A Small Ranting # 1: Based on a True Story.

Here's the True Story

When I first saw trailers for The Haunting in Connecticut I swore that I would never see that movie. I hate movies that are based on "true stories" or "true events" because when they're turned into movies, they always lean much more to the fictional side of the events that are being declared true, thus rendering all factual points being made moot. Not just in horror, but in any genre. I hate them. They're not workings of the human imagination, they don't do dick for us aside from show us how sometimes we can be genuinely good creatures to one another, but most of the time show us how fucking right awful we are to each other. The trailers looked ridiculous, another flash in the pan ghost story about some family moving into a fuckered house and experiencing all sorts of fuckery from every shade in the fuckered rainbow. Which is a lot of colors, let me tell you. These kinds of movies go back to fiction from a long year ago. About a hundred years last Thursday to be exact, or to be exaggerated, you pick. Books like Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and my personal favorite, Richard Matheson's 1971 novel, Hell House. Just to name a couple.

But back to the TRUTH. I had no interest in this movie, for obvious reasons. A co-worker of mine got onto the subject of horror pictures, and I said there hasn't been one in a very, very long time that's even unnerved me a little bit. At least from the American side of the cinematic ocean. Martyrs was a bit unnerving, but it is a beautiful piece of horror cinema, as is Takashi Miike's Audition. Neither has anything to do with anything supernatural, but they imply supernatural goings on occasionally, but there's nothing supernatural about them. Sometimes, real world horror applied in fictional settings is much more effective than monsters or ghosts or ghouls. True story. Moving on. This co-worker said that The Haunting in Connecticut scared him, so for some reason my logic detector went out the window and I said, "I'll have to watch it then." I don't know why I said that, or why I made that sort of decision. What scares me is a massive contrast to what'll scare other people on any given day. I mean, there's a reason why people come out of horror movies all scared, or they'll turn their eyes away from the screen, or jump and scream; and why I laugh through 99.9 percent of them.

So, then I watched it. And I hated it. It was ridiculous Hollywood horror cinema at its finest, far too reliant on jump scares, and never daring to go to the edge of what's acceptable in order to jar your minds or your imaginations. Before the movie ended, however, I started doing research on the supposed "true story" that this movie was based on.

Yup.

Thanks to the modern era that we live in and the simple fact that information of all kinds and every sort is available at our finger tips, this bullshit marketing scheme of "based on a true story" falls entirely flat. Like The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror before it, The Haunting of Connecticut hasn't an ounce to truth to it whatsoever it. What it is is the vulgar fictions of two demented "paranormal investigators," Ed and Lorraine Warren.

First, The Exorcist. I know there's a lot of Catholics out there. I know that there are a lot of Christians out there. Both of which manage to let their belief systems interrupt the parts of their brain that process logic and reason. That's not an insult, or at least it's not meant to be one, I promise. What it is is evidence that these filmmakers are preying on you because of your belief system to sell their fucking movies. And I'm a FAN of The Exorcist, I was even named after it. The Exorcist movie, and the novel before it, was based on a "real life demon possession!" That of a still unidentified young boy where all the supernatural happenings either happened when no one else was in the room but the boy, or can be logically explained. The boy was also a known prankster before he began his little fits that led to him being declared as possessed by a demon and eventually exorcised by Catholic Priests and the like on numerous occasions. This went on for a while until the boy was hospitalized, then POOF. Miraculously cured of all demons inside him. An elaborate hoax to get out of going to school? That's the cleanest explanation, and it just so happens to follow Occam's razor. William Peter Blatty heard of the incident while in college and that lead him to write his novel, The Exorcist, which I still haven't ever really read. William Friedkin's filmed version of the story does a brilliant job of blending the supernatural and real world stuff to the point where you almost never know if Regan is possessed or not. At least until the end of the film. But it's entirely fiction.

Just as The Amityville Horror, which just so happens to have had the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, and their declaration of it being a demonic possession of an entire house. The Warrens used to be Ghost Chasers, but that all ended when The Exorcist film was released and saw an enormous amount of success, so they began to chase demonic possessions instead; trying to capitalize on the success of the infamous horror movie. Amityville followed The Exorcists path and had a book written about the events that has been edited and re-edited time and time again because, as with all these stories, no one can get their stories straight. OJ Simpson's defense team did a better job getting his story straight than these families can. The book was followed by a great deal of movies based on the supposed event, including a remake in 2005, starring that Ryan Reynolds guy, that further pushed the event into ludicrous fictional areas.

Then we get to The Haunting in Connecticut. If this movie scared you, you're a pussy. That's all there is to it. None of this happened, in fact, the co-author of the book that this is based on disowned it and has said that he's glad the thing is out of print. He was told by the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine (I like writing it like that, it makes me sound sophisticated, or even journalistic!), to just make shit up and make it scary to fill in the gaps between the stories being told by the family that lived in this supposed haunted house. A family that was going involved in drug abuse and alcoholism and none of them could get the story right whatsoever.

The movie itself is an elaborate joke made on me to get me somewhat interested in a film that riffs on several basic plots from the books I mentioned in the first few paragraphs of this blog. There's a seance, there's ectoplasm, there's all sorts of weird stuff going on; all of it eeriely similar to Hell House and The Haunting of Hill House.

Based on a true story my ass.

Here's something to think about, in reflection of this trite film and how somehow "based on a true story" is some killer marketing ploy that a whole lot of folk believe in. There's a film out there, a horror picture, from 1984 that involves several teenagers having sleeping issues. They have a shared dream and they refuse to sleep that leads to their eventual deaths. The film was based on a series of articles in the LA Times in the 1970s about Hmong refugees that were suffering from horrible nightmares, they refused to sleep, that lead to some eventually dying because of it.

The movie is A Nightmare on Elm Street, it's influenced by true events with graphically fictionalized elaborations on what those dreams entailed; it was immensely successful, and never once was it touted as being based on a true story. It didn't need to be. Elm Street was art, the by product of real world information being processed through the human imagination so that we may understand it better, or come to terms with it happening. Anything and everything that's "based on true events" is just a load of bullshit being sold to you for being gullable.

IT HAS BEGUN: MORTAL KOMBAT

...Again?

Indeed. In 1992, Mortal Kombat was released in arcades much to the dismay of angry mothers and overly sensitive types all over America. In the budding genre of fighting games, one had to do something somewhat unique and-slash-or original to stand out -- or stand up, I should say -- against the competition. Street Fighter had paved the way for a genre that came almost out of nowhere and sucker punched kids like me into dropping a whole lot of coins into the arcade cabinets to beat the crap out of my friends' digital avatar representations of themselves. Or the fantastical representations of themselves to be more accurate, 'cause no one I know dresses like fighting game characters. I'd probably laugh at them in a very mocking sort of way if they did. NetheRealm Studios (then a part of Midway, but now a part of complete awesomeness) did just that and came out full steam ahead with punches swinging and kicks flinging, and Johnny Cage punching dudes in the balls. Mortal Kombat just let it out there in a fiction that mashed the basic ideas of Big Trouble in Little China and Enter the Dragon and did so with copious amounts of digital blood and the trademark fatalities that cemented Mortal Kombat not only in video/fighting game history, but in pop culture as well.

