That's April over, an eventful month! There was a fun birthday party that was unfortunately followed a few days later by a funeral for one of my Uncles. Always a sad day when someone you've known for your entire life is gone, seeing the amount of people there and hearing about how involved he was in the community and how appreciated he was was nice. They played Leader of the Band which was a very nice farewell.

I had the stress of keeping Dennis housebound at the start of the month because he was getting into too many fights! That's all behind us now and things have calmed down, all the cats are in summer mode adn spending their time basking in the sun. I spent a good bit of it working on this website and getting it all online. I bought a film camera and shot my first roll of film, there will be a blog post about that soon. I have a Autocorrebt show this evening. May is already looking busy, but you'll have to wait until next month to hear about that.

Films

A quiet month for films, I didn't watch that many. I just haven't really been in the mood for films as of late.

Rose of Nevada 👍

A beautifully shot film that I really enjoyed but felt like I only half got what it was going for. Felt a bit scattershot in that regard.

Pizza Movie 👍

A really silly comedy with fun characters that’s full of jokes that had me laughing throughout. Would have loved to see this in a packed cinema.

The Drama 👍

Really funny but felt like it never quite landed on its tone.

Thrash 👎

Some really good visual effects for the storm! At least there was that. This just never hooked me in, there was never any real tension and I was bored most of the time.

TV

Lots of TV this month. A great mix of new, new to me & returning shows.

The Comeback 👍

I hadn't watched any of this before, it stars Lisa Kudrow as a former sitcom star making a comeback. The first season was in 2005 and the next in 2014 and there's another from this year that I haven't gotten to yet. I really enjoyed this, Lisa Kudrow is excellent in it and has some great dramatic moments while also embodying this character hilariously.

DTF St. Louis 👍

A very odd tone to this one but a tone I really liked. It tackles loneliness and feelings of inadequacy really well. It was subtly quite funny at times but also really sad. I loved all the people in this, it's a show of people doing their best and trying to be good to one another.

Paradise 👍

I've just started this, being told there is more to it than the initial premise piqued my interest. IT's good so far, really easy to watch and the plot had me coming back.

SNL UK 👍/👎

As mixed as SNL US, some episodes have been really poor and other have been good. THere's been a few really fun sketches though and Weekend Update is hitting for me every episode.

Taskmaster 👍

So far so good, the line up is working well together and there's been some great tasks.

The Apprentice 👍/👎

It's more of the same, sometimes good sometimes dull. Felt predictable who would make it to the final 2 given how useless a lot of the people were.

Games

Max Payne 1 & 2 👍

I wrote about these 2 games here.

Dragon Quest VIII 👎

I wrote about this here.

Esoteric Ebb 👍

I wrote about this here.

No One Lives Forever 👍/👎

I've just started this, I'm a few levels in and there will be a blog post once I'm done with it. It's fine, some levels are really fun whole other are really frustrating. I think this is a game that's looked back on fondly but reality doesn't always line up with our memories.

Music

Only a couple of new albums I was listening to much this month but lots of new singles that have me excited for the albums. I'm an album guy though, so I'll cover them when the album is out.

Harry Styles - Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. 👍

Not landing with me as well as Harry’s House did, it's maybe not as upbeat and fun. Still an album I'm enjoying it's a nice chill listen.

Metric - Romanticize The Dive 👍

I've only listened a couple of times, it's more Metric and it's good. It's already growing on me.

The Big Star Quintet - Gig 👍

I didn't really know about Big Star, this was one of the founding members of the group and other musicians playing a bunch of their songs. My friend Sean had an extra ticket for the gig so I joined, it's always fun to go listen to a band a friend thinks you'll like without having heard them. They've been about since the 70s and it was one of those gigs where there's just so much experience on the stage to appreciate, they sounded great and had loads of songs I like. I'll be listening to them more. When we got there it turned out the tickets we had were for the show the night before 😬 but luckily the guy on the door was nice and let us in anyway. This meant that since I technically didn't use Sean's extra ticket I didn't have to pay him for it which is an extra €50 in my pocket. What a way to end the month.

Theatre

Did Daddy Laugh? 👍

This is a sketch comedy night run by Stephen Bradley and Ronan Carey. This is always really fun, they invite some of Dublin's best comedy people to create sketches for the night. Sign up to Stephen's newsletter so you don't miss the next one.

Adelphi '63 👍

Set in 1963 this follows two teenagers with plans to see The Beatles in the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin. The writing was really funny and the production was great, the way the cutaways were done was excellent and the soundscape was brilliant. It's on for another few days in Smock Alley.

I was looking for something big to sink my teeth in and have always heard people rave about Dragon Quest VIII as one of the all time great JRPGs so I decided to check it out. JRPGs arne't a genre I play a lot, most of my experience with them is via the Pokemon, Paper Mario(well the first 2) & Mario & Luigi games with a few others at various points in time. Dragon Quest VIII is set in some sort of fake medieval type Europe, there's a King I'm hanging out with but he's been turned into a frog guy and we're off to fix that and there's a gruff English bloke with me. It's fine, there's some general goal but it wasn't really grabbing me at any point but it was just enough to keep me going.

