Busy busy busy!! But I will not let this die. Must work in regular writing into my routine. Continue to be in a transitionary period, in which other priorities take hold. Watch this space.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Welcome to the Pony Motel
Busy busy busy!! But I will not let this die. Must work in regular writing into my routine. Continue to be in a transitionary period, in which other priorities take hold. Watch this space.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Thursday Rundown
- I need a holiday. Someday when I have the free time to keep this thing up to date as I've always intended, I'll be able to write about all the
stupid junkgreat stuff I want, but for now here's the two week summary (plus others I'm sure I've completely forgotten): - Bayonetta - * * * * (out of four)
- Dead Rising - * * * (out of four)
- Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop - * (out of four)
- Dead Rising 2: Case Zero - * * * 1/2 (out of four)
- Dead Rising 2 - * * * (out of four)
- Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock - * (out of four)
- Halo: Reach - * * 1/2 (out of four)
- Machete - * * * (out of four)
- Metroid: Other M - Zero Stars (out of four)
- The Other Guys - * * * 1/2 (out of four)
- A Serbian Film - * * 1/2 (out of four)
- This is hilarious, in the grand tradtion of the awesome lost kitten poster design exchange.
- This is easily the best thing to come out of Halo: Reach. By far.
- There's been a lot of discussion about the rising Tea Party, having emerged from the deepest, darkest, stupidest depths of America. Comprising nearly entirely of stupid, old, racist Republican morons, the inept "movement" is one of total confusion: seemingly united without a specific message or ideology or cause, they seek to represent a fictional American minority who have suspiciously, strangely appeared with the election of a black president - because they're racist idiots. Two articles inamongst many - White America Has Lost Its Mind and the superb Rolling Stone Tea and Crackers - cover the astonishing movement in all of its confusing complexity.
For the Week of the 3rd October 2010 - 9th October 2010
Film Releases: Buried (Wide), Eat Pray Love (Wide)Notable Video Game Releases: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (360, PS3, PC), Comic Jumper (360)
Rock Band Releases: R.E.M. Pack 1, T. Rex Pack 1
Zero Punctuation: Halo: Reach
GUITAR HERO: WARRIORS OF ROCK REVIEW
GUITAR HERO: WARRIORS OF ROCK (2010)
*
Developed By NeversoftPublished by Activision for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii
For the long-running Guitar Hero series the writing's been on the wall for years: despite reviving and dominating the rhythm game genre during the mid-noughties, the series has floundered pathetically into the new decade with a stubborn refusal to evolve*, leaving superior rival series Rock Band to take the rhythm game crown while the once beloved precursor dies a sad, miserable death. With the upcoming Rock Band 3, developer Harmonix (the company who originally developed Guitar Hero) have evolved their groundbreaking series even further, offering a new instrument (the keyboard) as well as promising instrument tutorials in the form of a "pro" mode, using a real guitar, keyboard and drumkit to teach how to play the actual instruments through their game. In a morose attempt to distance themselves from this, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock goes the other direction, introducing a pitiful Brutal Legend-lite story mode which makes no sense alongside their sadly series-traditional poor gameplay and setlist.
For the uninitiated, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is a rhythm game in which players simulate playing the guitar, base, drumkit or vocals from their choice of 93 songs, with difficulty ranging from Beginner to Expert+. The distinguishing feature from Rock Band and previous entries in the series is Quest Mode, in which players assume the role of several characters completing a story as disinteresting as it is poorly written: in order to save the Demigod of Rock, eight characters must be recruited to take on a mechanised creature called The Beast. The player must acquire these characters from venues playing parts of the setlist awkwardly aligned to the characters, and gameplay is changed introducing "powers" that each character has, changing the score and gameplay in mostly meaningless ways like additional multipliers.
