Reviews by MaxL

I wasn't a huge fan of Man of Medan, the first chapter of The Dark Pictures Anthology, but I gave Little Hope a chance to improve on it. Well, it did turn out to be better than Man of Medan in some ways, but infinitely worse in others!

The main drawback, once again, is the characters. While I felt nothing for the characters in Man of Medan, I very quickly grew to outright hate this lot! They're constantly being mean to each other for almost no reason at all, and they're often arrogant to boot.

This is exacerbated by a problem I've had with Supermassive Games since Until Dawn, but that reaches its apex here. The dialogue does not sound natural! Nearly all the lines are badly written and incongruent not just with each other but also with the situation; they sound like nothing people would actually say. I was almost endlessly thinking, "I could have written something better than that!"

On the other hand, I think the story is miles better than Man of Medan. It's still not scary (partly because of the characters and partly because it escalates too quickly), but I became steadily more intrigued by the events in the 1600s that were revealed through flashbacks. And the ending is genuinely brilliant, complete with an inspired reason to keep everyone alive.

And yet, I still can't bring myself to rate it higher than two stars out of five. That is how insufferable the characters and dialogue are!

My rating: 45%

Man of Medan is the first instalment in The Dark Pictures Anthology, a horror series from the creators of Until Dawn. Now, I like that game, but its writing is far from perfect, so I hoped this title would remedy some of its problems. Sadly, it didn't. In fact, it has some additional problems of its own.

The big one is the characters. Good God are they boring! It doesn't help that you have to endure a lot of them wandering around the ship, usually alone and almost completely wordless. They're so devoid of any appealing or interesting personality that I honestly didn't care who lived or died. In fact, I did get a couple of them killed, and was utterly indifferent.

Also, in my playthrough, Brad was completely absent during the abduction scene, and when he reappeared later, there wasn't a word of explanation as to where he'd been.

I've heard that in the online multiplayer mode, both players' stories run concurrently when their characters split up. I guess that's a nifty idea, but I'm not really interested in exploring that path.

The graphics are easily the game's greatest strength: they nail the ominous atmosphere. That and the premise is pretty interesting once it becomes clear what's going on. But although it piqued my interest at times, the one emotion it didn't evoke was fear.

Final note: depending on your choices, you may end up with an unsatisfying narrative and dialogue that makes characters or even scenes seem inconsistent.

My rating: 65%

So we've arrived at the third entry in the Jurassic World trilogy, and the sixth in the Jurassic Park series overall.

First, let me set up my own expectations. I was merely disappointed in Jurassic World at first, but each time I see it, I find myself disliking it more and more. And Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was so relentlessly, insultingly stupid that it makes me angry just thinking about it! So I was hoping for at least minimal improvement with this one. And… that's pretty much what I got. I'd say it's the best of the Jurassic World trilogy, but only because it mainly evoked indifference rather than anger. Which is fitting because that's the attitude the movie itself seems to have. It reeks of tiredness and apathy, like it's not trying very hard to be interesting.

I had two questions going in. One: how many feathered dinosaurs would there be? And two: how the hell did Blue have a baby?! I was under the impression that she was the last of her kind. I didn't remember any other raptors escaping at the end of Fallen Kingdom, let alone male ones. Well, the movie does address that. It's explained that her genome contains monitor lizard DNA, which can reproduce asexually. How very convenient!

As for my other question… Yes, there are a few feathered dinosaurs – and, as I expected, they're the result of experiments with pure DNA instead of splicing – but they get so little screen time that I'm not sure they'll help sell the public on the modern image of feathered dinosaurs, not helped by the fact that the movie itself isn't very good. I've said before that one good approach would be to use their unthreatening appearance to their advantage – play up how beautiful but deadly they are – and this movie kind of plays around with that idea. For example, the Therizinosaurus kills a deer at one point, not for food but just because it's in the way.

