I made it a goal to play Dragon Age Origins on PC, for one reason: I got the version from GOG and it includes pretty much all of the DLC. Now, I’ve played DAO a few times on console because it was more convenient for me to do that, and I came in a bit worried about the interface and the combat. I had played a little bit earlier and didn’t find it to be that bad, but I was still a bit worried about it. I played a couple of weeks in my normal time, but for the past couple of weeks I was on vacation and so managed to play it pretty much every day, so let me outline how that’s all worked out.
The first thing is that this time through I started to struggle with the interface. I actually am not having much difficulty triggering abilities as the ability bar is pretty usable, but what I’m struggling with is the mouse pointer. In order to change which enemy you’re targeting, you need to select it with the mouse and right-click on it, but in combat I am having a lot of trouble seeing the mouse pointer to do that, and the auto-selection doesn’t always work all that well. Since you need to be fighting something for an ability to automatically target it, if that hasn’t kicked in or you haven’t properly selected an enemy yet you would need to click on them with the mouse … which means that I’d need to be able to see the mouse pointer. So I often spend a lot of time with my main character not doing anything while I try to figure out how it’s all going to work, which is very frustrating.
I’m also finding the combat more difficult than the console versions were. I’m playing as a two-handed warrior using greatswords, but previously I played as a two-handed dwarf warrior using axes and don’t recall things being as difficult as they are here. I really had a difficult time in the ancient ruins with the Ashes of Andraste, although a big part of that was because at least in this version the game loves to spring enemies from behind on you, which means that they targeted Wynne who was my main healer, and once she went down things tended to go poorly, especially since I really hate flipping between characters and so like to play only on my main character. I have the others set up to use healing poutices as part of their tactics, but sometimes they don’t use them quickly enough and I don’t use them quickly enough either. Which meant that with the drakes I had to reload a few times to finally beat those fights, which also happened when the enemies were primarily mages. I had to learn in this game to seek them out because otherwise they’d pretty much devastate the part.
Which reminds me of something that I thought of while reading “Dungeons & Desktops”, which talked about how many CRPG makers really disliked the ability to save anywhere. Yes, you can use that to save scum and avoid all negative outcomes — and I can’t say that I didn’t do that on occasion — but one reason to have that is to avoid having a player having to make up too much time if they happened to get something wrong or make a mistake. I was doing pretty well in the ancient ruins until the drakes appeared, and if I hadn’t been saving after every fight I would have had to fight them all over again when the drakes suddenly appeared and I had to learn a new strategy for them. That would have made that surprise far, far more annoying and frustrating than it was. If a game is suddenly going to spring sudden potentially fatal surprises like new enemies or an increase in difficulty they had better let you save before they do that in case the surprise causes you to die and have to replay a significant amount of the game just to get back to where you were. This is the sort of thing that really frustrated Shamus Young about “Dark Souls”, and in fact a sudden increase in difficulty added to the fact that you could only save a long time before hitting that point is actually responsible for my not being able to finish the original “Persona” game. So while the save systems do mean that people might be able to save scum, the alternative is far worse.
Anyway, back to the combat. After leveling up and getting better equipment, I’m doing better, or at least can usually take on darkspawn without too much trouble if I pay attention. But my party has my main character, another warrior (Alistair or Shale usually), Lelianna because I need a Rogue for locks, and Wynne for magic and healing, and in some really, really big fights Lelianna has saved my bacon. In the fight against the elf Keeper, I had cleared out all the enemies but the spellcasting Keeper killed off everyone else, so after recasting Lelianna as an archer early on — which I never did on the console — I had her stand away and pick him off with arrows, using a health poultice as required. I expected to have to reload and try again, but she managed to win. The same thing happened against Flemeth, but I only won that one because Flemeth wouldn’t move from the one spot and as long as I kept out of melee range I could plink her to death with arrows. Against the dragon at the ancient ruins only the main character went down, and that was probably only because I was out of Wynne’s range behind the dragon and not paying attention.
At any rate, I’m not really enjoying the combat but it’s not incredibly frustrating either, so it shouldn’t stop me from finishing this run. I just am not finding it as easy as it was on the console for some reason.
The main reason to pick this up was to get Shale, but I found that Shale was less hostile than I figured she’d be from watching Chuck Sonnenberg’s Dragon Age Origins playthrough. She also had some hilarious lines when I explored the fact that she calls the main character “it” all the time. When I asked if she was going to call me that all the time she gave the simple answer of “Most likely”, and when I commented that she didn’t talk about her previous owner that way she said basically that it was a quirk of hers. I’m running with her in the party now but will need Alistair at some point, and will need Oghren for the Deep Roads, which is where I’m at now.