Aside from further widening the gap between this series and Rock Band, the Quest Mode goes against the entire point of rhythm games, which is simply to "play" the songs that you like: because songs are unlocked through this campaign, much of the music is cut off until the mode is completed. Forcing a barrier to playing songs from the setlist whilst excluding "cheats" to unlock all songs and play "No Fail" is an awful design choice. Further, pressing through the entire campaign is an arduous task due to the mass of unlistenable music on offer; whereas the upcoming Rock Band 3's broad setlist offers something for everyone, Warriors of Rock offers little for anyone. The setlist is padded out with unlistenable garbage no one in their right mind has ever heard of, with even better and known songs, such as Muse's Uprising and Nine Inch Nail's Wish, implemented in a way that they are not fun to play. This is really compounded by something like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, in which the piano parts are awkwardly forced onto guitar - better just to wait for Rock Band 3 which features the song with an actual keyboard to play. In fact nearly any song on offer that you'd want to play is already available in the rival series, which took the much smarter move of making each non-band-specific game a platform rather than an entry into the series: Rock Band 2 allowed the import of all of the original Rock Band music in addition to literally thousands of downloadable songs available through DLC and the Rock Band Network. With Warriors of Rock, the issues with exporting songs from the previous games (why licence only a dozen songs from an 80-song game?) means anyone unfortunate enough to have fallen prey to this series instead of jumping onto the Rock Bandwagon is stuck with what amounts to a pitiful selection of songs, most of which suck.
Beyond this, Warriors of Rock suffers from the same issues as the last few games in the series. Anyone with an expensive audio-visual set up will be frustrated by the fact that Guitar Hero's calibration system does not work, keeping the same moronic manual set-up that demands the player to input the approx amount of lag there might be between controller and TV. (Tip: use the values that Rock Band's automatic callibration outputs.) The difficulty of the game is entirely broken: whereas Beginner is impossible to fail, Expert+ is basically impossible, falsifying difficulty featuring notes that aren't actually there. The system is unbalanced in that there's no way to grow as a player from Beginnner through to Expert+, unlike the perfect difficulty in Rock Band that introduces new players and allows them to grow through to a one-to-one Expert difficulty, that just makes sense.
For what little it's worth, the online multiplayer works fine and the graphics look just as good as you'd expect from a high budget title. But there's no getting around the fact that Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is awful, and awful enough to end the series. Any benefits and goodwill earnt from the surprisingly competent but lackluster Guitar Hero 5** are squandered due to inexcusable design choices and the ongoing refusal to progress and grow. Yes, every other sentence in this review makes a comparison to Rock Band, but there's no way around that: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is inferior in every way to its competitor and it doesn't sadden me to see it kill the series. My happy memories of the first three games will not be tarnished, rather complimented by the natural evolution that has made Rock Band the amazing and groundbreaking juggernaut that it is.
* It's possible, maybe even highly likely, that without the substantial popularity and subsequent threat that the Rock Band series presented other instruments may never have been added to the Guitar Hero franchise.
** It might be worth noting that Guitar Hero 5's surprise popularity mostly arose from the fact that it didn't suck nearly as hard as Guitar Hero World Tour.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Thursday Rundown
Forth Quarter. 3, 2, 1, GO
- Atheists and agnostics more about religion than believers. There's a surprise. Louis CK also has a valuable lesson to teach us about the Catholic Church.
- Sally Menke died earlier this week. Quentin Tarantino's editor and collaborator since he began filmmaking, it's incredibly sad to see and read about their partnership, especially the nice way he and his actors would greet her through the footage, for only her to see while in editing. Bye, Sally.
- Also - this is incredibly cute.
For the Week of the 26th September 2010 - 2nd October 2010
Film Releases: Dinner for Schmucks (Wide), Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (Wide)
Notable Video Game Releases: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (Wii, 360, PS3), Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions (Wii, 360, PS3, DS), Hydrophobia (360)
Rock Band Releases: Anthrax Pack 1 (Among the Living, I'm the Man, Indians, Madhouse, Metal Thrashing Mad), My Chemical Romance - I'm Not Okay (I Promise), My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade, 30 Seconds to Mars - Closer to the Edge, Atreyu - Coffin Nails, Buckcherry - Out of Line, The Doobie Brothers - Listen to the Music, The Doobie Brothers - Long Train Runnin
Zero Punctuation: Amnesia: The Dark DescentThursday, September 23, 2010
TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN REVIEW
.