After a series of somewhat disappointing ventures -- from the admirable attempts in the 3D realm of fighting games such as Deadly Alliance and Deception, to the complete and utter fail of Armageddon and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe -- the guys and gals at NetheRealm Studios have brought Mortal Kombat back to the forefront of the fighting game genre and blasted their way through the competition to get them noticed again. The competition over the years has fallen off a great deal. Where once it seemed that almost every game developer was trying to make some sort of fighting game to capitalize on the success of the Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats, the tournament brackets has dwindled down to just a handful. Namco held the top spot for several years with the constant entries in the Tekken and Soul Calibur franchises -- although, Soul Calibur has constantly been going downhill in my opinion since Soul Calibur II -- while being closely followed by Tecmo's Dead or Alive (only because they were still making them at the time, not because that game is a quality fighting game at all) and Sega's Virtua Fighter franchise, which has most certainly seen better days since Sega hasn't released a console version of the latest iteration and probably won't. Just a few years ago, however, Capcom came back almost quoting the N.W.A. song, "Hello," saying, "I started this motherfuckin' fighting shit, and this is the motherfucking thanks I get?" and released Street Fighter IV, one of the most solid fighting games I've ever played. They subsequently updated it and released a second version of the game, Super Street Fighter IV, and it continued to rock the house. Not to be outdone, Namco released the equally as solid Tekken 6 as a multiplatform release for the first time in the series' history. Then Capcom answered the call to the fans and delivered Marvel vs. Capcom 3: The Fate of Two Worlds. It was just time. With the top fighting game development teams creating some of the best fighters to date, it was time for NetheRealm to do another Mortal Kombat game.

The lingering question was, however, would it be a good one? Ever since NetheRealm turned to the 3D playing field with Mortal Kombat 4, the series has slowly been reduced to a mere shadow of the bloody arcade powerhouse it once was. Deadly Alliance was a step in the right direction, Deception furthered that step. But Armageddon was a giant step backwards, even though it boasted the playability of every character to have appeared in any Mortal Kombat game. The Kreate-A-Fighter and Kreate-A-Fatality modes just seemed to weaken the series, and the game play that was born from Deadly Alliance just didn't have a lasting appeal to it. I, myself, would still rather pop in a copy of some form or another of Mortal Kombat II or Mortal Kombat 3 and click the buttons away at combos that had been burned into that specific part of my brain that I had dedicated to the remembering of fighting game move lists and the like. I can still remember several fatalities from both those games (and a few from the original Mortal Kombat). Then along came the biggest let down in the franchise's lengthy history: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. It just wasn't Mortal Kombat. The blood and gore had been seriously toned down, and there were no fatalities worth mentioning. And that's not even the most important part of a fighting game, that's just the perks of playing a Mortal Kombat fighting game. The game's engine was a play on the Deadly Alliance engine and it had too many gimmicks going on at one time.

Would Mortal Kombat be any good? The questioned lingered quite heavily in the cloudy part of my brain that hides the memory of chunking down over sixty bucks at the arcade when Mortal Kombat 3 first came out. Yes, in one night.

Flawless Victory

Not only is the answer, "yes," but it's a very hard hitting, brutal assault on the senses sort of yes that you'd expect from a forceful drunk after you asked him to step outside. The kind of yes that punches you in the nose and you don't remember what happens after that moment 'cause your face stings, you taste blood, your ears ring, and you can't see shit thanks to the girly tears watering your orbitals.

NetheRealm Studios went back to what made Mortal Kombat... well, Mortal Kombat, and capitalized on that more so than when they capitalized on the birth of the fighting game genre. We're treated to a three-dimensional world that focuses on a two-dimensional playing field that takes the game back to its hard hitting roots. The game flows like a brilliant mixture between Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3. But more on that later. The game runs smoothly and frantically, yet has brief moments that are sure to jar those folks that aren't that comfortable with the human anatomy. You know, the bits and pieces that lay underneath the skin. Those are called X-Ray moves, and while I always thought the UFC games would be the first to employ such a tactic (the first time I'd ever seen anything like what's being done in the new MK game was on a UFC related program), NetheRealm beat them to the punch in a very hard way. You see bones break, livers frozen and smashed, skulls and spines crushed, all sorts of horrible things that are bound to illicit the same responses that the arcade versions once did when someone performed a fatality. The characters are rendered wonderfully with a few exceptions (Smoke's hair, the lack of pretty faces in the women at certain points, but hey, let's not be TOO vain), and the game never loses that spit polish shine that fighting games NEED to have. The only time the visuals take a turn towards the downward spiral is during the game's cinematic sequences during Story Mode. Instead of doing them all in-game, utilizing the same engine, they opted for semi-pre-rendered sequences that lose the clarity of the game's engine, and you can see those tale tell signs of compression at a few points. But let us not be too picky. The sound has some minor issues, but mostly not during game play. I've seen a few during game play -- the sound being slightly delayed during X-Ray moves, and the character specific dialog going out completely -- but mostly it's been during autosave junctions and mismatched dialog during those junctions.

The stages are more than a welcome sight. With the current trend in Capcom's fighters to be the minimal approach in regards to the fighting locations (both Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 have just a handful of stages), Mortal Kombat goes all out, offering a plethora of familiar locations, several new ones, and some night/dawn/day variations of others, we're offered plenty of variety of places to beat our opponents to a bloody pulp in. A lot of the stages are revisions of stages from the first three Mortal Kombat games, updated, polished, and prettier than ever. There's the Pit, Shang Tsung's Throne Room, Goro's Lair, Shao Kahn's arena, and so on and so forth. There's also some really lovely new stages like Shang Tsung's Flesh Pits which appear to be one part Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory and one part Hellraiser Cenobitial lounge room. Y'know, the place they'd go to relax after they've torn your soul apart. In fact, now that I think of it, without getting too Cenobitial, there seems to be a lot of influence from Clive Barker's fiction going on in the new Mortal Kombat, but that could be just me. The game is visually quite beautiful in a very dark and twisted sort of way, and I couldn't be anymore the happier about that.

FIGHT!

But as with any fighting game, the main importance is always on game play. How it controls, it precise or wishy washy; is it a quality fighting game? I think so. I've played a lot of fighting games, and while I'm no expert tournament level player, I like to believe I can judge the quality of a fighting game just by playing it. This is one of the most hectic fighting games I've played that wasn't Marvel vs. Capcom related, and that's not a bad thing. Unlike the Vs. Series from Capcom, a lot of what's going on in the new Mortal Kombat is intended. Although, I've discovered, this new Mortal Kombat is very button masher friendly. Which isn't a bad thing at all. That allows new players to not feel overwhelmed and get beaten all the time, which is never a good thing when you're just getting into a fighting game. The game is really well polished and balanced as far as single player fighting and regular versus fighting goes. I'm not sure about online play since the PlayStation Network has been down since the game's release. Even Kratos, the character a lot of people were worried about not being balanced at all, is quite balanced and open for the massive beat down against skilled players. The moves are elegantly timed and worth learning (I've not encountered a useless move, yet) and there's a lot to learn in terms of competitive fighting in this game. The only downfall I've found in the gameplay is that a lot of the characters don't quite play the way they used to. Some of them have been given minor changes to the way they used to play, while others (Liu Kang and Raiden) have been overhauled completely in comparison to Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3. The three tiered super-bar is quite helpful as well. The enhanced moves give you a little bit of edge with some moves and delivering more damage with others. Some moves, like Sektor's teleport punch and Kabal's Dash, gain a frame or two of invulnerability, while others, like Sub-Zero's ice blast, actually do damage instead of just freezing the opponent. The dial-a-combo's from Mortal Kombat 3 are there as well, but as just a collection of preprogrammed default combos and not the begin all/end all of the game's fighting engine. While I've not discovered any massive string combos yet, I know that they're there, and I'm eager to learn one or two. The one thing that isn't present that has been present in the 2D Mortal Kombat games since the original is the effectiveness of the pop-up when you jump in and kick someone. The traditional Scorpion combo of jumping in with a low-hitting jump kick and then hitting them with his trademark spear just doesn't work anymore. And, since I've been playing those first three MK games for a very long time, I keep trying to do those kinds of combos to leave myself open for a whole lot of humiliation.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