The game starts out in a small town and I was given a number of quick quests to complete before being pointed to go find a crystal ball in a nearby cave by a waterfall. I was playing the PS2 version and the game uses random encounters for battles so once out of a town every few seconds you get into a battle with random enemies. Not my favourite type of system but I would soon come to understand why it's in place. My first time through the dungeon I got to the second encounter before getting destroyed, it was clear I was very under-leveled for this dungeon even though it's the first one! So that's where the random encounters come in, the game wants you exploring the World and getting into battles to level up, but it feels like you have to go out of your way to do this. The 3DS re-release changes this so you can see the enemies on the map but from what I've read doesn't change XP requirements so you still have to do it anyway. 🤷‍♂️

I got through that dungeon and boss after a bit of grinding and then things let up a bit. I visited a couple more towns, completed the next couple of dungeons on my first or second attempts and it seemed like I was over that initial hurdle... until I hit another one. I looked up a guide online to see how under-levelled I was and it was 3 levels at least, maybe 4, so it was going to be another 40-60 minutes of wandering around getting into battles to level up some more. I might have kept going if I enjoyed the combat in the game but I found that aspect to be frustratingly unpredictable due to the amount of randomisation it uses. From one battle to the next you will get a group of enemies that are a push over or a group that leaves you down to a few HP and possibly with a dead party member. Even the turn order has randomisation to it for every turn meaning you can't even get a grip on it once you're into a battle. This makes planning difficult but especially healing because you don't know if you will go first or last so you're constantly making sure you have enough HP to withstand as many attacks as there are enemies for each party member because that does happen, I've had someone go from full health to dead in one turn because of this. And that's just in some random battle on the map that I got some bad luck on. I think all of this made the combat not very interesting. There are mechanics to defend or power up but they feel pointless when there's no way to have a battle plan so you just end up wandering about using your best attack most of the time, it's rare that you need to employ any other tactics. It's all about the numbers in the end and success mostly comes down to grinding battles to have bigger numbers than the dungeon boss.

If the combat was more interesting I'd have stuck with this longer but put it down after about 7 hours. The game world looks great with vibrant colours and it has a real Breath of the Wild vibe to it, very peaceful and chill. I have to call out the really nice transitions between the times of day presented with a camera pan to the sky. Unfortunately not a game for me, I am still looking for something big to sink my teeth into though. I might have a look at something from the Persona series...

Esoteric Ebb is a story heavy D&D inspired RPG where you play a Cleric trying to solve the mystery of a tea shop that has blown up. This ends up being a much smaller part of the game as the focus moves onto the people in the town and an upcoming election and the parties involved but it's the north star you'll keep coming back to. I really enjoyed the writing in this game, there was real depth to the characters and plenty of funny situations. It's heavy on politically themed issues as well and while I did enjoy this it can start to go on a bit at times much like its inspiration Disco Elysium. I noticed this in not just the screen layout but the way my stats would pipe up during conversations. This works less well than it did in Disco Elysium given it's just strength, dexterity etc. It also treat HP in that abstract way Disco Elysium did but it was weird when I'd randomly fail a charisma check and lose HP as a result because for the most part HP is related to physical damage like in D&D. It diverges from D&D style rules and just does what it wants which while fun can end up being unpredictable.

My favourite part of the game was how well it let me role play. I used to be really bad at playing a role in a game until I played some proper good sessions of D&D in real life and it clicked with me that you just pick who you are and go with it. Even if that's being the most evil bastard you can be, you have to trust the DM or game designer has created something to accommodate that. I choose to be a proud Cleric who asked everyone which way they were voting in the election mainly as a means to let them know I was voting Freestrider. A clever way the game encouraged me to stick with this was by giving me a increasing XP multiplier every time I said I was voting Freestrider so by the end I was getting 100+ XP every time I said it as opposed to 5 the first time. The loot system also helped with playing the character I wanted to because there's just so many items to modify your character's stats that my starting build didn't define me and even if it did I could just go absolutely all on one specific stat. Beyond those systems the dialogue options almost always had a silly choice to dig my heels in on or the opportunity to flirt in inappropriate situations and while these rarely rewarded me with something it just made things that bit more fun.

The biggest knock I have gainst the game is the combat which is all carried out in the dialogue tree. There just isn't a lot to it and failure meant reloading a save and hoping for dice rolls that went in my favour this time. Even at that dying was tough as I pretty much always survived the hit dice checks and carried on with 1 HP. While combat is influenced by your stats it's so infrequent that there's little point in building your character towards it. Beyond that there were a few times I felt a bit lost and it's a case of revisiting locations and conversations but sometimes waiting for something that happens at a specific time. These were just mild annoyances in a game that had me enthralled once its hooks go into me.

Esoteric Ebb is available on Steam and at the time of writing is 10% off. It took me about 20 hours to complete and it's a pretty easy game to get through. I was awash with various healing & spell recovery items by the end. I strongly recommend it especially for fans of D&D and Disco Elysium.

