Over the last week there has been a bit of a meme floating around twitter, where folks are supposed to post an image from any movie that they have seen seven times or more. I love these sorts of things as a thought experiment, but I hate the way that they clog up twitter. In the past I have used these to spring off and start a blog post, so that the entire madness can be contained within my private domicile. The thing is this actually became a bit tougher of an experiment than I would have thought. I went into this thinking surely there are not that many movies that I have seen seven times or more. However I am in fact old… and also grew up without cable television… which the more I thought about it increased the number of films on this list. In a few cases I am going to be lumping multiple films together because mentally I think of them as a set.
You are going to see a bit of a trend. There are a lot of 80s and early 90s movies that I watched a lot… in part because I did not have cable television until college and was limited to only a handful of over the air channels. Combine with that the fact that I was an only child and spent an awful lot of time alone as a kid… by choice mind you. There were many times I had the television on in the background as signs of life, and in many cases this was actually some movie playing in the background since we only had a handful of over the air channels.
Star Wars Original Trilogy
Star Wars – 1977
The Empire Strikes Back – 1980
Return of the Jedi – 1983
This is easily my first obsession when it comes to movies or characters in general. I saw this film when I was two years old at the local drive inn theater. Reportedly I came away talking about almost nothing but “Darfa Bater” and was completely obsessed with him. For those not of at least my age, one of the quirks of VHS movies is that when they first became available they were ungodly expensive… on the order of magnitude of $100-200 for a single movie. Then something changed around 1989 if I remember correctly and you could start to get movies somewhere near the $30 price point. I remember one Christmas the only thing I asked for was a copy of the Star Wars trilogy, and while these are not my actual VHS tapes they were this set from CBS Fox Video. I likely damned near wore them out, with Empire Strikes back easily being my most watched in the series.
Indiana Jones Trilogy
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark – 1981
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – 1984
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – 1989
Shocking to no one that grew up in the 80s… I was also super into Indiana Jones. I love the first and third film… and tolerate the second film. Mostly the whole bug room thing made me super squeamish because that was my personal fear, not snakes or rats. I did wonder if I had actually watched Temple of Doom seven times, but figure over the many years of catching it on cable and leaving the channel tuned there… I have to have watched it. It was also the one I had a shitty VHS copy of the first, which absolutely bumped up its view count.
Blade Runner
Blade Runner – 1982
Blade Runner is one of those formative science fiction epics for me. There are scenes in this movie that I am still obsessed with as an adult, and have yet to see anything to really fully replace the visuals. I enjoyed the second Blade Runner, but there is nothing that will truly ever replace the original. I am probably always going to be more than happy to sit down and watch this one. I wore the shitty HBO recorded copy that I had ragged.
Dune
Dune – 1984
I remember when I first encountered Dune like it was yesterday. It was shortly after the birth of my cousin Christopher, and we were spending a lot of time up in Oklahoma City while my mom helped out. The highlight of these trips was unfettered access to cable television, which meant I consumed copious amounts of HBO and MTV. So this would have been after HBO started showing Dune and I am pretty sure in that one weekend I watched it start to finish at least three times. My uncle happened to notice my obsession with it and gave me my very first copy of the Dune paperback, and I was enthralled by the glossary in the back of terms… starting what has become a lifelong connection to this universe.
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters – 1984
My uncle was always an early adopter of technology. As a result they had a VHS camcorder long before anyone else I know had one. The original one that they had was in two parts, a small VCR and a small camera that together made a complete package. My cousins were so obsessed with Ghostbusters that they went enough times to the theater to see it, that on one of these viewings my uncle snuck in the recording and taped a copy. This poor recording was the first time I saw the movie and made up for a ton of subsequent watchings once I got a copy of it in my grubby little hands
The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter – 1984
I feel like this movie will forever be thought of as something trying to ride the coattails of Star Wars hype. However for me personally it was so much more because it combined my love of space epics and video games into a single package. I still think the Gunstar is one of the coolest ship designs ever, and if I ever get a 3D printer I figure I will make myself one. For years we have heard about a potential sequel but nothing seems to ever come of it. As a kid I would have loved the Galoob line of toys that never materialized either. It does not hurt either that I had a shitty VHS recording of this from HBO that was on regular replay.
