At 8bit Island we are unabashedly Oppo fans.  Every time we get our hands on a device to review it catches us off guard with how outstanding the phone is, given the retail price.  Now that Oppo has released their 5G series under the Find X2 line, getting my hands on the $800 Find X2 Lite I have been blown away yet again.

The first thing to note about the Find X2 Lite is that 5G thing which is giving everyone COVID-19.  It hasn’t rolled out everywhere in NZ and in the case of Spark in Wellington, no luck yet. Though the tech in there did see some improvements already, with much faster and more consistent connections on the Hutt Valley train line.  Switching back to my Renox 10x Zoom I noticed it dropped back so there are some improvements in tech, even on 4G while we wait for that sweet 5G coming.

As with all of the Oppo phones, the battery continues to be generous for the price and it rocks a 4025mAh battery like the A91.  I did notice the battery drop faster than the A91 did which is no surprise as every wireless tech advance has more power requirements.  Yet even using it to game and watch videos on the train and lunch break every day, as well as absurd amounts of podcast listening I still got a day and a half out of the battery. With a 20ish minute charge I got half a battery so it is easily good enough.

The phone is filled with Snapdragons giving it a lot of power, which is easily enough for casual gaming. If you are super serious about mobile gaming you may be more inclined to for the high end Find X2 Pro which is also bonkers value for the money, but for $800 there is plenty of power here for your gaming needs.

Another mainstay of the Oppo series is an excellent camera for the price.  With most phones you have to buy their top tier ones to get above average camera arrays, but Oppo tends to load up their range with great cameras. The Find X2 Lite keeps that going with four cameras on the back and an excellent one on the front. With the smarts in the camera this makes for some excellent photos, even with my lack of talent.  

The lack of an SD card slot is a little disappointing.  The 128GB storage space should be plenty but I have always liked having a heap of my data being on an SD card for quick moving.  Even the Find X2 Pro doesn’t have a slot, instead it has a heap more space with 512GB.  One addition that some phones have been axing is the classic 3mm jack. I have adjusted to using bluetooth, but it’s always a handy backup to have if your headphones die.

Given the $799 price tag and the addition of 5G tech, the Find X2 Lite is a no brainer if you are shopping in this price range.  By all accounts it feels like a much better phone than the price presents, and is only beaten for value by the more expensive Oppos.  So you know, go buy it for the 5G revolution.  

The post Oppo Find X2 Lite Review – The mid-range 5G heavy hitter appeared first on 8-Bit Island.

I loved The Last of Us: Part II as shown by my spoiler free review, which covered the mechanics and lightly touched on the story.  Here I am going to dig into the story and it is going to be filled with spoilers. If you don’t want the ending ruined I recommend you stop reading now.

Ready? Snape killed Dumbledore. 

A tale of II badass women

The Last of Us: Part II is a brilliantly structured narrative.  The first half where you play as Ellie, witnessing the death of Joel at the hands of Abby triggering her to take a journey through Seattle to hunt her down is exactly the kind of sequel I expected.  I mean I didn’t expect Joel to be beaten to death in the more violent version of WHAT THE GOLF? but the revenge story felt appropriate for the series.

What I didn’t expect was the second stage where right after Abby confronts Ellie with a gun pointed at her. Here the game jumps back in time so you play the same days as Abby, after she finally got revenge for the death of her father at the hands of Joel.  Initially it felt like it was going to be a short backstory making you feel sorry for her seeing the death of her loving father, but it becomes so much more.

House of Wolves

As Abby you see her as part of the wolves you had been slaughtering, as the community is trying to survive while dealing with a dangerous cult at their door.  Despite there being a truce the bodies of their soldiers are being brought in by the dozens, presumably by a certain Ellie and Tommy. 

As we see Abby is dealing with being in love with her ex, while his pregnant partner rejects Abby, and she eventually creates a friendship with a couple of scars.  All of them being rejected from their homes, make their plan to leave the city for good when the murderous Ellie kills Mel and Owen while Abby is out looking for medicine.

The hunter becomes the hunted … then the hunter … then the hunted.

As Abby’s story progressed I started to feel sorry for her for being hunted by Ellie, but even still when the scene came for Abby to try taking Ellie out, I struggled with trying to kill her.  Regardless of how much of a rage fueled antagonist Ellie was, we have spent too much time with her for me to feel comfortable in that scene. 

When Abby leaves Ellie to live again, she proves she is the lesser of these two evils and Ellie gets to enjoy her undeserved happy ending with Dana on a farm.

