29/July/2011

I watched Captain America last night. I'd liked the trailers, but for whatever reason I was in no particular rush to see it. I'm glad I did, though! It's no masterpiece of cinema, but as a dude who likes superheroes beating the crap out of Nazis, it thought it was thoroughly entertaining.

The origin's pretty simple - weak ol' Steve Rogers gets subjected to a super-soldier program that makes him mad ripped. Meanwhile, Red Skull (a dude with a red skull!) is tampering about with mystical artefacts and bombing cities and being a bit of a jerk, so their interests inevitably clash at some point. It's simple enough, but what really brings it to life is how the whole movie is like a "two fisted tales" comic brought to life, full of down-to-earth yet somehow over-the-top war antics brought to the big screen. You got one guy clobbering the crap out of guys armed with sci-fi guns, and all he's got is a shield and blue spandex. And superhuman strength, too.

As tragic as it was, I'm always fascinated by the two world wars, and seeing it explored in fantasy or sci-fi fiction always whets my whistle - I suppose I could try and make comparisons between Captain America and X-Men: First Class for both basically having superhuman dudes on both sides of the war (albeit different wars), but Cap does the war theme much more gung-ho and explosion-filled manner, which is more my cup of tea. It helps that it really emphasises the sci-fi nature of the film; it's not just "the Cold War with dudes with magnetism", it's "World War II with fuckin' Star Wars!!" Seriously, there's a war going on, but then the Nazis are toting disintegrator guns and building-sized laser tanks and then Cap and his non-super buddies are just blowing them the hell up all by themselves. It's weird and wonderful and I love it.

The mixture of historic war and totally out-there sci-fi elements made me think of one thing - Dark Void. Yes, call me shallow, but I thought if they're going to do a Dark Void movie (that's in the works, isn't it?) then this is a step in the right direction. It just needs the jetpack, the alien world, and those giant flying mechs piloted by lizard men. Make it happen, Hollywood!

I think what made the movie work was just how likeable the characters were, and how excellently they were played. Cap's a staple of the Marvel Universe now, but he's a hard guy to sum up quickly what he does, and how that makes him likeable (mind you, I have not read any comics with Captain America in them, so sue me). Like, Spider-Man: "young kid juggles home life, love life and superhero life all the while putting on a brave face." Likeable! Wolverine: "indestructible Canadian asshole." Ambiguously likeable! Cap: "fights for freedom."
... who doesn't in the Marvel universe?
(okay, tons of people, but I'm just sayin')
Yeah, Captain America as a superhero is a cool guy, but as a character, he's been a bit too "symbol of patriotism" for my liking, more of an icon than an actual person. The film does a great job showing how even as a short and skinny little guy, he had the biggest damn heart in the city of Brooklyn, and emphasises that although made into a soldier, his ambition isn't to be the perfect soldier, but remain a good person. I found that a really nice way of expressing it. Of course, I suppose it helps that the entire story takes place in World War II, and his main deal is that he's in modern day where he's not exactly part of the military, where such a statement can't be as easily expressed.

We didn't mean to, but we caught the movie in 3D. I watched it entirely without the glasses and it was just fine. Obviously you saw bits where you would probably have seen some nifty 3D effects, but instead it was just a green and purple mess. I suppose it helped that unlike Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I wasn't watching a film that took place almost entirely in rubble, debris and dust, and giant indistinct robots were not in centre focus. I still can't get over just how dark those 3D glasses are; why bother lighting the film to create ambiance and clarity when you're just going to watch the thing through a veil of darkness if you try and watch it in 3D? I'm almost sure when I saw Avatar the glasses weren't nearly as dark as this; maybe it's just a Moviehouse thing. Who knows. Either way, my friends tell me there were a couple of good 3D usages, but there's otherwise no need.

Like I said, it's no masterpiece of cinema, but it's a very fun Indiana Jones style romp and I'd recommend it for anyone who likes a good ol' romp around. My mother isn't big into superheroes (because she actually has taste) but I'd imagine this would be the kind of thing she'd enjoy.
I'm not sure how good that is at convincing people to watch it. "My mum would like it, so you should, too!"

I saw a poster for a film called Shark Night. I think it should have been Shark Knight instead.