Overall, I’ve kinda liked the DLC but didn’t find anything that I would have really missed, other than Shale. I’m looking forward to trying some of the separate DLC, such as Awakenings and “The Dark Spawn Chronicles”, both of which I will try. I don’t know if I’ll do “Lelianna’s Song” or not. I’m also thinking that I have to take Morrigan’s deal despite the fact that my female Warden is going to marry Alistair because I don’t know if getting him killed will still let her be queen, which is what I’m going for here.
Ultimately, I’m having fun when it isn’t frustrating me, and it doesn’t frustrate me all that much. Hopefully I can get through the rest of it without too many issues.
Thoughts on “Bumblebee”
March 21, 2023I had pretty much given up on the modern “Transformers” movies. I think I watched the first three — at least the last of those because I got it in a cheap pack somewhere — but was never all that impressed by them, mostly because it couldn’t capture the aesthetics and themes of the original cartoon. Sure, a non-animated feature film was going to try to be a bit more adult than a cartoon, but I didn’t find the shift one that made them more mature as opposed to make them, well, more explodey. Since I actually liked Bay’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movies, that was a pretty good indication that the “Transformers” ones were not up to snuff. So I abandoned the entire series and didn’t look back.
Well, until this past weekend. So why, if I had abandoned the series, was I willing to sit down and watch a prequel to them? As it turns out, I ended up talking about this with a friend of mine — I think it was because of the trailer being released for the new film adding in the Beast Wars — and he said that “Bumblebee” was actually a good movie. Now, his recommending it did not really mean that it was something that I was going to like. Sure, this friend recommended “Doctor Who” to me, which I liked, and “Doom Patrol”, which I liked for most of the first season, but he also recommended “Farscape” to me, which I didn’t care much for, and “Star Trek: Discovery” to me, which I hated. So the best I can say here is that while we often do like the same things, it tends to be for different reasons, so if one of us likes it the other might well like it, but if there’s nothing in that thing for that person to like then we won’t like it.
What that means here is that his agreeing with me about the original movies (mostly) but commenting that “Bumblebee” was actually good piqued my interest, and so I made a mental note to look out for it if I could get it cheap or get access to it cheap. And I managed to get it relatively cheap, and so decided to watch it. And what I’ll say about it is that it is better than I thought it’d be, but still has a huge flaw that ends up hurting it.
This is, as noted above, a prequel to the original movies, tracing Bumblebee’s time on Earth and how he lost his speech synthesizer and how he preserved the Earth for the Autobots to land on. It starts in the middle of a fight scene on Cybertron, with the Autobots being forced to flee the planet. Bumblebee is sent to Earth to prepare it to be a base for the Autobots, but soon after landing he is attacked by a Decepticon that followed him there, I guess, who destroys his speech synthesizer — deliberately, since Bumblebee refuses to tell him where the rest of the Autobots are — and while the Deception is destroyed Bumblebee is gravely damaged and transforms into the classic VW Beetle, and loses consciousness and his memory. Later, a young woman is living with her mother and her mother’s new boyfriend after the death of her father, which she is still broken up about. She is trying to finish restoring a Corvette and goes to her uncle’s junkyard and finds Bumblebee. After getting frustrated with not being able to fix the Corvette, she goes back to her uncle and appeals to get it, and he gives it to her as a birthday present. She fixes it up and then Bumblebee transforms, and they start to develop a friendship. Meanwhile, a pair of Decepticons are torturing Cliffjumper for information when Bumblebee’s beacon — reactivated when she was fixing him up — pings them revealing where he is, and so they destroy Cliffjumper and head to Earth. There, they meet some military officers led by an agent who was attacking Bumblebee during the first attack and arrange to trade technology with them if they will help them find Bumblebee. Meanwhile, Charlie — the young woman — teaches Bumblebee about music and gives him a new radio (which he soon learns to use to communicate like he did in the movies), and then a guy who has been crushing on her bursts in and sees Bumblebee, but she convinces him to to tell, and they eventually head off to a cliff where her fear of diving is revealed — she had thrown away her diving trophies before — and she is bullied a bit. Then she leaves Bumblebee at home and tells him to stay in the garage but he gets into the house and trashes it in a slapstick sequence, but as he does so he plugs himself into a wall socket which causes an Energon surge that the Decepticons trace. This causes a sequence where the military and Decepticons try to capture Bumblebee, and they manage to do so while Charlie is shocked into unconsciousness while the military guy spins a story that she stole government property, but