My Science Project
My Science Project – 1985
My Science Project is arguably not a good film, and I know this. However I still have a deep connection with it, in part because there was a time when this was one of the few movies I had access to. Something you have to understand is that in the early days of the VCR, there was a buy in to be able to rent movies. I remember Aardvark video charged a hundred dollar membership fee, in order to get access to rent films and even then the rental fees were around ten dollars each. Suffice to say we did not rent a whole lot of movies until that changed. One of my Dad’s friends from work used to take blank VHS tapes and fill them up with 3 movies per recorded from HBO and then send them home to me. This often meant I got a rather random assortment of movies, and on one of these early offerings was My Science Project. This film does not hold up at all, but I still love it.
A View to a Kill
A View to a Kill – 1985
A View to a Kill is not a great James Bond film. I grew up mostly only knowing Roger Moore as my Bond, and as a result I have a kinship with movies like Moonraker. A View to a Kill was also on one of these movie mixtapes, and as a result it got way more views from me than it really deserved. I still love the soundtrack though and it will probably be my favorite bond “theme”.
The Goonies
The Goonies – 1985
Once movie rentals became cheaper, it saw us getting a movie pretty much every weekend. When cousins were in town, it often saw us renting multiples. Goonies was always one of the movies that was in pretty regular rotation. I loved it as a kid and I still love it as an adult. It is just a fun adventure film with cartoony bad guys and entertaining characters. It does not hurt that many of us were obsessed with trying to beat the extremely obtuse Goonies II Nintendo Game.
Aliens
Aliens – 1986
Around 1990 a local video store went out of business and sold off all of their movies. Among these I picked up a number of gems like Alien, Aliens, and Predator. The one I watched the most often however was Aliens. As a kid I thought Alien was kinda boring to be honest, moved too slowly. Aliens on the other hand was this big science fiction adventure horror film and I loved it. I loved everything about the weapons that they were using and thought Sigourney Weaver was a badass.
Highlander
Highlander – 1986
While this came out in 1986, I did not discover it until the 90s… when HBO was playing it constantly. It became a favorite of me and my friends and if it happened to be on while we were together… it was a high likelihood that we were going to watch it. Once again it is a series that I was largely enthralled by the mythology of it. There was rumored to be a cut of Highlander II that was actually watchable, and I remember so much discussion about maybe trying to get our hands on a copy of it. To the best of my knowledge… there is not a version of the second movie that makes any sense.
The Lost Boys
The Lost Boys – 1987
I am not entirely certain what it is about this film that made me so obsessed with it, but it was a thing. Maybe I had a crush on Star, or maybe I just thought that the vampires looked badass. Whatever the case I was enthralled with the mythology of these films to the point of trying to track down the comic books that were referenced in it (that did not exist of course). This obsession lead me down a path of discovering a lot of horror comics in the process and warped my little mind. The soundtrack is also great, and I can still sit down happily to watch this at any time. I did not hurt that I bought a copy in that video store sale as well, and had easy access.
G.I. Joe The Movie
G.I. Joe the Movie – 1987
I am not sure I fully understand why this grabbed my imagination so much. Sure I loved the GI Joe cartoon, but this movie was so much more. There was an actual mythology that they were introducing to Cobra, and I was completely hooked. Looking back now… it is cheesy as shit, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
Hellraiser Trilogy
Hellraiser – 1987
Hellbound: Hellraiser II – 1988
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth – 1992
I am slotting this in here because of when the original Hellraiser was released since I am keeping a psuedo chronology here, but in truth it was not until high school that this obsession began. I love Pinhead and the whole lore of the cenobytes… even though most of it was just sort of made up on the spot for the films and had very little connection back to the Hellbound Heart story. There was a period around 92/93 that I dissected these films bit by bit. By then we were a family that owned two VCRs and dubbing off a copy was a thing.
Akira
Akira – 1988
In truth my first exposure to Anime was Macross as part of the Robotech cartoon. However Akira began my real explorations of what I liked and did not like in Anime. I got my first copy of Akira like everyone else did at the time… Suncoast Video. I am absolutely certain that I have watched this at least seven times, because I spent a lot of time trying to digest everything that was going on in the shots.