Aside from the near total neglect of feathered dinosaurs, the plot itself is also a bit of a letdown. It does finally bring back Lewis Dodgson, who was pretty underdeveloped in the first movie, but on the other hand, it squanders all the potential of dinosaurs running loose in the world by once again confining them to a designated area. It's like neither the corporations nor the filmmakers have learnt anything! It's also pretty laughable that the whole thing happens because of locusts! Dodgson's company, Biosyn, has created giant prehistoric locusts, which have escaped and become a plague, eating everything except Biosyn crops, which would allow them to corner the market on the world's food supply. Pretty much the entire plot revolves around those damn locusts. This is supposed to be Jurassic Park, not The Swarm!

One of the big selling points of this movie was the return of the old guard: Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler and Ian Malcolm from the original movies. In some ways, it is good to see them again, but they feel nothing like their old selves; the writers or director (or both) have warped them into something unrecognisable. And I still don't care about the World characters like Owen and Claire, so whenever dinosaurs were chasing them, all I could think was, "You can have them!"

This movie marks a few dinosaurs' first appearances in the film series, like Nasutoceratops, which first appeared in the Netflix show Camp Cretaceous, and Dreadnoughtus, which was introduced in the game Jurassic World Evolution. There's also a brand new addition in Atrociraptor – which, funnily enough, I first heard about in the documentary series Prehistoric Planet, which came out just before this film's release. When they showed up, I was most disappointed that they were featherless. I wondered if the feathered raptor that menaces Owen and Kayla was supposed to be a pure-bred one, since it's never identified in the film, but no, apparently it's a Pyroraptor.

And then you have the Giganotosaurus. I'm not going to sugarcoat this: it looks terrible! It looked far better in Jurassic World Evolution! I think we were all expecting it to fight the T-rex, like the Spinosaurus did in Jurassic Park III, and (spoiler alert) it does, but it's so brief that it's yet another big disappointment, like it was just an afterthought. In fact, the T-rex barely appears in this movie at all.

Like I said, for the most part, this movie got no rise out of me whatsoever. Even when something theoretically exciting was happening, I was completely indifferent. But one thing that stands out is a recurring problem where time apparently has no relevance. For example, during the chase scene in Malta, when a raptor breaks through the door a character just shut behind them, the person is much further down the stairs than the editing suggests they should be. By that same token, there's a moment when the Giganotosaurus is deterred and then turns back, and everyone has apparently had time to get up the ladder.

There's one phenomenally stupid scene where pterosaurs are attacking Kayla's plane, and Owen tells Claire to eject; the pterosaurs immediately go after her and destroy her parachute. It's like, what did you think was going to happen? Idiots!

Also, the scene where everyone sees the Giganotosaurus just feels wrong. Grant identifies it matter-of-factly, then everyone immediately starts backing away from it. It feels jarring, a very unnatural reaction, like they suddenly remembered they're supposed to be scared.

Now, my last couple of comments might be considered major spoilers, so you have been warned.

One of my big issues with Fallen Kingdom was the idea that Benjamin Lockwood, in creating Maisie, poured a ton of money and company resources into a selfish personal project just because he couldn't get over the loss of his daughter. Well, this movie nullifies that idea by further exploring Maisie's origin. Except the truth it reveals is arguably even stupider! Let's just say they seem to think it's a clever parallel with Blue's asexual reproduction.

The other spoiler I'll give concerns Dodgson. I wondered if he'd end up suffering the same fate he does in the Lost World novel: essentially what happens to Peter Ludlow in the movie. But instead, his fate is reminiscent of Dennis Nedry's, which is rather appropriate, since it was their deal that ruined everything in the first place.

To sum it up, if this really is to be the last Jurassic Park movie, then it's a thoroughly underwhelming finale with only the faintest hint of effort; the series ends not with a bang but with a shrug. (Hell, the ending doesn't even feel like a conclusion, but more like a deferment.) But I can't agree with those claiming it's the worst of the series. Not when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom exists. Seriously, every second of that movie felt like an insult, to the original Jurassic Park and to the audience's intelligence! Like I said, I'll take uninteresting over anger-inducing any day.

