Right as rainy

So LOST has gone into its fifth season. And as if the intricacies of Season 4 weren’t enough, it’s getting even more complex. New characters and sidestories are popping up all over the place, and instead of flashbacks and flashforwards, people are now timetraveling themselves. So it is rather hard now to determine who is where, and especially, who is when.

I am not sure I like the direction the series is taking. It’s becoming very difficult to follow the weekly release format, with so much happening. I am also not sure if the creators actually have worked it out until the ending of season 6, which is supposed to end the series, or if they’re just trying to fill the time until that happens. Because if they do, they should rather take a shortcut to whatever ending they thought of, and write it in now, because few things are worse than a series dragged out just for the sake of dragging it out. I will most likely follow the series up until the end anyway, but if they lose the plot completely, that might change.

On a sidenote, if you haven’t played the LOST videogame yet, think of giving it a skip altogether. It’s a classic case of wasted potential. The game tells a nice story which ties into LOST quite well, and could have been a part of the series. The cinematics and direction are a 1:1 carbon copy of the series format. But the gameplay is a different story. It lacks consistency, tries to incorporate too many elements from different genres, and is at times sorely frustrating. Overall the game makes an unfinished and rushed impression, as if it had to come out no matter what, and noone really took the time to playtest it. Try it on your own risk, and don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Good old James Bond is back on stage. “Casino Royale’ was arguably one of the finest movies ever to grace the franchise, and ‘Quantum of Solace’ missed that bar only by a couple of inches. So logically enough, and going with the zeitgeist, there has to be a video game as movie tie-in – by the title of ‘Quantum of Solace’. And remarkably it’s the first James Bond game to make it to the PC since ‘Nightfire’ which was released in 2002, and also the first modern PC title to be directly based on one of the movies. Needless to say it is obviously present on virtually all other mainstream platforms as well. Enough reason to give it a try.

About 5 hours later the conclusion was somewhat sobering. I watched the credit roll (which seemed to be almost as long as the game) and thought to myself ‘Is that all?’. ‘Quantum of Solace’ is clearly trying to appeal to the mainstream FPS crowd, leaving a lot of potential unused or ignored. Level by level is spent doing run&gun scenarios and chicken shoots in the style of the early ‘Call of Duty’ titles, with a bit of hand-to-hand, some minute pseudo-hacking, a bit of pointless stealth and some irritating awkwardness in a few scenes. Most of it is just Bond-unworthy, as he usually has smarter means to outwit his opponents than shooting everything that moves. To add to the frustration, there is exactly one way through each level, each event is scripted, and the  execution of the objectives is as flexible as a railway track. No alternate routes, no silent way, nothing. (continue reading…)