Streets on Fire
Santa Cruz Skateboards – Streets on Fire – 1989
I’ve talked about this video before in a few other posts, but growing up in the middle of the country with no ready access to concrete… I spent a lot of time watching the bad copies of skate videos I had access to. I am not even sure HOW I got my hands on this… but I know my copy made off another copy. When you had no real access to new material, there ended up being this underground network of folks dubbing off copies for everyone else. This thing has such an amazing soundtrack and it was doing something different from most Skate videos… actually trying to tell a bit of a story. Hamfisted as it might be there was a narrative through-path connecting the skate clips.
Nightbreed
The Nightbreed – 1990
I love Clive Barker and this is my favorite movie that he has been involved with. Nightbreed is such a great tale about how maybe Monsters are actually the good guys. I was obsessed with the lore of the Breed and of Midian and immediately went out and bought Cabal the novel it was based on reading it cover to cover. It is just so freaking good folks.
The Crow
The Crow – 1994
What can I say. I love dark antiheroes and was absolutely going through my Vampire the Masquerade phase when this movie came out. The hype around it surrounding the death of Brandon Lee made this essentially required viewing for anyone. Again I think I was more engaged with the mythology of it than anything else. I had not read any of the Crow comics prior to this, but absolutely did afterwards. The soundtrack is still phenomenal which only helps cement this as a great viewing for me.
Shawshank Redemption
Shawshank Redemption – 1994
I have to say at face value… this would not have been a movie I was into as a senior in high school aka when it actually was released. This is a film that I did not discover until an adult, with cable television… and the USA network playing it pretty much every single day. All of that said it has probably become my single favorite movie. This might be the closest I have seen to the perfect film, and I have this habit of stopping to watch it any time I notice it is playing on television. I cannot say with any certainty how many times I have watched this film but it is absolutely over twenty.
Clerks and Mallrats
Clerks – 1994
Mallrats – 1995
There was a period of time when I was super into Kevin Smith movies, and I have subjected my poor wife to these more times than I can count. While I have also watched a lot of Chasing Amy I don’t think I have probably watched it seven times. I know for certain due to multiple rentals before purchasing my own copy of both that I have seen Clerks and Mallrats way more than seven times. These movies fairly adequately encapsulate my high school and college sense of humor. Clerks has a special place in my heart but I think I like Mallrats way more, and like Chasing Amy even more in spite not watching it as many times. I think it is probably the quote-ability of the one-liners. Something that was super popular on IRC was playing sound clips… and I had a directory loaded full of quotes from these movies.
Hackers
Hackers – 1995
This movie is so dumb and I love it so much. Like I am still uncertain if this movie intended to take itself seriously, or if it was always meant to be this slapstick send up of what Hollywood thinks hacking is. I tend to align to the later because there is a self awareness in this movie that you only really see upon repeated watchings. I think the studio thought this was a serious movie, and the writers absolutely went in another direction creating this cartoonish abomination that no one can really take seriously. It has a lot going for it… entertaining protagonists, phenomenal music, and great villains. This movie also began my love affair with Matthew Lillard.
Scream
Scream – 1996
Scream and Hackers have so much more in common than just the fact that Matthew Lillard is great in both of them. Scream is this self aware send up of the entire Horror movie genre, while also being one of the better slasher flicks to have ever been created. It is simultaneously not taking itself seriously, while delivering this deeply nuanced serious entry into the genre. I have watched the original so many times because it is so freaking good. I am pretty sure we went and watched it multiple times in the theater even.
The Matrix
The Matrix – 1999
The Matrix fills this niche for me of not only being this mind-blowing movie… but also being the perfect DVD to showcase what that technology could do and why it was so much better than VHS. This is literally the first movie that I bought for my DVD player, and as a result got a lot of repeated viewing because DVDs were expensive. I’ve continued to watch it every so often throughout the years just because it is a great film. I am happy to see that the franchise is being revisited and I liked the most recent version almost as much as I liked the original.
What Changed?
So one of the interesting things about this thought experiment is that I realized I just don’t engage with media in quite the same way that I used to. Some key reference points… I graduated high school in 1994 and graduated college in 1998. We bought our home in 1999 and have been living in one place ever since. I just don’t watch movies in quite the same way as I once did. Weekends used to be marked by a trip to the video store to rent fresh fodder because the lack of access to cable television meant there was almost nothing worth watching. However I can’t say that I have rented a movie in any form since the advent of Netflix. There were a lot of times you rented the same film more than once because in a small town you had a very limited repertoire of what was available.