My rating: 50%

The game follows Conker, a squirrel with a hangover, just trying to get home while being forced to save the world.

This is a supposedly funny game that struck me as the exact opposite! Of course, I already knew how unashamedly vulgar it was, but I still found it almost universally unamusing.

Right off the bat, the dialogue rubbed me the wrong way. It's impressive that all the voices were done by one man and one woman, but the accents are often inconsistent, so I couldn't tell what accent each character was supposed to have. Doesn't help that their speech is so muttery that it kills any sense of timing.

That's partly why none of the jokes got any rise out of me at all. It wasn't the anger-inducing kind of unfunny: more like a barren, joyless void. I wasn't angry, just reduced to a state of such pure misery that it was like my soul had died. Is this what falling into depression feels like?

There's no wit to the jokes whatsoever; it's like the crudity itself is the joke. Other times, the humour stems from utter nonsense. I mean, what is the logic behind a Terminator haystack?! The few times it breaks the fourth wall come straight out of nowhere and are too incongruous to be funny. And towards the end, the pop culture references are so blatant that they just become maddening.

Conker himself is a slimeball who often cheats and swindles the other characters he meets, then unleashes a monster that brutally butchers them, just to kick them while they're down. That might have been funny under other circumstances, but the game did nothing to hearten me beforehand, so it just came off as mean-spirited, like the game was made by straight-up sadists.

Its absolute nadir is the Big Big Guy – or, as Conker calls it, the big-bollocked boiler. When I saw that, it completely broke me; I had to pause and silently weep for a few minutes.

The only scene I liked (apart from the Clockwork Orange homage in the opening shot) was the Great Mighty Poo. Maybe it's because I knew it was coming because I'd seen it in a Joshscorcher video, but I think that's the only time the game actually did something funny with its vulgarity, namely the boss's excessive confidence in what he is and that he can beat you.

In conclusion, this is, hands down, the worst game I have ever played! It's bad enough that it's on my least favourite console, but its humour depressed me to the point that I felt like I'd never be cheerful again. In my mind, this game is where joy goes to die!

My rating: 25%

This game was actually my first exposure to Asterix in general. When I was about five or six, some neighbours had this game on their Sega Mega Drive, and we'd sometimes play it when I visited them (as well as Sonic the Hedgehog one and two, of course). Then I watched the animated film Asterix and the Big Fight, which applied voices to the characters I'd seen in the game. Eventually, I got my own Mega Drive for Christmas, and this was one of the games I bought for it. After that, I discovered the comics because my dad had a few of them, and I've been an Asterix fan ever since.

So, with that said, how does the game hold up today?

The plot is that Getafix the druid has been taken to Rome as a prisoner, and you're on a mission to rescue him. There are six levels, though each consists of around ten sections, or "rooms". In each room, you have the option to play as either Asterix or Obelix; I like to alternate between them.

At first, it seems like a decent platformer, especially combined with the fun music in the first few stages. However, back in the day, I got about four or five rooms into level one before I got completely stuck. I think what stumped me was a locked door for which I couldn't find the key. Now, finally after all these years, watching a longplay on YouTube has revealed that the key was under a patch of floor that I was supposed to bomb with an explosive pellet. I can safely say I never would have thought of that, but that turned out to be the least of this game's problems! As it progressed, it got so nonsensical that it defied comprehension!

Even early on, the power-ups are kind of weird. One of the pellets you can throw forms a cloud that you use as a platform to reach higher places, and there's another power-up that allows you freely float like a balloon! I know the Asterix comics were goofy, but I don’t recall anyone ever doing anything like that. Aside from the magic potion, the comics were mostly pretty grounded.

Then, later on, you’re doing things like riding giant washing-up bubbles! Like, what?!

