Uneventful independence day

So it was independence day at the weekend which basically just meant a long weekend. I didn’t see any parades or fireworks I guess I’m too far of the beaten track for that sort of thing.

I entertained myself by seeing a few films, first I saw The last airbender in 3d. Back in school calling someone a bender was a good way to lose some teeth so I suspect there’s some difference in meaning there. This was really only part 1 of x so an unfinished story of the usual heroes tale framework lots of fancy special effects and wire work plot was a bit meandering I suspect it would have made more sense if you knew the cartoon it’s based on. This is the first M Knight Shyamalan film I’ve seen with no plot twist at the end but I guess that’s mainly down to this being a part 1.  It was pretty enough and the acting was decent but it felt a little hollow.

I also saw Ateam which was a lot more suited to my mood. It’s a great fun film with lots of ridiculous action and wonderful set pieces. The cast is top notch ever single one of the main characters seemed to hit the right sorts of note to match their tv counterpart. Well worth seeing.

I also played Singularity which is a nice little time travel themed first person shooter from Raven. It has a nice gimmick of being able to use the Time Manipulation Device to regress or progress objects through time. So rusty crumpled metal crates or barrels become shiny and new or the reverse. Broken staircases flow back into place damaged electrical conduits repair themselves. The TMD also gradually acquires a range of powers like a time freeze bubble and a sort of telekinetic gravity gun esq mode. There are plenty of puzzles revolving around changing the temporal state of objects to progress. It’s a fun game with some limited playing about with various timelines the environment changing as you alter various things jumping back and forth between the past and present. It’s a nice little game with some neat ideas but fairly short. It’s an unreal 3 engine game so at times it looks great but it seems to be an older version of the engine as it has that annoying texture pop in thing that the first gen Unreal 3 engine games had where stuff will look all fuzzy and out of shape then the textures will pop into place.

In other games news I picked up crackdown two yesterday, so far it is as brilliant as the first one I’ve not got to smashing people in the face with tanker trucks levels of strength but I’m ramping up slowly. Some of the new additions to the system the weapon and vehicle level system seems interesting. It seems so far like a polished version of crackdown but I’ve only had a short while with it so we will see how it pans out.