25/July/2011

I rented Metroid: Other M last week, and finished it yesterday. In the past I only got rentals for three days, but it seems Xtravision now allows you to rent stuff for a whole week. For £4, that's not a bad deal, as a week is usually enough time to finish a modern game, or at least sink enough time into it to get a good feel for it.
For the curious, despite what the Games I Own section implies, I don't own Metroid: Other M - my brother does! ... yeah, maybe I had a good reason for listing it at the time, but if I were to continue keeping track of all my brother's games that'd be a bit tough, especially since we're on different continents now. I might quietly drop those listings sometime in the future unless I eventually own them myself or at least have some comments to make on them. (You gotta sit down and write a review on Other M, bro! You waffled far too much about it through email and on the phone to back down now. =P )

I split the review into headers mostly because I'm a lazy writer, but I guess it could serve as how disconnected the two elements are anyway.

Story
Let's face it, that's what Other M is about. Don't freakin' deny it. The movie scenes are unskippable, the TV commercials focused only on the storyline, and you unlock the ability to watch the game as a two-hour movie once you finish it. That's not the sort of stuff that screams, "check out our rich and engaging gameplay!"
As you know, I really don't give a hoot about stories in video games. I will say that I was trying to pay attention to the story just to see what they do with it, though my word, it was difficult to pay attention. I never expect a video game to contain a good story anyway (read a book, people!), but the whole thing came across more like someone's amateur novel than a legitimate piece of visual storytelling.

There's the obvious setback of having some pretty bad writing and voice acting; the story reads like a bad anime script most of the time, and I get the impression the voice actors were in dire lack of a good voice director. Some of the acting isn't bad, but some of it just made me cringe. I think one of the problems comes from how this is the first time Samus has proper lines of dialogue, and then simultaneously has far too much to say... and nothing worth saying. One would think an otherwise mute hero finally talking and narrating throughout the game might give us more insight into their character. Instead, Samus chooses to narrate the exact same stuff that's happening on-screen. Give me a snarky catchphrase any day.
There's also the matter of how Samus constantly talks about her commanding officer, Adam Malkovich, who was first seen in Metroid Fusion (though chronologically after the events of Other M; in Fusion, Adam's just an AI reproduction of himself, so to speak). It's been a while since I played Fusion and again, I just glossed over most of the story, but I recall Adam being a bit of a hardass military guy but despite his cold exterior, made a decent impression on her as Samus' mentor and confidant (my brother thinks Adam and Samus were in a relationship, though I don't know nor care - argue about it in the comments if you want!). Adam's still a cold hardass, but Samus now spends most of her time just gushing over the guy, talking about seeing him as a father figure and such-like, but none of it really convinced me or made me cared about them as characters - it instead made me think, "show me this, don't tell me this!" Yeah, they show you scenes, but it does little to show a good relationship between the two.

One of my biggest complaints was that despite Nintendo's tooting and trumpeting over LOOK HOW CINEMATIC AND STORY-DRIVEN OUR GAME IS... there's not actually much story to tell. The story only feels long because Samus feels the need to narrate the bleeding obvious and recap everything she's seen so far at random moments. A good story wouldn't have to bludgeon you over the head with the character's inner thoughts, especially one in a visual medium because - oh, I don't know, it's got freakin' visuals?
If Other M is Nintendo's attempt to show they're hip and "with it" and can do cinematic games too, they've done it pretty atrociously, as I found Samus a much more engaging character before this game. Having Samus speak and share her inner thoughts with the player didn't show me a deeper side of her - it just showed she hasn't much else to say outside of telling me what I'm seeing on-screen. Also, lots of maternal drama.

The game really bludgeons you over the head with the whole motherhood theme. Admittedly, exploring that in more depth in a video game could be interesting; like, how much Lara Croft change if she had a child? Other M has the mother theme running through the whole damn game (the whole game takes place inside a spaceship shaped like a baby bottle, for Christ's sake!), but none of it feels any more engaging than what was implied through Super Metroid's story. The villain of the story then turns out to be evil because it's got mommy issues, and Samus spends so much time at the start angsting about the infant Metroid that it just gets a bit tiresome.
This page has much better exploration of the times than I would have the talent or patience to do; it's a very interesting read. I admit probably the easiest answer to the rather uncomfortable relationship (fixation might be more apt) between Samus and Adam is just the difference in gender ideals between Japanese and Western culture, though I'm hardly the expert to talk about that either.

