VIDEO GAME: Abzu (2016)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Abzû Year: 2016 Rating: E Time Played: ~2 hours After years of obtaining the free game from the Epic Games store, I'm finally working my way through many of them. I'm not doing them in any particular order, but I saw Abzû and thought it looked relaxing. Once I got into it, I found that it was basically an underwater version of Journey. While I loved the narrative nature of Journey, I felt Abzû had less of an emotional impact by the time its short playthrough concluded. While Abzû is incredibly derivative of Journey, I do have to admit that the visuals were quite stunning. Everything was rich and colorful—even in some of the darker levels. There was a lot of care given to the underwater environments and it was clear that the game developers had done their research to recreate these beautiful underwater environments. Unfortunately, the underwater gameplay is also something I struggled with in this game. I constantly found myself struggling with the...
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MOVIE: Avatar (2009)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Avatar Year: 2009 Rating: PG-13 Length: 162 minutes / 2.7 hours For being 10 times the amount of money I would normally spend on a movie, I had hoped that this would be worth it. As per my previous stance on 3-D, I was hesitant on going to this film when it first came out. However, since I did some reading up on what forces went on behind this film, I decided to give the 3-D experience a try. What an experience it was! I can see why the film industry was really pushing for more movies to be in 3-D because it is spectacular. The glasses weren't uncomfortable, and if you took them off for a second, it wasn't a terrible color-shifted image, it was just slightly blurry. Although, one thing that 3-D cinema is going to have to fix is to have more things in focus. You can't rely on previous film-making techniques here. At any rate, if you can get over the blatantly...
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