Overall, Beans has some charm, and while the humor (and puns) may be just a bit beyond younger players, it manages to be a good, if slow, introduction to the tycoon sim genre. Best Coffee With a Cause: Grounds & Hounds Three Blend Starter Kit. A Dope Black-Owned Coffee Brand: Dope Coffee Organic Guatemalan Coffee Beans. Best Mild Roast: Lavazza Super Crema Coffee Blend. Technically, that's intentional to ease players into the game, but this also drags out the action significantly, meaning that at times, players can walk away for a while to take a break without any consequences for being away from their keyboard. Best Medium-Roast Coffee: Peet's Coffee Big Bang Medium Roast. Unfortunately, the pacing can feel way too slow as you start to build your shop empire one coffee at a time. Thanks to its graphics and central concept, it may not have great appeal for some players, but the flow of action does make it accessible for younger players who have a concept of money. The graphics are old school and pixelated, and the music is repetitive and can get on the nerves in long play sessions, but the game is intuitive. To that end, Beans does an admirable job of easing players into the game flow. The goal is to open more shops in town and become a tycoon. Beans: The Coffee Shop Simulator is, initially, a slow-paced game where the player builds a business and then tries to grow customer appeal, add to the menu, add amenities and events to drive traffic, and expand the staff. ![]() ![]() Leaving behind his terminally ill mother, Rigo heads to NYU, where Will and Abby met, to tie up the film’s storylines in a neat, unsurprising bow.If caffeine is a stimulant, this tycoon simulation's drawn-out gameplay and action is clearly caffeine free. But the script must move on, to Javier and Isabel’s son, Rigo (played as a college student by Àlex Monner). Playing a worldly business owner who falls in love with the newlywed wife (Laia Costa of the one-take feature Victoria) of his young foreman, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Banderas, along with Costa, almost makes the preposterous love-triangle storyline work. A stand-alone film about their quasi-feudal situation-with the simmering tension between Banderas’ Señor Saccione, a lovelorn tycoon, and Costa’s Isabel, the principled wife of his most treasured employee-might have made for an interesting update on The Marriage of Figaro. The insta-love might give off bad vibes since he declares love after one day but manages not to contact her for a weeks-long period. Honestly, it’s a bit rushed, and she didnt even know his first name on the day she slept with him. It’s a relief when the action abruptly transitions to an agricultural estate in Andalusia, where Banderas lends some much-needed gravitas that even Patinkin can’t muster as Dylan’s kindly grandfather. Coffee & Vanilla has beautifully drawn characters but so far, the plot is a bit gushy. Nor is there a single believable instance of trauma, despite the script’s heavy reliance on sudden tragedy. Though the film’s plot spans several decades, there is little sense of the passage of time. The utterly forgettable second section deals with Will and Abby’s child, the now-grown Dylan (Cooke). That first chapter of Life Itself is the most eye-roll-worthy, but at least it’s memorable. Still, I think we’re supposed find this pale imitation of Llewyn Davis Byronically charming, even when he tells his wife that her favorite singer, Bob Dylan, sounds like he’s singing with a “cock in his mouth.” By the time our second narrator-yeah, that’s a thing-tells us that Abby is the kind of wife any man would want because she’s beautiful, nurturing, and willing to put anything in her mouth (at a sushi restaurant, but the implication is that she’s remarkably low-maintenance-she didn’t even cry as a newborn), Fogelman’s tedious, artificial ideas about love and “the perfect woman” begin to mire the film in a fatal blandness. ![]() There’s a lot of claptrap in these early scenes about unreliable narrators and purported heroes-cues that we shouldn’t trust Will’s words. Through voice-over narration and extended flashbacks, we learn about Will’s relationship with his wife, Abby (Wilde), whose recent departure has left him in his current state. After getting himself thrown out of a coffee shop, he arrives at the office of his therapist (a thoroughly squandered Bening), sipping from a spiked cup of joe for court-appointed treatment. At first glance, Isaac’s Will, a struggling screenwriter in New York, isn’t nice at all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |