Avengers: Infinity War

All of Marvel’s superheroes come together after the previous movies all contributed towards bringing this epic endgame of a movie together, where Thanos is about to threaten the whole universe with his rather complex reasoning.

Infinity War is full of exciting battles, but the quest of Thanos is equally interesting to follow, as the Infinity Stones show off their powerful abilities. The latest plot developments of the previous movies Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok are picked up further, but essentially, all of the movies are connected.

The cast is the largest seen yet, where almost every major character returns, with the exception of Hawkeye and Ant-Man. Seeming as a fourth Avengers movie is scheduled for 2019, I assume that they will return then. In the mean time, the humor is still intact, but obviously, the tone has become darker.

Key characters will die, and the fate of others will be left uncertain. As Thanos combines his personal loss with the concepts of balance and survival while interpreting this across the known universe, the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy team up to fight him and his Children.

The CGI, production values and settings are of a top caliber as you would expect, but it's really impressive how this large cast managed to carry the plot direction alongside a compelling and effective major villain. It also looked like every ability of each Infinity Stone was displayed here.

While The Avengers back in 2012 was perhaps the first great all stars superheroes movie, Infinity War steps it up further, raises the stakes and manages to entertain, engross and impress throughout, while DC's movies are generally poorly left behind.

I should had started out with comics, especially after seeing so many great superhero movies already. But at the same time, the movies do attempt to bring out the best of the comics in their own medium, so it's okay if you don't have time to read thousands of comics dedicated to each character if you ask me.

Avengers: Infinity War is perhaps the best Marvel movie yet so far, and it's naturally more exciting to see it if you saw the numerous previous movies. How spoiled we are with movies like these nowadays! Film making has gone quite far with technology, skill, direction, and so on.

Rating: 8.5

Devil May Cry

I’m playing this popular franchise for the first time via the HD Collection on the PS4! Devil May Cry is a 3D horror based hack and slash where you play as Dante, some kind of demon hunter bent on stopping evil from breeding and happening.

Loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and it’s Italian mythology, Devil May Cry was a hit back in 2001, with some challenging moments, but the gun and swordplay combined with transforming into devil like super powers made it stylish and standout from the crowd.

The worse factors are the camera wrestling as there are many blind spots, but also the repetition of having to fight almost all of the bosses 3 times.

Still, it was quite standing out back in the day, and arguably, numerous games have been inspired by it.

Rating: 7.3

 

 

Honestly?

From all of the negativity I have heard over the years for this sequel, it’s all very exaggerated. The camera wrestling is still there, but the difficulty has been lowered, and there is more variety with bosses.

The mission structure is still weird and asymmetric and not balanced regarding length, and the plot is still very thin and minimum. But the gameplay is intact, and so are the action moves, the weapons and the item management.

About Dante’s change of personality, I honestly barely noticed this here either, as his “acting” is almost non existent in both games anyway. Don’t be shy to play Devil May Cry 2, or perhaps I have the advantage of immediately playing this after the original!?

Rating: 7.2

Easily the best of the trilogy, this special edition has 5 difficulty modes as I discovered this upon defeating it for the first time, wow! As a prequel, you get to see Dante and his brother Vergil duke and team it out, while devils are allowed to cry.

You can turn the camera slightly, and there are more guns, styles and weapons than before. The bosses are also of a higher caliber, and you will have to fight them again Mega Man style. The only thing that really bothers me after playing these one after another is that for the guns, there is no auto button, meaning that I got tired with my fingers.

Plus, based on the numerous games I have beaten by now, the gameplay might be repetitive at times, but then there are enough weapons, action moves and such to keep playing with entertainment. Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening is worth playing, and quite challenging!

Rating: 7.5

Gaming Achievements

Achievement Unlocked!

Recognise that? You either don't care at all, or your ego just got boosted, or perhaps you are floating somewhere inbetween like me, regarding this feature which has been present since the previous gaming generation, except that Nintendo hasn't used it generally yet.

The majority of video games nowadays have an achievement/trophy system that when you meet certain conditions during the game, you unlock these. From unlocking a secret level to beating the game, from walking a large sum of miles/kilometers in game to doing silly scenes like bugging NPC's and fooling around, to overcoming the most challenging trophies which are in Sony's case in the Platinum rank.

What I find interesting to monitor even more than seeing my personal achievements or comparing them with friends is the percentage associated with each trophy and realizing that they represent how many of the gamers who own the game in total have achieved this trophy.

For example, in the case of Bloodborne, not many owners of the game have beaten it normally. A much lesser amount have beaten the DLC bosses, and an even much lesser amount which includes me has seen all that is available in the bonus Chalice Dungeons.

My general conclusion with the games that I currently own is that the majority of modern gamers don't beat their games, and beating a game in my opinion is defeating the final boss, seeing the ending, and seeing the credits, and then you get back to the main title screen.

It really seems that only a small portion of gamers beats games, at least nowadays, regardless of many they own. For me, one of the best pleasures of playing good games is when I finally beat them and bring closure to them in my subjective view.