And copious amounts of it, too. I'm a self-proclaimed gore-hound and have been since I was a wee lad watching Friday the 13th with the same glee that most kids my age reserved for birthdays and Christmas presents. It was one of the attractive draws for me towards Mortal Kombat to begin with, and I'm more than happy to say that this game does, indeed, return to the roots of what Mortal Kombat is in terms of gore, and I'd dare say they pushed it a whole lot farther. The bloodshed in the game is always present and it is abundant. The blood stays on the ground when it splatters there, the characters take a whole array of horrible wounds from destroyed orbital sockets, to flayed flesh, to busted noses and even exposed brainmeat. The game does not let up. It's a relentless assault on decency through a digital format that leaves the real folks safe and unharmed, except for maybe a little ego bruising. And it gets worse with the fatalities. With only one or two being absolute stinkers, the fatalities of the game are just what the developers promised: memorable dispatches in the unrealistic variety that'll either make you laugh at the almost absurdity of them, or you'll cringe at the brutal nature of them. A lot of the fatalities are mixtures of several fatalities characters had in the first three games, or updated versions of them, and a lot of them are brand new expeditions into the realm of near-medieval torture. Even the innards of the characters have been beautifully rendered in a completely horrific sort of way.

Select Your Fighter

The roster of characters for this Mortal Kombat should be familiar to anyone that's familiar themselves with Mortal Kombat at all. All the characters appearing in this game, with the exception of one (two for the PlayStation 3 version) are from the first three Mortal Kombat games. Scorpion and Sub-Zero are there, Liu Kang and Kung Lao are there, Goro, Shao Kahn, Kintaro and Shang Tsung are there; Mileena, Kitana and Jade; Johnny Cage; you get the idea. Only Quan Chi is from one of the later games in the series, and seeing how Quan Chi is one of the best characters introduced post MK3, he's quite accepted. The other character, the one exclusive to the PlayStation 3, is Kratos, from God of War, and he fits right at home with the rest of the characters. He fits so at home with the cast of Mortal Kombat, that it literally feels like NetheRealm just ripped him right out of God of War III and didn't have to do anything to him to make him fit. Each character has been slightly updated in comparison to their looks from the older games and it works really well. The design efforts that went into redesigning the classic characters from those games has really payed off in the end product. NetheRealm has come along way since doing simple palette swaps of characters to beef up the roster. But worry not, those palette swaps are still in there after a fashion. If you pre-ordered the game from GameStop, Best Buy or Amazon, you got a special retro look for one of the three original ninja in the game: Sub-Zero, Scorpion, or Reptile, which is a mix between their costumes in Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II. It also gave you their original fatalities, which were beautifully rendered, and I finally get to do my all-time favorite fatality ever in an MK game: Sub-Zero's Spine Rip. The game sports twenty-eight playable fighters (two of which have two different sets of animations, Sektor and Cyrax), two costumes for each fighter, and three non-playable boss characters. That's quite a decent cast of characters for a fighting game and there's more on the way. The Lady in Red (or Skarlet) and Kenshi (from the later MK games) are slated to be DLC releases some time this year. Large rosters have become almost necessary in the current fighting game scene, and Mortal Kombat doesn't disappoint.

Back to the Beginning

The game doesn't just return to its roots in terms of gameplay and gore and all that, but also in setting and story telling in the game's Story Mode. I'm one of the rare, oddball sorts that actually pays attention to fighting game storylines, which is why MK has remained in my library despite some of the rather disappointing efforts. Mortal Kombat has always had a rather interesting story going on in it, and it's a lot more cohesive than what Street Fighter and Tekken have to offer. Which isn't a knock on Tekken or Street Fighter, just that some of the stuff that's going on in those game's stories is either really out there or really goofy.

The game picks up where Armageddon left off and everyone is dead except Raiden and Shao Kahn. Now, I dunno about you guys and this is a total tangent rant, but I've always loathed how Raiden has been pronounced in the Mortal Kombat games. It's supposed to be pronounced RAI, like eye, den. Not RAYden. He's slightly based off of the character Lightning from Big Trouble in Little China, but also based on the deity of Raijin (rye-jean). So, there's that. But anyway, Shao Kahn's beating Raiden to shit and just before delivering the final blow, Raiden brainmails himself in the past and lets him in on what ultimately happens. I don't know how this works, but I don't question the capabilities of deities in fiction. Now Raiden in the past knows the ultimate outcome of the Mortal Kombat tournament (I still prefer the Shaolin Tournament for Martial Arts as it was called in the original game, as the Mortal Kombat tournament sounds a bit flakey) but is only provided a few glimpses into how that outcome comes about. And by in the past I mean just as the first tournament in the very first Mortal Kombat game is beginning. The story unravels there with a total of seventeen chapters -- if I remember correctly -- where you play as a different character for each chapter, and it covers the story that spreads across the first three original Mortal Kombat games. And it's quite satisfying, very challenging, and pleasantly surprising, as things don't turn out the way they did in the original trilogy. You'll find yourself often pitted against multiple opponents or placed in other unfair situations. My ONLY complaint about the Story Mode is that it doesn't seem that anyone who writes a martial arts tournament into any kind of work of fiction knows how martial arts tournaments work. You don't go around challenging folks. There are brackets and whatnot, kind of like the NBA playoffs, and everything builds towards an ultimate climax.

FINISH HIM

In conclusion, I'd have to say that yes, Mortal Kombat is back. Almost like it had never left (or fell into a cycle of mediocre releases). The franchise has been resurrected and has taken its rightful place in the fighting game landscape, butting heads with the other top tier franchises in Tekken and Street Fighter. If you were ever a fan of the Mortal Kombat games or that first movie (I've yet to meet a fan of the second one), then check the game out. You owe it to yourself.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds

I finally feel as though I can give a proper review of this game as I've played a decent amount of it and have gone through almost every character in one fashion or another. A disclaimer to begin with, I review games differently than most others that write these things. I try my hardest not to break the game down into it's individual parts, because, to me, that's not properly analyzing the product as a whole. With that said, however, this is a fighting game which puts it apart from something like Dead Space 2, the last game I reviewed. Thus there will be a lot of talk about the individual parts.

On with the show:

First the obvious: the entire Vs. series of games from Capcom, with a few exceptions, have been games made to appeal to a wider audience than their other fighters like Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. Going back to the two pre-Vs. games in X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes, the games have had a much more simplified manner of playing and not a lot of variance in the execution of moves. There are no charge characters like Guile or M.Bison from Street Fighter here -- even if Guile and M.Bison appear in the game -- and there's no intense Zangief styled 360 rotation moves to pull of devastating wrestling attacks. It's designed so that anyone can pick up the sticks and feel as though they're actually playing the game. That being said, however, the timing on Marvel vs. Capcom 3's gameplay is quite precise and unforgiving in a lot of instances. Especially if you're the kind of player going after those devastating combos that leave the other player feeling completely helpless.

The gameplay is fast, hectic, and intense. It's the kind of fighting game where sitting around and feeling your player out for a round or two just doesn't work. You've gotta have a good knowledge base of how your character works before the fight begins, and you've gotta be pretty decent at executing that knowledge base if you want to put the hurt on people. The gameplay is also FUN. I've not had this much fun, personally, in the Vs. series of games in a very long time. And for a series of games that were designed to be total fan-service, I would assume that would be one of the most important factors.