Starring Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis
Based on the novel by John Marsden
Written and directed by Stuart Beattie
Keeping the grand dream of bad Australian filmmaking alive is Stuart Beattie's horrible Tomorrow, When the War Began, a sad adaptation of John Marsden's smart young adult bestseller that sacrifices realism and poetry to make an action film, and a crap one at that. The worst person for the job short of Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, Beattie's directorial debut takes his horrible writing as the Word of God and exchanges Marsden's affecting dialogue for the kind of quips and one liners only ever heard in movies, meanwhile chipping away at nuance and subtlety and character making way for broad obvious stereotypes and broad obvious action sequences, simultaneously ensuring none are believable, engaging or effective. Consider that the only decent films on Beattie's résumé - Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - are handled by great directors (Michael Mann and Gore Verbinski respectively) with no qualms about changing or completely rewriting Beattie's junk; leaving his scripts intact results in The Messengers, Australia, or, heaven forbid, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
A vaguely promising opening introduces its talented young multicultural cast led by farmgirl Ellie (Caitlin Stasey) planning a camping trip to untouched Australian outback valley (termed "Hell") with greek troublemaker Homer (Deniz Akdeniz, too good for this shit), freshly-popped childhood BFF Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) and her idiot boyfriend Kevin (Lincoln Lewis), token rich girl Fiona (Phoebe Tonkin), token Christian Robyn (Ashleigh Cummings, the only actor in the bunch who looks the right age) and token Asian stereotype Lee (Chris Pang). Take special note of that last one: Lee will be playing the role of the Magical Negro in this here shitstorm, acting stoic while gathering firewood for the group, magically recovering from a gunshot wound, and saving Ellie from a fucking CG snake. The Australian Real Cancun is broken by the sounds of military aircraft as Marsden's unidentified invaders (Gooks!) take over their hometown, nearly derelict upon return. (What should be a difficult scene involving the discovery of a starved-to-death dog in an empty home is instead brief and quickly forgotten about.) As the reality of an opposing military invasion sets in, the teenagers come to realise that no where is safe, and that they must fight - and kill - to survive.
The events in Tomorrow make little sense: despite declaring that their town is swarming with soldiers and shouldn't be navigated during the day for fear of capture, Ellie and friends move about the town during the day whenever the plot requires it. Both a late night reconnaissance into enemy territory and a ludicrus chase in a garbage truck (that costs several soldiers their lives) end suddenly with our heroes apparently teleported to safety, and each kill is commented upon with strange, amused shock and awe, which feels completely alien. (Beattie's film is so bereft of actual emotion that after Ellie murders several young soldiers and stares into the face of a dead girl no older than herself, narration needs to kick in to explain what happened and how she'll remember it for the rest of her life - apparently a shorter time than the film, which forgets it nearly instantly.) So inept is Beattie's film that characters rarely emote but never stop explaining how they feel, which is often total nonsense. (This is especially repellent in a scene where isolated stoner Chris (Andy Ryan) describes finding the bodies of his neighbours - and their dead infant - alongside jokes about how wasted he is.) Ditto an excruciating pop-rock soundtrack that fits Act I but then doesn't stop, nullifying realism and seriousness whilst colliding with the headache-inducing sounds of everything blowing up, rendering the film possibly more defeaning than this year's idiot-explosion-fest The Expendables. It ends with a hysterical shot of the teenagers armed to the teeth with rocket launchers and machine guns from, somewhere, I guess, before coasting into a music video sequence that shouldn't exist.
