shinyobjectreviews

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Color in Constructed

I've been thinking a lot about the role of color in deckbuilding (specifically in commander because it's what I play) and it's odd.

There's a very obvious upside to playing multiple colors: you get to play more cards and cover more situations. This is why the color pie exists. In draft, colors let you commit to something while giving wiggle room abotu the specifics and make sure you're not just picking the best cards.

But what's the trade-off? What do you give up for this increased card pool? Well, your land situations get worse. But what does that entail? Most often, it means you don't get to cast spells when you want to (this is especially common in draft). A lot of people play ETB tapped lands like guildgates which can sometimes feel like paying a mana and other times feel like playing a turn behind everyone else. But of course sometimes it means you don't get to cast spells at all.

But then there's budget.

If you spend the money on it, then your lands can essentially have no downsides. You can play those extra colors with effectively no cost.

But as I type this I think about how that's true of every deck and nearly every card. A lightning bolt is always going to be better than a shock. But that seems different for some reason.

I don't know, I guess I was just rambling.

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My experience with Disco Elysium, and why I won't play it

The short answer: I died from looking at a car.

Disco Elysium is famous for letting the player die in incredibly easy ways. Before playing I remember hearing about how you could sit in a chair that's so uncomfortable it deals one point of damage, and you could have a character build who only has one health point. That's funny. But I also remembered that story explaining how you had to fail a check to avoid sitting in the chair, then fail a check to ignore the damage, then die. My situation was not nearly as multi-staged.

After playing the game for two hours, I come upon a car, and the game tells me it's my car. I click some buttons to learn about it (as it's my first playthrough, I wanted to learn about the world). It tells me what the controls are, how I probably used to drive it, and then, after clicking on an option (I don't even remember what it said, but I think it implied starting the car), the game made a noise, and all the sudden I was given a dialogue choice of how I wanted to scream at everyone and quit the police force. I was confused, picked something, then the game took me back to the main menu. I had died. I reloaded my save and it was from an hour and a half ago.

I want to talk about why this removed all interest in me playing the game.

You just hated dying

Yes, dying sucked, and having to start over from earlier sucked. That always sucks in games!

You just needed to save your progress first

Yes, I hadn't saved the game in over an hour. How was I supposed to know I needed to? This is the first time the game gave me basically any consequences outside of how my face looked. I hate games that encourage save scumming, and I didn't even realize this was one. Am I really supposed to play like that? I really didn't want to, and just wanted to take the game at face value for my first play through.

You have to learn somehow

The game never warned me that this could happen. There was never a safe opportunity to learn about it.

It definitely told you there was a morale health bar

It did not tell me that if it was depleted, it would be an automatic game over. It also wasn't clear that I only had one point of morale. It just showed a bar. I assumed it was depleted slowly. I didn't realize it was one single chunk of health.

Didn't you have a healing item?

I did, but I couldn't use it because I got one-shot. Apparentyl, if you go down to one health normally, it'll warn you.

Why did you pick a build with only one morale?

I picked the pre-made build (since it was my first time) called "the thinker" because I wanted to learn about the game. Apparently the character based around thinking about things can't handle thinking about things.

But you should have known it would make you fragile

How was I supposed to know that out of the million stats, two of them have very specific, countable consequences. The stat that improves morale isn't even called morale.

Well, just keep playing with the character

Knowing that anything could kill me is way, way too stressful

Then pick a different build and start over

I haven't played enough to know what I need, and am scared of making the same mistake again. Plus, I succeeded on the check to fix my face, which is giving me some sunk cost.

This isn't a game where you can just click on everything

Oh sure, talking to people or doing some rigorous action I can see why I would need to be careful. But I was looking at a car. A car I knew. Why in the world did I have any reason to expect that to affect my mental state?

There were clues

There were not. The game up until this point had told me any time I was taking a risk, like with the dice rolls, or from my internal monologue warning me. It did no such thing here.

Are you going to let one bad experience stop you from playing a great game?

As you can hopefully tell, it wasn't the experience that annoyed me, it was the game telling me what it expected of me and what it was giving me. It was telling me that random things might happen that ruin your progress. It was telling me to be careful with everything. It was telling me to save every time something goes well. It was telling me not to trust it.

It was telling me the type of game it was, and it's not the type of game I think I'll enjoy. Or, at least, it's a different type of game than what I want to play right now. Maybe I'll get over it.

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March of the Machine Aftermath is fine

I keep seeing people complain about MOM aftermath, and while understand a lot of them, I disagree with a lot of it. I don't think the set is incredible, but I don't think it needs to be hated on in the same vein as double feature or 30th anniversary edition.

And luckily, the Professor just came out with a video that conveniently lists complaints, so I can just use that as a basis!

Only 5 cards per booster pack

This is one of the most common complaints, and I disagree with ti fully. When's the last time you opened a booster pack and there were more than 5 cards that you wanted from it? Maybe if it's a brand new set or you're a super collector who wants 4 of every card, but otherwise, no, most of the cards just turn into bulk. So if the 5 cards there are equivalent to the 5 best cards of a normal booster pack I don't see a difference, unless you physically need the cards because, I dunno, you use them as fire starter. I think it's perfectly normal to want more things, but they're not doing anything, so they might as well not be there, so in this case, they aren't.

The cards aren't good

So then obviously this is the issue, right? If the cards aren't good, then the small packs matter, right? But this is entirely subjective. The cards look good to me. There's a lot of fun ones in there! A lot of people say they're going to buy singles, and well if they are, then obviously the cards are good, right? Every single card in the set looks like it could have a home in a deck. All of them. There's no filler if you ask me. No, they're not all the best cards in the world that will rock standard to its foundation, but does anyone want that? Does anyone want a set where every card is the top of the format? If the card has even, like, 6 cards that end up seeing standard play, then it will have had as large an impact as most recent sets, and far more in comparison to its set size.

No Real Story

Again, incredibly subjective. Every card outside of maybe tranquil frillback and Vesuvian Drifter shows us something happening on a plane or with a character. It shows us what is lost, what is safe, what's being rebuilt, and how people feel. More than most sets if you ask me.

Very little flavor text

Just because a card doesn't have flavor text doesn't mean it doesn't have flavor. You're telling me Arni Metalbrow needed flavor text? Or the Kenrith's Royal Funeral? This has been a thing for years now, but people have never, ever been satisfied with the amount of story content we get.