But level three, the forest, is when I really started to question my sanity! Not only are there giant beetles and giant baby birds, but one of the rooms is made of coloured blocks like Lego bricks, which actually made me say out loud, "What the hell am I looking at?!"

Level four, Germany, just straight-up broke me. You pass by women who explode for no apparent reason (yes, you read that right!), and there’s one room where you’re walking on giant strings of sausages! I was so flabbergasted by that that one of my favourite Linkara quotes seemed very appropriate: "I… I think I broke something in my thinking thingy!"

I've heard plenty of people comment on how hard the game is, and I can see why. The worst part is the time limit, which is often so brutal that it gives you just barely enough time to get through the whole room. It certainly doesn't help that many of the rooms are mazelike, so expect to run out of time several times before you find the right way to go.

In conclusion, it plays okay just as a game, but I'm not sure whether the hardest part is beating the clock or staying sane through the off-the-rails visuals it keeps throwing at you! Seriously, what kind of crack were they smoking when they came up with this?!

My rating: 50%

Essentially a remake of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. It's the same basic setup: build a park, create dinosaurs by excavating their genetic material from dig sites around the world, and try to keep both the animals and the guests satisfied.

I'm still trying to decide whether I prefer this to JPOG. On one hand, as strange as it sounds, I prefer when everything's locked down on a grid; it makes space much easier to manage. Here, when trying to place a building close to another, or a path or something, it would often say "building constraints" or "terrain constraints" or just "obstructed", even when it looked like there was plenty of room. On the other hand, I love the freedom you have in JWE, not just in the variety of dinosaur species (especially with the DLCs that include even more), but the fact that you can name individual dinosaurs, buildings and even your ranger teams.

The only DLC I didn't bother with was Secrets of Dr Wu, because I'm just not interested in the hybrid dinosaurs.

For me, the hardest part was trying to unlock every entry in the InGen Database (basically what other games might call a codex). In some cases, the conditions are just outrageous, particularly Paul Kirby's character profile! That's the main reason my final play time was over 103 hours.

Overall, it's a fun and addictive park simulator, and by far the best thing to bear the name Jurassic World.

My rating: 90%

Artemis Fowl is one of my absolute favourite books, second only to A Villain's Night Out by Margaret Mahy. I've been waiting for a film adaptation ever since I first read it in 2004, when I was fifteen, so imagine how excited I was when I heard that one was finally on the way. I was a tad sceptical that Disney was in charge of it, but I remained hopeful even through the numerous delays that ended up pushing it back almost a full year. However, that optimism was almost completely crushed when the trailer was released. I didn't watch it myself because I generally try to avoid trailers, but the reactions were almost universally negative. That public reaction persisted when the film itself was finally released, so I was not very enthusiastic going into this movie.

Having now seen it… Well, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. It's terrible! Even all that bad press could not have prepared me for this! You can probably guess that there's a ton from the book that they got wrong, but that statement just doesn't cover it. They got just about everything wrong; it's as though, at every turn, they were going out of their way to piss fans off! This is a top contender for the worst adaptation I've ever seen!

Now, for those who haven't read the books (or seen this movie, for that matter), I might have some minor spoilers, so you have been warned. If you haven't read them, definitely do so. :-) There are eight in the series, but for me, it's a no-brainer: the first one is the best.

So just how badly did this movie misrepresent it?

Right from the start, the main thing the creators botched is the character of Artemis Fowl himself. In his very first scene, he's shown surfing, and Mulch Diggums (who serves as the narrator in a nonsensical bookend) tells us he loves everything about his home, implying that he has a very cheery, carefree attitude. That is the antithesis of the book version of the character! While Artemis does become more compassionate as the series progresses, he started out as a cynical academic type who spent nearly all of his time on the computer. To directly quote from the book, "Long hours indoors in front of the monitor had bleached the glow from his skin." Also, more importantly, he was fully aware of his family's criminal activity and determined to keep their name alive and infamous. That's why he devised the plan to kidnap a fairy: to restore his family's fortune. Was Disney really so afraid that a protagonist who was an antihero or a villain wouldn't sell? The legions of fans of the books prove that's not the case! That's why the Disney name being attached to an adaptation of this book was our first sign that something was wrong. In fact, the book's epilogue says, "There is a tendency to romanticise Artemis, to attribute to him qualities that he does not possess," and ironically, that's exactly the trap into which Disney fell headlong!