There are plenty of films that I have watched more than once however. There is probably even a large list of films that I have watched three to five times. However there is something significant about that seven times because that really is a lot of repeated viewings. I thought I would honestly have a smaller list of movies, but over the weekend and this morning I have been jotting down films that I know I have watched that many times. A lot of this meant crawling mentally through the movies that I had recordings of and had ready access to. The list wound up much larger than I thought it would be, but I have to say this list of films does a pretty good job of explaining the formative stuff that calibrated my tastes.
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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to spin off of a topic that started on the Blaugust Discord. Side note and a bit of a plug… every single day there are discussions like this happening there. Ultimately a conversation thread spun up in the Post Discussion channel about what actually denotes the title “Indie Game” and to a lesser extent what makes something a “AAA Game”. These two terms are often times bandied about as opposite ends of some sliding spectrum. What I present to you today is that we often use terms with concrete certainty like “hardcore” or “casual” without them really having any concrete meaning associated with them. I feel the same is entirely true for what we think of as “Indie Games”.
I first heard the term “indie” as referred to record labels or bands. I remember listening to a lot of great albums on Sub Pop or SST. Collectively it was agreed that this term meant any band or label that did not get big label support and as a result was not getting much in the way of airplay on the radio. This sort of music was largely relegated to college radio stations or other smaller independently owned stations that had programming other than “Top 40”. I still remember the weird feeling when Red Hot Chili Peppers crossed over from being a very underground phenomena to being on a major label and that you could find cassette singles in Walmart or hear them on the local rock radio station. However just as the fact that radio has no real relevance anymore, I would suggest that “Indie” doesn’t mean a whole lot in gaming terms either.
To illustrate this point, let’s have a thought experiment. I present to you four games that all have had fairly wide success. Which of these are independent games? How do you even quantify what independent means? I see lots of twitter accounts for example heralding that they only play Indie games to give Indie developers airtime… but what does that even mean really? Does “Indie” denote a design ethic or an art style, or does it simply mean an independently held studio not owned by a large publisher or first party platform? Let’s break down each of these four games and present the information we know about each of them.
Hades – Developed by Supergiant Games which is a studio of around 20 people. Supergiant originally had a publishing contract with Warner Bro.s Interactive Software, but more recently they entered into an exclusive publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive that relates specifically to physical game editions.
Valheim – Developed by Iron Gate Studio which at the time of creating the game had around 5 employees. This was published through Coffee Stain Publishing, which was acquired by Embracer Group in 2018.
Death Stranding – Developed by Kojima Productions LLC which is an independently held studio reformed out of the ashes of a similarly named studio once owned by Konami. It has around 80 employees and the development of Death Stranding was in part funded through a timed exclusive deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Additionally there is a publishing deal with 505 Games to handle the PC release only.
Cuphead – Developed by Studio MDHR with a staff of around 20 people. This was funded in part due to an exclusivity deal with Microsoft that lasted a little over a year.
So again I ask you, which of these games is an “Indie”? The truth is I really do not know. Before this thought experiment I would have said Death Stranding was not but Valheim was… however in truth the data could flip in the opposite direction given that Embracer Group is now one of the largest publishers. My original definition of what made an Indie studio would fall along these lines:
An Independent Games studio is any studio not owned exclusively by a first party platform or is not the exclusive subsidiary of one of the major games publishers.
So under that language if you were not owned by one of the platforms of publishers that held big ticket E3 shows… you were an Indie. By that specific verbiage every game in the above list would qualify as “Indie”. However I feel like that might be disingenuous as often times there is another criteria that folks bring into the mix. That of course is budget and the truth is I could not find any reasonable numbers surrounding the budget of any of the titles above. My gut reaction would be that Death Stranding had the highest production budget and Valheim the lowest… with the others taking the middle ground and probably Hades having a higher budget than Cuphead.
I still say that right now, with the way that games work and publishing in general happens between the assorted platforms… that none of these titles have any real meaning. I would say the same is true with AAA games… which is a term I found out yesterday apparently comes from the ratings of financial bonds. We are going through a really weird phase, especially with Microsoft acquiring what used to be large publishers to turn them into semi-exclusive vassal states. I think in the coming years the differentiators between all of these terms will become more meaningless. While we as human beings love to classify things into silos, I submit that the only meaningful designation right now is “games I enjoyed” and “games I did not enjoy”.
I know I am riding on the fumes of a discussion that has already died down on the Blaugust Discord, but if you have any more thoughts to add to the mix I would love to see them below.