The Pinkertons

Here's where I'm going to break from the pack a lot. I think WOTC were somewhat justified to send the pinkertons. Put yourself in their shoes: someone has some of your unreleased product, but claims to have gotten it through legal means. You can't sue them you can't call the cops on them, you don't even know who they are, really. But they also won't stop. They are doing it because they want the views. What can you do to stop them? Hire some private detectives to find out who this person is and stop them from revealing the whole set (it didn't work in time). The pinkertons are probably the only organization large enough to basically find one guy who could be anywhere AND try and get your possibly stolen product back. Like, someone at WotC probably just googled "how do I find a person on the internet and get them to stop leaking important information" and clicked the first link, and was in too much of a rush to double check anything. Also, the guy who did it had to have known what he was doing, and I don't trust him at all to give an honest account of what happened without embellishing things to make him look better.

Abuse of wealth and power

If someone is doing something that negatively affects you full well knowing they are, what else can you do? This guy was basically doing the card game equivalent of sharing private pics online. He knew he shouldn't be doing it, why would asking him to stop ever work? This wasn't an abuse of power, it's just the only thing they could do in the situation.

No Longer play standard

Okay, this is more of a reason not to buy the product than a reason to complain about the product. And yeah, standard kinda sucks. But it's clear this set is heavily focused on commander, seeing as how of the 35 rares or mythics, 22 of them are commanders. So in that sense, it's succeeding, and making it standard legal is moreso to reflect how it's a continuation of the plot and also because why not. If the cards are of that power level, why not let them be in that format?

Okay that was pretty much everything. I don't think the set is great, I just think it's average. People are disappointed because it's something new but doesn't feel worth it to them. I think it's fine if something is new without being novel.

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Color Identity is Holding Commander Back

You heard me. Color Identity, a term I think invented for commander, is a card’s entire color spectrum. It includes the colors the card is, the color of its other side, the color of all symbols on it (excluding reminder text), and basic lands (including reminder text). All the cards in your deck must have the same color identity as your commander or fewer of its color identity’s colors. I think it serves no purpose in commander.

Benefit of the Doubt

So what does color identity supposedly add to the game? Some people would say it feels thematically linked. If you, the player, are represented by your commander, then surely you can only use colors that “you” know? But that’s a flimsy excuse. It a silly flavor reason, and doesn’t really hold water anyway, since creatures regularly change colors. What about forcing players to adopt new strategies? Restrictions breed creativity, that’s what Maro says. Except this is an imposed restriction. Unlike other restrictions, there’s not problem you can try and address or work around, because the problem itself doesn’t exist. Also, the restriction isn’t uniform. Blue decks get restricted to blue, but Grixis decks get restricted to blue, red, and black. Why does one deck get more restrictions than the others? What are we balancing here? Why do we feel the need to restrict what a commander can do based on how many colors they are? Which leads to another common argument: if you let players play any color, then you get to play degenerate combos with your commander, like Tolsimir playing Intruder Alarm for infinite tokens. However, this doesn’t really change things. Decks already have infinite combos. Making it easier doesn’t really change anything, and anything truly broken usually can already be done anyhow.

Confusion

A lot of people already have massive issues with color identity. Devoid cause a huge problem. Colorless decks before wastes was a big problem. Players have been arguing about hybrid cards for years. All of these issues stem form the fact that the rule is so made up and artificial that nothing feels correct. If it’s to limit the card pool, then saying no to everything feels correct. If it’s mechanical, then surely allowing any card you could cast in a mono-X deck makes sense. Run those phyrexian mana cards, why not! Some people say no to those but yes to hybrid, because flavorfully hybrid represents access, whereas phyrexian mana is solidly other colors. But no one can agree on it because the rules are made up!

Problems

This has also caused issues in gameplay. One of the big issues with Commander Legends was how limiting the draft was. There had to be so many colorless cards to let players speculate during the draft, but they could ONLY speculate on those cards. You had to pick a two color deck, then every single card you could play HAD to be in those colors. Unless, of course, you got lucky and got one of the three color cards. Cards that I feel were specifically designed to be constructed cards, not draft cards, in order to discourage playing them, but the mere fact you gain access to a third color was too powerful. Three colors is strictly better than 2 colors. Always. If you have a two color card, and another card with the exact same text and mana cost but had a third color, that second card is strictly better as a commander. Because of how color identity works, it doesn’t even need to be in the cost. This is why Golos got banned.

Magic Has Already Solved This Problem

But I want to make an argument of why it’s not just awkward, but better if it were removed. Magic the gathering already has mechanics in place for this. If you have a mono-red deck and you want to splash a black card, there is already a cost associated with it. It is already harder to do, and there’s already a reason to not do it. But, at the same time, the whole reason other colors exist is to splash them. If you have an issue in your mono-X deck, tough luck. Any other format, you can just splash for it, if you’re willing to take the risk. If your deck is unable to do something, you adjust to it. You can’t do that in Commander. Instead, everything must be available to all colors, and if it’s not, you blame the designers.

If you’re limiting colors to prevent combos, there’s already something in place for that, too. I discussed it last article: archenemy. If players spalsh for another color to make their deck stronger, then just team up on them, like you do any other time players do it. Anything the color identity rules are adding is already being covered by other rules in the game.

In Summary

Just get rid of it. It’s bad for the game. It makes some card strictly better than other for completely artificial reasons. It screws with the color pie. It is removing tools that are essential to the game. It doesn’t add anything to the format. It’s just dumb and confusing.

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Everything in Commander has a Reason

Commander is different than most every other format. Traditionally, magic decks are 60 cards, max four of a single card, and the only difference between them is the card pools, in terms of range of printed cards and ban lists. But Commander has tons of other stuff going on. All of it is designed to make the game more fun for casual players and to play well in multiplayer

The Commander

Commander has a commander. It has to be a Legendary creature. I feel like this is mostly to limit selection, so that you aren’t just going to pick absolutely anything, but I think it’s also because Legends traditionally have very powerful effects (since there can only be one of them in play), so it makes sense to ask players to have those as their primary creatures. The fact that you can recast your commander is so that you can constantly have something to do, and you’ll never be completely out of things to do. This is also why they arew creatures: creatures are the card type that has the most impact, in the sense that they can attack, block, have abilities, and stay in play. The argument for adding planeswalkers is that they similarly do a bunch of things, but I personally lean on the opposing side, since planeswalkers don’t interact with much of the game unless they explicitly says so, as opposed to creatures which do it by their very nature. The commander tax is a way to stop players from relying too much on their commanders, and the fact that it’s 2 mana means that you can do it every other turn if you draw nothing but lands. Then there’s color identity, but that will require it’s entire article. In fact, it was going to be this one, but it ran long.