A few weeks ago I went to see the 4K Remasters of The Killer & Hard Boiled in the cinema. I haven't watched Hard Boiled in a few years and I think I only ever saw the dubbed version. The Killer I maybe saw when I was younger but have no memory of it, my main memory of The Killer is a character model from Action Half-Life a mod for Half-Life I played a lot as a teenager. They're both still really fun movies, the action is a sight to behold with everything exploding apart from the gun fire and while the stories are fairly forgettable the bromance in The Killer is good fun. Seeing both of these reminded me I haven't revisited either of the heavily inspired by John Woo movies Max Payne games in years and gave me the itch to play them again.

Max Payne

I love the tone of this game. Set in the slums of a gritty turn of the century New York exactly the way a European at the time would imagine them to be the set up of a man out to avenge his murdered family is a great pulpy setup. The dialog for Max is fantastic with the perfect amount of melodrama and dead pan jokes with James McCaffrey nailing the tone.

The gameplay is fun vut frustrating these days with a heavy reliance on memorising that there will be an enemy around the corner not to mention the broken adaptive difficulty system that you'll want to find a mod to disable. Without it the game just gets more and more difficult until you walk into a room and die from a single shot!

It really tails off in the third Chapter too with a bunch of repetitive levels full of copy & pasted areas the padding of an already short game is noticeable. Still overall it was fun to revisit this and the presentation more than makes up for a gameplay loop that becomes lackluster before you get to the end.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

At the time I remember this feeling like such a huge improvement over the first game in absolutely every aspect and I still feel like that today except for the level design which is better but has a habit of falling into the same pitfalls of the first game with a requirement to go into a room and be gunned down instantly only to run in shooting first once you reload. It does it less but still does it sometimes.

In terms of story and presentation this sequel is in another league. It takes some of the characters from the first game and gives them much more background while also introducing a few new people. The main story between Max & Mona works well with great performances and writing for both characters. The presentation of the graphic novel story parts is also a big upgrade not only in the art but the sound design used to punctuate certain moments. The casting of actual actors to portray the characters in these parts over members fo the development team pays off big time.

The New York this one is set in feels more representative of the NYC of the early 2000s, fewer slums and more high end apartments and a general feeling of cleanliness. It still works though, there are some grittier areas and the Autumn setting is captured well with rain drenched streets littered with orange leaves.

A big wow factor at the time was the physics system, this was one of the first games I played with so many active physics objects in the environment. It doesn't wow the way it once did but the novelty is still there with many areas set up specifically to show off this feature. With a big upgrade to the quality of 3D models & textures as well as the movement feeling much more smoother this is a far easier game to revisit than the first which despite being only 2 years older feels more like a game from the 90s.

So that's the first 2 Max Payne games, I think both are worth picking up cheap in a sale and playing through. Neither of them takes more than about 7 hours to complete. I considered going back to the third but despite some fun moments and excellent shooting I remember the story being a mess and it turning into a slog towards the end. As for the movie, I have no interest in ever watching that again. It's incredible how much they fumbled what should have been a fun pulpy action movie.

Why a website those are ancient!

They are! But they're very easy to make and host these days and you own everything on it and can back it up and keep it. This one is hosted on Neocities and it's just a whole load of HTML generated using a Python script I wrote. I can keep everything on my own PC and also backed up online. That way I'm not concerned with some website going under or being abandoned because it's full of fascists. I can just upload the html somewhere else. I could have set up Wordpress somewhere but I don't really need that for the level of what I want from a website. Simple HTML does the job just fine. I think this doesn't display well on mobile but what site does anymore? That battle was lost a long time ago so just read this on a laptop or PC as the internet was intended to be browsed.

Another reason: I'm probably not the only person to have noticed how many friends have moved away from social media these days so I thought this would be a way for those people to keep up with what I'm up to and a way for me to share what I am doing without relying on those platforms. Those are my reasons and I will not be elaborating further on them.

There's still a few things to fix up. I have to write all the pages that have links at the top for a start and I'll probably be tweaking the layout and fonts etc. as I go.

What can you expect?

I will be sharing any upcoming shows I have like Auto-Correbt & Friends on May 1st and probably shows my friends have on that I think will be good. I'll share things I have been playing, watching & reading that I think are good too that'll probably be in a roundup every now and again.

A quick list of broader topics I want to write about...

Hivemind

A live show that's also a game I created with my friend Mark. I'll talk about how it works on a technical level and also what a nightmare some of it was to make.

Game Development w/ Godot

I'm currently working on a 3D Stealth game and really enjoying using Godot for it. I used it for Hivemind too so there's lots I've learned.

How I made this website

It's nothing too fancy or technically involved but an interesting mashing together of things to generate an entire static website that seems like it might have something proper behind it. Yes I know static site generators exist but sometimes it's fun to do something just for the fun of it even if a solution already exists.

Photography

I bought a film camera recently, my first one! I haven't even gotten through a roll of film yet but wanna talk about what that's been like for someone who learned how to shoot only digitally over the past 20 years.