so last weekend i had a big plan, originally i had planned this big page about covering the two video game movies currently in the cinema, mineycrafta and until dawn, i was pretty late to Minecraft but i did commit to seeing it originally, i even wrote an intro draft to the article talking about my experiences with the series (i have never played it and don't really have any intention to) but on the day things just didn't go that way, for a start the showings even this late out were almost fully packed, the tickets a ridiculous price that was double what it is in the local indie cinema we usually go to and i just, was really sick and not up to being chicken jockey'd by a bunch of tiktokers,so plans had to be changed I'm sad to say. we did still see until dawn though and i got to play a ton of other cool games over the weekend that i will still talk about though :)

until dawn is great, really great, it's some of the closest I've ever seen a movie get to nailing a video game structure down to save points/checkpoints and funny game overs, it even has a continue system! sure it might not be an accurate adaptation persay but it was a great time and one that feels like a refreshingly earnest time in a sea of game movies that seem to be becoming increasingly bland and seemingly annoyed at the fact they're even based on video games (like the last two i watched, sonic 3 and Mario). it has a lot more in common as a movie with something like cabin in the woods than it does with the game, but it does it in a more gamey way with it being a time loop movie centred around the cast trying to make it until the morning, kind of like the objective in a game and when they die and a new enemy type spawns they reset at a checkpoint which was one of the main characters writing their name in a guestbook, it's cute, how it progresses with the different enemy types as it goes on and they learn more or how it has them slowly lose lives (turn into wendigo) slowly as they die and reset, it's super charming in that way, like it's really leaning in on the fact it's based on a game, it feels super inspired and charming.

now yeah like i said it's actual connection to the game is, very tenuous, the doctor shows up and is a big part of it, he's still played by peter stormare who steals every scene he's in, it has references to things like the inpatient and rush of blood, has reimi malik's character referenced, in a very funny way actually since they clearly couldn't get him to sign off for his real likeness so they had to just reuse his game character model from the ps4 version which stood out so bad and made me laugh so much, and the movies end does tie directly into that first game, but this is a lot of very small things, some are very blink and you'll miss it and that ending thing is a credits scene, but this doesn't super bother me since at least it gets the vibe and the feel right, something that the more *technically* accurate sonic and mario movies just couldn't manage.



i don't have a ton to say about the rest of it beyond that, the characters are fun, it's consistently really funny and it's really creative with its monsters and kills (love the corruption gas and the water that makes you explode) and the mystery was fun to watch, plus it has a really fun finale and it wasn't overly long or anything, it was brief, did what it wanted to and then let you go with a nice ending, it all worked for me and i don't even really have any complaints about it, I'm a big fan of the resi movies so it diverging from the games doesn't bother me in the slightest and it's not like it doesn't still have aspects of that like with the wendigos and the masked killer (and i suspect the use of different monster scenarios every night might be a reference to the fact the devs have done this exact same thing with their other series "the dark pictures"), it does more than enough while still being original enough to be worth watching, so i think you should go see it.



after the movie we ended up trying out some of the arcades at the place we went to see the movie in, it's this huge hockey stadium that also happens to have like a, not a mall but like, a big entertainment space (they had big plans for this place originally, big y2k'y kind of space with big asperations like a science centre and a cinema and stuff, even named the odyssey originally) in it that used to be pretty dead, it's kind of revitalised now though and part of that is a whole new arcade, on top of the old arcade that was already there, so now it has two arcades, why? no idea, is it a bonus to the place? not really, one of these is just full of exactly, and i mean exactly the same games as the other one, like, all of the actual games that aren't mobile ports or gambling are available in the other arcade and that other arcade actually has more games to it, plus bowling and a resteraunt, where this one only has an escape room thingy, a small cafe that used ai generated food artwork and a few extra gambling machines, *yay*. so we skipped the first one since it didn't have anything unique and focused super heavily on the second.

the first game i ended up trying was this cute little card based arcade game buried in the corner of the place, seemingly mostly forgotten: animal kaiser: king of the animals. if you've played either yakuza kiwami or yakuza 0 you'll probably have an idea of how this works since this is an entire genre of game in Japan and it's featured in both of those. you get physical cards and use them in the arcade game to battle other players and npc's, you go through a series of battles until you lose and then you get given a cool card at the end as a bonus which feeds back into the game. it's really cool and i kept the card i got from it as a little souvenir, the game has a ton of charm with these Tokyo-jungle looking animals doing absurd almost disgaea'y special moves against each other, sure there isn't much depth without the cards since if you don't have a card its basically just a slot machine with cool graphics, but even then its still just cool to watch and there's a lot of charm here, the low poly ps2 looking models help a lot in that regard, super recommended if you ever see a machine around.

