Strike: The Silkworm (BBC adaptation) Part Two

Part two. At some point my commentary is probably going to dry up, because as you all know I never finished the book in detail so I won’t be able to judge how closely the show is following most of the ending. We’ll see how it goes. Also this is later than I had planned to do it because I have no motivation for this – it’s not awful the way the book was, just really, really dull.

As it turns out I was able to keep commenting until the end, since they cut just about everything that happened after I ragequit.

 

Strike: The Silkworm (BBC adaptation) Part One

This trainwreck just will not stop. Despite how much I disliked Cuckoo, I’m continuing into Silkworm. But with a heavy caveat – I loathed the book. You all know I loathed the book. I loathed it enough to quit half way through my coverage of it for you all.

I’ve tried several times to sit down and start going through this episode and I just plain don’t want to. It’s not going to be fun. So I did some thinking; by the time I did the book I was a lot better at this sort of thing than some of my earlier series here, so we already have a detailed plot synopsis. Rather than make myself do it all again, I’m just going to watch this with as much of my attention as I can muster and note down what’s been altered from the book and if there’s any new content.

It’s not like most of you care either way. I suspect almost everyone’s just waiting for me to stop tormenting myself and carry on with Harry Potter stuff. If you are interested, I suggest you re-read my coverage of the book first so you know what the heck I’m talking about.

Part One, then: “War veteran turned private investigator Cormoran Strike investigates the disappearance of a provocative author.” Not the most interesting synopsis in the world, but at least it’s accurate.

Let’s go. Before we start, I am fully prepared to quit if it becomes clear at any point that they haven’t tried to fix any of the extremely offensive things that made me abandon the book coverage.

[I’ll interject occasionally if I have something to say but I doubt I have much to add here.]

Content warning for suicide under the cut.

 

More Fangames: A first look at Pokemon Sage (Demo 2.0)

Last year, I wrote about my experiences with some fan-made games, one of which was Pokemon Uranium. One of our commenters made us aware of Pokemon Sage then, and I thought it looked promising and would be well worth keeping an eye on. At the time, I got the impression it was still in a very early state, there was plenty of concept work to look through and a short playable demo but not enough to draw any firm conclusions one way or another.

I later stumbled across discussions of Pokemon Sage again, in reading discussions of Pokemon Uranium in a Let’s Play thread by Orange Fluffy Sheep on the Something Awful forums (the Let’s Play forum is a guilty pleasure of mine, I lurk but don’t participate). People there were much harsher on Uranium than I was (I think rightly so; I do still mostly like it, but I’ll readily admit most of the flaws they tore it apart for are real and deserve the mockery), and several of them kept bringing up Pokemon Sage as an example of a Pokemon fangame that gets right the things Uranium got wrong.

To make a long story short, they’re absolutely right. But we’ll get to that.

Anyway, I was in the mood to play some Pokemon recently, and remembered that earlier this year (late July, I don’t know the exact date) a more substantial demo of Pokemon Sage had been released. I don’t normally care for playing incomplete games – I can tolerate incomplete or abandonned serial fiction, but when it’s a video game and you add to that the possibility of getting psychologically invested in a save file (which may not be compatible with future versions of the game even if it does continue to update), the frustration level increases greatly. That said, Sage intrigued me enough and the new demo had enough of it implemented that I thought it was worth giving a try, so here’s my review of Pokemon Sage Demo 2.0.5 (this version released 10 August 2017, available here) after having played it to completion.

[I won’t be contributing much to this one, I haven’t played it yet – it looks really promising and I probably will, but I also want to try and wait for the full game.]