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Yesterday Blizzard released a recruitment pitch looking for new talent to work on a currently unannounced survival game. We know almost nothing about this other than based on the concept art provided that it appears to be leaning into a more fantasy world/through the looking glass feel. Though at this stage I am doubting you can really read much into this one. It makes sense that Blizzard would be exploring this genre because it isn’t one that they have a game in. For decades the Blizzard model has been to take a game genre that is reaching maturity, and then release a highly polished version of it that leans on the best features of everything else out on the market. If the company still has any of its magic dust left, survival is absolutely a genre that could use coalescing into a better game.
One of the challenges with survival games as a whole is there are already a good number of pillars of that landscape. Ark, Rust, and The Forest are likely the biggest players, but you have a number of smaller games that have had their own “phenomena” moments like Valheim where everyone seemed to be playing them. Most recently New World has proven that there is still a lot of interest in the genre and that folks are looking for a more complete game experience. Unfortunately also in the case of New World it has been proven that players will not put up with a crappy game experience as its player base has dwindled to a peak of just under a million players to a current peak of just over seventy thousand.
New World however is a tale of mismanagement pure and simple. From the short sighted server design, to the history of patches that destroy entire chunks of the game, to the questionable reliance on a game ethos that appears to be counter to what the players wanted. I feel like if New World were a game that could support large communities and had an interesting progression that did not feel openly antagonistic towards its player base… it would have been a multi million player game. So if Blizzard can come along behind something like New World and learn from its mistakes, then I fully expect it would be a success. Pending of course that the company is able to deal with all of its hostile working conditions bullshit in a reasonable manner.
I do however wonder if this might be one of the first changes we have seen as a result of the Microsoft acquisition plans. No matter how successful a Blizzard Survival game might be, it was never going to be a success on the order of magnitude of the Call of Duty franchise. Activision Blizzard seemed to only care about games that would be that level of success, given how many studios were lashed to the support of that single franchise. Phil Spencer has already shown interest in breaking up that Call of Duty machine and letting studios create different sorts of games. So I am wondering if this is creating an environment where it is okay to move forward with smaller games. Based on some comments from Mike Ybarra it sounds like maybe this game has been in pre-production for a bit. I just wonder if the talk of the acquisition is creating breathing room for games that might be ideal for Game Pass.
It is way the hell too early to tell if I would be interested in a Blizzard Survival game, but I will say what I am very interested in is someone making good on the potential that New World had. Amazon Game Studios has proven time and time again that they do not have what it takes to make that game a success. Proof of this comes again within the last 24 hours when a patch has broken a good number of the games systems including storage and crafting and produced at last count 267 significant bugs. In addition to actual bugs they took measures to obfuscate the player count, so that the player base would have a harder time seeing drops in population which is never a good sign. So essentially I want someone to make good on the promise of this genre and present something that is stable and designed in a manner as not to fragment the player base and prevent us from all playing together.
When a survival game is good, it is this blissful experience of exploration and discovery. When it is bad it is a frustrating skinner box designed to focus grinding of the player base and create a flytrap of forced engagement. I would love to see Blizzard bring with them knowledge they have learned from other genres and produce a leap forward in the survival game genre. I am just not entirely certain if I believe that Blizzard is still a company that can do this. Shadowlands has been a miserable experience, and I have serious doubts about if Diablo 4 is going to be the game I hope it might be. I am still holding out a glimmer of hope though that the Microsoft Acquisition will create a lot of net positive effects within the company that will ultimately improve the quality of their products.
So what are your thoughts about the prospect of a Blizzard Survival Game? Drop me a line below.
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This weekend I wrapped up my play-through of Guardians of the Galaxy and had a pretty great time with the game. I started the game up on Thursday and last night early in the evening I finished the final chapter. All told if steam is to be believed it was a little over fifteen hours worth of game-play. I have to admit I had initially shown zero interest in this game because I fully expected it to be similar to Marvels Avengers since it has that same sort of feel to it. If someone would have told me that this was originally intended to be an expansion for that game but was spun off into a single player adventure… I probably would have believed them because it is going for the same “almost MCU” graphical style.