The selection of characters is a fantastic assortment of who's who from both sides of the battle. The selection process was a long, legal battle to get the characters that do appear in the game, but I think the end result is well worth it. There's a lot of familiar faces missing from the previous game (and some long-standing characters that also didn't make the cut). The reason that Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had so many characters, however, was that the game's visuals and battle data was all copy and pasted from other games. There were only a handful of sprites that were new to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Cable, Marrow, Amingo, and a few others) and everything else was ripped from Darkstalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, MSH vs. Street Fighter, the first Marvel vs. Capcom game, and the Street Fighter Alpha series. Visually, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was quite disappointing in that those recycled sprites didn't age well and became very pixelated (like Morrigan for instance), and even the new sprites didn't have the same polished feel as something from a Street Fighter III. Especially when set against the three dimensional backgrounds of the game. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is using a new engine (of which only two characters found in the game were previously rendered on; Chris Redfield and Wesker) in MT Framework, thus everything was being designed from the ground up. The animations for Chris and Wesker, while keeping the tone of the characters, are a bit different from Resident Evil 5; Ryu, Chun-Li and Gouki don't have any borrowed assets from Street Fighter IV, and Morrigan is actually brought into a new game with a new character model. Finally.

The character selection can be a little off when first experienced or first glanced, particularly on the Marvel Comics side of things. Especially if you don't read Marvel Comics or have a small understanding of what the New Marvel is trying to do with its properties. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of missing and/or absent faces that people would come to expect from another Vs. game, but people tend to forget that the last Vs. game came out ten or so years ago, and the landscape of Marvel Comics has changed drastically. A lot of characters that appeared in MvC2, for instance, are no longer relevant in the comics world (Gambit, Rogue, Sabretooth) and some of the characters in the game have risen up to take their places (Deadpool, X-23, and She-Hulk, for instance). While there may not be as many characters in this one compared to the previous one, I think the wide variety of the selectable characters from M.O.D.O.K. to Amaterasu balance the game out firecely. I'd also like to mention that with a much more compact selection of characters to chose from, it restricts the selection process and almost forces people to choose more characters. From a personal standpoint, I've used and have wanted to use more characters in this game than I ever did in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 across the arcade release, the Dreamcast release, and the more recent PlayStation Network release of the game. Each character is also presented in four different color schemes as per usual with Capcom's fighters. Some of them, like Spider-Man's selection, are all sorts of wonderful as I love Spider-Man's black and white costume the most even after all these years he hasn't worn it, and others are just painful on the eyes. One of Cap's and two of Magneto's are this way.

Visually, the game does what it's supposed to do. The design of the game was intended to be a living comic book, if I remember correctly, and it does just that. Each character model's rendering looks as though it could have been pencilled, inked and colored by any given comic book artist and then thrown into the game. This is one of the few games that really captures that vibe well, especially for a comic book related game. I don't know if this is a cell-shading process or what, but the end result is a rather brilliantly colored spectical of constant action. One of my biggest fears about fighting games going to a three-dimensional presentation from a two-dimensional one was the loss of intricate details such as flowing clothing, facial expressions, and the like, but this game has further cemented what Capcom has been doing with Street Fighter the past few years, and that fear has been silenced completely. There's a lot of detail going on in this game that, to me, rivals some of the animation that SNK has done with the King of Fighters series for a very long time. The backgrounds are also really well done, though I wish there was a background viewer of some sort in the game's gallery so you could see what was going on and fully appreciate it as it's almost nearly impossible to do so while playing the game. The backgrounds are just as varied as the characters, though there's a lot less of them, which is a bit of a downer for me. I miss the days of old when every character had their own background full of details, and then there were special backgrounds for specific things. Like the bottom of the Pit when you fought Reptile in Mortal Kombat, or the tall grass field in Australia where Ryu and Sagat fight in Street Fighter Alpha 2. My favorite backgrounds presented here are the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and the Tricell Laboratory (which is full of Lickers and a Tyrant).

The sound of the game is just bat-poop crazy. There's so much going on all the time it's hard to decipher what's what at times. The character vocalizations are more present here than in any of the previous games, or any other fighting game for that matter, and they really do illustrate the personalities of the characters. Deadpool, by far and far, is the most hilarious and outspoken character of the game. From his opening game taunts against Wolverine, Magneto or any Street Fighter character ("I love Street Fighter! Would you mind signing your spleen for me?!), to his fake Shoryuken, to the random names for his own moves (Katana-Rama! Chimichangas!), and finishing it up with his win-quotes, which are done in pure Deadpool style. He breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to you. Wolverine sounds gruff and growling as always, but it is definitely a different voice actor this time around. Spider-Man mocks and is quite playful, Doom is dominant and egotistical, M.O.D.O.K. is insane, X-23 is trying to hard to be a better Wolverine, so on and so forth. Capcom really went all out to capture the what makes Marvel's characters... well, Marvel's characters and nailed it on the head with all of them. And they didn't do too shappy with the Capcom side either. The game also comes with a really neat Japanese voice over track option for the Capcom side, and if you set it to "original" you'll get a nice presentation of how the characters have always been shown. Certain characters (Ryu, Zero, Arthur) will speak Japanese, while others (Chris, Wesker) will speak english.

There's a ton of music in the game as well. Each of the nine stages has three different themes going on at different times, and each character has their own theme, a lot of which are brand new, others are remixed versions of their classic themes from other games.

The presentation of the game, from the cinematic sequences which are nothing short of amazing, to the game's menus and game's modes are all well done. There's the traditional fighting game stuff of course (arcade, versus, online battles) and there's the training mode which, I have to say is a stroke of genius on Capcom's part, has the option to simulate connection speed. Part of the reason I don't play fighters online is because I can't adjust very well to bad connections and lag (the other reasons are input delay, and it lacks the intimacy and fun of being right next to the person you're playing against). Here you can select what kind of connection you are playing at or who you're playing against has and relearn the characters accordingly. There's also a Mission mode that operates like the Trial mode from Street Fighter IV and gives you some time to learn specific moves and combos for every character in the game.

All in all, the game was more than well done, and I think it was more than worth the ten year wait for it. Not everyone is going to like it for whatever reason, but it's a solid fighter that presents itself as a game that anyone can pick up and play and it executes that presentation very well. On the flipside of that, however, it's also got a great deal of depth to it for all those tournament-like players, and frame-counters and the like. I think the people that would enjoy this game the most are, of course, people that REALLY enjoy fighting games, and fans of Capcom and/or Marvel.

Bits and Pieces 8: ENTER THE SUBTITLE.

Nerd Shit

So Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation are coming out on Blu-Ray on April 19th, 2011. Two shitty movies made by some fucking dude that has no idea how a martial arts tournament works and a complete fucking asshat that no one should really pay attention to. Although I was a bit fond of the original attempt at turning Mortal Kombat into a movie, I have since grown up and pushed the action button, and realized that, just like his godawful attempts at making Resident Evil into movies, that guy ripped everything that was Mortal Kombat out of the movie and threw it in the trash, then made things up as he went along. Seriously, not one real fatality in the game? Hokey, pokey martial arts sequences that were better rendered in their native China than in any American flick EVAR?! It was nothing more than a case of some snooty filmmaker snob saying, "HEY, WE CAN DO STORIES BETTER THAN THOSE GUYS CAN, SO LETS JUST FUCK SHIT UP!"

This happens all the time in American cinema. Just look at every superhero movie made in the last two decades (minus the first two Blade movies, 'cause those were better than any comic Blade had ever been in) or any movie based on a video game. Especially Resident Evil and that Tomb Raider garbage.

And don't get me started on Street Fighter.

But that's all besides the point. Despite my ranting and raving and SHEER NERDRAGEHATE for the Mortal Kombat movies, I can still enjoy them.