Everything Else

You can only have one of each card. This helps increase diversity, so games will be more different than 4-of formats. You’ll be seeing different cards more often. The 100 card minimum also helps with that. Both in general also make it harder to form singular strategies: you can’t just build a deck built around a specific combo or even a specific mechanic most of the time. This helps make sure players pick deck archetypes that are more wildly supported, which makes it easier for other players to grasp when playing against them for the first time. However, the massive card pool means that at least some weirder options are possible. The card pool also allows for exploration and creativity, which also leads to more fun games. The change to life totals is to help make the game go longer, allowing for players to do crazier things, rather than having to worry about keeping alive. It also helps stop players from dying “incidentally” to things that affect each player, or to combat damage bonuses. In order to kill a player, either you have to do something really big, or the game has to go on a while, both of which are what most people would consider a good thing.

Multiplayer

Something not technically tied to the format but is implicitly tied to it is multiplayer. A lot of people usually assume exactly 4 players. This actually changes the game a lot. It slows down the game, since players can’t easily attack other players without risking getting hit by other players more easily. That means you can just play one pretty good blocker and spend the rest of the game doing silly stuff. The free-for-all nature of multiplayer also leads to archenmy and kingmaking scenarios. Archenemy is what it’s called when all players team up against another player, usually when their in the lead or are certain to win the game on their next turn. This is actually healthy for the format, because it encourages players not to make good decks. It encourages them to make fun decks. Few players want to team up to stop a player from having fun, but everyone wants to stop players who are just trying to win. The opposite of this would be kingmaking: where a player is so far behind they can’t really win, but they can still affect the game. This allows players who are behind to still contribute, perhaps with a simple removal spell or a single creature to attack with. This encourages players to keep playing even when they’re behind, and could even give them a chance to come back. Or, more often, as the name implies, let someone else win by helping them out before dying. Some would call that essential to the format.

So, in my next article, I’ll explain color identity, and why it serves no purpose to the game.

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Dishonored and its issues of choice vs. experimentation

So, I've been playing Dishonored 2 and something about it keeps throwing me off. I loved the first dishonored, and honestly I love this one, too, but something that popped up every so often in the first game keeps coming up in this one.

In Dishonored (the franchise), one of the big selling points is the "choose how you want to play" aspect. The most straightforward is non-lethal vs. lethal. You can either kill people or knock them out, and in the case of the primary assassination targets, there's always some way to take them out of commission without killing them. But there's other options, too. For example, in one level, you need to enter a building, but it's protected by essentially a wall of lasers. So you can either deactivate the lasers, reprogram the lasers, get someone else to turn them off, or try and find another entry point.

So how do you learn these alternatives? Some of the things are very specifically said to you. The laser wall is described to you by an NPC, as is the fact that it can be rewired, and were to get the tool to do it. Sometimes its obvious. You can look at the wall and see where it is and what it does. You can see the power cords and where they lead to, so you can deactivate it.

So what's the problem? The problem is that you have to learn these alternatives in the first place. For example, if you want to deactivate the wall of light, you need to know where its power source is. So you have to go to the wall of light, find the cord, and follow the cord. But all that involves going places, interacting with things, and affecting the game. But since you don't know where these things will lead, it means that A) you might end up leading yourself into something you don't want to do unintentionally or B) you won't know when you are taking the action you want to.

The game has a strong amount of exploration baked into it. Money is found everywhere. Collectibles like painting, upgrades, and the game's version of skill points are strewn about the stage. There's even an item in the game, the heart, that specifically exists to show you where upgrades are, since they'd be permanently missable otherwise. So that means you want to go around to every corner of the map. But if you're doing that, you're not picking your favorite or best option, you're just going everywhere.

For example, when I heard about the laser wall, I decided I was going to deactivate it. I had the money to afford a rewiring tool from the black market. But then, while exploring, I found a way to steal from the black market. I didn't, but it gave me the option. Then, once I got past it, I found a back door to the room. I would have much rather done that and saved my money, but I didn't even know it existed. The NPC told me to rewire it! I thought the whole goal of the level was to rewire it! Then I had to backtrack through parts of the level that I either was or wasn't supposed to go to, all to basically fake taking options I chose not to. But I didn't even choose not to take them I didn't know they existed. And you could say "well, you could have done research and pick your favorite option afterwards," but the game doesn't let you know when you've made a decision. If I see something in a room I want, I'll go to the room and take it, but whether that's the final room of the game or where the map is stored is unclear to me unless I already have the map!

It feels natural for a game to include both of these things. In either case, you are given multiple options. The "choose your path" mentality says that if there are three doors in front of you, pick the one you like. The exploration mentality says if there are three doors in front of you, go to all of them. If you want players to pick their favorite thing, they need to know their options. I think that's why the non-lethal stuff still feels good. I know there's a non-lethal option for every character, so I have to put work into discovering it and playing it out. But the other choices are in the game are not always framed as choices. If I can buy a rewire tool, how would I even know I have the option of stealing it? If an NPC I trust says I have to deactivate the laser wall, how was I supposed to know I could go around it? Is the game telling me not to trust it? How will I know to look for alternatives when I'm not sure if or how any exist? And if I try to find out, how will I know I'm not choosing one by accident? And do I want to?

Another way this rears its ugly head is with experimentation. If I bump into a guard while sneaking, what do I do? If I'm "choosing" to play stealthily, do I restart? If I "chose" to be in that room, do I just keep playing? If this guard is equipped with some weapon I've never seen before, can I even make an informed choice without fighting them at least once? It's a game all about making decisions, but never really informs you all that well on them, and doesn't let you get that information until after you've made a choice.

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Warhammer's Dice Mechanics

So warhammer uses dice in a bad way and I hate it sort of but it's also completely understandable.

The game uses miniatures, which means that the health system needs to be managable. The best solution would be to have it so that when a miniature is hit it dies, so there's no need to track individual health totals for what could be a hundred models. But if you do that, there's no nuance to the combat, since everything results in death or perfectly fine. Some models can have more health (a model with two health can just have a single marker placed on it to denote damage, vehicles are big enough that you can safely fit multiple counters on them, and characters are unique enough that you'll only have 2 or 3 at a time to track), but with the average model (of which there are often dozens that both players need to be aware of) you want to still have a reason to use a big gun over a small gun.