Ultimately, the story for Other M just doesn't do anything for me. The story comes across as generic and poorly localised, and the fact the game demands you pay attention to it hen it offers nothing special insults me more than anything else.
On the bright side? The visuals are pretty neat lookin'!

Gameplay
This is what we really want! So, is it any good?

It's okay.

... I'd never actually planned how I was going to start talking about the gameplay, so I guess just rambling off a list of the various gameplay modes will work, right?

The free-roam mode is the main backbone of the game. For exploration, it's rather cumbersome; the camera is presented like a Crash Bandicoot game, always looking into the horizon no matter what direction you're going, and there are no controls to alter it or rotate it in any way. This means you get less of a grasp on your environment just from the basic view alone, and quite often if you have to backtrack, you're practically running into the unknown. It functions reasonably well despite that quirk, and the controls work quite nicely; Samus' variety of movements all work well in a 3D plane despite only having a D-Pad and three buttons to work with.

The first-person view gets you a better view of your surroundings, and is the only mode you can use missiles in. That part gave me a bit of grief, as having to stop, glue yourself to the floor and then orientate yourself to where the enemy is from a new viewpoint is kinda awkward, especially when facing enemies that move or recover fast. It does give you one second of slow-motion upon entering first-person view, which is a nice compensation, but limiting missiles to this view only did always bug me.

SO MANY WOOOORDS

There are predetermined parts of the story where you're clued to the spot in this mode and have to look around to find a clue towards advancing the plot. These bits seemed to be little more than pointless roadblocks, as either what you're looking for is painfully obvious, or even already highlighted in the movie scene beforehand... or so damn obscure you can spend upwards of ten minutes glued to that same spot still trying to find whatever the hell the game wants you to find, with absolutely no clue regarding what you're looking for. I don't know what sort of challenge these scenes were meant to provide, but nobody buys a Metroid game to play Where's Wally In Zebes, for crying out land.
Likewise, there are parts where you control Samus in an over-the-shoulder view, but these serve only to pad out the game and make shit look tense. You can only make her walk at a frighteningly slow pace, and nothing actually happens in those scenes. It's about as much fun as it sounds.

Combat is intriguing. You run around in free-roam mode and have access to your beam, and can get stronger point-blank charged shots on your foes by either jumping on their heads or running into them when they're visibly weakened. It can be fun and fast-paced, though it can feel very limited with only your regular beam at your disposal; switching to first-person for your missiles isn't too awkward, but it just breaks the pacing for me, and using only charged shots for most of the game just gets a bit tiresome. Still, the cinematic look of them is very nice, and the boss battles are often nice and rewarding with Samus offering a very stylish finishing move on them once their health is drained. Definitely better than the bosses of Metroid Prime, no argument there.

There's a strange feature called Concentration where if you're close to death, you can run away and hold the A Button to restore one energy tank's worth of health (this feature is also used to refill your missiles, though that can be done anytime; refilling your health can only be done when you're nearly dead). I mean, yeah, it's a nice alternative to the ol' "don't get shot for a while and your health refills on its own" feature that most modern games use, if only because refilling your health glues you to the ground for a good five seconds, meaning you have to use that time strategically so you aren't smashed to a pulp in the middle of recharging. But the whole thing could've been avoided if the game actually had item pickups.
I'm serious, there's no health refills or missile refills in the game outside of save points or the Concentration ability. What this means is that most combat is little more than distraction with no actual direct benefit from it. While in the other games defeating enemies would at least reward you with health or missiles, here you get zip. Did someone just forget to implement them, and the Concentration feature was just the quickest replacement they could think of? Or is it an attempt to make the game more appealing to casual gamers? It's not a totally heinous feature (I wasn't complaining about it during some of the boss fights!), but it just seems a strange thing to implement when the whole health and missiles thing had already been handled quite appropriately by the other games. No need to reinvent the wheel, buddy.