In that fight Abby takes a knife to Dana’s throat and Ellie cries that she is pregnant.  Abby says good, because her pregnant friend was killed by Ellie, and Lev calls out and stops Abby killing her.  In that moment I felt Abby should have said something that told Ellie she had killed a pregnant woman too because I felt like Ellie’s conscience got to get off scot free there.  From Ellie’s perspective this moment would make Abby seem more like an evil antagonist, and less like a revenge bent rage monster like Ellie is.

Can you feel, the evil tonight?

Ellie isn’t haunted by what she has done in killing lots of innocent people, but by the death of Joel which doesn’t sit right in the context of the game.  Because she lost one person, she took so many people from their families so she could try to kill one person.  She could have seen the Wolves organisation as not being a good one, but she knew Joel was flawed and couldn’t see how what she was doing was so evil.

The number of encounters with humans and clickers does a disservice to the story.  Four or so hours could have been cut out of the game as by the end they started to feel more like an inconvenience between the major plot moments.  The small open area when Dana and Ellie first leave fits well into the narrative, but the repeated combat encounters didn’t fit as well with the annoying number of them.

Shiv me baby one more time

Other little things annoyed me like the shivs.  Ellie finally upgraded to a knife rather than breakable shivs in the first game which makes so much sense, of course she would have a knife. Abby on the other hand crafts shivs despite being a soldier in a well armed army, if anyone should have a knife it would be her.

Yet despite some flaws and a big slice of ludonarrative dissonance (I have always wanted to use that term), the story is as depressing as it is outstanding.  At the end of the day Abby gets away, though beaten and battered plenty, which she proves herself to be deserving of as she keeps showing some level of mercy. 

Whereas Ellie who even after facing off with Abby and losing, gets to live a happy ending making a loving family home with Dana, and throws it away at another chance for revenge, and ends on her own, unable to even play her guitar because of the fingers she lost in her final fight.

Goody two-shoes

The story is as horrible as it is brilliant.  There aren’t many ‘good guys’ in the story except maybe side characters like Dana and Jesse, and the bad ending for Abby and Ellie is exactly what they deserve. Despite being awful people, both Abby and Ellie are such well developed characters that makes the shocking story such an important journey.

In the end the terrible and unsatisfying ending is what makes the game so damn brilliant, even if I did prefer the ambiguous ending of the first game.

The post The Last of Us: Part II spoiler review – A tale of II bad as women appeared first on 8-Bit Island.

Brian

After a while, you’ve reviewed so many phones that it’s hard to tell when one ends and another begins. So I decided to review the only way I can now, by comparing the A91 to all the other Oppos you should buy.

So many people review phones by way of rewriting the technical specs and adding in a few sentences about how shiny it is. To be fair though, the A91 is pretty and shiny. But how did it make me feel, both about myself and about the world we live in right now?

It didn’t. It’s a phone, people, not an opiate.

Also by arguing with Blair over phones, because hey, gotta pass the time somehow.

Blair

It’s interesting looking at the smartphone market. Apple did the “We are Apple” thing, Samsung did the “We are not Apple” thing, and also I guess Nokia was somewhere there just wondering why no one wanted a 3310 anymore. Then the market expanded massively. Sony released their phones to be waterproof, and Microsoft released theirs with an OS that did its best to remind us that even big IT corporations can miss the goal by a WIDE margin.

Then there’s Oppo.

I hadn’t heard of Oppo until I got out of the Reno 10x Zoom and I realised that sometimes you want to skip the massive advertising markets because these overperformers are there waiting.  Since then I have consistently checked out their phones and been blown away by the value for their prices, even if the name convention has me lost every time.  The Oppo A91 keeps this trend of value for money going.

Mid-range, high-mid range. high-range pricing

Blair

With most brands I have gotten used to a simple model there is a cheap model under $500, a mid range up to $900, and a high end for well over $1800 with some reaching over 2k now.  Oppo phones don’t go that high, and sit somewhere in the middle of the below-mid range pricing to the low end of the high end pricing.

The A91 is below the middle at $650, but you are getting an outstanding phone for that price.  Even more so if you get in early to nab a bluetooth speaker that is available before then end of July.

Brian

I’m unclear on how Oppos business model works, except that I’m now positive every other phone is overpriced.

The A91, as Blair said, costs under $700 and, depending on deals, comes with Extra Goodies. For the quality you’re getting here, which we’ll get into in a minute, that’s really, ludicrously good.

A Stylish phone for those without either

Blair

Look I am sitting here in my Warehouse jeans, Spiderman T-shirt, 5 year old ripped hoodie, and a FIFA U-20 world cup beanie. I don’t know style, but the Oppo A91 does. I was given the Blazing Blue phone to test and it looks gorgeous.  

The whole back has a design that creates light streaks that bend and twist as you move the phone. This is the kind of thing I wouldn’t care about….until I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out  how they did it by turning the phone under the light.  I then did that on at least 7 different occasions because I use my time wisely.

