Wednesday 24 June 2020

Pokemon Sword and Shield Expansion, Isle of Armor: How is SwSh 6 months later?

What was intended to be a short, simple review of a pretty short expansion turned out to be something a lot longer then I thought. Maybe I have been playing the series for too long... Well, before Min Min joins Smash and gives me another excuse to dump even more time into Smash's Spirits Mode (not that it needed more reasons to be the game I've put the most amount of time into on my Switch)

Wednesday 17 June 2020

Detective Pikachu (Movie): Gen 1 pandering done right?

Pokemon brought into live-action, brought into the real world in a way that made them look like they belonged, not just using their original designs for merchandise and parading armies. I won't lie, I was sceptical at the news. Ignoring the fact that video game movies have a reputation for being really bad, thanks to many, many examples from the past (take your pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games#Hollywood_(live-action) ), what really made me cautious was the fact that there has been concept art of real-life Pokemon put up in the past made by one of the people who helped work on the designs used in the movie, and others following the trend. Nothing against RJ Palmer, I won't deny his talent as an artist, but the more dinosaur esque approach to the designs did not look good, and with other pokemon like many of the bug type Pokemon, object pokemon like Jigglypuff, even some like the Eeveelutions, it wasn't hard to find versions of these live-action interpretations that looked like they were at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley. To me, the normal design but with more detail was what I could see as real-life Pokemon, it's why stuff like this (https://www.deviantart.com/badafra/art/real-live-pokemon-Blaziken-303463061) interested me more than Palmer's work (though that picture of Groudon is somewhat terrifying.


Wednesday 3 June 2020

Frozen 2: At least they kinda broke the trend of sequals sucking?

Remember when the idea of Disney making sequels was code for "this is going to suck, don't buy it!"? These things were seen as absolute disasters, cheap cash grabs that only exist to capitalize on direct to home media. While they've certainly improved on this, my guess is that the Frozen Shorts were akin to the traditional Disney Sequels, acting as placeholders until this movie came out, and got rushed to Disney+ when the DVD and Blu-Ray sales were going to tank due to the lockdown. Was the 6 year wait worth it though?