They woefully downplayed his intelligence, too. In the book, he discovered the existence of the fairies himself and devised the plan to exploit them all on his own. One of my favourite scenes is his efforts to translate the Fairy Book (which is basically their bible and, of course, completely left out of the movie). But in the film, his father is the one who finds out about them and has pretty much done all the work for him. Essentially, they took a zealous criminal mastermind and turned him into the most passive character imaginable. And yet, at the end, they still have Artemis proclaim himself a criminal mastermind despite never having him do anything to support that claim.

But it's not just Artemis. The entire story ends up butchered here. They tried to include almost every key scene from the book, like the troll attack in Italy and all the important beats of the siege of Fowl Manor, but in all cases, they completely changed the motivating circumstances. For example, in the book, Holly's reason for visiting Ireland, which ultimately leads to her capture, is to perform the Ritual to restore her magic, but in the film, she's breaking ranks to "clear her father's name" for some initially ill-defined reason.

Speaking of which, Artemis's goal in this movie is to rescue his father, and his reason for intercepting Holly (after a continuity error where he's inexplicably accompanying Butler on site, I might add) is just to prove his father's claim that fairies are real. So, after nothing but wide-eyed fascination up to that point, his treating her as a prisoner later is straight-up contradictory. But then they bond after one scene where they talk about their fathers, and suddenly they're best friends by the end. They become friends in the books, yes, but not until much later in the series. All through the first book, their relationship is nothing more than captor and captive because, like I said before, that was the core of Artemis's plan all along. He took no pleasure in keeping her prisoner; he just saw it as a necessary evil.

Now let's list a few more examples of minor changes that rubbed me the wrong way. For one thing, in the book, Artemis's mother wasn't dead; she had a prominent role! For another, I'll never get their decision to call Butler by his full name. In the books, a Butler bodyguard never reveals their first name to their employer unless they're sure they're about to die, which (spoiler alert) very nearly happens in book three. Nor do I understand why they made Mulch Diggums a human-sized giant dwarf, especially since they made the fairies in general much taller than they were in the book anyway; Holly is described as exactly a metre high, a centimetre below the fairy average.

In fact, the scene that comes closest by far to resembling its book original is Mulch's clash with the goblins in his prison cell. While we're on the subject, interestingly, there are a couple of elements from the second book worked into this movie as well, like Artemis's session with the school counsellor and the whole plot of trying to rescue his father, plus an allusion to Opal Koboi's partnership with Briar Cudgeon.

And then, on top of all the scenes that they warped beyond recognition, they also added a plot device that didn't exist at all in the books: something called the Aculos. It is a textbook example of a MacGuffin: an all-powerful artefact that all the characters are trying to obtain, whose exact function is kept vague. Not only is it as mundane as you can get, but what's infuriating is how the entire plot is rewritten to hinge around this MacGuffin. It's what the father's kidnapper is after, so it's also Artemis's end goal, and it's at the centre of Holly's back-story and her disgraced father. It's even the altered subject of Mulch's safecracking scene.

You want to know the moment that angered me the most? It was the words that Holly uses to activate the Aculos, which is the first paragraph of the Fairy Book. The cheap exploitation of those words from the novel pushed my hot button so hard that I actually said out loud, "Oh, fuck you!"

