Recent Stuff 6: I'm Still Here! Edition

Well, May felt like a weird month for me. Tried to get some reviews out, but by the time I actually attempted to stick with a game to review, the month was over... Something tells me that might be a reoccurring theme in the months ahead. Who knows.

"Current Games"

In quotation marks because I either stopped playing these weeks ago or barely touched at all.

Lovely Planet: After trying the somewhat confusing but charming demo on Steam, I immediately purchased. You know how games like Bit.Trip Runner or Super Meat Boy play like, right? Where you go through a sequence of events that kill you in one hit, and instantly respawn to try again? Well, imagine a game like that in first-person view, and that's what Lovely Planet is like. Not gonna lie, it actually felt kinda hard to get into at first, but I got the hang of it after some time.

There's supposedly a total of five planets (each with their set of stages), but I stopped playing once I finished the third. It was meant to be a brief break, but I unfortunately never returned. The game gets pretty intense, as it demands you to think outside the box in a few instances, and it doesn't help that your bow and arrow doesn't have a reticle on screen. Still, I enjoyed the challenge, but it did leave me fatigued after marathons of stages. If there's one major complaint, it's that I think they should have shuffled the second and third planets around; the second planet feels like an absurd difficulty spike after the first, and the third planet is like a breeze in comparison.

Also, Lovely Planet has some really, really catchy music. Planet one and three are my favs.

To note, this was the first game I was trying to review in May, but yeah, never returned...

Thunder Blade: Sadly, only played one session of this. Still, if you have a 3DS and your only exposure to the Thunder Blade series is the abysmal Genesis port (Super!), then play this and never return to that version ever.

Heart Beaten: I have a review of this I'll be submitting after typing this blog entry up (edit: just noticed a listing with pictures. Hope I'm not intruding on someone else's possible review!), so don't want to give too much away. Just gonna say it had some good hitters. This was my second attempt at writing a review in May, but kinda fell away from it at some point. Though, instead of starting anew with another game, I still went ahead with this one, since my thoughts on the game were still fresh at the time.

???: Now this is actually a game I'm playing at this very moment, though I'm on the fence on whether I wanna review this, so I'm saving my comments for the review itself. If not, you'll see this game revealed in the next blog entry anyway.

-Movies!- (spoilers, just in case)

So I was like, "Screw it, let me watch some movies this month (May) in theaters."

Avengers 2: I already said my piece in Janus' entry, but I'll repeat it again. It was an alright slugfest of a movie. Nothing particularly bad except for the fact it felt more like an intermission than a complete movie. Instead of focusing more on the plot that's actually going on within the movie, it kept veering to the side to set up plot threads for upcoming films. I thought this was the most disappointing thing, since it ended up downplaying Ultron as a major threat, unintentionally setting It up as a "pushover".

Mad Max Fury Road: Just one ginormous chase sequence. And it was fantastic. Absolute lack of shaky cam made my day, as well. If you want to watch a modern day action chase movie where 99.99% of the stuff is actually happening on screen, then you need to watch this movie.

While Avengers 2 was average-ish at best, it did help push me into seeing most of the Phase 2 movies that I skipped out on these past few years, and watched the following:

Guardians of the Galaxy: Very fun adventure movie. Makes me upset that I skipped watching this in the theaters, as it seemed like it would've been a hoot watching on the big screen.

Iron Man 3: Odd pacing, but it was alright.

Captain America Winter Solider: Dude. Dude. I was pretty blown away at the intensity of this film. It never seemed to run out of steam, and when you thought that would be it, the movie just keeps throwing stuff at you. I was exhausted by the time the end credits popped up. My exposure to MCU's Captain America prior to this film was the two Avengers movies, where he comes off more like a dork than anything else, so when I watched this, I was like, "Man, Steve Rogers is the truth. This guy's legit."

Captain America The First Avenger: Watched it for completionist sake. The pacing was a bit shaky. Wasn't thrilled that they skipped a whole bunch of stuff via montage once Cap started fighting in the war.

-Comics?- (some spoilers)

So, this in turn renewed my interest in my on again, off again relationship with comics, specifically Marvel. And I'm wondering how quickly this habit will die off again, especially with what's currently happening to the Marvel universe with their take of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I dove into a few "Event" paperbacks that I've been meaning to read for the last ten years, like Avengers Disassembled (Hawkeye's death was absurd), House of M, and Civil War (surprisingly quirky, but I hated its non-ending that requires you to read other comics).

After that, I decided to just stick to a "solo" series instead of events, and since I enjoyed the Winter Soldier so much, figured I would make my way through the Captain America series that started up after Disassembled, its beginning issues being the Winter Soldier story arc. So far, I've completed issue 21, which is heading into the Civil War leg of the series. My "goal" is to reach around the 50th issue mark and its subsequent issues, as the stuff afterwards doesn't appear to be interesting, though I wouldn't know for sure without reading spoilers.

That's it. That was my month and eight days.