I can enjoy them even more when they have nerdshit stuffed away in them that makes Ed Boon and his crew at Netherrealm Studios the kings of SECRET FIGHTING GAME SHIT. They actually started all that, by the way. With Reptile in the original Mortal Kombat arcade... oh, and those "fatality" things.

The Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Blu-Rays (both films probably make for really good films for me to watch really drunk, or to be watched with me while I'm really drunk) have a nice little easter egg stuffed away in them for the gamers. Yeah, folks like me. Embedded in the secret coding of the Blu-Ray lies an extra costume for Mortal Kombat -- the video game that's being released on the same day that's a reboot for the franchise -- for Jade. Jade's digital life began as a hidden character in Mortal Kombat II, before debuting in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a fully playable character. In order to fight her in MKII you had to use nothing but the low-kick button during one of the rounds that you win, and she'd take you back to Goro's Lair -- a stage from the original Mortal Kombat -- and beat the crap out of you.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the second time a Blu-Ray disc has featured a video game aspect to it that is only functional on the PlayStation 3 console. The first was the fully playable demo of God of War III on the District 9 Blu-Ray.

And just to connect the two, Kratos, the lead character from the God of War series -- and the most badass badass to ever grace the world with his GODRAGEHATE presence -- is a fully playable character on the PlayStation 3 version of the new Mortal Kombat game.

I Hate Hollywood

I do. I really, really do. But to keep this rant to the bare minimum of wordage, I'm hating them now for what they do to video games. It's no secret that video games make more money than Hollywood does nowadays. They just do. You want a good example? Look at the sales and money generated from Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops. It smashed all records in the entertainment fields like the Hulk when he got back to Earth after Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and the others shot him into space. If you didn't get that, or didn't understand it, then obviously you're not spending enough time reading comics. And that just makes you UnAmerican.

But it doesn't stop there, oh, no. Video games also offer better production (nothing can look fake in an all digital world), better acting for a great deal of the time, and... DUN DUN DUN, better stories. Take Black Ops again. It's a standard, big budget action flick, but it out action flicked most of the big budget action flicks I saw last year, and it was better written. And that's saying a lot since the Call of Duty series is hugely popular for it's online multiplayer, and isn't known for it's epic, cerebral storytelling masterpieces.

But... God of War III blew the remake of The Clash of the Titans to absolute fuckall IN THE TITLE SEQUENCE ALONE.

Yet, Hollywood still has this 'holier-than-thou' aspect to it where the collective they, whomever these faceless twats are, think they can take some concept that was thought up in a video game -- or in a comic or some other medium that wasn't in the HOLY GRAIL CINEMA -- and do a better job. And they fail. Miserably. Instead of making a straight on horror film that involves zombies, but spirals out into an elaborate biochemical fuckjob like the Resident Evil games WERE, they put in made up characters that aren't even in the game, and make them wannabe kung-fu action stars (sorry, Milla, you're no Donnie Yen), and take the story into weirdville.

And it continues. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves are video games that make a flawless merger between the lazy, voyeuristic, inactive aspects of the cinema, and the involved, interactive, busy-bee aspect of the video game. It's a mix between Raiders of the Lost Ark style adventure and... I've got nothing else. Yet, when the rights were optioned to make a film based on the franchise, this guy starts yammering on about making a movie about a family of folks to be reckoned with in the antiquities world. Which has absolutely nothing to do with Nathan Drake, the world he operates in, his motivations, let alone either of the two (soon to be three) game's the character has appeared in. What his intentions are... they're like optioning the rights to make a Batman movie, then dealing solely on Bruce's family issues, keeping Martha and Thomas Wayne alive... and never having him actually be Batman.

Okay, that was probably a bit much, but still... stop licensing stuff out and make Hollywood, it's shite writing staff, it's shite directors; make them find original material inside their own fucking brains for once.

It's a retard's medium, cinema. Good for wide-eyed, doped up entertainment, but little else.

And don't get me started on horror cinema from America. For the past twenty years or so, horror from Hollywood has been a giant turd that's been forcefully smashed into the surface of my eyeballs. Even video games get horror right.

Just look at Dead Space 2. Heh, heh.

My apologies for those of you that subscribe to the HOLY GRAIL OF ENTERTAINMENT that movies seem to hold over people. I just don't share that opinion at all. It's a passive and lazy form of entertainment that's the equivalent of a cellophane packaged yellow-sponged snack cake with cream filling.

Yes. A goddamned Twinkie.

Dead Space 2.

Bare with me with this, 'cause I haven't written an actual review of much of anything in ages.

In 2008, Electronic Arts released a game called Dead Space. Developed by Visceral Games, Dead Space was a horror game in the same vein as the Resident Evil series with a high emphasis on jump scare tactics, dread inducing confrontations, and very little in terms of provisions and what not. The sub-genre is called "survival horror," a label that Capcom created for it's Resident Evil and Dino Crisis games. At around the same time, I had just about given up the hopes that anyone would make a truly great horror game any time soon. Something that would instill a sense of immediate dread and not just rely on the jump scare routine that has populated Hollywood horror films since its inception. But Dead Space was different. The first lure that got my attention with the game was that Warren Ellis had worked on the story aspects of the game, followed by Antony Johnston. Two comic book writers whose work I am familiar with and fond of.

Playing Dead Space came with a new sort of precedent in interactive horror that I hadn't experienced before in a game. Dread was always there, always present. Even with the somewhat predictable jump scares they used, they never really prepared me for what was coming next, or, even worse, what COULD come next. The end result was the best horror related experience in video games that I had participated in.

Dead Space 2 is a different creature altogether. I relate the two games to Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens. Dead Space was the introduction. It was often a slow burn sort of horror to establish the world it takes place in and the characters that populate it, including the character you play as, Isaac Clarke. You don't know what's going on, and a lot of the focus of the narrative is spent on figuring out what's going on. By the time the sequel comes around, you already know what's going on, and it becomes a different sort of narrative. Dead Space 2, like Aliens, is about closure, but from a different perspective. Where Sigourney Weaver's character is slowly coerced into going back to LV-426, Isaac is just dropped into the mess (so to speak). One of the main differences between Dead Space and its sequel is that Isaac now has a voice. He can speak his own mind, and his reactions to what's going on are now something he possesses. In the original game, by not giving him a voice, they're essentially giving you that voice. Isaac's reactions are your reactions. In Dead Space 2, Isaac becomes his own character, and he's someone you don't mind following around and pushing through the meat and viscera of the problem. The other main difference is that in Dead Space, because it's an introductory sort of chapter, you do wonder what happened to the Ishimura, and you put into narrative induced situations that revolve around the answering of those questions. In the sequel, the answers are already there from the get go -- for the most part, there are new questions to be asked, however -- and instead you're provided with a new narrative aspect on the game, which is to get out alive, to survive, and reach that ultimate climax for Isaac and find closure.