So the developers were like "how can we make some guys with 1 hit point easy to kill and others harder to kill" and their answer was percentages. Give one guy a 33% chance to lose his one hit point and give another guy a 66% chance to lose his one hit point. It feels the same, right? A bigger gun increases those odds, a smaller gun decreses them, so in the same way a big gun is better used to kill a big guy in other games, it does so here as well.

I don't need to talk about the dice thing, though that is an issue with me personally (if you have to roll higher than a 3 in order to figure out if you have to roll higher than a 4, then why not just make them roll once and hit a 6, the math is the same, it's just that one takes longer), because dice rolling is fun for a lot of people, and can lead to fun moments. Similarly, the choice of only ever using d6s is economical and consistent if cumbersome. However I learned that the Apocolypse system used in huge games uses a system that can swap out with d12s while using the same numbers, which I think is really cool. But even when you collapse the stats, the problem is still there.

The issue is that progress is replaced with luck.

In a game with HP, every time you hit something you get closer to it dying. The game progresses as things get hit over time. A weapon that deals a 3rd of their health will kill in about 3 turns, depending on things like hiding, blocking, healing, etc., but importantly those are all things players can do and know how it impacts the game.

In warhammer, the euivilent to a weapon that takes out a third of their health is a weapon that has a 33% chance of killing. This means that the target will die in 3 turns, but with absolutely no certainty. It is entirely possible they die in one hit or never.

This means that, while numbers can go up and down over the course of a game, progress is effectively imaginary. In fact, the game goes backwards. Your expendable resource, Command Points, starts high. So on the very first turn, you can maximise your odds more than any other turn of the game (from what I've seen), meaning your opponents effectively start with the lowest "health" they'll have the whole game. As units die, your odds get even worse since you're rolling fewer dice. Rather than having an exciting and tense finish, with no one knowing what will happen, almost every warhammer game I've seen ends with players just deciding they don't want to play any more.

So to summarize, warhammer, in an effort to simplify tracking without simplifying combat, they made a system where players feel powerless and games get boring fast. And just because I feel the need to say it, the fact that you could concievably play an entire game without any model dying is not a good sign.

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An In-Depth Analysis of my Observations Playing CROSSBOW: Bloodnight

CROSSBOW: Bloodnight looks like shovelware, and I don’t blame anyone for thinking that. There’s a lot missing from the game. There’s a typo in the launch announcement. However, the lack of standard triple A bloat means it’s rather easy to dissect the game. So I’m going to break apart some of what happened to me as I was playing and started to question the quality of the game only to determine it was my own skill lessening my experience.

Devil Daggers

Credit where it’s due, a lot of stuff in the game is a blatant ripoff of Devil Daggers. It will occasionally come up. If I say DD know I’m referring to Devil Daggers. The developers have said publicly the game is intended for fans of DD, so they’re not trying to hide it, and though the games are extremely similar, it’s still worth analyzing CB:Bn to see what they decided to keep, lose, or change. Originality is nice to have, but it’s not everything.

The Crossbow

Let’s start at the beginning. The crossbow is amazing. When sustaining fire the triple-chambered crossbow fires each chamber individually. When firing like a shotgun, they all fire at once. When firing the rocket, the center chamber pulls back further, and the prongs bend back considerably to emphasize the weight of the projectile. The appearance starts to resemble a modern-day compound crossbow, as though it is focusing the strength from other prongs into one. Your character also slows down: thematically this shows again the strain of this massive projectile, but practically it also helps you line up your shot better, since the rocket has more pinpoint accuracy and higher damage than the standard projectile and can therefore be used to fire at long distances. Something taken from DD is that the projectiles have a rather significant spread and a slow velocity, meaning that you can deal more consistent damage faster by being closer to your target, a dangerous but rewarding and skillful strategy. The crossbow also changes color as it upgrades, which you won’t miss due to the camera slow and bright glow, but it’s nice to see it on the crossbow itself as you’re playing. It’s an easy signifier, but it also just looks nice and feels cool.

The Introduction

The first half minute of the game is slow. A single zombie (The Restless One) spawns, then a couple more. You then get the big tentacle monsters (The Tainted Ones) that spawn the bats (The Hungry Ones). Of the few comments I’ve seen in the game, one was a complaint about this intro being slow and uninteresting after the first few runs. After all, while it does a great job at slowly introducing elements to new players, you learn pretty quick, but it can’t just be removed from the game because it would interfere with the time-attack scoring. I also disliked this part after my first few runs. However, I have come to love this part of the game. The end of a run can often feel dissatisfying, and most players will immediately want to try again. While most just want to rush to where they were at, the game forces you to wait, calm down, and get reacclimated. You also get to blow off some steam by obliterating the weak early enemies at almost no risk. I’ve also used this time to practice: learning exactly how long after the spawn animation takes until a demon is vulnerable, how close to the eye I have to shoot, rehearsing projectile timing, anything that I feel could use work.

The Spawning

This was one of the first issues I had with the game. I often died to demons spawning in behind me, or werewolves (The Feral Ones) using their long range dash to hit me from the other side of the map when I hadn’t even seen them appear. Even with the big red circles that appear before they spawn, However, there were two things I learned in short order. The first is that each enemy has its own unique spawn sound, each one roughly as loud as its importance (I wouldn’t even think the zombies had any if I didn’t hear it isolated during the introduction). The howl of the werewolves is especially notable, which is good because their dash has incredible range. The second thing I came to realize is that the game was pushing me to look where I was going. Shooters are all about circle strafing and firing while walking backwards, but not CROSSBOW: Bloodnight. In this game, you have to fire forward. Where you’re looking. It is safer to run towards one of the stationary Tainted Ones to try and kill them while letting the zombies and bats chase you from behind. The Feral Ones will dash at you, but you can pay attention to the noises they make to try and dodge them, or just turn and look if you dare. Once again, the game offers you a choice: run away from enemies while shooting behind you and risk bumping into guys in front of you, or charge at foes head on (remember the primary fire is better at close ranges) and try and thin out the herd later.