the second game we ended up trying here was halo: fireteam raven and it was, despite it being the game i was the most curious about, the worst game i had played that night and it was the worst by a significant amount and it was also the worst rail shooter i have ever played. the game gets some things right, the cabinet looks cool, it has XBLA integration via a QR code that lets you get on leaderboards and might even have achievements? and it has the aesthetics down super well, using what I've been told is a lot of assets from the 360 remake of combat evolved to good effect, it's a nice looking game. that's more or less where the praise ends because this game plays and controls awfully to the point that i would consider the game borderline unplayable, at least if you don't want to spend hundreds beating a single just okay game in an arcade. now yeah a lot of arcade games are hard, but most rail shooters can be 1CC'd if you're especially good at them, it's brutal and I'd never recommend it but you can do it. the reason it's like this is because of how attacks and damage work, it's similar to something like time crisis where enemies are shooting all the time usually before you can even kill them, though the issue here is that in a more fairly designed game like time crisis you can hit the enemies before they shoot without even memorising them because they have stun frames and sometimes even die in a hit, you just need to have the skill, not only that but not every shot from the enemy will damage you, only telegraphed ones and that's not even considering the games cover system. here though, enemies often shoot you before you can really even get a shot at them, add that onto the fact they have shields and take upwards of 10 shots to kill and the fact that every shot they do does chip damage and it results in you taking damage more or less the entire level, it's not fun and it feels so unfair even in the games easiest levels, plus the fact enemies take forever to take down is just not fun. even the controls aren't great, the mounted guns are super imprecise and while the grenade buttons are placed well, the reload button is placed in such an awkward place that if you have smaller hands like me it becomes really hard to actually hit it during a shootout, leading to even more damage being taken and a very sore hand. all of this coalesces into a game that's just a nightmare to play and one that i really can't bring myself to recommend unless you're super into halo, if you are into halo and have the cash to burn on it? sure i can still recommend it, the story here is seemingly very well done and might even be canon and it has the music and aesthetics down, so you'll for sure have at least a passable time here, though as someone who really isn't a halo fan (i only played 1 and 2 and didn't like either all that much, sorry) there just wasn't as much here for me as i thought there would be and i really didn't have a good time with it.

the last game i played might have been my favourite, it was space invaders, but not a normal game of it, a rail shooter! space invaders frenzy is similar to the original 70's game, complete with a similar graphical style using a huge panel that's not quite a normal screen, almost looking dot matrix or like it's made of dots, if that makes sense, it's a very unique look, you get two guns and you have to play space invaders as normal but now with you shooting them down with the two big guns you have, it's simple, really simple, with just the shooting, a bomb you can get and a special extra score ship you can hit but it's really fun, it doesn't seemingly have an ending or anything, just high scores, but it's so unique looking and so fun to see the big invaders break into small ones that its hard not to recommend at least trying it, it's a great 10 min session and a real highlight of the night, super hard though even with two players.

while i play and cover a lot of these, sometimes low effort cashgrabby and not very interesting GAAS games, it's rare I'm ever all that excited for them, i like the experiences i have and the memories of them, the feelings associated, they're inherently ephemeral things, games sent out to die that can be experienced for a short time by a group of a few people and then eventually forgotten about by all but the most dedicated, that's an interesting thing to experience i think and it's why i keep coming back to these games even if i never really end up loving most of them, or even liking most of them. some i do get excited for sure and some i do indeed love like ultra rumble or caravan stories or faaaast penguin (the first of which i play daily and the people in my discord know i will not shut up about it), but it's very rare, this was one going to be one such game, a game i got genuinely really really excited about, I'd even planned to play with some people in that earlier mentioned discord, crack open some strawberry monster and have some snacks and make a night of it...... that's not what happened and this ended up being a game that i actively loathe a little, not because it's not what i wanted, in most ways it's exactly what i wanted, but in the ways it wastes its potential all for greed and the ability to not pay some fucking artists.

the game is like this, it's a hero tactical shooter, which at this point is already an oversaturated subgenre, with the gimmick that it has these cards that let you change the rules of the game, you draw them randomly each round and the team can use a collective currency this way to select 1-3 of them and get the cool effects (it makes its normal weapons free here which i do find to be a super nice change to the formula) which can range from things like spawning a bot, changing map weather by adding things like rain or smoke or fog monsters, give you familiars or a sword that can deflect bullets, you can debuff the enemy team with things like big head mode or making them drop their weapons from clumbsyness or buff yours by making your bullets come back into your gun after they've been shot, it's all so cool and it makes a bog difference to the moment to moment gameplay, it really did make every round feel unique, add that to the fact the hero's all have super fun abilities (i love pathojen's healing and pointblanks railgun especially), a slower time to kill which makes things feel a lot more fair and accessable and just the best gunplay in a game like this? it made the game feel really special in the moment, especially with how all the maps were a lot of fun and pretty and the games ended a lot more quickly than your average game like this, i even liked how it handled the final round with a 1V1 duel between all team members on a small map, it felt very fun and fresh to me, it's just a shame that it's all wasted for the greediest monitisation i may have yet seen in a game and a use of generative ai that feels so fucking insulting.



it's rare i get this angry about games, both in my writing and in general, the people that know me see i usually play it up when it does come around but this game got to me, this game actually upset me, part of it was the dissapointment, part of it was the sheer brazeness to make it a fucking paid ai MTX, part of it was that i was loving what i played of it, this almost became a game i could have ran regularly, part of it was also the fact that the game was really solid artistically, it has a great style and some good character designs (i love the mechanic, pathojen and pointblank) and all of it is just wasted on this game that insists on shoving generative ai slop shit in your face in a way that it almost seems like it'd have been easier and cheaper to just *not*, it's a game that moreso than any other feels like it went out of its way to replace artists just because it could. all of this is done for shockingly bad montisation, the kind of game that has like 8 currencies, skin banners and weapon charms, weapon skins that only apply to specific weapons that you will have to pull for and can't be used on other weapons, fucking ai art sprays (also apparnelty ai art skins), ai art backgrounds for your character card, fucking buyable heroes, battle passes and keys and just, it's so much, it's so fucking much, enough to ruin the game for me, the moment i saw those sprays and the game using ai to advertise its skin banners, it was over for me, i was out and i will very much not be going back, fuck this game and fuck the machines, we deserve better than this.