F1 2016 - PS4 - Initial Thoughts

So there is not much more to say than what is already in the video at the moment. While I am adding this to I guess I missed that, it is obviously a brand new game. It is not going to have yet gone unnoticed. With that in mind though, F1 is actually quite niche. (As much as any multi billion dollar sport is niche). F1 has its fans. Millions of them, but in gaming terms I don't know how many people they attract. It will be enough to keep knocking out a new release every year, but it's not one of those racing games that is all that easy to just pick up for the non racer. It's not arcady, it's beautiful F1.

I am a fan of F1, along with many of my friends, it's what we talk about, watch and do as part of our social time (well that and cake!).

I have spent the grand total of 3/4 hours playing this game so I can't really give it a full review as yet. I am not in that sort of position to have found and picked through the meat of the entire game. So this initial thought is that it looks amazing, it plays quite nicely but as you will hear I have issues with where my own ability fits within the game.

If I go dark on here for a while, you know why!

Awesomenauts - Xbox 360 (Although it's on everything!) - Game Review

Awesomenauts was released back in August of 2012 and I first saw it while interviewing game developers at the Eurogamer Expo of that year. It is a MOBA (at the time I had no idea what that meant, and the developer was looking at me with a little distain), but it stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Since the advent of Twitch for streaming games, there is big money now in these games like League of Legends, and this is loosely based on this premise but is a 2D version and much more cartoony in its graphics.

I bought this game on the 360 as soon as it was released after playing it at the Expo. It took up a lot of my play time, and it is one of those games where, if you don't understand what is going on. You will lose. Guess what, I didn't have a clue!

This type of game is fantastic and works well if you have a proper team of players like League of Legends has. You play a different character in the team as each team member has a role to play in the
battle.

Your mission is to break through the automated defence tower/s (there is usually one high and one low) to get through to the oppositions energy core. Destroy that and you win.

There are a range of versions now in terms of characters, the PC version has more characters than the Xbox version and depending on the kickstarter projects you may have invested on buy now as DLC there are two add-ons in Starstorm and overdrive, each adding a handful of other playable characters.

So why is it so hard? Learning the controls and playing the basic missions to get you familiar with the game are super easy, they have designed it so well in this respect but for this game is the epitome of easy to learn hard to master. It has a very strong focus on team that if you don't know how the characters work together or who does what role in the team you can get destroyed very quickly.

This is my defining experience of this game. It is 3 vs 3 with automatically spawned bots that are more crucial than I first realised. These little guys inflict damage on anyone who gets in their way and most of the time a new player sort of just ignores them, and that can be a problem. They got me on more than one occasion! They also serve to be the reason you can attack the turrets, they are the focus of the heavily armoured towers and you need them to try to attach the tower, as without them you will die!

Once upon a gaming life I played Call of Duty MW2 on a very regular basis and would almost call us a clan. We had great players, and me. It was for fun, but we had competitive matches and we all knew our role. I was a canon fodder player, I would distract an enemy giving the better players time to attack and get the kill streaks. We used the Xbox Live chat and it worked. With Awesomenauts I never had this with anyone. I never had a community so playing it was always with random others, some good, others bad and while I think the game is phenomenal, the user experience can wildly vary according to who you play with as a team. If you get placed with a host of randoms who are as bad as you are, it can demoralise you and could tarnish your experience of what is a great game.

Awesomenauts is a great game to try and while I have written above about how playing online can be a frustrating mix of players, actually don't let that put you off. You can play a local game and it is designed to be a 3 player split screen for that experience. So next time a group of mates is over and you don't want to dig out Mario Kart (because lets face it that is a bit of a go to party game for everyone, that and Super Bomberman) you can do a fantastic game of Awesomenauts with them all. It will get over the not knowing who you are playing with as you are all together and to learn you can play against fully AI bots. You could take it online as well, if you fancy your chances against the great unknown of the gaming communities.

It is a beautifully designed game and one that for the price is great to have just as a rainy day game. You may not play it with any real regularity (although there is a massive community of players) but I think it is one of the games you have to own. I go through phases of really wanting to play it and I sit and try to improve myself, trying to learn how the classes work for each character and how to a good player, realise I am never going to be good and move on again to something else for a play through.  I then come back to it six months later, ready and invigorated to try it again.