The Dash

If you check out the reviews on Steam, the primary difference between CB:Bn and DD is that the former has a dash. Once again, It didn’t really think of this while playing, and didn’t really start using it until after my first dozen runs. I actually started using it almost jokingly in the introduction as a way to get from the first spawning zombie to the second. I started learning the exact distance of the dash and it’s timing. Eventually, I started using it in game. It has the same issue as above, where dashing into a crowd of enemies is just as common as dashing away from them, but if timed well and planned well it can be a literal lifesaver. If you can properly perform it, you can also dash into the Tainted One and fire off a one-shot kill into the eye with the shotgun.

The Special

The game has an ability it grants you once every 60 seconds roughly where , if you press Q, it will slow down time a bit and show you a giant line the width of a house directly in front of you. Your crossbow is also aimed up and glows with radiant light. If you pull the trigger, every enemy in the highlighted area will be skewered with a holy lance and get one-shot. Like the dash, I was unsure of how best to implement it, but I have three theories. The first use is as a emergency clear. If you’re panicked and want to just get rid of some enemies, you can hit this to get a little space. It’s a nice way to bring the tension down if you’re starting to not enjoy it. The second option is as a time-saver. If you have multiple enemies you want dead, especially Tainted Ones whose weak points you can’t reach, you can line them up to hit at least two and maybe more. This is a use of skill and lets you try and optimize your runs. Lastly you can just show off with it. Use it for some dumb reason because you feel like it. Whatever the reason, the fact that it’s on a cooldown encourages you to use it aggressively rather than save it for a powerful attack, since the sooner you use it the sooner you can start charging up the next one.

The Enemies

I’m solidly impressed at the enemy variety. The Restless ones are bolt fodder, keeping you aware of your surroundings, but never dealing enough to kill you without you knowing it. The Tainted Ones are stationary to give you fixed goals, and they spawn bats to harass you but only until you give them a little attention. The werewolves are the first big threat: they do not exist to be killed, they exist to kill you. You must know where all of them are to stay safe. The Troubled Ones shoot shockwaves, and are the first true long-range foes. They force you to jump at the right time, forcing you to stay aware of your jumping, and punishing those relying too hard on bunny-hopping. Those are all of the enemies I’ve encountered for now, but they all come together in such exciting ways. Even the Tainted Ones themselves have neat interactions. Nearly all of them spawn at the edge of the map, making it harder to kill them form the other side and forcing you to get up close, but I also encountered one in the center of the map, whose positioning forced me into an awkward spot in order to get to its weak point.

The Map

I’ll be honest, I don’t have much to say about the map. It is donut shaped: big circle with a spot in the center no-one can get through. I much prefer it to DD because it has some landmarks around it that help orient you, allowing you to more easily remember where enemies spawn and where you are in the moment. The hole in the center also give you just enough of a safe space that your circle strafing doesn’t get weird with demons just sitting in the center getting constantly kited. I also expect a boss to spawn there at some point, making for a nice focal point.

The Setting

On a thematic level, the map is heavy with gothic arches and pointy spires. While I assumed this was an anachronistic stylistic choice, I did my research, and it turns out gothic architecture did in fact originate in the early 12th century, where the game is set. The opening text tells us that the game takes place close to 1193 AD, a time when the church outlawed the use of Crossbows against Christians. The game recontextualizes this as declaring the Crossbow as “ungodly” and “demonic,” which is a clever way of getting an excuse to use Crossbows against Demons. The crossbow in question, is mildly inaccurate not in terms of time but location. A triple-chambered repeating-crossbow seems far-fetched, but China had been using repeating crossbows (Cho ku nu) and triple-bed mounted naval crossbows for hundreds of years by this point in time. Firing multiple bolts simultaneously at the cost of reduced range and accuracy was actually a real tactic used at the time as well. The idea of either being hand-held requires some suspension of disbelief, as does the ammo storage, but that’s well deserved for an arena shooter like this.

The Story

There isn’t much of a story here, but it’s there if you look. As mentioned, the game declares the Crossbow ungodly, and implies that it is used in some form of demonic ritual. However, the glowing light implies otherwise. Each enemy is named after some form of torment: hungry, restless, troubled, tainted, etc., and with exception of the Restless Ones, each one releases a soul when slain that the player can “collect.” This implies that these demons may be corrupted forms of humans that are being slain to release their tormented souls from some form of punishment and collecting them for some unknown reason. The fact that the zombies and the bats don’t leave souls follows this logic, since the zombies seem more like animated lifeless corpses than living creatures, and the bats are, well, bats. They also spawn from the Tainted Ones, so they are kind of just extensions of that. The game also has achievements that I have yet to understand, and seem to imply I am either evil or not evil based on a statistic I have not found. It intrigues me, but I will have to keep playing I guess to find out what it means.

Minor things

I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t have anywhere else to put these so here’s some other stuff I just want to throw in there.

The first upgrade you get is from killing a werewolf, after which another werewolf immediately spawns, letting you directly compare how long it took to kill the last one and how long it took to kill this one.

You can actually see the werewolves jumping in from outside the map before they spawn.

When you’re hit, the screen goes bloody like any other game, but there’s already blood everywhere, so the game give you a scary tone that plays until you heal back up.

Conclusion

And that’s all I can really say about the game. I’m not here to convince you to buy CROSSBOW: Bloodnight, I’m not here to convince you it’s good, I’m not even trying to convince you to play it. I just wanted to talk about this. I’m not even sure if it’s my favorite game of the year, if only because Hades is about the toughest competition it could have faces. So if it’s not my favorite, not the best, and arguably not worth your time, then what is CROSSBOW: Bloodnight?

My best answer? It’s mine. This is a game I want to exist. This is a game practically built for me. I bought it, played it, I loved it, and I feel like I’m the only one who has, and that makes me feel special. So maybe don’t look too much into this review. Perhaps I’m overblowing it because I feel personally attached to this game in a way I never have before. But hey, if you’ve gotten all the way to the end, maybe you care about what I have to say. So here’s the summary.

CROSSBOW: Bloodnight is a really cool video game, and I really like it.

[shinyobjectreviews]

CROSSBOW: bloodnight

Here’s the story:

It’s late. I was working on some stuff on my computer and just finished. I had less than an hour until I needed to get to bed, but I spent so long working that I didn’t get to play Hades, a roguelike that really wants to be played an hour+ at a time, so I’d hate to have to stop halfway through.

