Amazon Bought Twitch?

Anyone following gaming news almost certainly knows by now that Amazon purchased the Twitch streaming service for almost one billion dollars. Immediately following this acquisition were questions of 'why?' Can't answer that, but what I can say is that I hope it works out as well as it may. Amazon has one of the larger presences on the Internet with numerous data centers that people can pay to use, such as for hosting and running game servers. With full access to that kind of backend, I would hope Twitch's service improves. May be a while before the improvements materialize, but hopefully not too long.

Hopefully More than an Upgrade

Among the events of this week are the releases of the Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux; both of which I am looking forward to. I am looking forward to them for the obvious reason that I enjoyed the original games and that I like the idea of games like these getting such deep reworks. Both will be running on the latest version of 4A engine, which should not only look great but run very well too. I remember commenting on how with 2033 and Last Light, it is pretty cool to be playing a game, taking screenshots, and have practically each one look like a cinematic render. Should only be better now. Plus a number of mechanics have been added and refined, making for a more what should be a more enjoyable experience.
Tuesday should be a fun day.

Disappointing, and Worse, Not Surprising

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I saw the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie and enjoyed it, though it did have some issues, in my opinion. Now one of those issues is haunting me because of the number of people I hear/see commenting on the movie that never realized that Rocket was exactly an antihero, and little more. Constantly I am finding people say he was the best character in the film. I'm sorry, but a paragon of a classical archetype is nothing special. (The performance was very good though, I am glad to say.) Rocket did not really even have much depth because every action feel directly in line with the archetype.
...at times it can be a little annoying having even a mildly literary mind, because you catch things like this and the comments from other people that don't, can just be irritating. Eh, still a fun film.

Some Internet Communities...

So the other day I did something that was mildly regrettable. I read posts at the forum for a video game. The reason this was mildly regrettable was that the forum, for years now has been somewhat known for its toxicity. The sheer levels of hate, vitriol, ignorance, and arrogance rivaled that of many competitive political campaigns.
I am not going to identify the forum because I don't want to bring such negative attention to it, even though I don't think this would reach many people. Besides, even if I could reach a lot of people, nothing would happen. It past a 'call for civility' because it is at the point that the people are deranged enough to probably think they are being civil, or have fallen so deeply into the mob mentality to be unaware of their own words. (Well, being unaware of one's own words is not unique to this forum or any conversation, sadly.)
At least I do know some forums where everyone is nice, helpful, and civil. I'll stick to them.

Good But Not As Good

A few days ago Guardians of the Galaxy released to theaters, and I went to see it. After The Winter Soldier and all the trailers, I had high hopes for GotG, and it mostly lived up to them. It succeeded my expectations enough that I can happily say I enjoyed the film. It did have some weaknesses though, and one of them is something I have been noticing with a number of the recent films I have seen.
I never felt a connection to many of the characters. Starlord and Groot were both easy to connect to, but the others had a less compelling presence. This was disappointing, especially with how important those characters are. However, the film was still a lot of fun (the ending was also awesome) so go ahead and see it.
To put it another way, my issues with it make me hope that there is a longer cut of the film somewhere (that will hopefully materialize on media in the future) that does a better job of introducing and connecting the viewer to the characters. At least it felt like such a cut exists because of how some things were built up in the film that I did see.