One of Other M's unfortunate downfalls is that exploration now feels a bit diluted, both because of the rather crummy camera angles, and also how lifeless the environment is. You're not exploring actual alien planets, you're just romping about a ship imitating their environments as habitats for breeding aliens. The authorization gimmick (where you don't get new weapons or abilities until Adam says so) isn't too game-wreckingly dreadful, since you're still getting the abilities around the time you need them, but it loses the thrill of finding these items all by yourself and then discovering where they get used. Also, losing the ability to scan stuff drains the game of personality a little - learning about all the flora and fauna of these strange, alien planets was one of my favourite aspects of Metroid Prime, as it just added so much extra tidbits to an already beautiful game. It would've been nice to hear an explanation for why an insectoid tree-beast has the head of a duck.

I suppose the best way I can conclude is by saying it's an intriguing game.
It's not quite "Metroid in name only" like I was fearing, but it is quite different from the other games; I can't deny that Other M's Samus Aran isn't Samus Aran to me, and I didn't really give a damn about her or any of the characters (so, no, the Ridley scene went by without comment. Still a really dumb scene though, and that page does a great job of stating just how bad it is if you actually tried to give a damn about series continuity). It's been an intriguing experience to play it, and the fact I could finish it in a week of light play was a nice relief (I've been tempted to try and play Twilight Princess again, but there's no way I'm sinking another five hours of my life just to get through that fucking tutorial), though I don't think I'll buy it. It's been the perfect rental game though - £4 to own it for a week is enough time to finish the game and see all that I need to see. If anything, it's nice that Nintendo are willing to let third-parties experiment with their properties, but this one just didn't do as much for me as a regular game would've.

23/July/2011

It's been a quiet month. I dedicated practically all of May into the grunt work for it, and since then it's been a slow, tedious grind to fill out the rest of it, but the Puchi Carat shrine has been revamped. It's one of those things I was really excited about working on, and now that it's over, I'm struggling to remember what my aim actually was. I think my plan was to include just as much information as I possibly could, even stuff like the locations and the map and so on, but I ended up either not having much to work from, or lacking the patience to work with it, so I dropped a whole page and spread its content across other pages. Oh well. Let me know if you enjoy it! (I'll be interested to hear if people think the design should be less pink, or even more pink)
Also, game music. It's just stuff I left over from last time, I'm afraid.

I'd meant to mention it earlier when it was actually news, but I've been helping out the Super Mario Bros. Movie Archive a little by providing summaries and notes for the various early script drafts they've provided. I say check it out not just because I'm tooting my own trumpet, but because it's a very extensive and informative site; the sort of ludicrously extensive project that just screams "labour of passionate, insane love." Even if you liked the movie or not, it's a treat just to see all those preproduction materials spread out online, and the interviews are a lot of fun to read. Admittedly my role isn't much more than shortening stuff down for people who don't have hours to burn reading film scripts, but I'm glad to be helping out. Check it out!

I watched two movies on Thursday, both pretty much polar opposites. The first was Attack of the Giant Leeches, which was more background noise than anything; my dad picked it up at a pound shop months ago, and I threw it on when some friends were over just because. Why not, y'know? Eating lunch and watching people get eaten by giant leeches is totally appropriate. People in the backwaters of America are falling victim to giant man-like leech monsters! ... if they step into the swamp, first. Despite the limbs and all, the leeches never step foot on dry land. After that happens more times than it should, a rescue operation is set about to retrieve the missing people and destroy the monsters. That's about all there is, really.

Well, it's a half-century-old black and white horror film; it's hardly a thrill-a-minute affair. It's pretty slow going and glacially paced, though there is a creepy scene of the leech monsters feeding on the captured humans, but there's not much else of worth about it. There's some drama about a tubby guy's wife getting into an affair that's mildly intriguing, but then all three people involved are killed so quickly and that leaves the film to focus on the dull-as-toast protagonist. On the bright side, it did get us conversing about how we would make a film about killer leeches. My proposed title was "Oh No! More Leeches!" and involved a marriage councillor who happened to be a giant leech, in both senses of the word. No, it didn't make sense in context.