So I look through my other games, either ones installed or small indie games that I could install in 5 minutes. Receiver and the Ghostrunner Demo are mostly what I’ve been using, but it’s a little too stealth-centric and doesn’t give me that button mashing rush I need. Superflight and Luftrausers are too skill intensive. Other games have to be played in a story mode that doesn’t have great chapter selects, or are too hard to hop in and out of. I definitely don’t want to play multiplayer. Devil Daggers got very close, but the annoyingly dark atmosphere and art style tenses makes it hard to relax.

I get desperate and head to the store. I sort it by shooter, since FPS seems the most like what I need. I get the normal big dumb shooty games, CS:GO, Doom, big expensive stuff. I think of how to describe what I’m looking for. Short? That just gave me games with short story modes. Fast? I want something that can be played quickly. I type in fast and it suggest fast-paced. I click it, that’s close enough. Once again, same sort of stuff. I click singleplayer. At that point I start scrolling through, but they’re all big campaign games.

Then, I see it. CROSSBOW in big bold capital letters. I click it before I consciously register it. The cover art looks like it was whipped together in minutes. Reviews are positive but there are only about 100. I catch a glimpse of the auto-crossbow in the store page’s video, as a crossbow fanatic I’m used to them but it’s got some nice detail to it. The prongs actually bend, and the machine gun nature of it is explained by the triple-chamber, again unrealistic but not outlandish.

The description looks nice. It’s a score-attack arena shooter, which means it would be short, frantic, and replayable, which is what I was looking for. I ignore the flavor text about demons or whatever and go to the reviews to make sure the game isn’t just crap. The first professional review says “Pretty much Devil Daggers with a crossbow, a dash move and a dark gothic setting and it’s addictive as hell.” I’m sold. I scroll up, double check the price, a measly 2.99, and buy and install it.

The opening title screen is just the cover photo. The main menu is just the cover photo. I don’t care. I click start. It tells me the crossbow was outlawed in 1193 for being demonic. I give this game huge credit, because it was in fact outlawed by the church (except if you were using it in the crusades) but not because of demonic implications, just because it’s incredibly powerful and can cause a lot of pain and anguish, which was seen as un-Christianly. But I’ll accept it as story justification.

Then, the game proper starts. No instructions. I have a crossbow. A zombie spawns in front of me. I hold the mouse button and it spews bolts into it. It dies. I love this game. More stuff spawns. I shoot it and it dies. A big guy spawns, and he shoots bats out of his mouth like the guys in Devil Daggers. I shoot it in the eye a bunch and it dies. I get curious about right mouse button. I hold it down and the middle prongs spread out. The bowstring gets pulled back further. This is again fairly accurate, since automatic crossbows (which did exist in 1193, albeit in China) were not fully primed, since the automatic nature required the string to be at half-pull. But with it fully primed, clicking left mouse fires a small explosive round. I’m in love again. Alternating between the firing modes, I kill zombies, bats, squid monsters, some werewolves show up. At one point, I get some sort of super move that rains giant bolts from the sky.

I invite my fiance in to see the game because it makes me so happy. She says “Honey, that looks like shovelware.” I don’t disagree. The game is barely minutes long, and the art is the same everywhere. But I love playing it.

I go online. No one is talking about it. There are no reviews of it. I can’t buy any merch. The developers have other games they care far, far more about.

But I don’t care. I love CROSSBOW: bloodnight.,

[shinyobjectreviews]

I didn’t like Infinity War

Infinity War was much more flawed than I expected it to be. I definitely see how people could have fallen in love with it, there were some bold choices made and some strong performances, but I had so much trouble staying engaged in it that I didn't enjoy the film. I'll leave the spoilers for after the break, but let's just say I have a lot to say. I based my format roughly off of Moviebob’s “Really that Bad” because I like the way he admits some things are minor and some are not.

Stuff I liked

Everything looked nice. I really liked the design of most of the aliens, especially horn lady and squidward. They were well designed and well animated. I liked most of the planets and spaceships, even if they were a little derivative sometimes. This doesn’t mean much when the richest company in the world is funding the biggest movie in the world based on a series with years of design behind it.

The infinity stones did stuff. I was happy that the infinity stones kept their specific abilities, mostly. It wasn’t just “collect all the mcguffins,” they each retained their abilities, mostly. The set up from the previous movies actually payed off in this respect. I’ll give them a pass for ignoring the soul stone, which would be a little tough to pull off, and the mind stone, which was just what the last one.

Thanos was amazing. I loved Thanos as a character. He’s one of the best villains in movies I have ever seen. He had a clear goal (kill half the universe) with a clear and personal motive (finite resources on his planet) and a clear pathway to that goal (the stones). Every decision he made and every word he spoke came from that very clear background, which made all of it carry weight. He had a very clear goal that the heroes had to get in the way of, so the tension coming from him was real. The audience knew what would happen if he succeeded, so they were engaged, and they knew what he needed to do that, so they were interested in the decisions. There’s a reason he’s the main character of this film, to the point of being the protagonist.

Random ending stuff. I liked seeing Thanos get home, sit down, and smile. I like hoe they clearly show the gauntlet was cracked, meaning he spent his one shot. I liked the choice for silent credits, and the title turning to ash. I liked them saying Thanos will return to emphasize both that while his mission is over his story isn’t, and that he was in fact the main character.

Minor Stuff that bugged me

Tony got nanites. This was something that bugged me in Black Panther, too. Nanites are a sci-fi writers crutch to explain why someone can do ridiculous things that look cool but easy. The trouble is that it makes it very hard to understand exactly what Tony can do and know whether or not he is in danger. At one point, he turns his arm into a scary laser cannon, and later he turns it into a knife. Was there a reason he chose a knife instead of a gun? Is it just a knife or was it something else? The Iron Man franchise had previously put a lot of effort into showing exactly what his suits are capable of, and putting enough limitations on him that you can be worried about his safety. But when his suit can turn into anything with telepathic influence it’s hard to be concerned.

The tone was inconsistent. A lot of people bug Marvel about this, especially in Guardians 2 and Ragnorok, their tendency to have a nice moment then immidiatley cut it with a joke. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. This film had some of that, but this time I noticed it within characters. Thor was simultaneously the saddened, desperate survivor and the boisterous, comical warrior. A lot of people liked the quiet moment he had with rocket, but to me it just felt so incredibly awkward. He lists off the people he lost, then chuckles, then rocket makes a sarcastic remark. It made me cringe.