Now, so far, all I've talked about is what disappointed me as a fan of the book. But, even if you take the adaptation angle out of the equation and just look at it as a film on its own, it's still awful! And the main reason for that is the pacing. It ceaselessly rushes from one scene to another, and the scenes themselves are so hurried that the film barely gives itself, or the audience, a second to breathe. Therefore, every scene is left almost completely devoid of passion or emotion. Or maybe that's just because the only emotion I ever felt was anger at how they were disrespecting the source material!

The special effects are… not the worst I've ever seen, but still far from impressive. Except for Foaly the centaur: the blend between the actor and his horse body is pretty seamless. But the CGI reaches its nadir when the troll attacks Fowl Manor; that entire sequence looks so fake that I had my head in my hands from the first frame.

That's about all I have to say. I hate this movie. I wouldn't recommend it to either fans of the books or newcomers. I think the only thing keeping me from giving it a score of 1/10 is just how much my expectations had been lowered, so I'm not really angry so much as just depressed that the movie turned out the way it did.

Final words: I hope this travesty doesn't discourage people from attempting further adaptations in the future. Maybe, at some point down the road, we'll get a movie that respects the books and understands what made them so popular. There's still hope for Artemis Fowl to be done justice.

My rating: 20%

The plot follows three androids – Kara, Connor and Markus – on their quests to discover who they really are.

Every Quantic Dream game after Fahrenheit (AKA Indigo Prophecy) has struck me as just okay, but I was hopeful that this might be the one that broke the mould. And I'm happy to report that it delivered. :-)

I think it goes without saying that the graphics are absolutely top-notch, as expected.

My main problem with Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls is that the lead characters are boring as hell, so the story falls flat emotionally. But here, it's appropriate that they lack a distinct personality: they're androids, basically machines, so it makes sense for them to be defined by ambitions instead.

I like how, after each chapter, you're shown a flowchart detailing which path your choices led you down. It allows you to get a full scope of just how many possibilities there are, how many events they scripted.

I also really love how the main menu interacts with you. :-)

That said, there are flaws. The writing does lead to some scenes feeling fragmented or lacking cohesion. But the big one for me personally is that Markus's story feels very rushed; the manner in which he progresses to revolutionary leader could have been thought out and paced a little better.

Still, on the whole, I was more than satisfied with this game. It's not perfect, but its effective character writing makes this by far my favourite Quantic Dream game since Fahrenheit.

My rating: 85%

When the island's dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.

This review will be slightly longer than usual, because the Jurassic Park franchise is so special to me.

When I first saw Jurassic World, I thought it was merely an overwhelming disappointment after a fourteen-year wait – the biggest letdown of my entire life – but watching it again recently, I find it legitimately irritates me. Now that the sequel is out, I have to stop kidding myself. I hate the Jurassic World movies! I hate them!

All the same problems I have with its predecessor are still present here. The characters are just as annoying, and the CGI is every bit as unappealing. The dinosaurs don't look alive; I just feel like I'm watching a video game. Although, thankfully, there are more noticeable instances of practical effects. My favourite scene is when they're extracting the T-rex's blood, if only because it was really there in front of the camera.

But what makes this sequel so much more unbearable is the abundant, blatant stupidity. The premise is insipid and a full-on retread of The Lost World: environmentalism (misguided, if you ask me) versus capitalism. The villains are straight-up cartoonishly evil, and the characters make some monumentally idiotic decisions; the ending in particular is nothing short of rage-inducing.

It also bothers me how they keep claiming the Isla Nublar dinosaurs are the last of their kind. What the hell happened to Isla Sorna? A quote from The Lost World is directly referenced in this movie, so clearly Site B does exist.

There are a few blindingly obvious homages to the first movie, which are just plain embarrassing.

Sadly, my wish for feathered dinosaurs still wasn't granted. They'd better be a plot point in Jurassic World 3, otherwise I'm giving up on this series completely.

Long story short, I really didn't like this movie. I used to think Jurassic Park III was the worst of the bunch, but I'd even take that train wreck over this banal and uninspired waste!

My rating: 35%