Generally I don’t care about style. because I used to put a phone in a case that covers everything up anyway. As with their previous phones Oppo has you sorted with a case in the box to help accent their coolness. My Reno 10x Zoom has a matte black cover that has a nice strip to show the cameras and brand, and this one comes with a see through jelly case so you can spend as many hours of your day mesmerised by the back without having to worry about dropping your phone.

This also helps as the A91 is super slim and so the cameras raise slightly out of the back, which looks and feels fantastic in the case that Oppo built.

Brian

The thing with Oppo, and the thing that never ceases to amaze me, is that they’re always great. Really, the only thing I can do at this point is compare the A91 to the rest of the A series, or even the upcoming Find X2, because I can no longer fathom a world where an Oppo is not my primary device.

The A91 is ridiculously thin and, while I’ve never really understood the appeal of ultra-thin phones, I can certainly appreciate the damn-near razor’s edge on this one. I keep thinking we’ll hit a forced limit of how thin we can make things, but companies like Oppo keep proving me wrong; it’s less than 8mm thick. How is that even possible?

It also weighs less than any phone I’ve ever held, which makes sense considering it’s basically paper-thin.

With regard to the colour, I cackled out loud when I saw it was called ‘Blazing Blue’. This is because, during my edgy teen poetry phase, I wrote a ballad about a demonic duck named Raoul, and described his eyes as ‘blazing blue’. I realise that this is wholly subjective to me, specifically me, and only me, but I wanted to mention it and give a shoutout to the design team who share this penchant for hyperbolic drama with me.

This is how it feels when doves cry.

Not exactly Camera shy

Brian

There are four cameras on the back of the A91, each more camera-esque than the last. The selfie camera sits in silent judgement on the front, while the rear cameras consist of a 48MP camera, an 8MP ultra-wide angle camera, and two 2MP cameras.This leads to a wonderful 48MP camera setup, with the AI we all know and love. This also means the return of everybody’s favourite ‘Let’s see what happens when I max out Beauty Mode’, and, uh, yeah. Hey, if you want this, awesome, but I prefer the light touch. Which is, thankfully, Oppo’s preferred option as well.

Blair

If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry; it means they take some super detailed photos. On top of that, the smarts in the phone keep getting better, so they make the photos look better than anything I could do with a professional DSLR camera.

On top of that they’ve added a shaky mode to the videos so those tiny hand shakes you do doesn’t make your videos tough to watch.  This is especially valuable when you are walking behind your child videoing them doing something great.  You can actually see what they did instead of watching moving colours shaking around a screen.

MORE POWER! MORE!

Blair

I’ll be the first person to admit that when it comes to phone power, I am not totally sure how powerful a snap or a dragon pumps out. I can say absolutely every game I played on the A91 ran like a dream. The toughest question then becomes how much battery life will you have.

Before I committed to the Oppo ecosystem I never had a phone last the day if I was playing games semi-regularly. For the purposes of testing this phone I put my Switch aside (sorry WHAT THE GOLF!) and just gamed on my phone.  The battery was at just over 50% at the end of the day. 

This is crazy, under normal use I can get the phone to last 2 days easily and, if it does run out of juice, it doesn’t need hours on the charger.

Brian

By now I’m an old hat at setting up new phones, but honestly it’s never been this easy. It took a while, but after allowing access to my Google backups the A91 was ready to go with all my apps ready and waiting. No, it didn’t log me in to everything automatically, but it also didn’t scrub my back in the shower. Which would really have raised several, far more concerning issues.

The super-sweet addition in this little friend is the ultra-fast VOOC 3.0 charging, bringing the 5000mAh battery from 0mAhs to full mAhs in about 40 minutes. It also lasts just over 2 full days with normal conditions, as Blair said, which is ludicrous. Unless you make a serious tactical error, your A91 will not die unexpectedly. 

Oppo, you’ve done it again, and I don’t understand it. I just appreciate it.

Turns out we agree

Brian

My favourite part of reviewing the A91 came when I was looking for the included screen protector, which apparently comes pre-applied to the phone. That’s ten minutes I’ll never get back, but at least the A91’s screen is unscratched, and that’s what really matters.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Oppo know what they’re doing. The A91 is an ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-fast, and ultra-long-lasting device, for a ludicrously low price.

Unless you want a better Oppo, this is a solid buy.

Blair

$650 is not a lot of money for a good phone, and the Oppo A91 isn’t a good phone; it’s a great phone. Seriously. 

Between the cameras, the awesome software tweaks, and the powerful battery, this is a no-brainer for someone wanting a phone in the mid-price range. My only recommendation would be to buy a more expensive Oppo, because you get even more awesome for a lower than expected price.

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