she decides to break Bumblebee out with the help of her crush. Meanwhile, the Decepticons learn that the Autobots are coming to Earth and prepare to destroy the Earth to prevent that and destroy them, and head off to send a message to Cybertron revealing that fact. Charlie shocks Bumblebee back to life, and the two of them head off to stop the Decepticons, pursued by the military. Her mother’s boyfriend and the family come to help them and distract and head off the military, and then Bumblebee tries to stop the Decepticons, while Charlie sees a way to stop the transmission and heads out to do that. Bumblebee destroys one Decepticon and the other tries to stop Charlie, but the military guy attacks that Decepticon and Bumblebee engages her as well when the military helicopter is shot down — after saving the military guy’s life — and Charlie is able to disable the transmitter. Bumblebee triggers a flood that would kill both him and the Decepticon, but Charlie dives into the water and swims down to him and this somehow revives him. The military guy lets them go, Charlie is reconciled with her family and seems to be starting a relationship with her crush, and Bumblebee has to leave on his own, and picks up the Camaro as his alt-form, and drives off past a truck that resembled the alt-form of Optimus from the cartoon.
As you might have guess from reading the summary, this movie is a bit overstuffed, and I haven’t even fully described all the threads here (for example, Charlie gets the Corvette running at the end after giving up on it earlier). Obviously with so many threads it was going to be difficult to develop them all properly, even in a movie that’s almost two hours. And the movie doesn’t develop them all that well. For example, Charlie’s fear of diving itself at the end comes mostly out of nowhere and the reason she didn’t want to dive earlier in the movie makes more sense as her being overwhelmed by the emotions — the last time she saw her father was when he cheered her on at a dive meet — but at the end she seems afraid to dive into the water for … some reason. She had a crush on a boy earlier that only provided a small bit of angst for the guy who was crushing on her. Even worse, there’s an interesting undercurrent where her reminiscing about her father triggers a memory in Bumblebee about Optimus trying to fight off a horde of Decepticons and being surrounded at the end, which provided a very interesting parallel between the two of them, but it’s never mentioned or brought up again. There are lots of these elements in the movie, so much so that it seems like they wanted to keep every idea that they came up with in the movie no matter how they conflicted or whether they’d have time to play them all out.
Making all of this worse is the fact that they try to intersperse all of these threads together, which leads to some huge shifts in tone and hurts the development of the threads that they do try to develop. Bumblebee’s getting used to Earth and restoring his memory shifts to the Decepticons killing Cliffjumper and coming to Earth, and even earlier we don’t even get him landing on Earth for more than a few minutes before he’s attacked again, after we just had a huge battle scene to start the movie. And that fight was unnecessary because all it really does is show how he lost his memory and speech synthesizer, and that could have been caused by the pod crashing, which would have freed up some time to develop the other threads and created a more consistent tone. I would have minimized the Deception threads until the end because we didn’t really need it and it really breaks the tone of the movie. I would have also dropped the military guy’s plot because it is totally disconnected from Charlie’s plots until the end and didn’t add much.
Because where the movie is good, really good, is with the interaction between Charlie and Bumblebee, as he learns about Earth and her and they become friends. These were some of the best scenes in the first movie as well, but they seemed to get more play and more focus than they do here. All of this leads to an odd impression of the movie for me, because when Charlie and Bumblebee are interacting the movie is great, and some of the other scenes are good, but when it breaks the tone and fails to develop certain plots the movie isn’t very good. Building off of that relationship and adding the other elements in later — and limiting them — would have made this a far better movie.
One final note is that the movie really does work to push the nostalgia button, constantly making references with music and TV shows to the 80s. However, especially early on most of these references seem really forced, there just to make that reference and not as an organic part of the movie itself. I can compare it to “Scream Queens” or “Guardians of the Galaxy” where the references seem natural and yet really do work as references. This does get better later in the movie, especially when Bumblebee starts using the radio to communicate.
So it has its good points and bad points, and so for now I think it’s going into the box of movies that I might rewatch at some point. I like Charlie and Bumblebee, and some of the other elements work, but it’s just way too overstuffed for me to want to rewatch it on a regular basis.
Tags:sci-fi
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