Up, 2009 Movie

As I am having a hard time putting Anno 2205 into words, let alone a review, instead have this review of the Pixar movie Up.

Yeah, we're not in for a serious journey here, people.

So Up is an 3D animated movie by Pixar and Disney, about an elderly man who, using balloons, flies his house to South America to fulfill a promise he made to his late wife.

Despite being a kids movie, Up puts some heavy subjects on the table, most notably failure and death.  But I'll go on about the plot and my theories about what its trying to tell the viewers later.

Up is fantastic to watch, both in the animation and the cartoony style they chose to create in.  The animation flawless, and even now, more then ten years later it still looks good. The voice acting is also excellent, writing is almost perfect, and otherwise your standard good Pixar movie.  Seriously, Pixar is scarily good at making movies.  The only downside I felt when watching this movie was that the final scene(s?) felt a little over the top, but, it's about a man flying his house with balloons.  How more over the top can you get?

I would be disappointed in myself if I didn't mention the first ten minutes of the film, or rather, after the first five but before the first 10 minute mark.  The first part of the film introduces Carl the elderly man, as a kid at this time in the movie, meet his future wife, also as a kid, and set up some backstory that seems meaningless but has a point later.  After they first meet, it shows them getting married, getting jobs at a zoo, and growing old together.  It's an amazing sequence, done entirely without any dialogue or spoken words.  I would have paid admission for the movie, shown just that scene, and go out satisfied.  

Well, satisfied, except for the fact Carls wife dies at the end of that little sequence.  Yeah, kind of a downer.  But her death ties nicely into the fact that Carl views that he failed her, because he never took her on an adventure to South America.  

See, in my eyes, this movie has three things at its core: The Little Things Count, Failure, and Letting things go.  If you want to see this film and haven't,don't look any further, because SPOILERS are being discussed now, though I will try to limit them.

The theme of failure continues with the villain, who was accused of fraud, as an explorer discovering undiscovered animals and things, and spent his entire life trying capture the bird that drove him to this extent alive.

Carl is also driven to the extreme of proving that he is not a failure, to his late wife, bringing his house to Paradise Falls.  But once there, he opens up her childhood 'Adventure Book' and looks to the back, the 'Stuff I'll Do' section is not blank as he thought it was, instead, it's filled with pictures of their life, and at the end, she writes 'thanks for the adventure, now here's to your future ones!'.  This proves to him that he never failed his wife, and starts the climax of the movie.

It also ties nicely into The Little Things Count category.  None of the things Carl and his wife did were big things.  they were all small, quiet things.  Heck, the movie has Carl's kid sidekick, who he picked up on accident, even says, "I think I like the boring things the most..." when talking about his dad and how they used to hang out before they divorced.

yeah, this movie deals with some heavy things for a kids movie.  I mean, it's not groundbreaking, but it's god damn refreshing.  

The final part of the themes of Up, is Letting things go.  The villain of the piece, never does.  He is willing to kill people to get what he wants, to prove to the world he was not a fraud.  Carl eventually does let it go, and when after the climax loses his house after too many balloons are shot from it, he says, 'it's just a house'.  There's a scene early on in the film where he is trying to protect his house and its possessions from a lightning storm, frantically trying to make everything isn't damaged.  

The antithesis of that scene is after Carl lets go of his failure, and starts throwing things, all sorts of things, out of the house to lighten it up so it can fly again. 

So yeah, I love this film.  it means a lot to me, and I think my theory of the what it means is correct, and the great thing about theories about what films mean, is they're ALL correct.  or at least relevant to the person who thinks them.

Anyway, hoping I'll be able to word what I think of Anno 2205.  See you next time.

Anno 2070

 This time, I'm going to go over the Anno games...all...three that I own.  That's 2070, 2205, and 1800 in order of release date.  There's 3 more before that, all historically based, but those three are the only ones I own.  and honestly all that I wish to own, so that's why we're only reviewing three of the six games.

Anno 2070 was the first Anno game I tried, quite a while ago.  And, despite still owning it, I can't bring myself to play it anymore, even with only 20 hours on it, though I have a suspicion it's more then that...