Thanos tortured someone to get information from someone else... three times. First, he threatens Thor until Loki relents and gives him the cube. Then, later, he threatens Nebula until Gamora give him the location of the soul stone. Then again he threatens Tony until Strange gives him the time stone. It plays out exactly the same way each time. Each person swears they won’t give anything up, lets him interrogate twice, then gives up. It is repetitive and lazy writing. The very first time he did it I didn’t like it: it’s a super old cliche and an especially heinous one when you’re preventing the death of half the universe by letting your brother/sister/friend die.

Thor missed. Thor hit Thanos really hard with a weapon they had set up the whole movie as being able to kill Thanos, and he misses simply because he didn’t aim for a kill shot or lopping off an arm. I get that it’s just supposed to up the tragedy, making it even sadder that they lost when they were so close, but it wasn’t from not trying hard enough, or being unlucky, or being outsmarted, it was just because Thor was an idiot. A similar thing happened with Star-lord, but that was a little more forgivable since it was well set up and played well with the characters.

They break an infinity stone. Why can an ancient stone of limitless power from the big bang even be shattered, much less by someone who literally got their powers from the stone itself, and why does breaking this stone not result in anything other than a big yellow puff?

Thanos’s character is different from his previous appearances. His actions in the previous avengers films and in Guardains seems odd in retrospect. He literally gives away one of his infinity stones, despite in this movie being, in this movie, completely dedicated to finding them. He argues with Ronan in Guardians, but in this movie he’s calm with everyone. Granted, I like the new Thanos, but to everyone who says “they’ve been setting up Thanos for 10 years,” well, they’ve been setting up a different character. This one just has the same name, same daughter, and about half the attitude.

Bigger Issues

The characters were interchangeable. Marvel is wise enough to know only some of their characters will end up being popular. Spider-man shows up because he’s popular, but does’t do anything that any other hero couldn’t have done there. Tony goes to space, but if he had been ant-man or falcon instead, nothing would have been different. Thor had a Thor-specific plot (with Rocket for some reason), Gamora and Nebula had things only they can do, and arguably Scarlet witch and Vision, but everyone else was just generic fighter. Even Steve Rogers was nothing more than “a guy who knows another guy.” Wakanda served the exact same function as Sokovia in Avengers 2, it was just that Wakanda was popular. Tony never acted like an engineer, Hulk never acted like someone scared of their emotions, falcon was never loyal, spider-man unlearned his lesson from the first movie, the Guardians... well, they’re whole bit is that they’re weirdos in their own movies, so they didn’t seem that out of place. Still, it lessons the fun of throwing everyone into a movie together if they aren’t really doing anything that they need to be themselves to do. Everyone was there, but no one really needed to be.

Nobody does anything. I don’t mean this in the broader sense. I know that “the villain wins” sometimes makes it feel like the heroes didn’t get anything done, but usually you can have them get minor wins along the way, or build character, or get most of the way but fail in the end. Thor is the only one who gets a story like this: he must find or create a weapon that can kill Thanos. This involves going to a specific place, doing a specific thing, almost dying, but still coming out on top. Everyone else in the movie, though, has very unclear goals. They know they have to defeat Thanos, but that’s it. Tony and crew just follow a guy into space and end up on a planet where they plan to... do something? Fight Thanos, I guess? They don’t really have a plan, and the fight they do end up having is just a bunch of random punches and kicks. The whole fight at Wakanda is just a fight to save literally one guy but they act like its this huge war. The only character who makes meaningful choices or has actual growth is the main villain.

I stopped caring about death. The first character to die in the film is Heimdall, one of my favorites, but it’s sort of brushed away so I don’t really feel it. The next character to die is Loki, possibly the single most popular character in the Marvel universe. He dies graphically on-screen. It’s sad, but something about it lacks weight. This was not like agent Coulson dying in Avengers, or even like Quicksilver or Freya. This was like Captain Antilles dying at the beginning of Star Wars. It was a death to set up the villain and motivate the hero, which admittedly it did. But when the most popular character in your universe not to have a movie named after them dies in the first ten minutes, all the sudden death means nothing. People were so excited over the concept that anyone could die in this movie, but since none of the deaths were given time to grieve or even contemplate, they fell flat. I found myself detached from the characters. Since, as I pointed out above, all of the characters were interchangeable, I knew that anyone could die at any moment and not affect the overall story. In a film were major characters turn into minor characters, killing off a character always feels like killing off a minor character. I knew all these characters, cared about them in their movies, but in this movie none of them are doing anything so I don’t care. They all finished their arcs from their individual movies, they were complete characters, so killing them off just meant no more sequels. When the finger-snap happened, all I could think was “oh, there’s someone who’s contract ran out.”

Thanos was ridiculously overpowered. Thanos being a powerful and nigh-unstoppable force goes without saying. It’s a superhero team-up, of course you need someone powerful enough to require them teaming up. The issue is the word “nigh.” At the start of the film, he has the power stone. This is a good way to show how he’s strong enough to single-handedly take on the hulk and the asgardians. The power stone is also the vaguest of the infinity stones, so it’s a good one for him to start out with, because we can gauge its power level based on Thanos’s. Then, he gains the space stone, and gains the ability to teleport, which is actually a pretty clever way of allowing the villain to interact with multiple story arcs across space. Then, though, he gets the reality stone, and everything goes out the window. In a movie where the main plot is to kill the bad guy, it’s hard to think the heroes are going to be successful when he literally dies in front of us and comes back to life. The reality stone, as its name implies, alters reality. When Thanos comes back after dying, I at first assume this is some sort of illusion, and Gamora killed a fake Thanos. But then, Thanos turns Drax and Mantis into cubes and paper, meaning that it does have an effect on the real world. But maybe that, too, is an illusion, I think, in one of those “if you think you’re dead you’ll act dead sort of ways. But then he turns bullets into bubbles, and I lose all hope that Thanos can be defeated. From that point on, any times Thanos is losing, it feels forced and arbitrary, and anytime he’s winning it feels obvious and unpreventable. This would be fine if it happened at the end of the movie. The times stone is treated like this in the film: the moment that all hopes is lost. But instead, it happens less than halfway into the movie.

