Upcoming Posts...will come later

My Uncle may have had a heart attack on our way to work today so I'm postponing my reviews of the X-Files and Friday the Thirteenth until later.

Crackdown...with Tentacles

About a month or so ago I started playing a game that I never thought I would enjoy. I believe I only had this thought in my head because I hadn't read very much about the game and the title didn't strike me as interesting (having somehow developed the idea that simple one word titles are boring). I am speaking, of course, about Prototype.

You play as government experiment gone (gasp) horribly wrong, Alex Mercer. Perhaps we should just call him an escaped government experiment, since he seems to be exactly what the government was going for, much to their chagrin. After waking up in the hospital to some guy trying to cut through your skin and deciding that, in fact, you'd like to keep it intact, you make your escape.

The game is based around a mission system, much the same way that the GTA series is focused. There are missions to kill as many enemies as possible in a given time period with a different power, weapon, or vehicle, missions to see how quickly you can hit way points, and missions that even challenge you to fall from the sky and see how close you can get to the middle of a target. The missions are varied and entertaining enough to keep you playing the game, which is good, because there is a lot to enjoy here.

Mercer has a wide range of combat and special abilities that he upgrades throughout the game by earning experience. You earn experience by flogging enemies and completing missions. Each power is well animated and fleshed out and feels like it could make a definite impact on the way you play the game. I find myself using the Armor defensive ability with the Blade offensive ability because the combination makes for a surprisingly powerful melee character. If that sounds like it could cause some mayhem, you're right. The game doesn't hold back on the violence and gore, and you can expect to see a lot of things that will remind you that Prototype is rated M for Mature. For example, the Musclemass ability, which basically turns Alex into a grayish version of the Hulk, literally rips enemies in half when you devour them.

Speaking of devouring, the story is moved along through visually intense cut scenes that you can watch by basically eating certain enemies and civilians. The cut scenes are static images overlaid with sounds, movement, and other elements that are thrown at you while a voice over plays in the background. They are interesting and sometimes creepy, and they present enough of the story in large enough chunks to keep your attention.

Unfortunately, though the missions are varied nicely in the beginning of the game, as the game goes on it suffers from a great deal of repetitiveness, brought upon by the lack of any new kind of activities to engage in. At the time of writing this I have to confess that I have grown bored enough to stop playing, which is a shame because I haven't finished the game yet. Once you reach the highest tiers of your powers, the game starts to drag because you aren't really being rewarded for any of your work.

I would definitely recommend this to anybody that enjoyed Crackdown, as the two games have a lot in common, my favorite similarity being one of the main means of travel: leaping to the top of tall buildings without having to worry about dying from a fall.

No Yellow Ant Here

I remember those carefree days of sitting in front of the TV with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller clutched in my hand, directing an army of black ants, lead by their symbolic leader, the yellow ant, to beat back the soldiers of a red ant colony before moving in to defeat their queen and conquer their territory. SimAnt was an amazing game for somebody as interested in ants (and other insects) as I was at the time. There have been only one or two additional attempts at an ant colony simulator that have actually made it into mainstream notice, but they were either too buggy (no pun intended) or fell out of public view before they caught on.

Now we come to Ant Nation, a game you can download on the Nintendo Wii. I watched early previews for this with high hopes that I would soon be reliving those glorious days as the yellow ant. I purchased the necessary Nintendo points, downloaded the game, played for five minutes, then promptly turned off my system and went to play something else on my computer. The experience was something akin to being told you had to attend a funeral, have a route canal, and put down your dog...all on your birthday. Maybe that's a little harsh, but it was a bad experience, befitting a harsh description.

The game gives you very little to start with. There's no real tutorial, but the first ten missions or so, out of a total of 100, are meant to familiarize you with certain tools and aspects of control. However, the game doesn' really explain what it means when it tells you to use certain tools or take certain actions. It took me so long to figure out that "Level Up An Ant" meant "hold the little guy down and poke him until he got angry" that I seriously considered the game to be broken and my money to be wasted. I was probably right about the latter.

I decided to give the game a second chance and played it while I was installing another, more entertaining, game on my computer. When I use a game as filler for the installation of another, it usually speaks volumes about how much I like that game.