The major downside of online games in the console world is the need to have Xbox Live Gold, or PS+ for the Playstation Network. I used to have these by default but no longer have them as my online gaming has slipped down the priority order of expenses. Apparently I need to feed my children, who knew that was a thing (do I need to put a disclaimer in here....surely not!)

I have not gone into each character that you can play and what they can do. If you are interested you can see them all in this wiki. What I will say is I seem to gravitate to playing as Clunk every time. He is the tank character. The big, slow but exceptionally powerful character than can take a lot of damage and dish out as much to the towers and other players. I think however I am a bad player (as mentioned) as he should be alive for large amounts of time, I seem to die much quicker than expected. There is a real skill to this game despite being so easy to pick up, appreciating how this type of game works and what is required of you for the whole team effort. If you are a League of Legends player, this would be like the popcorn version of that game, something light hearted in between heavy sessions of LoL. However that could just be a poor perception on my part, especially from the real hardcore Awesomenauts fans.

What drew me in first of all was the spectacular and beautiful 2D graphics and platform aesthetic, what kept me playing was the addictive game. What lost me was how I never seemed to learn how to improve as a player of the game. As with a lot of the reviews on the site, they are built around my ability to afford and buy games and films that I would be buying anyway, so there was always going to be a bias to enjoyment. I would still suggest you try this game out. It is fun, quirky and addictive and if you don't find you enjoy it, then you won't have spent too much on the game as you can buy it quite cheaply on Steam or the old gen consoles.

Ronimo Games deserves a pat on the back for their work on Awesomenauts and their continued developments through the Kickstarter investment projects. It's another fantastic indie game that is taking on main stream releases and while it will never be as big as COD or the Drake series, it has a strong following of players, of which you could very easily become one.

Community - TV Series

So Netflix now has Community available to watch. My suggestion is to sit down and get watching. There is something here to point out, they only have the first five seasons. The sixth season was produced and broadcast by Yahoo. This is why the main bulk of the Community is available, but one season is not.

This annoyance aside, it is still a fantastic piece of writing, directing and acting. Each person is perfectly cast and the dynamic of the show is perfectly set.

The premise of the show is a once high power lawyer, Jeff Winger, has been caught and found not to have graduated college. He is sent back to community college to get his degree before being allowed to practice law again.

He tries to hit on a girl in his Spanish class and creates a fake study group to try to spend time with her. This becomes a problem when a study group actually appears and so the series begins and continues with the fun and foibles of the groups dynamic playing out each week.

While the show has its main set of characters, I find that some of the side characters are just as funny (sometimes more so). For instance John Oliver plays the psychology professor that keeps dropping in for small parts in other episodes. He takes over teaching anthropology for a short time in season 2 and through all this his character arc of drunken English idiot is perfectly developed from his first episode showing as just a connection to Jeffs past as a lawyer.

Ben Chang, the crazy character of the show who starts as a teacher but evolves (or should that be devolves) has some of the funniest parts and because they were so perfect, you can see his inclusion in the later series grows as he would have undoubtedly tested well with audiences.  Ben Chang is played by Ken Jeong who as we know from the Hangover films plays crazy so very well!

The main study group however are made up of

Jeff Winger (The Leader) - Joel McHale
Britta Perry (The Millitant) - Gillian Jacobs
Abed Nasir (The Nerd) - Danny Pudi
Annie Edison (The Girly Stereotype) - Alison Brie
Shirley Bennet (The Mum) - Yvette Nicole Brown
Troy Barnes (The Jock) - Donald Glover
Pierce Hawthorne (The old confused idiot) - Chevy Chase

The characters are distilled into the stereotypes I have listed above, but are of course so much more than that, and as the show progresses unlikely friendships form and the dynamic of the group changes.

Rewatching this on Netflix has been fun, but what was interesting to notice this time is the directors of the show (for a large number of episodes) are The Russo Brothers, of Captain America and Marvel fame. They really have gone on to do well for themselves and from this body of work it is easy to see why.

It is such a self referential and self aware program that plays in the stereo types you expect from a sit-com but subverts them because of the fact it knows it's using them.