However where Avengers felt like a generic rehashing of the looter shooter genre… Guardians of the Galaxy has so much fun and heart packed into this short experience. It does a really excellent job of splitting the difference between the comic book Guardians and the MCU Guardians. If you were a fan of the comics, you get a better version of Starlord and Gamora as well as a lot of interesting easter eggs along the way and characters you likely never expected to encounter. If you were only a fan of the MCU movies, then the characters are close enough to make it feel fairly familiar and still be an enjoyable ride. The story told is extremely enjoyable and has all sorts of twists and turns and chaotic interludes before wrapping up with some pretty damned emotional moments. Each of the characters grows as you travel through this adventure… well minus Groot maybe because we still don’t really know for certain what the hell he is saying.
Probably the worst thing that the game has going for it, is that combat in general is pretty bland. It starts off fun enough and as you unlock additional elemental weapons those sprinkle in some entertaining effects, but ultimately feels very repetitive. Combat tends to come in waves where you encounter a few packs of baddies before moving on to the next area, and there are absolutely times especially towards the end where I wish I could have skipped some of it. The game would have also benefited greatly from an ability to swap your perspective between the Guardians. You are stuck playing shootmans the entire game when it would have been more entertaining if you could have taken over Gamora or Groot and changed up the pace of combat greatly. There is a “skill reload” system where if you time your reload at exactly the right time it fires a pulse of energy that deals a large amount of damage. However after doing this hundreds of times it just feels gimmicky and not really fun anymore.
The game also has a lot of mini-games, where you are asked to do a thing with little to noexplanation of how it works. The worst of these is the Llama puzzle. Essentially Kammy the Space Llama likes it when certain characters sing, and hates it when other character sing… and you have to use this in order to steer her into this target zone. I do not love mini-games in the best of times, but I sincerely wish that there were skip buttons when one of these comes up in a game so that we can resume playing the ACTUAL game. The other problem that I ran into constantly is the fact that ship combat really does not work with a mouse and keyboard. The controls are way the hell too twitchy with the mouse and I wound up having to hook up a controller each time the game decided I needed to dog fight in the Milano.
The other challenge that I encountered constantly is that the game is exceptionally bad at messaging things that you need to do. Often times you learn what you need to do by failing… over and over again until you finally realize where you were supposed to jump at a moments notice. This happens constantly with any section where you are sliding down a chute, and pieces of the ground drop out from under you… and you effectively need to know to jump BEFORE this happens not in reaction to it happening. Generally speaking the game resets you back quickly and you can get into the action and try again. However there are a few cases where this happens AFTER a cutscene and the checkpoint is before the beginning of the cutscene forcing you to sit through the dialog again before trying to do the thing correctly. You can manually save, but these are mostly useless because upon loading the save you will start back at the beginning of the nearest checkpoint rather than the exact moment you saved.
One of my favorite parts about this game is the huddle system. Every so often during the battle a synergy meter will fill and you can “Huddle Up”. During this you talk to your team and based on their current moods you either need to tell them something to bolster the moods or something to calm them down and keep them from getting sloppy. If you make the right decision, they get pumped, gain a buff, and you are treated to a montage set to some 80s song. The music is absolutely one of the highlights of the game, and much like the MCU movie it is a soundtrack picked out from the greatest hits of that era. The huddle theme though can be a little weird at times… like during one boss fight it started playing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” which is not exactly asskicking music.
I get that at this point… you are thinking… Bel you have mostly just talked about negatives here, why should I play this? The truth is, I was sold entirely for the story experience. In fact at some point pretty early into this experience I dialed the difficulty down all the way just so I could get to the next bit of story a little quicker. Honestly for me I probably would have liked this better as a walking simulator or something more akin to the Telltale Style of adventure game. Combat was fine, but not terribly enjoyable and the boss battles often times felt like they drug on two or three times as long as they should have. The story though was a freaking blast and I hope that maybe this same team gives us another Guardians adventure in the future.
So where I land on this game is that I am very glad that I played through it. Would I suggest it to someone who is a fan of the Guardians comic? Absolutely, there are a ton of Easter eggs that you are going to spot along the way. Would I suggest it to someone who has only ever seen the movies? Absolutely, it is going to be close enough to what you remember to still feel familiar. However in both cases I would probably suggest waiting for this to go on sale. The combat is not terribly enjoyable and just feels like busy work to gate you from getting to the next bit of story. If you do pick it up I suggest playing on the lowest difficulty because I think it will be the story that keeps you going rather than the combat that mostly feels the same at the end of the game as it did at the very beginning.
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