During the game you spend most of your time buying cookies and candy with gold that you collect for completing missions and dropping them on the ground so that you can build up your army. Then you watch in abject horror as said army is wiped out by a single stronger enemy, like a Japanese beetle or a weaval of some kind. This wouldn't be a problem if there was an easy way to build your army up again, but you spend an exorbitant amount of your starting gold on building up your initial army. Once you're down to four ants, it becomes hard to kill even the random lady bugs, which are supposed to be the weakest enemies in the game. This necessitates a restart, which is a horrible way to extend gameplay length.

Outside of building up your army, you have to move your ants around and give them commands with a set of tools that are somewhat strange. The pipette is straightforward enough; you hold a button to suck up your ants and press another to release them all. However, in order to get the ants out of their colony (which you'll see as a small 2-dimensional mini map) you have to do some odd massaging thing and hope that they don't all cascade back down the hole once you've stopped. The pipette is pretty much the only way to move the ants around that I've seen, but again, I haven't been through the whole game. Once my army was wiped out for the third time, I decided the game wasn't worth much more of my time and my other game had finished installing.

If you want to play an ant colony simulator, and have fun, you'd be much better off finding an old SNES, a copy of SimAnt, and leading the yellow ant to victory.

Parlor Tricks...Like Muggles Do

Anyone who knows me, or has bothered to ask about my taste in books, will know that I have a guilty pleasure in the form of the Harry Potter series. I had decided, back when they first became popular, that anything reaching that level of feverish popularity, read by that many people, could not, in any way, be good. Then the mother of a friend forced me, quite literally (by shoving the book into my bag one day) to read the first one. I grudgingly opened the first book and, like magic, I was hooked. Now, don't misunderstand me, I may be a huge fan, but I was never one to participate in any of the crazy line camping. I did anticipate the release of each book after the third (since that was when I started reading them), but, come on, I wasn't an addict.

Now we come to the movies, which have been a fantastic disappointment on the whole. The only movies in the series that can actually be called good are the first and second. And by good, I mean passable. And by passable, I mean I watched them all the way through. The third movie turned me off with the change of Dumbledore (necessary as it was, they didn't choose somebody with even an iota of the talent the earlier actor had played) and a werewolf that seemed nothing like the one in the book (or even the standard idea of werewolves as being either big and powerful or more wolfish/dog-like in appearance). In the fourth movie, Dumbledore nearly throttles Harry after his name comes out of the Goblet of Fire, further showing how little the actor had read the books, which, upon searching, was more true than I had guessed. I found out that he hadn't studied the character at all, he played Dumbledore how he wanted to, and not how the character is actually written. A dangerous, abusive, angry Dumbledore goes against almost every encounter readers have with him in the books.

I can't remember what turned me off about the Order of the Phoenix, but that's a bad sign in and of itself.

Now we come to the most recent movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I had high hopes; the movie was taking a turn down a darker, more adult road. I'm a sucker for romance and the romance that blooms between Harry and Ginny was one of my favorites because you almost want it to happen from the end of book 2 onward. The movie takes this bit of plot, rewrites it with an inky scalpel and some frayed duct tape, and then stuffs the whole thing into the room of requirement (room of hidden things edition). Ron and Hermione's romance bit was done well enough, which is perhaps the only thing I can give the movie credit for.

One of the overarching problems that I have had with most of the movies is the lack of special effects. Yes, they've shown some things flying, they've shown us dragons, people on broomsticks, and the occasional magical malady or two, but the real lack of ambient magic in the movies makes the scenes seem like hollowed out versions of their distant book cousins. For a book series that has grossed as much money as this one, and for all the merchandising and movie sales, it seems odd to me that there would be no money in the budget for bigger, better, more vibrant, and more visible magic in what is supposed to be a magical world. Half-Blood Prince was no exception.

Let's talk about things that they just plain left out. The pivotal, action packed last scene, where the death eaters are fighting DA and Order of the Phoenix members, Snape whisking Malfoy away from the astronomy tower and out onto the grounds while the battle rages around them, Harry tearing past everybody in his efforts to reach and inflict serious harm upon Snape's person, was awesome...IN THE BOOK!

