No Man's Sky

I was going to leave it at No Man's Diary, but after a couple of weeks with this, I feel like I've digested it enough to talk about in a more review-y kind of way. No Man's Sky is too big, too different, too weird for any initial gut reaction to be properly accurate.

It struggled to live up to the hype - but then, how could it not? Pitched as the biggest, most ambitious game you've ever heard of, never mind played, No Man's Sky is a functionally infinite universe of planets to explore, mine, trade, and fight among. Gameplay is relatively simple - it's essentially resource and inventory management, with simple combat layered on top - but the "I'll just go over here and..." factor means there's always something on the horizon: an alien outpost, an ancient monolith, another upgrade you're just a few more minerals short of...

No Man's Diary #6

( 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 )

Day 7
As I scour my current system for the elusive chrysonite, I find another ship upgrade. It's pretty incremental - only a single inventory slot - but I like the look of it, and manage to scrounge enough materials to get it up and running. I have to fly without a shield for a while, but only fall afoul of pirates once.

I ignore the next crashed ship I find; I'm finding that repairs quickly get expensive and time-consuming, so I think I'll wait for something that's a more dramatic upgrade than a single inventory slot.

Unless it, you know, looks really cool, or something.

Hitman episode 4: Bangkok (and Bonus Summer episode)

One town looks very like another when your head's down over your target, brother.

So far, Hitman has taken us to an exclusive fashion show in a Parisian mansion, a secret lab located under an Italian seaside resort, and the Swedish Embassy in Marrakesh, so a hotel seems a little... ordinary? Certainly, it's the first location where an ordinary person could find themselves without being a high-flying international assassin for hire.

But the Himmapan luxury hotel is no ordinary venue; this is, after all, Hitman, and that means plenty of backroom areas rife for exploration and exploitation.

No Man's Diary #5

( 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 )

Day Five
I've spent the last two systems searching in vain for chrysonite, but haven't seen so much as an atom of the stuff. Salt in the wounds was Sarah practically tripping over the stuff on a planet she found, but I keep looking.

I find a world with huge mountains of gold, and spend an hour mining the stuff to swell my coffers a bit; despite the new ship I got yesterday, I'm still in the market for a bigger ship, but the ones I like the look of all cost between one and two million units. I've currently got less than half a million.

No Man's Diary #4

( 1 | 2 | 3 )

Day Four
As I fly low over the surface of another mostly-dead world, I spot a blob of blue and red standing out from the surrounding brown ground, a plume of smoke billowing out into the thin atmosphere.

I land nearby and sprint/jetpack over the rocks to survey my prize: a crashed starship.

The Thing (1982)

Waaay late to the party on this one; I've owned The Thing on BluRay for about two years, but I only finally got around to watching it last night, after seeing a bunch of people on Twitter talking about it in relation to an allegedly-anachronistic reference in the Netflix show Stranger Things.

It's been a journey.

Anyway, we watched it, and #controversialopinion time: The Thing isn't really that great.

No Man's Diary #3

(1 | 2)

Day Three
I warp into a new system, which I find is occupied by a gruff but honourable warrior race. The first planet I land on, I find another Manufacturing Plant - score! While trying to blast the door down, I attract the attention of the Guardian drones nearby. By the time the dust has settled and the door is open, I've killed five of them, but I now have the blueprint for antimatter, which will come in useful for making Warp fuel.

The second planet is a storm-prone radioactive rock with scattered oceans. It has no vegetation, and it's populated entirely by bouncing potato creatures. I haven't named the planet yet; I may just call it "Ireland".

Star Wars: Rogue One - trailer 2

You've seen it already, I know you have, but what the hell:

That... doesn't look too bad. Then again, Lucas managed to make Star Wars boring, so the guy who turned in a snorefest like Godzilla..?

Yeah, I'm pretty definitively on-record as not having a very high opinion of Gareth Edwards' last movie, so I suspect that if this is good, it'll be more down to a script he didn't write and the involvement of Christopher McQuarrie and Tony Gilroy. Still, I want to be optimistic, and I will say that if Edwards is good at anything, it's solid VFX work, and getting the sense of scale across. The guy sure can pick a DP, too, and I love the score going on here.

Felicity Jones seems about as emotionless as I'd expect from the guy, though, so... fingers crossed, but breath definitely not held.

No Man's Diary #2

(previous entry)

Day Two
I spend the first hour or so continuing to explore Coyote Tango. Setting out from the Trading Post I'd parked at, I stumble almost immediately on an upgrade for my Exosuit, increasing my inventory space by one. It's the first of three I eventually find, though I fill them all with mechanical upgrades, leaving my actual carrying capacity entirely unchanged.

As I explore - mostly from the air now, which is faster but requires a lot more Plutonium with repeated takeoff - I come across a Manufacturing Plant, which has a door that needs to be blown open. My mining laser doesn't make a dent, so I wander off. By the time I realise I can switch the multitool into a combat mode, I've lost track of where I am, and can't find the door again.

I spend about another hour trying in vain to relocate the Plant, but just find more outposts and beacons, as well as enough alien sites to increase my known word count to over 30. Eventually I give up on ever finding the door again, and blast off to investigate the system's third and final planet.

No Man's Diary #1

Day One

I wake up on a hot, windy planet, and the first thing that happens, after a slow scan of the horizon and my smoking, damaged ship, is a warning from my suit that the temperature is hazardous. According to my HUD, it's less than 40 degrees Celsius, but I take the suit's word for it that the depleting heat bar is a bad thing, and move off in search of shelter and the materials I need to repair my ship and multitool.

Ninchilla Prime (my new homeworld) is a planet of rolling hills and towering plant life, scattered with timid herbivores; in the whole time I spend there, I don't see a single hostile or carnivorous animal (though there is a particularly aggressive plant species I call Mr. Whippy).


There's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff here, most of which I leave with their auto-generated names, although I later regret not renaming the system to something more memorable in case I ever want to come back.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Ultimate Edition)

When Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (I'm not going to bother typing the full title again) was released to a critical savaging, my interest level in it leapt dramatically upwards. I wasn't a huge fan of Man of Steel, and I don't know that I've seen a Zack Snyder film that I thought was particularly good (though Watchmen probably comes closest), but there's something much more compelling to me about a grand, glorious catastrophe.

But as the venom for Dawn of Justice faded, so, too, did my urge to see it, and I ultimately never got around to watching the thing theatrically. But now the alleged Ultimate Edition is out, and the talk online was that it actually wasn't bad - so, I figured, why not.

Now, I've still not seen the theatrical cut, so comparisons aren't possible - but I figured that it'd be interesting going into the "director's cut" without any baggage (well, aside from the trailers, and the aforementioned critical mauling)... but I can easily see how a hacked-down version of this could have been terrible.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition... is.