The original intention of Marsden's Tomorrow series was to demonstrate the author's optimistic idea of today's youth being able to take responsibility and action in the face of something as horrific as war, to demonstrate courage and maturity in the way that most Western societies no longer require or demand, especially on home turf here shaken to the point where "things will never be the same again". Despite that latter mantra being repeated throughout Beattie's vapid film, never once does it grasp the point, reducing loaded and thoughtful material to petty teenage drama and action fodder. Consider that Marsden's smart decision never to identify the invading force is undermined here by a blanket grouping of "Asians," which Beattie attempts to make up for by having the dimwitted Kevin spout rubbish about the country invading being irrelevant. Bullshit. In a better film, perhaps. (A rare moment of self-aware defeatism has Corrie declaring a book she's reading is "Better than the movie," to which Ellie responds "Books usually are." Again, bullshit. A good adaptation that uses the material to take on themes and ideas can be just as potent as the source material, occasionally even better - consider Charlaine Harris' unreadable Southern Vampire Mysteries that spawned Alan Ball's fascinating series True Blood, or David Yates' adapation of Rowling's overlong meandering Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix.) Any kind of subtext is lost in the film's complete cluelessness, be it infantile decisions to frame guerilla attacks alongside discussions about "boys", or insipid monologues about the nature of murder and religion; imagine this material given the respect it arguably deserves as a HBO miniseries, in the Generation Kill vein, instead of this tripe. Fans should be furious: stillborn and a guarenteed international failure, Tomorrow, When the War Began deserved better.
TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN (2010)
* 1/2
Starring Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis
Based on the novel by John Marsden
Written and directed by Stuart Beattie
Keeping the grand dream of bad Australian filmmaking alive is Stuart Beattie's horrible Tomorrow, When the War Began, a sad adaptation of John Marsden's smart young adult bestseller that sacrifices realism and poetry to make an action film, and a crap one at that. The worst person for the job short of Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, Beattie's directorial debut takes his horrible writing as the Word of God and exchanges Marsden's affecting dialogue for the kind of quips and one liners only ever heard in movies, meanwhile chipping away at nuance and subtlety and character making way for broad obvious stereotypes and broad obvious action sequences, simultaneously ensuring none are believable, engaging or effective. Consider that the only decent films on Beattie's résumé - Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - are handled by great directors (Michael Mann and Gore Verbinski respectively) with no qualms about changing or completely rewriting Beattie's junk; leaving his scripts intact results in The Messengers, Australia, or, heaven forbid, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
A vaguely promising opening introduces its talented young multicultural cast led by farmgirl Ellie (Caitlin Stasey) planning a camping trip to untouched Australian outback valley (termed "Hell") with greek troublemaker Homer (Deniz Akdeniz, too good for this shit), freshly-popped childhood BFF Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) and her idiot boyfriend Kevin (Lincoln Lewis), token rich girl Fiona (Phoebe Tonkin), token Christian Robyn (Ashleigh Cummings, the only actor in the bunch who looks the right age) and token Asian stereotype Lee (Chris Pang). Take special note of that last one: Lee will be playing the role of the Magical Negro in this here shitstorm, acting stoic while gathering firewood for the group, magically recovering from a gunshot wound, and saving Ellie from a fucking CG snake. The Australian Real Cancun is broken by the sounds of military aircraft as Marsden's unidentified invaders (Gooks!) take over their hometown, nearly derelict upon return. (What should be a difficult scene involving the discovery of a starved-to-death dog in an empty home is instead brief and quickly forgotten about.) As the reality of an opposing military invasion sets in, the teenagers come to realise that no where is safe, and that they must fight - and kill - to survive.
The events in Tomorrow make little sense: despite declaring that their town is swarming with soldiers and shouldn't be navigated during the day for fear of capture, Ellie and friends move about the town during the day whenever the plot requires it. Both a late night reconnaissance into enemy territory and a ludicrus chase in a garbage truck (that costs several soldiers their lives) end suddenly with our heroes apparently teleported to safety, and each kill is commented upon with strange, amused shock and awe, which feels completely alien. (Beattie's film is so bereft of actual emotion that after Ellie murders several young soldiers and stares into the face of a dead girl no older than herself, narration needs to kick in to explain what happened and how she'll remember it for the rest of her life - apparently a shorter time than the film, which forgets it nearly instantly.) So inept is Beattie's film that characters rarely emote but never stop explaining how they feel, which is often total nonsense. (This is especially repellent in a scene where isolated stoner Chris (Andy Ryan) describes finding the bodies of his neighbours - and their dead infant - alongside jokes about how wasted he is.) Ditto an excruciating pop-rock soundtrack that fits Act I but then doesn't stop, nullifying realism and seriousness whilst colliding with the headache-inducing sounds of everything blowing up, rendering the film possibly more defeaning than this year's idiot-explosion-fest The Expendables. It ends with a hysterical shot of the teenagers armed to the teeth with rocket launchers and machine guns from, somewhere, I guess, before coasting into a music video sequence that shouldn't exist.