Fear plays a pretty decent role in horror, but it isn't the end all, nor begin all aspect of it. Fear is also an entirely subjective thing. That's why I, as a 34 year old guy, am terrified of spiders while other men my age may or may not have a problem with them whatsoever. The intention of Dead Space 2, at times, may be to scare you indeed. A lot of what makes Dead Space 2 (and the first one for that matter) has little to do with fear. The guys and gals at Visceral Games have attempted to instill the sense of dread in you from the get go. They never want you to be able to play the game casually, to shrug off what's going on, or to not let if effect you. They're trying to emulate what all good horror does and should do: disturb you, set you off balance, emit emotions that are often best left in that dark space in your brain that you really don't want to think about. Throughout the first game, I was never calm. Dread was always present 'cause I never knew what was going to happen next, what I was going bare witness to next, or what sort of monstrosity was just waiting around the corner to do very, very nasty things to me. That's where the gore comes in. I've never been too big of an admirer of gore-less horror fiction. I don't like the philosophy of leaving it to the imagination of readers/viewers because that nulls the point of even trying to write, paint, or film horror to begin with. As a reader of horror fiction, I want the author to use his imagination to try to disturb me, not for you to try to get me to use my imagination. That's why I write horror myself. Nevertheless, the gore in Dead Space is there for a reason. Gore isn't a natural thing to behold in the landscape of the human condition. It's there, but not for the majority of the populace. Not everyone works in an abbatoir or as a forensic pathologist. It's stuff we do not see, and the mere idea of seeing what's inside us -- or another living creature for that matter -- is a repulsive, revolting act. In horror, it's often there to unsettle you, and weaken your immunity so that the presenter of the fiction has easier access to the psychological aspects of the horror. Dead Space is rife with it, as is the sequel. The sequel out does the original in terms of gore, and it has that aspect to it. There is a lot of psychological stuff going on in the game (from red herrings, to being hunted by men and monster alike, to the main character literally going insane), and the gore is there to keep you vulnerable to it. It's never the same kind of gore, either, in terms of the presentation of the fiction. In the action sequences (when the monsters are attacking you and whatnot) it's always the same, but in the cinematic, plot-driven sequences of the game, it's really threatening to your psychological make up in terms of how you consume fiction. There is a lot of stuff in Dead Space 2 that is truly unsettling, even to my experienced eyes. The plot elements present in Dead Space 2 are much more frantic and quick paced, while not lessening the horror elements from the first one at all. It's very, very, very much like the transition from Alien to Aliens, but not losing anything in between. Alien was pure horror, while Aliens was more sci-fi action with horror elements. Dead Space 2 is pure horror with some sci-fi action elements here and there that create a much more pulse-pounding pace. Another really key storytelling aspect of Dead Space 2 that was established in the original is paranoia -- which goes hand in hand with the dementia that plagues Isaac. You don't know who to trust, especially because of the original, and in this one it's taken a step further so you don't even know if you can trust Isaac. Especially towards the game's conclusion.

Another aspect of the story element of Dead Space 2 that really gave me a unique feeling was how seamless the plot unravels. In the original -- and with most other games -- there is a bridge between one level and the next. In Dead Space, the bridge was riding the tram from one location to the next, and while you're riding the tram the game goes to a loading screen. Other games use this same method as well. Dead Space 2 did away with it, and I, personally, felt that it was quite an innovative way to present a game that is heavy on storytelling. There aren't any loading screens in Dead Space 2, there aren't any moments where you ride a vehicle from point a to point b and don't get to enjoy the ride because the game is loading the data. There aren't any smoke breaks for Isaac while the game installs the next level (sorry, Snake, but I gotta poke fun at the smoke breaks). It was one of the reasons I finished the entire game in one sitting because not having those chapter breaks between levels and whatnot worked towards immersing you in the fiction better. I think that the guys and gals at Visceral Games took cues and notes from the folks at Naughty Dog and what they've done with Uncharted, to present you with a storytelling method that's not only immersive, but seamless.

Unlike a lot of gamers, or anyone who writes a review of video games, I don't rate or rank the graphics or visual presentation in any sort of normal way. I genuinely gave up caring about graphics as a focal point of gaming towards the end of the last generation of consoles (the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox). I base my appreciation, or disgust, with the visual aspects of gaming depending on how it serves the game's story. So, with that in mind, Dead Space 2's graphics are very, very impressive. Just like the original, Dead Space 2 manages to create tension, dread, and anxiety through atmosphere alone. Be it in darkened cafeterias, dimly lit corridors, brutally ransacked shopping areas, and even a brightly lit school-like district. The game takes place on the Sprawl, a massive space station near Saturn, which differentiates it from the previous game in a very distinct fashion. These were normal people that got all mutilated here, not engineers and the rest of the crew of the Ishimura. It was actually that section of the space station that disturbed me the most: the School district location. It was very brightly light, with lots of color... and lots of children monsters. There was a level of creepiness there that I hadn't seen in a long time in any sort of horror, but there was some levity there, too. The visuals in Dead Space 2 fit the fiction they're trying to tell almost perfectly. The in game menus are all holograms and fit nicely into the world they've created, the technology seems well thought out and has practical uses for everything you see (from plastic cups, to the more high tech gadgetry) and everything is animated very well. It doesn't hurt at all that Visceral dedicated a lot of effort in providing as much detail as possible. At lot of the environments reminded me of putting stickers on G.I. Joe vehicles when I was younger. There's a lot of detail to the point where you see warning stickers everywhere and they're clear and readable. The sound is also on par with the fiction they're telling. There's lots of creepiness provided through sound alone, whether it be through the music, the noises the monster's make, creepy children's songs, insane gibberish being spoken by one character or another. There are times when the sound drops out completely, which only fuels the dread. In the zero gravity sections of the game -- much like the first game -- they really hammered home the tag line from Ridley Scott's Alien to a very believable and frightening reality. In space, no one can hear you scream, indeed.

The meat of the game, as with all games, is the gameplay. Through my three play-throughs of Dead Space 2, I couldn't find a single flaw in the game play whatsoever. It's tight and fluid, just like the original. I think they may or may not have switched up a few button pushes here and there, but for the most part it plays identical to the first game, which is the way sequels to games should play. If you go into the sequel of a game and it plays drastically different than the original, then you're playing against the learning curve and it can take you out and away from the experience. I don't know if I had an unfair advantage in Dead Space 2 or not. I played the original a lot, and when I picked up Dead Space 2, there was no learning curve to be learned for me. I knew what did what, and I knew how to move fluidly throughout the environment. Of course, there were still plenty of moments when I was overwhelmed by the game and was reduced to a panicking little feather of a man just trying to get out of the chaos. But that's a perfectly acceptable in a game where horror is the main theme.

The replay value, something that is also a very important part of gaming, of this game is tremendous to me. I gotta stress that part of it. To me. The Dead Space games put me in an environment I'm quite comfortable with due to my love and adoration of horror, and replaying them never lessens the quality of the fiction they're giving me. It's to the experience I have when I re-read Clive Barker's the Books of Blood or re-watch many, many different horror films. I enjoy it thoroughly. And the dread, I'm happy to say, is always present -- even if I'm going through with all weapons maxed out and I can dispatch enemies with the greatest of ease. The atmosphere they've created is one I enjoy to experience again again. That said, however, unless you have the same particular fascinations that I do with horror, I'm not so sure one would find the pleasure in subjecting themselves to the atrocities that are present in the game on more than one occasion.

Dead Space 2, like the game before it, isn't just a good, quality made game. It's a good, quality made horror experience rife with shocking, jaw-dropping, and uncomfortable experiences. This kind of horror works its way into your bones, settles in your nerves, and shakes the very core of your humanity.

Just like all good horror should.


...fuckin' needles...

2010 in Games.

2010 was a crazy year for games. Lots of shit going on all over the place, and as a gamer I've decided to give quick reviews and whathaveyou for what I bought and played in 2010. Leaving out the stuff I have from previous years and whatnot.

I rented some games in January, for the first time in over a decade, but I won't really be covering them. They were Bayonetta, Darksiders, and MiniNinja. All three were fun, but not something I could see myself committing to spend sixty bucks on.

My 2010 year in gaming began in February when BioShock 2, Dante's Inferno, Aliens vs. Predator and Heavy Rain were released.

