Sea of Thieves

The first thing you see when you drop into the Sea of Thieves isn’t the sea; it’s a table, a grubby, worn, wooden thing in a dingy tavern, dimly lit by candles, the hurdy-gurdy strains of some shanty (or Ride of the Valkyries) warbling in the air. There’s a woman at the bar who’ll offer bits of gossip or refill your tankard (for free - the business model is unclear).

Through the door, out into the too-bright sun, and you’re greeted by shanty lean-to stores and tents - where you’ll pick up Voyages, and (eventually) buy new boots, hats, weapons, tools - all looking like they’ve been cobbled together from the remains of whatever ships washed up here before you did. A short distance away, bobbing on one of the best water simulations you’ve ever seen, is your ship. Part vehicle, part home base, she’s your Falcon, your Serenity, your Black Pearl.

As a great captain once said, what a ship is - is freedom.

Destiny 2

The short version of any Destiny 2 review is this: If you liked Destiny, you’ll like Destiny 2. If not, you probably won’t. Most of the changes are quality of life improvements, leaving the whole thing feeling much more like an expansion than a sequel.

 The one area that’s seen a lot of attention - both from the devs and from press coverage - is the addition of a story, and it’s the story I want to talk about here.

 Destiny set a low bar for game narrative, thanks to most of it famously being hacked out 9 months before launch. To be honest, I’m not sure Destiny 2 has better writing, as much as there’s just a lot more of it; there’s still a lot of cliche and a dearth of subtext (everyone either says exactly what they mean or makes a joke), but the thing that bugged me most about it was the lack of cost.

 Spoilers follow.

Ben-Hur (1959)

For a film as old and as famous as Ben-Hur, I was expecting fewer surprises.

It's as long as expected, but for the most part doesn't feel like it, because there's more plot than I thought; it's more subtle and even-handed, politically, than I thought it would be; and it's got a lot more Jesus than I expected, as he shows up periodically to give someone a drink or wander around on a hill in the background, always shot from the back so you can only see his magnificent hair.

He's always accompanied by an organ swell, too, just to make sure you know it's really Him.

Rogue One

I love Star Wars.

The Empire Strikes Back is probably my favourite film of all time. I mean, sure, I was burned by the prequels, I'm not the hugest fan of The Force Awakens, and I think Return of the Jedi is actually more than a little bit rubbish, but I love Star Wars.

I hated Rogue One.

Don't Starve Together

Most of the time I've spent with Don't Starve to date has been vicarious; charming as it is, the Tim Burton aesthetic never quite clicked with me, and the gameplay was just a little too punishing; I prefer my games with a little more direction included, or at least some kind of instruction beyond the title, even if it's as simple as No Man's Sky's "reach the center of the galaxy at some point".

My wife and her sister, however, meshed immediately, so I've spent uncounted hours sitting on the sofa with Winston or Wendy or Woodie tramping around the procedural landscape, offering advice, if not assistance.

But now Don't Starve Together has launched on PlayStation 4, and I'm pitching in to "help".

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.

Warcraft: The Beginning

There are probably two major barriers to entry on Warcraft, and characters with names like Gul'dan, Khadgar, and Medivh only represent one of them; the other one, and perhaps the bigger of the two hurdles, is that there's just too much here to fit into a two-hour movie.

The opening is breakneck, throwing characters, locations, and names around with enthusiastic abandon, but without really introducing any of them. It's a shame, because there are some valiant attempts at character work scattered throughout, but a huge amount of development feels missing - it often feels like they've left fast-forward on for long sections, as we whizz through (or, more often, past) the "craft" part for the sake of getting to the "war".

Full disclosure: I was a big WoW player for about seven or eight years, from just after launch in 2007 to about midway through Cataclysm. In that time, I was something of a lore fiend, and went so far as to read several of the tie-in novels. The point being, I already had some idea of what the plot of Warcraft was going to be before I even got close to booking a ticket.

I have no idea how confusing this film must be for someone without that reference point.

Hitman: Marrakesh

Another month, another exotic, sun-drenched location to explore; IO Interactive only just managed to get this one out in May, but they are just about managing to keep to their one-a-month “schedule”, and Marrakesh is yet another change of pace from what’s gone before. Where Paris was contained clockwork, and Sapienza was sleepy and flexible, Marrakesh is tense and claustrophobic.

The targets this time around are a banker, currently holed up in the Swedish embassy, and an army general looking to use public unrest surrounding the banker’s paramilitary-assisted avoidance of prosecution to build up support for a military coup.

With violence brewing, 47’s sent in to prevent the fall of a government… or, more specifically, the building contracts that said government has awarded to the ICA’s construction-company client.

The Jungle Book

Lots of people have a nostalgic attachment to Disney’s first take on The Jungle Book, but I'm not one of them; there are a couple of catchy songs in there, but there’s not a whole lot in the way of story, or even characters. So I thought it was an odd choice for a live-action remake, but the fact that there’s so much space to fill in means that on reflection, it probably makes more sense than Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid.

And it really works - the script fleshes out the world and the characters, and builds a more robust plot with actual stakes. The credits describe it as "based on the books by Rudyard Kipling", so perhaps the changes come from this being a more accurate adaptation, but either way, it's a much better story than the 1967 version.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

The cliff-notes version is this: the writing is as good as it's ever been, and Naughty Dog have squeezed near-unbelievable performance out of the PS4. The gameplay is... well, it's Uncharted: slightly floaty (but mostly forgiving) puzzle/platforming interspersed with fairly loose gunplay, but both are spiced up by the introduction of a grappling hook, which opens up possibilities for both traversal and Tarzan-swinging aerial takedowns that simply never get old.

Narrative-driven games are always more difficult to talk about. Potential spoilers abound, even when discussing the opening stages.

So I'll try and avoid spoilers, as always, but... Pyrates - ye be warned.