Why?  Because of Anno 2205, and more importantly, 1800.  Both, but more so Anno 1800, improve the game and add gameplay that appeals to me, so, trying to get into a now outdated and clunky game to me is really hard.

Back to the future!  Wait, shit, wrong franchise.

 

So I'm going by memory, though don't worry, I played the game recently in offline mode on steam for a bit, enough to refresh my memory.

Anyway, Anno is a series of city building games set in different time periods.  This was the first Anno series to be set in the future. It's a future where...I honestly don't know a lot what happened, but I do know Climate Change screwed things up.  Perhaps there's some lore in the campaign that I repeatedly ignore to instead play in sandbox mode. 

Yeah, there's a lot of features in this game before you even start the game.  There's voting, daily missions, annual missions, a story campaign as I mentioned earlier, and even account unlocks for reaching certain achievements ingame.

But the game is at heart a city builder, so I ignored all that and went to sandbox mode, easy of course since I was new at the series and game and just a noob in general, and started building for one of the two factions.

At start you pick one of two factions to play as, each with there own buildings, materials, and citizens to please.  One is the Global Trust, which thinks that the planet earth is there to be plundered, and that climate change clearly was not the fault of corporate greed.   The other is the Eden Project, who are environmentalist hippies, except they are willing to kill you to protect mother earth.

While they play the same, they are not the same.  I mean, Anno is at it's core a game about making simple to complex fabrication chains to please citizens so you can tax them heavily, so both factions are the same on that count.. But, they react to pollution differently, their buildings make different things, they require different fertility's for different plants to grow, and their buildings to power other buildings are radically different.  

I usually played Eden, since I too am an environmentalist that advocates murder.  Eden is all about making a heavy plant based diet for your citizens, using nature friendly power sources, and mines for minerals aren't nearly as pollution heavy as for the Trust.  Of course you need your citizens to be entertained or informed too, so you make the 2070 equivalent of smart phones for them.  

I'll admit I never got too far in the game, having only gotten to early Executives tier, level 3 of Eden citizens.  There are some problems with the game that were solved in future games, that I just can't get over though...

The user interface is clunky, but I don't mind that too much.  No, it's that all buildings do work automatically and don't need anyone to operate them.  I find the lack of needing citizens to be the work force annoying.  Also service buildings, like hospitals and fire stations and police stations have a pre determined radius around them requiring all buildings to get benefits from them to be in that small radius.  In future games they replaced that with a certain amount of road tiles leading away from the building.  ...If you didn't understand that, basically you could make your own, if limited, area of usage with roads in 2205 and 1800.

Also the quests are clunky and hard to understand for me, and come up rarely.  There's also an upgrade system with ships and the ARK, your homebase away from the multiple islands you can colonize, which I don't understand at all.  The graphics also look weird and just...off to me, but that might be the time, I'm not sure.

Anyway, there's also a war component to Anno, which since I played on easy never really used or saw much of.  But you can make warships to attack trade routes, make islands surrender to you, or just protect yourself from optional pirates.

I'd rate Anno 2070 a C+, honestly.  It -feels- like the devs were really trying to make this a good game, but only made a mediocre or average one.  But still, I-wait, there was an expansion to this game that I need to talk about?  Well, damn.

Yes, there was, and it added a new faction that you unlocked by playing the game as Eden or Trust, the brainy scientist or Tech faction.   The expansion is called Deep Ocean, and allows you to not only add these new citizens to your Trust or Eden ones.  But, the Techs require underwater resources, which you can only get from underwater buildings on 'underwater plateaus' or pretty much just underwater islands.  Techs also allow you to build more of the weird upgrade systems and temporary upgrades to production chains if you want, but I could never understand that stuff, even if I loved building underwater and the Techs.  Techs also expand warfare to allow better weapons as defenses or on ships, AND adds aircraft.

So yeah, with the expansion I'd give them a B- or even a solid B.  But I'll admit, I'm biased.  I love science fiction more then historical or fantasy games, and I love the idea of underwater cities.

Anyway, next time, Anno 2205.  TO THE MOON.  or more likely, to bed with me, it's god damn late as I finish this.