The movie, incomprehensibly, just leaves it all out. The death eaters show up, they do their business, and then they run away without so much as a single expelliarmus from any member of any army or order. Harry gives chase through empty halls, he gets thrown around, Snape says a few things, and the whole thing is over. Not only did this lackluster scene fail to communicate the desperate urge of Harry's to seek revenge on the man who killed his mentor, it was not climactic, it was not exciting, it was bland, it was the vanilla ice cream of magical climaxes. Then as if to underline the lack of a battle and the flippant mistreatment that his character received from movie 3 on, they don't even have a funeral for Dumbledore. One of the most important characters in the series with one of the most gut wrenching moments in the book and all we see is the school working together to make the dark mark disappear.

What about Grawp comforting Hagrid? Harry telling Ginny that they can't be together? Hermione crying openly on Ron's shoulder? The merpeople singing their song of tribute? The respect of the centaurs shown from just inside the Forbidden Forest? The white tomb where Dumbledore is laid to rest? A character that was central to pushing the story forward is given all the farewell fanfare of a red shirt from a Star Trek episode.

The next movie is being split in two but I have little hope that being 4-5 hours long is going to make me like it. They've left so many holes in the plot with the movies that they'll be forced to avoid certain parts of the final book. Horcruxes or Hallows? How are viewers supposed to know why Voldemort goes to Dumbledore's tomb? How are we even going to recognize it?

Already, Something Funny

Below is a post on Sullivan's "The Daily Dish" (which I read regularly) that caught my eye...and made me laugh.

Why Listening Is Important - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan



Why Listening Is Important - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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Peter Jackson Directed Dead Alive

A friend pointed out to me that Peter Jackson did not direct this movie (I must have heard the preview wrong) and that this movie was made after a failed attempt to make a movie out of the Halo video game. Thanks Danny.


My Review of District 9

I liked this movie. The Movie confronts racism/illegal aliens in a manner that is both familiar and yet foreign enough to seem like he isn't preaching to us. He gives us aliens that are only remotely human-like, and so undertakes the job of making us identify with them, instead of building off of a relationship with more human-esque beings. The story is believable, there a good bit of action, and the graphics are great. However, if you sit closer than the back seats, bring dramamine because the shaky camera will leave you feeling sick. I don't understand why the director does this, the scenes are action packed enough without obscuring our view of what is going on. I can understand it if you are blending your CGI, but the graphics in this movie stood up to close up shots of the aliens without looking too computerized. I don't like feeling as if I'm going to be sea sick while I'm sitting in a theater.

A Great Way to Ruin October

My Review of The Haunting of Molly Hartley

October has always been my favorite month. I love horror movies, thrillers, and slashers. I love the general feeling of being creeped out or wondering if something is standing right behind the couch. It was with this in mind that a friend and I decided to see this movie Halloween night. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about it was the price for the ticket to get in. The story is a thoughtless, cliched, mess with no real redeemable qualities. The characters are flat cardboard cutouts of traditional stereotypes that feel like they're just going through the motions of making a movie. Most of the story elements and "surprises" are so transparent as to be laughable, and in fact, most of the people in the theater laughed out loud and mocked the characters and their plight through the second half of the movie. If The Happening had not been so bad, this movie would rank as the worst movie of all time. It's bad...

"To Fly A Star Destroyer Through"

My review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Let's face it, most of us hardcore Star Wars fans saw previews for this movie and thought to themselves "I'm going to hate it, but I have to see it." I went into the theater completely prepared for the ruination of story continuity, cheesy, lilting visuals, a plot with holes you could fly a star destroyer through, and voice actors who were tired of playing their roles. What I got, while not mind-blowing or earth-shattering, was an entertaining movie with lots of gritty lightsaber combat (like in the original trilogy) and a better look at the camaraderie that formed between the Jedi and the Clone troopers before they were ordered to kill them. The visual design was top notch, the voice actors put some umph behind the characters and the story, however improbably, held together enough to finish the movie. Strangely, the biggest complaint I have is the lack of the opening fanfare and scrolling text, which I think was removed because it is, ultimately, a kids film.

This is new but not very shiny

It seems strange that I should be as "tech savvy" (is this term outdated yet?) as most people think I am, and not have a blog. I read blogs (recently), I watch twitter (ever since the Iran election), and I know all about RSS feeds, news aggregation, social networking tools, and my facebook page is semi-constantly updated with stuff from the internet that I think is fun, sad, interesting, outrageous, and downright sick.

So now I've started a blog, which, in retrospect (or if I look backwards *ba dum ching*), may be a bad idea considering my already busy schedule.

I'll start the blog out by reposting three movie reviews that I put on Fandango a while back, enjoy.