Being a completionist in the sense of doing all the side content, overcome all the challenges and getting all of the achievements is not in my interest. There are insane people who might do that per game, but as for me, give me a robust single player and a replayable multiplayer, and I'm all set and content.

Flok Strips

Before I depart my decade as a twenty-ager, let's write down 1 final nostalgic post about the time when I used to draw and write my personal comics called Flok Strips as a teenager.

I was exceptionally bad at drawing characters then, and I still am now. I can copy someone's art by re-drawing it, but that's about it. That is why my comics, which is called stripboeken in Dutch, always featured characters which I could draw very easily.

These short stories would usually be about video game related themes, as I even recaptured the most memorable moments of the infamous Sony PlayStation E3 event from 2006, such as Old Snake pulling a gun inside his mouth, or the Genji 2 guy talking about crabs and massive damage.

Other comics would feature quizzes, ultra violence, mock high school life and many times, at several points I would be out of ideas on how to end the short stories, and I simply would let my characters suicide then, hah!

My main protagonist was Flok, who always was very hairy and had two very large front teeth, covering his entire mouth. Of course, I used to have two large teeth a very long time ago, and the comics exaggerated this.

Other characters included Killer, Flok's main rival, Absurdo, Joop Andersom and het Hoofd en Voeten, which frankly all hardly had personalities, heh. The comics would usually end after 4 frames so to speak.

I almost wanted to include a screenshot of one of these comics as an example, but I decided that this is a personal treasure of mine. Perhaps if you happen to meet me personally one day, then you too will be granted the privilege of experiencing the good old Flok Strips!

And with that said, I bid my teens and twenties farewell, and I look forward to the rest of my life!

Death Parade

Dead people are judged by arbiters to either be reincarnated or to enter the void.

Death Parade has style to it's games being played, and the intro song is nice, but most episodes are forgettable and don't offer much interesting content or satisfying climaxes.

As is the case for me personally, with anime, it's always a gamble as to how entertained and interested I will be, as I find the objective highly rated series very misleading. It's a true jungle out there.

Death Parade just turned into the shortest reviewed product on Flok Factory yet. Am I getting out of ideas?

Maybe it's time to rewatch Monster for a third time after all these years to remind me of my personal golden era of anime.

Rating: 6.0

Kingdom Hearts

Long ago in 2003, I bought this as a birthday gift towards my brother. As I borrowed it once, I never continued on when I was fighting in Monstro.

Now I have finally beaten it for the first time. The concept is exciting and it surprisingly works, Square Enix and Disney team up in order to bring you Kingdom Hearts, where Action RPG gameplay and Final Fantasy cameos meet the many worlds of Disney’s magical stories.

Combat is straightforward and Donald plus Goofy are likable, but I liked the soundtrack most of all(especially with all of the various battle themes), and the story with themes about darkness, light and hearts is okay and keeps the plot going. With optional challenges and a big enough of an adventure to venture through, Kingdom Hearts is a true surprise hit from 2002.

Rating: 8.3

Sora, Donald and Goofy go on a new adventure to find Riku and stop Organization XIII’s plans for domination, whom use the Nobodies as replacement for the Heartless.

KH II is improved with gameplay and customization, and the new Disney worlds are welcome additions next to the returning ones. The story is fine until it all gets convoluted near the climax, which apparently seems to be the status quo with this franchise.

After beating it I must say that I had about the same amount of fun as with the previous one, although the challenge is easier here. For now I will skip the other entries in this collection and return to them as well as the other compilation on the PS4 before Kingdom Hearts III arrives maybe this year!

Rating: 8.3 

And it should be no surprise by now that this franchise is infamous for it's convoluted story, but also it's horrible subtitles, such as "Final Chapter Prologue".

The Port Machine

After watching the latest Nintendo Direct, I can´t help but to label and criticize the company´s latest business model.

Although sales and third party are back on board, the amount of ports being made not only for the Nintendo Switch, but towards the Nintendo 3DS too, really make it way less interesting for me as I have pretty much played and beaten all of these before.

There are several definitions of what a port, a remake, a remaster and so on are, and in Nintendo´s case, they seem to either up the graphical scale, or add a minimum amount of new content, like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Switch for example.

Perhaps the worst feeling of dislike I now have is that essentially, at this point, the Wii U has become a black sheep of the family, just like the Virtual Boy. With only a handful of exclusive games on it left, why else would you ever want to be interested in one right now?

It's like porting over all of the exclusive and best N64 games to the Gamecube in a minimum of 2 years and pretend as if the N64 never happened, because that's what happening in my opinion with the Wii U and the Switch right now.

I thought that Nintendo would stop the production of 3DS games by late 2018, and focus on it's hybrid console from there on out and combine all of the developing teams, but instead almost the whole business at this moment  has become The Port Machine, and I don't like it.

I'm not forced to rebuy any of these, as I have them on my Wii U, and I know that new sequels and original content are happening, but this just became another reason for me to wait until I buy the Switch. E3 will certainly be a deciding factor depending on what else is announced.

But for now, I am definitely not feeling it, and I will go back to my PS4 for the time being, as Sony in my opinion and dare I say it, has a better flow of new exclusive releases than Nintendo has as I write this post. Let's see what happens next in 2018.