The other film was Persepolis, which a friend gave to us before she moved back to Belgium. It's a very political, very cultural film that I wouldn't deem myself worthy of summarising in detail. About the quickest way I can sum it up is as a coming-of-age story for an Iranian girl and the changes that undergo her life and her country along the way. There's war, there's drama, there's angst, and then there's a few doses of humour that catch you off-guard.
Totally the kind of thing my friend was into.
I thought it was a very intriguing movie, though being a totally ignorant tosspot regarding Iranian history, culture and its political climate, I might not have got as much out of the story as I could've done. Still a fascinating and intriguing story, mind you. Being a totally ignorant tosspot, though, I loved the visual style. All monochrome, very sharp with great bold definition between the characters and the backdrops; a great way of getting that stark comic artwork into an animated medium. It's the kind of movie I'd recommend on that aspect alone, though the content might not be everyone's cup of tea, though I had no idea what to expect and I still enjoyed it.

I've also rented Metroid: Other M for a week. I haven't reached the bit where Samus freaks out over Ridley, no. Details to come once I can form a decent judgment on it, perhaps?

10/July/2011

"You're not dead. That's great!"

Just an quick mention to say Random Action Hour has finally finally got the Japanese Transformers coverage up again, along with G.I. Joe: The Movie. We can experience the joys of Galvatron sitting in giant wicker chairs all over again!

06/July/2011

Went to see Green Lantern. It's a decent bit of eye candy.
I admit I was a bit biased when watching it, as I've been keeping up a little with DC Comics' reboot and their marketing strategies - namely, how they expect people who see the movies of their franchises will then want to read more and seek out the comics. Armagideon Times does a better job of talking about it in jaded tones than I would (and is a good read in general, I suggest checking it out), but what it basically boiled to was while watching the movie, I asked myself, "does this movie make me want to learn more about the Green Lantern and their adventures?"

Hal Jordan is a jet pilot who's all, "fear? pshaw!", and then he's chosen by an intergalactic space police and they say he's still afraid of things and he says "you're right" and buggers on home, and then once he learns that a poorly-defined cosmic entity is going to destroy the Earth (and the rest of the universe, but Earth comes first!) he mans up and destroys it all by himself.
That's about the gist of it.

The trailers and promotional materials really promoted the big science fiction edge to the film, with lots of emphasis on the weird and wonderful members of the Green Lantern Corp., all the flying through space and the awesome planet they all hang out on. Indeed, the film begins right away focusing on these elements... with an infodump of the origins of the corporation and the aforementioned poorly-defined cosmic threat (who is given the briefest origin story possible about halfway through the film). It doesn't exactly give the immediate impression that this is a movie that uses science fiction and strange, inhuman creatures in a respectable and commendable manner, and instead just made me think, "yep, this is a comic book movie."

The story functions adequately enough, but that's just it - it just functions. None of the characters really jumped out at me, nor was there much for it to actually say. I think the problem is that, because of the cosmic nature of the film, it's all too easy to compare it to Thor, which was a much more compelling film - it retained its cosmic feel even when on Earth, it had more appealing characters, more interest invested in the story, and Loki really stole the show as a layered and reasonably complex nemesis... for a supervillain, at least.

Green Lantern, meanwhile, feels more like it's just teasing the audience with all these grand glimpses of far-out science fiction locations and characters, and then having them rendered pointless because the human character resolves everything himself. When the Green Lantern Corp. is host to thousands of ring-bearers and their basic role as the space police, it's all the more disappointing when they don't actually factor into the story much. Besides informing Hal of the cosmic threat, testing his skills and giving him the powers in the first place, they don't actually contributed anything to the story's resolution outside of a sequel hook.

Also, the villains are kinda bare - the giant cosmic threat has those three words as his sole defining traits, and although the human guy is amusingly hammy, it just feels like he isn't explored enough; is the scene where he's kidnapped by the secret agents really the first scene you see him in? It establishes him as having similar slobby traits to Hal Jordan, but I don't recall it actually giving the two any real connection outside of the Green vs. Yellow energy thing that happens later. Again with the Thor comparisons, Loki is Thor's brother and there's the drama surrounding his heritage as one of the Ice Giants; he's a good person, but he just trails down the wrong path through bad decisions, giving him and Thor an obvious parallel.