BioShock 2

The BioShock series, along with the Resistance series, is what got me to give first person shooter games another try after not really caring about them for a very long time. BioShock isn't like a Call of Duty or a HALO, or any of the psuedo-military shooters out there, as the narrative plays a huge role and it falls more into the dark fantasy genre than a war-like or military genre. BioShock 2 isn't really a sequel, as you don't continue on as the same character from the previous game and instead play as another individual set in the same world. I think the stories were connected, but I don't really remember how. It takes place eight years after the first game, and you play as Subject Delta, a prototype Big Daddy that apparently was forced to commit suicide and is resurrected. The game was quite fun and the overall narrative is very pleasing in the end, and very twisted which is always a plus for me. One of the downsides to BioShock 2 is the graphics. It's running on the same engine as the previous installment, but for some reason or another, it looks a lot worse. A lot of muddy textures and detail pop up happened a lot. There were also some very hilarious issues with the physics engine that involved a man doing an endo on the back of his head after I killed him (located on the right) and some humorous twitcher glitches, which you can see in the video below.



Despite these humorous glitches and some minor graphical issues, the game still played really well and the narrative held me through from beginning to end. Which is all I really ask of games anymore, and it's becoming harder and harder for the more "elite" games to do that, and I'm finding it easier to enjoy games that used to be known for being relatively shitty.

Dante's Inferno

I don't have any neat pictures or videos about Dante's Inferno, but I did like the game. It was crazy, hellish and offered some really interesting moments. One of which was the first giant cock of video game, or at least it was the first time I had seen a giant cock in a video game. Lucifer's pecker hung to his knees, I shit you not. It was just there, flopping about while you're trying to kill the bastard fallen angel. Anyway, the game was designed around the same make up of God of War, and told the story of a Crusader/Templar Knight that broke his vows to his wife while on the Crusade, thus throwing her into Hell. Literally, Lucifer comes for her. Then you follow the path created by Dante Alighieri's Devine Comedy. It's a very interesting visual interpretation of the Christian mythological destination known as Hell and is full of all sorts of nasty demons and Cleopatra, who, like Lucifer, is also showing off her gigantic assets.

I do have to admit, at first, the idea of making an action adventure game based on Dante's Inferno was an odd one. The poem doesn't really translate to the video game medium all that well, but through the minor changes they made (making the main character a templar for instance) made the game work for me. A funny side note to it is: I let a friend borrow the game after I finished it, and he got freaked out by it to the point that he couldn't finish it.

Some of the best aspects of the game, or one of them at least, was taking the metaphor of "beating death" and turning it into a virtual reality. You actually do beat death after being killed in an elaborate boss battle. You kill him with his own Scythe after taking it as your own weapon.

Aliens vs. Predator

I wanted to really like this game. I did. But it kinda failed as an experience that could have been so much better than what it was. Why it raised all the controversy that it did is beyond me. The violence wasn't that over the top and was in perfect harmony with what had been established in both series of films. You can play as either a Space Marine (from Aliens) one of the xenomorphs (from the Alien franchise) or a Predator (from the Predator franchise, duh) but the end result is a lackluster video game that fails to capture the essence of either film franchise, but melds perfectly into the mehness of the two Aliens vs. Predator films. There's no tension, there's no buildup, and it's just a bit of a messy FPS game. Which is really, really sad. Though, I did play the crap out of it and had fun.

Heavy Rain

Hyper-analytical hat is going on. I wanted to like this game. I really did. I love horror -- yes, I consider this game to be horror, regardless of its lack of anything remotely supernatural -- but this game failed to reel me in from the get go. Which is a damned shame, because the originality of it, the presentation of it, and the design that went into it is all unique and pretty much awesome. But, I'm a consumer of fiction, and fiction takes precedence over everything when there's a narrative to be followed, or dragged through, or to be bored to death by.

Psychological thrillers, as critics and film studios call them, are a fun little sub-genre of horror that I really do enjoy. I'm something of a fan of Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels, and I love movies like Se7en, Zodiac (not minding the David Fincher connection there for a moment) and several others that are escaping my brain right now. So when it comes to this type of fiction, I'm going to hold it up against the things that impressed me the most, and not just compare it to other video games out there.

The writing was dull and uninteresting from the get go. You play as a wide range of characters (from what I understand) but you start out as a boring as fuck drawer of buildings and such, and you meddle around doing random uninteresting things that you do in daily life. You know, showering, doing some work, making some coffee, wandering around aimlessly in the back yard, all before the big tragic event happens. And said big tragic event in my eyes was nothing more than a cheap pop. First, you're presented with uninteresting character to play as that you have no emotional connection to whatsoever, and the game doesn't do much in terms of character building to devote an attachment to that character, then his child gets hit by a car. It's a cheap pop, which is a wrestling term if you hadn't realized so far. A cheap pop is something you do that will get an instant reaction out of an audience. Wrestlers do it by talking about the city they're performing in, or the local city's sports team that just won or lost. It gets an instant reaction out of people. As does anything tragic happening to a child in the first few frames of a movie. People, especially in this country, have abnormal attachments to children, and by doing something godawful to a child in any entertainment medium, you're going to get instant empathy from certain audiences. But, for me, it just doesn't work. I'm a writer, and I knew what they were doing when it happened, and I just groaned and rolled my eyes.

The game continues doing every day tasks, changing diapers, taking your kid to school, and all this stuff, until it gets to the main plot about a guy that's kidnapping children and murdering them. Which is kinda interesting, but it's not the kind of serial murderer fiction I care to ingest because it's associated to the cheap pop. Then there's the fantastical science fiction aspects of it that are the same reason I can't enjoy television shows like CSI and the like. The other aspects of the game try to adopt the prime time drama atmosphere and the psychological thriller atmosphere by presenting to us a real world looking environment. Until this detective/investigator guy shows up and he has a futuristic, I Am Robot (the Will Smith filmed version) detective gear that breaks the already established real world environments the game has delivered thus far. You even get to create a VR bouncy ball to help you wait in the police station.

Aside from a fictional standpoint, the game was pretty cool. Visually, it was beautifully designed (well, the character animations were a bit stiff, but other than that), and the gameplay was intricate and quite innovative. But, I'm not the kind of person that's going to give all sorts of accolades based on innovation and prettiness. I'm always much more focussed on the fiction I'm being told, and this one didn't sell me a good story. The voice actors were unconvincing, the dialog was pretty shoddy, and the overall plot was more akin to a Hallmark film than a serious psychological thriller piece. It really does play out like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I read in gradeschool, and the dialog shows it. You're given a lot of options in terms of what the character says, all of it has recorded audio, but in doing that they broke the natural ebb and flow of human conversation.

And then this happened:



I was attempting to make the character walk up a flight of stairs to the second floor of a hotel. She absolutely refused, turned around and began walking up an invisible flight of stairs into the sky. She never stopped, just kept going. That's about when I gave up trying to find something to keep me interested in the game.

Final Fantasy XIII

I don't have a lot to say about this game, 'cause I haven't finished it yet and I have to start over. My PS3 gave up mid-year, and I had to replace it. In doing so, the firmware update said THIS IS NOT THE HARDDRIVE I'M LOOKING FOR and I had to reformat it, losing everything. What I can say about it is that I liked it. Final Fantasy has gone from the old JRR Tolkein inspired RPGs that still populate the land, to a more Star Wars influenced Space Fantasy world while covering everything in between. FFVI and FFVII were more steampunkish than Middle-Earth based, and I quite enjoy that. I discovered later that I hadn't even made it out of the so-called twenty-hour tutorial for the game yet, and that kinda took the air out of my sails in starting over. I'll get to it, but not any time soon, I don't think.