The action was poorly done. Constant shaky cam, the rabid aliens were poorly animated, characters doing their one thing they do then leaving, it was awful. The fight in Scotland is alright thanks to its minimal members and unique power sets. the fights with squidward were fine because his powers were clear and his limits were realistic. All the rest, though were a slog. The fight on Titan where everyone just kind of jumped around and somehow knew exactly how Strange would teleport them was boring to watch, especially when the color palette was “orange and brown planet, villain wearing gold, two heroes wearing red and gold, one hero wearing maroon and gold, and Mantis.” and somehow every punch and shot made him flinch an equal amount no matter who was doing it or how. It then transitions into them trying to get the gauntlet off, which makes sense but was hard to realize during the action and there was no reason they couldn’t have mentioned that at some point as a way to conceivably defeat Thanos. The fight in Wakanda was a mess, with the rabid aliens moving so much you had no idea what they were doing, and the directors apparently not even caring, since all they want to do is show off everyone using their powers. They even lampshade it and point out that the creatures were literally sent in just to die, and even kill themselves.

That’s probably everything.

I don’t know, I just wanted to get this in writing. I tried to stay professional but this is about 50/50 personal opinion and professional opinion. If you disagree with any of this, that would make sense. It was a lot harder to get some of this in writing than I thought. I’ll end it with a little list of stuff that I feel like poeple would bring up, but that I didn’t feel the need to.

Stuff I didn’t like or dislike. I thought the finger-snap ending was a cool way to write people out of the universe but I didn’t think it was as adventurous as people make it out to be. There weren’t any specific deaths that I was particualrly happy or sad about, even spider-man’s. As I was watching the film I was really upset about how they treated Gamora from a feminist perspetive, but it was a little helped byt the fact that they did the exact same thing to vision. I thought the performances were fine. I thought the score was fine. The fact that Thanos probably could have used the gauntlet to double the amount of resources rather than halve the amount of people didn’t really bother me much because the movie was written well around that fact.

Thank you for reading my rant. Have a good one.

[shinyobjectreviews]

My rankings of Marvel Films

I’m about to post my Infinity War review so I feel like this reference will help.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Iron Man 3

Captain America: Civil War

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2

Black Panther

The Avengers

Iron Man

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Guardians of the Galaxy

Thor: Ragnorok

Doctor Strange

Ant-man

Thor

Spider-man: Homecoming

Avengers: Infinity War

Iron Man 2

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Thor: The Dark World

The Incredible Hulk

[shinyobjectreviews]

Kung Fu Panda 2 is the Greatest Sequel

Okay, so, Kung Fu Panda 2 is the greatest sequel of all time, or at least that I've ever seen. And I don't mean it's the best movie “despite” being a sequel, because films like Aliens exist. I'm also not saying it's a great movie, even though it is good.

What I'm saying is that Kung Fu Panda 2 is the best sequel in terms of what it is and could be a sequel.

First, it doesn't erase anything from the first movie. You see this all the time: the hero breaks up and is chasing a new girl or chasing after the one he got last time. The guys who became famous aren't famous any more and now have to redo their popularity. The orphanage they just saved is on the brink of bankruptcy and so on. This undercuts all of the development of the first film and usually is there so the audience can watch things play out in a similar fashion to the first movie. But if you do this, all the sudden the first movie is useless. Why would you bother making a sequel if you're going to undo important parts of the original? KFP2 amazingly integrates pieces from the original. Along with the obvious of Po being the Dragon Warrior and him being, y'know, a Kung Fu Panda, it takes in a lot of details and things that you need to see the original to really take in; stuff like Po and Tigress's differences, Po's exact fighting style, and Shifu's struggle to find peace.

And speaking of which, Secondly, the way they integrate the primary plotlines of both of the movies is nearly ingenious. Not everyone can spot this, but the first KFP did not have Po as the only protagonist, but also Shifu. Even though Po learned to go from ordinary to extraordinary, Shifu's journey from extraordinary to master was the real driving plot. So in other words, the way Po ends up by the end of the first movie is the way Shifu started in the first: an expert at Kung Fu but in no control of their feelings. And with that, they set up this spectacular plot strand going across the two movies, and you can watch Po in KFP2 and link him to Shifu in the original. They have very similar themes but are so different, and the writing is good enough that you can tell some of it is the difference in characters and some of it is the difference in situation.

So here's a third aspect, a big one, that makes sequels tough: most of the time, if the first movie was good enough to warrant a sequel, that means it was a complete and finished story (Or that they purposefully left in a dumb sequel hook that left the first movie unfinished, but never mind that). The first KFP left very little open, other than the aforementioned path to peace that Po was looking for. But what the creators were able to hone in on was Po's origin story. Me and many others basically just let the duck dad slide, thinking "eh, maybe that's how it works in this universe, Po's dad can be a duck." But the film takes that unanswered question, that nagging thought, and expands on it wholly. Believe it or not, even Mr. Ping's arc in the first movie, just deciding to be a little more open-minded (making tofu) is expanded on in the sequel. He grows the confidence to tell his son he's adopted, something he'd surely be too afraid to do by the start of KFP1. It also works off of how Po growing distant from his father in the first movie (giving up noodles for kung fu) culminates in the sequel as a potential to completely disconnect from him and find his biological parents. The story of Po's biological parents is heartwarming and touching and the way he deals with it is great and all but not what this essay is about. Possibly the greatest use of a sequel, often the most powerful and easiest to mess up, is the delayed set up. This is especially potent in comedy films. 

Earlier I mentioned that it's a major flaw to erase something that happened in the first movie to do it again in the sequel, but the audience wants a sequel, and that means it wants what was in the last movie. Part of this is solved by building on developed story elements or character relationships but a lot of it is dependent on reusing the first movies assets in exciting ways. Dreamworks its the nail on the head in this respect. Po's nerdy tendencies are brought in when they're relevant, but never quite the same joke. The furious five's various character bits are thrown in, but now with a 6th member. The perfectly timed, beautiful "Skadoosh" that seems to clarify once and for all to the audience the villain has been defeated. Even from a stylistic perspective, the use of 2d animation to represent a dream sequence is brought back and used to create a huge emotional moment. All these marked similarities in tone and writing style while still being fresh and clever make the movie feel thematically linked without it being a boring retread.

All I'm trying to say here is that Kung Fu Panda 2 does an amazing job at not only being a respectable sequel to a decent movie, but a perfect model of what a sequel should be. It builds upon developments made in the original rather than pulling them apart, it parallels the plot in a unique but comparable way, it answers questions that were left unanswered even if they didn't particularly need an answer, and it took the pieces of the original and rearranged them in a way that was familiar but fresh.

So yeah, pretty good movie.