But psssh, forget story, right? Eye candy! It's a really good visual effects like. Like, very good. My dad was originally interested in the movie at first because he'd heard reviews that said it's one of the best movies to see in 3D, and it definitely seems like it would be; we watched it in 2D though, and I do prefer it that way.

As a narrative of special effects with an adequate story, it's not bad; I sound like a real grouch here, but I enjoyed my time at the cinema with my chums. If you're hoping for real cosmic superhero shit on the big screen, we're still not there yet - humongous budgets can still only produce so much CGI, sadly!
Going back to my bit about DC's marketing strategy, does the movie make me want to buy the Green Lantern comics? Well, not really. The movie did little to get me invested in the story, and it just gave me the impression that despite the few thousand members in the Corp., the one human is all that counts. Obviously a film is directed to a different audience than a comic book, and one would like to assume the more niche of the two would get a chance to explore storylines and themes in a more engaging manner, but the point is, the movie was a fair-enough two hour special effects fest, but it wasn't the greatest of sales pitches.

Bit of an unrelated tangent, but thought it was worth discussing - I know jack about the Green Lantern as a character, but the version I'm most familiar with (however vaguely that is) is John Stewart from the Justice League cartoons, who's a black guy. And it got me wondering: what other superhero movies are there that have a black protagonist? Well, there's Blade, I suppose, and there's Steel, however disconnected that was from the source material (or so I have heard!). Same goes for Catwoman, though I haven't seen it and I'm sure there's people out there who have to argue that Halle Barry isn't black enough or something completely moronic like that. Although not based off any comic, I guess Hancock counts.
I've no idea what major differences there are between Hal Jordan and John Stewart, so what changes having one or the other as the leading character in the movie would be unknown to me, but I just thought it was intriguing. If anything, it would've been nice just for a bit of diversity - the DC reboot promotional material is so full of whities that it's not funny.

Found an old doodle I'd never finished.

I'd intended to redraw the cover to Double Dungeons and make all the characters and creatures on it look even more dorky than usual; I drew them all in pen, but this was as far as I could when redrawing it in MS Paint. Looks a bit like Jeremy from 3D Movie Maker, except he forgot to put on a decent pair of pants.

03/July/2011

I would prefer to have announced it with a relevant update, but I figure, why not - Otimusya lives!

Yeah, he emailed me earlier in the week, and naturally, it took me several days to get around to reply to him because I'm a shiftless bugger. Basically, he said that he'd stumbled across my stuff of his stuff during his web browsing, and he subsequently found the email I'd sent him back in 2009 - he hadn't noticed it until now. He gave me his permission to produce the translations, and pointed me towards a new mirror for his site, though he said he won't be updating it. A pity, but I'm glad his content is still online.
And, uh, wow, I'm still trying to let it sink in that he replied. Yes, it's a nameless internet game humour person replying to another nameless internet game humour person, but I'm just quite chuffed that he replied to me after not hearing from him for two years. That's very kind of him, if I do say so myself! I would normally suggest you check out his stuff, but, well, it's in Japanese, and I forgot what a labour it was producing translations, so you'll just have to hold your horses.

I'd also meant to make some comments on the Sonic Generations demo if just to emphasise I DON'T CARE ABOUT SONIC NO MORE (because reiterating that while playing all of his new games via demo or rental is totally the best way of stating that); such remarks as "the camera is still too zoomed in!" and "the spindash is so fast it makes me feel like I'm skipping half the game by using it!"...

[EMBED THE VIDEO HERE]
... but then Rage Quitter 87 and I started playing Sonic 2's battle mode, and I'm absolutely incompetent at it. It's hilarious and sad at the same time, and if that doesn't denounce me of my "Sonic fan"-ship, I don't know what will. He's got a slowly-blooming YouTube account of us playing together, and I'd suggest you check it out if just to verify that I am not very good at video games.

Today's observation: You know, the prospect of just crawling in a hole and dying for the Summer always sounds very tempting.
Some people say the proper term is "hibernation," but I find it more amusing to think that bears and squirrels and stuff are all little furry Jesuses.