Monday, January 11, 2016

Building Up the Castle

If you follow me on Facebook, you may know that my current gaming obsession is Fallout 4. One of the features in the latest version of Fallout is settlement-building. You need to set up radio beacons to attract settlers, then make sure to satisfy needs like food, water, and beds for the people who show up. You also need to prepare for attacks on your settlement by various factions that want to steal your resources or just destroy for fun.

Settlement building seems to be one of the most popular aspects of the new game. Lots of YouTubers have uploaded videos of their settlements, and some have published detailed how-to videos. My own entry is not very elaborate, but FO4 has given me the opportunity to mess around with the video capture features of my PlayStation 4. I therefore present my own Fallout 4 settlement video.

Thursday, January 07, 2016

The 40 Plot Holes That Weren't

Nena showed me an article called 40 Unforgivable Plot Holes in 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' by Seth Abramson of the University of New Hampshire. She agrees with me that most of them don't qualify as either. It looks to me like Seth wasn't paying attention half the time.

I can be an argumentative jerk, so I'm going to dissect his article item-by-item.

This is your spoiler warning.

Sunday, January 03, 2016

The Force Awakens

I have now seen the movie twice. I was a bit disgruntled the first time, as I had avoided spoilers until mere hours before I actually got to see it, which put me in a somewhat negative mood.

I was past the negative feelings this time, so I think I can safely say that I do, in fact, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I agree that it is highly derivative of previous Star Wars movies (I will not say which above the fold), but that doesn't really hurt it. This movie has the character development and dialogue that we truly love from the episodes IV-VI. It has action, but not pointless action.

Don't get me wrong: it could be better. The plot doesn't have blatant plot holes, but there are certainly plenty of open questions (which is okay if sequels fill them seamlessly).

Spoiler free, I am not disappointed that I payed to see it in theaters twice. I may even do it again. If you still haven't seen it, go away.