God of War III

What can I say? Some people have hobbits, I have a god killing spartan. The God of War series met its ultimate conclusion this year with the spectacular God of War III. A game that really made me question the necessity of badly written, overly CGI ridden Hollywood films every step of the way. For instance, go rent and watch the remake or the original of Clash of the Titans (the original actually inspired the God of War development team, as can be seen with the inclusion of a kraken in God of War II, a mythological monster that doesn't exist in Greek mythology) then sit down and play God of War III. I loved every minute of the game, including the end -- which apparently left a lot of other gamers and critics feeling a little flat. The entire presentation of the game felt very polished, even the opening credits sequence that also recapped the first two games in the series, and did so artfully.

To catch up, God of War is about a Spartan warrior that became a commander of an army at a very early age. He finds himself in a battle he's inevitably going to lose, and essentially, sells his soul to a devil. That devil just happens to be Ares, the God of War, who then uses Kratos to his own means. He eventually leads Kratos to do something that should not be done (he slaughters his own wife and daughter) and vows revenge on the God of War, but not before fulfilling the duties of the other gods for ten years. Ares attacks Athens, which angers Athena, and she helps Kratos (along with several others from the Pantheon) to retrieve Pandora's Box and eventually slay the God of War. Athena and the other gods then make Kratos the new God of War, but that doesn't last long, 'cause then he starts doing the same thing that Ares did. The gods take away his powers and try to kill him, but Gaia (who, for the sake of the game's narrative, has been rendered a titan) revives him once again and sets him on a path to get revenge on the gods. A tale of revenge that culminates in God of War III, where Kratos eventually destroys all of them.

The game is really a sword and sorcery piece in the vein of Robert E. Howard's Conan set in the insane world of Greek mythology, and it plays out quite beautifully, and in perfect tone with a lot of the tales from Greek mythology. Except the gods get theirs in the end.

The image to the right is one of those funny glitches you don't expect to happen, but happens anyway. Like in the Grand Theft Auto games from the previous generation, the ground disappeared beneath Kratos' feet. I had a good laugh at it, so I took a picture.

...to be continued tomorrow...

Bits and Pieces 7: Brain Dump

Graphics

I've been reading reviews lately on video games, and I know that I shouldn't, because I dislike reviewers of any sort, but I've been doing it anyway. There's only one reviewer I like to read, 'cause he's somewhat good at what he does, and that's Ben Dutka over at PSXExtreme. But I've noticed that people are still hankering on about graphics these days and it's just bothersome to me. I stopped worrying about video game visuals last generation with the PlayStation 2, because I knew they'd just continue to get better and better. Yet people still ramble on about them and if there's one minor hiccup in the visuals in the game, it'll severely damage the overall score of the game. Most of these hiccups are like seeing a random truck or car in the background of Lord of the Rings, you have to know what you're looking for to really spot it, and it doesn't remove you from the narrative being told. It's in graphics that video games are most like animation and comic books and are the least like films or any other medium of story telling. The visuals are artistic representations of the world the game is set in, even if the game is supposed to be set in a semi-realistic world. If one game looks more "realistic" than another, it isn't damaging to the one that is less in the realism department. Why? Because it's a different art team, a different development studio, and a different set of sensibilities that created that world. "Flaws" only become apparent when you compare one game to the next.

Graphics should be the least of gamers worries now days, and they shouldn't be a focal point of an over-opinionated twit that somehow believes themselves to be far more educated on the subject of video games than pretty much every other gamer that was ever born.

I hate critics. They spend very little time critiquing anything and spend more time criticizing everything. And their opinions aren't worth dirt, really.

Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops was released this past Tuesday. It's funny to me 'cause I still am not a fan of first-person shooter games. I haven't been a fan of them since the days of DOOM but because of some friends I've found myself playing the Call of Duty games and rather enjoying them.

Apparently it's the in thing for gamers who express their opinions on the Internet to hate and loathe anything related to Call of Duty -- especially any of them that aren't made by Infinity Ward -- for no real reason other than they've become disgustingly popular.

Moving on: I dislike FPS games, but I've played a lot of them this generation. They've grown on me, I enjoy them, and I've become a lot better at them than I was even just a year ago. Black Ops has easily become one of my favorite experiences with an FPS game in my lifetime. The single player campaign was a better story overall than the past two COD games. World at War was another disjointed World War II affair and, while it boasted some decent voice acting, was entirely centered around surface material. Modern Warfare 2 was derivative of several movies from the 1980s -- most notably Red Dawn -- and lacked a great deal of atmosphere. While I enjoyed both of them decently enough, they weren't as good as games like Resistance, Resistance 2 or the two BioShock games. But, I think Black Ops sits amongst those two franchises nicely. There's the Zombie mode, of course, and there's a lot of other random weirdness like Dead Ops Arcade, which plays a lot like Zombie Apocalypse and Burn Zombie Burn, two downloadable titles. And the multiplayer isn't broken. It's pretty solid and evenly cut down the middle -- I've not encountered anyone taking advantage of any glitches in the game or the like -- and relies a lot on skill or dumb-luck, which is what I prefer. Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer, even after all the patching and whatnot, is severely broken with a great deal of disadvantages towards all players regardless of skill level. I may suck at online FPS games, but I don't suck that bad, but at MW2? Yeah, with all the danger close, commando pro, and other associated perks, along with the horrible input delay, lag and hit detection; the game is just broken. I always hear about how awesome Infinity Ward is in developing games, but in the two efforts from them that I've played, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. Especially since they did absolute fuckall in the way of beta testing for Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer and released it broken and retarded.

Kinda funny how I just wrote a few paragraphs about hating reviewers, then wrote a rather short one, eh? Difference is: no one's paying me for my opinion, no one's going to wage their enjoyment of anything based on my opinion of it, and no one asked. I think.

Vanquish

Another game I bought recently. A lot of fuss was made about this game being like Gears of War, but I found it to be nothing like that game at all. It's a mix between Contra -- oh, yeah, kickin' it hell'a old school -- and Transformers. The game is pure chaos with a heavy dosage of methamphetemines pumped right into the heart for good measure. It's good stuff.

The Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead premiered as a television program on AMC almost three weeks ago and it's fantastic. I love how the drama is rolling out on screen and it all gets me excited and I have to fight against everything that is Dameyon to start telling people that are new to the fiction thanks to the television program what's going to happen next. The gore really exploded in the second episode, too. It's awesome. I think I've figured out what's going to happen in the season finale, though.

Dread and the Human Centipede.

I kept hearing about The Human Centipede and that it was gross, gnarly, disgusting, and horrific, and while I enjoyed it, I found it to be a bit disturbing, but overall it wasn't all that great of a piece of horror fiction. The way people were talking about it made it seem like it was the next Audition or Martyrs, but it was neither of those. It didn't dig around in the human psyche enough to get to that level, and it was more along the lines of Hostel or Saw, but better in my opinion. Hostel made me laugh, a lot, and Saw made me groan out of a complete lack of patience for the story they were telling me. The Human Centipede definitely brings a new definition to the term "ass to mouth."

Dread is one of my many favorite short stories from Clive Barker's Books of Blood. It's one of the few stories from that collection that doesn't deal with any supernatural elements, and revolves around a psychology student studying human fears. The film works along similar lines as Midnight Meat Train in that it uses the short story as a blue print and then goes, but develops it further. The movie is pretty good, I rather liked it a lot. I didn't like the ending as much as the ending in the short story, however. It had a similar impact surrounding the motif of dread, but the short story version was done in a much better way. Although it does have a few bits and pieces -- heh -- from the short story's ending thrown in around the whole thing.

And that's about it.