
My final verdict: if you're a 4X or Strategy game fan and you can get the base game on sale, you must buy it. It's well worthy of your money (on discount) and if you happen to like it, you'll have plenty of DLC to get later on, active patches coming out, an active multiplayer community, huge degree of replayability, etc. If you don't like it, it's still worth playing once or twice at a discount price before going back to your favorite games (your favorite r/Civ, r/MasterOfMagic, r/HoMM, whatever) - there's a ton of interesting ideas and entertaining-enough busywork to get you through at least one match without burning out. However, it fails to deliver on actual strategy and has many issues that subtract greatly from enjoying the game (such as 5-second ambience "beeping" infinitely or obtuse UI and keyboard usage) - and sadly, this is the death of a strategy game. 6/10 buy only on sale.
X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
This review focuses on comparing the movie with the Age of Apocalypse comics
I've recently read the "Age of Apocalypse Complete Epic" collection released by Marvel. Having just watched the movie I thought it would be cool to compare both while they're fresh in my mind.
I'm giving this review a 10 because I loved the movie. As an adaptation of the original storyline it's a poor effort at best. The comics themselves haven't aged well. The episodic format, too many characters, repeating story structures, recurring clichés and lack of depth are not up to scrutiny compared to superior works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.
The Age of Apocalypse comic series is an alternate timeline in which Charles Xavier died before bringing the X-Men into fruition and in his stead Magneto became their leader and mentor. In this alternate reality a supremely powerful alien (Apocalypse) takes over the planet, making mutants the ruling class, exterminating and enslaving normal humans.
First of all, half the fun of the comics is Magneto leading the X-Men. Normally a villain, to see his potential for good realised is awesome and in many ways he is a better leader than Xavier, much more active and passionate in his leadership. In the movie, of course, this is explored by having him join the X-Men in the final confront, but this happens too late and he is not explored at all as a leader, becoming just a powerful ally instead.
In the comics Alex (Havoc) and Scott Summers (Cyclops), Hank McCoy (Beast) and others are made into villains. This brings strong reactions from fans - to have us see how a few mishaps in destiny would turn our beloved heroes into a ruthless racist (Cyclops) and mad scientist (Beast). Again in the movie this is done by having Storm and Angel become bad guys but they're not explored as such, they're just there as mere opponents and when Storm decides to stick around and become a X-Men no one even think it's weird at all (neither the audience nor the other mutants). If instead we could see Storm enjoy her darkside and repent later, it would be much closer to what we see in the comic saga.
Apocalypse is a one-man army in the movie, always directly involved in leading his horsemen. In the comics he is instead a distant and ominous figure. He has built an entire empire to enforce his will on his behalf. Not only this gives him a much bigger air of empowerment but it also brings a much complex structure to his ranks. His horsemen are often battling against themselves for his favor, lower ranking officers are always eager and plotting to bring down current horsemen so they can take their place in the hierarchy, etc.
This internal backstabbing is created by the design of Apocalypse's philosophy - his belief that "the strong will survive and the weak must die", which he constantly preaches. This quasi-religious faith gives Apocalypse (and his Age) a lot more depth and relevance as a metaphor for survival. The closest thing in the movie is a single line when he asks to "be taken to the strongest mutants" and Psylocke tells her she'll do so. It hardly comes close to what we see in the original saga.
This is made only worse by the fact that this philosophy has a central role to play as contrast to the overarching philosophy behind X-Men. All the talk of the human species (homo sapiens) evolving into mutants (homo superior) is a metaphor for cultural evolution and personal empowerment. It tell us that it's OK to be weird and different because evolution is often weird and makes the new-and-improved stand out from the old. How normal humans react to mutants is a mirror of how society reacts to anything different ("not normal").
In this light, Apocalypse's philosophy, while still being as much rooted in biology (Charles Darwin's theory of evolution) as the genetics that explain the mutant phenomena, is at times a ruthless exaggeration of Magneto's views that mutants are stronger/better than humans and at other times is a step backwards in the sense that it doesn't care about who is "more evolved", just about who has the raw power to crush his enemies - which as we see in other X-Men movies is often the non-mutants that control government, technology, etc.
The resulting philosophical debate is a pretty interesting and enticing backdrop. In the movie, it's utterly lost and no attempt at all is made at preserving it.
Visually, the comic book landscapes are urban post-apocalyptic ruins, like in Mad Max or the Fallout games. Again, this is hardly true to the film - except for a few scenes: like the aftermath of the University's destruction and the ruined cityscape of the final battle. It's understandable that producers wouldn't want to change the entire visual style of the X-Men movies and I was content with the few throwbacks in the movie.
So, would it be possible to create a true X-Men: Apocalypse adaptation? The "Complete Epic" collection is almost 2000 pages long and it's not even complete. I don't think it's impossible though: much of the comics are episodic and many add little to the overall plot. The basic outline would boil down nicely to be explored in a single movie (or 2 if you wanted greater detail). Movies like Terminator do a great job of telling a complex story while still featuring great action. The same could have been done here.
Unfortunately, there will never be another X-Men Apocalypse movie adaptation. It's sad so many elements that made the original series so unique to start with were lost in translation. Alas, despite being a poor adaptation, it turned out to be a pretty good X-Men movie and maybe even one of the best super-hero movies ever made, and it is undoubtedly more mature, grim and violent than earlier movies in the franchise.