Abed is the voice of the audience in this case, the film/tv nerd that is socially awkward and aware of the conventions that others don't see. It is through his innocence that we get the charming animated Christmas episode, where only he and the audience can see it is an animation. The rest of the group keep the notion he is crazy and everything is as it should be. It is beautifully quirky and everyone is perfect for the show.

If you have not heard of Community I suggest you find it as soon as you can, as there is plenty of Youtube clips and interviews now that it is all wrapped up.

You will also find the not so nice side of it by the end. Creative fallings out and Season 4 loses the guy who created and wrote the show, only to receive such criticism for him to come back in 5 but then lose Chevy Chase because of on-set differences. This is well documented else where if you are interested in that side of this great show, but I would suggest you ignore it. Plenty of shows have dramas outside of the fun TV bubble (Castle being an example, where it is rumoured that by the end Nathan Fillion was nasty to Stana Katic. I hope it is not true as I found Castle such a fun show and think Nathan Fillion seems like such a genuinely nice and funny guy, don't burst my bubble!)

This series is perfect to fill small gaps in your TV time, but I bet once you start you will have lost a weekend and binged watched as much as you can in that time. It is worth it on every level and is a truly great series that has so much rewatchability that I am enjoying as much if not more so this second time around, and I expect when I get to the end, I will watch it again in the future. There are lovely little hidden side stories, background scenes and treats hidden on screen while the main story plays out, you will need that many watches to try to find and see them all.

Community is a great bit of television that I am sure many people will have now seen or been aware of. If you, for whatever reason missed that. Well let me tell you to get on it. Go back to school and get your education.

Million Dollar Arm - Film Review

This 2014 Disney film is not to be confused with Million Dollar Baby, a very different film!

Jon Hamm plays JB, a self centred, commitment-phobe batchelor who is driven by meaning less realationships, money and his work.

He is a sports agent, who has gone it alone with his Aash and Theresa as a small three person team.

They are down on their luck when their client list hits zero and no one wants to sign with them. They devise an idea to turn an Indian cricketer into a baseball pitcher.

 The competition is called "The Million Dollar Arm" where the winner of the competition can win the cash!

JB travels through India holding try-outs and then nurtures the winners back in the US with the traditional and expected fallouts, love interests and conflicts on the way.

As with most Disney sports films you can tell where this will end before it begins. That, however, does not make the journey any less enjoyable. While being predictable and formulaic, if you like a good Disney tale of the underdog, this will satisfy that itch very nicely.

This tale is based on a true story (and looking at photo of the real winners, Dinesh Patel has a striking resemblance to Adrian Sutil, F1 Driver).

Adrian Sutil - Taken from fanpix.net

Dinesh Patel (right) - Taken from nypost.com

The strange thing is apparently the true story is just that as well, pretty much all true. 

I am a fan of Disney and I love a good rags to riches story. Mighty Ducks (even 3!), Remember the Titans (another true story but much grittier but still Disney!) and Cool Runnings. This telling of a sporting tale is handled very well and is a perfect family film as it is inoffensive in the extreme. Which is why many may hate it. It pulls all the right heart strings and has you welling up exactly where they want you to, and some people don't like the almost cheap emotional manipulation that you get from Disney. I think the reason is because it is so structured, some would argue that loses the heart felt nature they are meant to be going for. 

I say to those people, you knew what you were getting when you put Netflix on and found this. Sit back and enjoy its simplicity and gentle nature and tone. I have had the word "Bland" running through my head all the way through this write up and I am loathed to use it but in one sense that is what the film is (and I don't mean it to sound negative). 

The predictability of the movie and classic Disney set up and resolution could have the feeling of a bland, mass produced story, but I say try to see through that. It is a lovely film about one mans self discovery and realisation there is more to this life than just the money. There is a real human quality to why you should feel for these characters and each actor does well to convince you they should be in this film. 

I would suggest watching this film as an antidote to a Saw marathon (or replace that with any other brutal horror franchise). It's easy, gentle and a perfect Disney film. Take that as it sounds. If you don't like Disney this film is not for you. If you do, it is not one of their classics but it will pass 2 hours of your life very nicely where you can let the wave of forced emotion wash over you like a cloud.