The original intention of Marsden's Tomorrow series was to demonstrate the author's optimistic idea of today's youth being able to take responsibility and action in the face of something as horrific as war, to demonstrate courage and maturity in the way that most Western societies no longer require or demand, especially on home turf here shaken to the point where "things will never be the same again". Despite that latter mantra being repeated throughout Beattie's vapid film, never once does it grasp the point, reducing loaded and thoughtful material to petty teenage drama and action fodder. Consider that Marsden's smart decision never to identify the invading force is undermined here by a blanket grouping of "Asians," which Beattie attempts to make up for by having the dimwitted Kevin spout rubbish about the country invading being irrelevant. Bullshit. In a better film, perhaps. (A rare moment of self-aware defeatism has Corrie declaring a book she's reading is "Better than the movie," to which Ellie responds "Books usually are." Again, bullshit. A good adaptation that uses the material to take on themes and ideas can be just as potent as the source material, occasionally even better - consider Charlaine Harris' unreadable Southern Vampire Mysteries that spawned Alan Ball's fascinating series True Blood, or David Yates' adapation of Rowling's overlong meandering Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix.) Any kind of subtext is lost in the film's complete cluelessness, be it infantile decisions to frame guerilla attacks alongside discussions about "boys", or insipid monologues about the nature of murder and religion; imagine this material given the respect it arguably deserves as a HBO miniseries, in the Generation Kill vein, instead of this tripe. Fans should be furious: stillborn and a guarenteed international failure, Tomorrow, When the War Began deserved better.
Thursday Rundown
For the Week of the 19th September 2010 - 25th September 2010
Film Releases: Charlie St. Cloud (Wide), Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Wide), The Girl Who Played With Fire (Festival), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Wide)
Notable Video Game Releases: Dead Rising 2 (PC, 360, PS3), Sid Meier's Civilization V (PC), Test Drive Unlimited 2 (PC, 360, PS3)
Rock Band Releases: Bob Marley & The Wailers - Legend (Full Album)
Zero Punctuation: Metroid Other M
Monday, September 20, 2010
Gangbangs of New York
- Halo Reach finished, review forthcoming. I honestly spent most of the time yearning to spend more time with Dead Rising, an insane game that has grown on me the more I've played it. Case in point: I've completed the main storyline and seen maybe 75% of everything the game has to offer, and have restarted the game several times retaining character intact; the last time I restarted my character had been kidnapped by cultists who stole all of my items and clothes. After escaping, I put on a Servbot head from a toy store and ran around basically naked except for the Servbot head - which I've restarted the game with. All of the dramatic cutscenes lose their effect when your face wears only this delightful expression, slowly turning to the camera. Also, there's a nifty reverence for this game in the current Left 4 Dead series, which included this as an Easter Egg (alongside an Achievement for killing one zombie more than the infamous Zombie Genocide Achievement, which demanded 53,594 zombie kills - the same number of residents in the fictional setting).
- If you have even the slightest fear of heights, I don't recommend watching this amazing video of workmen climbing over seventeen thousand feet to the top of a radio transmission tower. Definitely put it in full screen.
- This past week the Pope has emerged from "his cave in the Vatican and is offending his way across the UK," leading to not only thousands of believers coming out, but also thousands of the enlightened. Check out this awesome shot of Ian McKellan from the London anti-Pope march, or, even better, this magnificent speech by Richard Dawkins at the papal protest.
- On a similar note, this adventure to the Creationist Museum in the USA is great - I love all of the educational notices: Why bother with all that complicated science when you really know that God did it all?
- Many people aren't aware of how serious Starcraft is in Korea - this article covers it pretty nicely. (Summary: it's crazy.) It also includes the now-infamous APM demonstration video.
- This should make you happy.
- Forget Fiddy's closeted homosexual Twitter account - Andrew WK is what you need to be reading.
- Finally, this terrific analysis of the Australian anti-sexting ads is completely on the ball. It's unpleasant and demeaning and doesn't touch on the actual problem at all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
