ShupFace: Review-niverse

I recently saw the Dark Knight with Jono and a few mates at our local megaplex.

To begin with I’d like to say I watched this movie long after everyone else, so I was forced to endure countless people gushing about how great it was and in particular Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. I hate when things get hyped because my expectations are blown far out of proportion and even if the movie is really good I am usually left feeling a bit disappointed.

I’m not going to go into a long and detailed dissection of the Dark Knight. It was a good film. It was enjoyable and tense and unpredictable. I loved the way the Joker was written and I thought Heath Ledger was fantastic, I had so much fun watching him. Except that, despite how clever and dark it was, for me it was still just a very good comic book film. Which is fine, I love going to the movies to have fun. But I also like watching movies to be challenged and this didn’t do that for me, which is also fine.

Things that I didn’t like about it:

1. The Bat bike thing. It was ridiculous and crap looking.
2. Two-face. His face looked ridiculous and cartoony, particularly the stupid animatronic eye.

I have to be honest - that’s an unusually short list of grievances for me. I have a bad habit of picking holes in films, like the start of Iron Man for example, and the Dark Knight gave me very little to complain about. I’m almost a little disappointed!

I have been a fan of Disney ever since I saw Aladdin at the cinemas (1993). They have been responsible for many of the classics that I love like the Jungle Book and the Lion King. But when it comes to animation I think the baton has well and truly passed to Pixar.

Pixar Animation Studios are the company that brought us Toy Story (1 and 2), Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. These are all movies that I think are funny, intelligent and sophisticated in a way that is enjoyable for kids and adults. They also made Cars and A Bug’s Life, which are not too bad, and Ratatouillee, which I haven’t seen.

I recently saw WALL•E at the movies with my Dad. I think he was expecting to be pretty bored watching a “kid’s movie”, but I am happy to say he was pleasantly surprised. He found the movie funny, engaging and poignant. I did too, but I wasn’t surprised. I already know that Pixar have it going on. The movie has big goals and themes and I think it hit the ball out of the park again. I doubt WALL•E will have the same appeal or success as Nemo but I enjoyed it more overall. Maybe I’m just a sucker for robots…

I don’t know how long it will be before Pixar pass on the baton to a new company. For a while I thought Dreamworks might challenge them, but the subsequent Shrek movies, along with pretty much everything else they’ve made, has been sucktacular as far I can tell. In any case, I hope Pixar continue to make delightful, thought-provoking and fun movies for at least a little while longer.

I was pretty pumped to play the new Star Wars game Force Unleashed and I really wanted to like it. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy playing it, I did, but it’s just not very good. I think I was prepared to overlook the games flaws because I like being a Sith apprentice who slices and dices when he’s not shooting lightning from his fingertips.

There are several major problems with the game that I noticed:

1. The Force was definitely not unleashed.

There are very few powers in this game and you master them all through the course of the game. Force Push and Repulse are basically the same power and Grip is a variation on the theme of telekinesis. Force Lightning and Lightning Shield go together as well. You can also throw your lightsaber which is neato but there is so much wasted potential in a game that claimed to be all about the force. The force-combo’s were just combinations of lightsaber attacks with a force power e.g. Lightning Saber. I ended up using Force Lightning the whole game because the other powers are a bit useless in comparison. Grip is probably the funnest power but one of the least useful in real play. You can pick up your enemies with your mind powers and shake them like a dog, slam them into walls or just watch them squirm. Good for a laugh.

Another problem is that by the end of the game many of the units are immune to your force powers so you end up using your lightsaber anyway. The troops that aren’t immune (lowly stormtroopers) aren’t worth the trouble since they die from one sweep of your lightsaber anyway.

2. Gameplay was repetitive.

The level design was alright, though a number of levels were just a series of identical corridors. It was decidedly linear, which isn’t always a bad thing (particularly when the level design is so lazy you wouldn’t know where you were going). A number of the levels even show up twice. There wasn’t much variety in the units per level, or in the game overall. Even the big beasties, AT-CT’s and Rancors were pretty same-same really.

The hardness settings provide very little in the way of variation, they just seem to reduce the damage you deal and increase the amount of damage you take. Sith Warrior was pretty easy for me but my brother is having a fair bit of trouble with Sith Lord (I can’t imagine how hard Sith Master must be).

3. The game is annoying and broken.

The view flat out sucks at times. You have to be looking directly at things to aim powers on them and sometimes even that isn’t enough. I would have hoped the game could be a little more intuitive about targetting. If I am trying to pick something up I can forgive it picking up a box instead of an enemy, but if I am using Force Lightning does that make sense? Is it really that hard to make lightning attack the nearest enemy? I can’t tell you how many times I was surrounded by units and I fired lightning into open space missing them all.

A number of levels didn’t record my points, objectives or holocron collection meaning I didn’t know what I’d done during the level and I didn’t get any of the completionist  bonuses. Considering I made an effort to collect every holocron in the game this was pretty annoying. How does this get through play-testing? Troops would sometimes break and just stand there. I got stuck on walls and behind plants more than once. Did I mention that the camera sucked?

4. The storyline was pretty balls.

[Total Spoilers Ahead]

I haven’t read a lot of Star Wars fiction and don’t really intend to. I like the universe plenty but that’s just not really the kind of books I read I guess. So my only experience of Star Wars storytelling is really the movies and video games. Maybe I was spoilt by Knights of the Old Republic? Force Unleashed had very little in the way of self-determination and the alternate endings hinge on a decision made in the last five minutes.

There is a hint of romance between Starkiller and Juno Eclipse at the end, but very little build up. It would only have a taken a sentence or two every few cinematics to build the tension but there was nothing. I haven’t played the Dark Side ending yet but the Light Side ending sucked hard. Basically you end up fighting Darth Vader and when you defeat him you fight the Emperor. As soon as this happened I knew the end would be crap. Even if you defeat the Emperor where do you go from there?

So in the end Starkiller nobly sacrifice himself to save blah blah, who cares. I spent several hours hacking my way through repetitive levels of cookie-cutter monsters only to die in a cinematic at the end? Balls. I don’t care if my death saved the galaxy or whatever. I want to be the supreme badass! Which is why Star Wars stories outside of the general chronology are so much more fun (like Kotor).

[/Spoilers]

Anyway, despite all that I’m off to finish the dark side storyline… just to see what it’s all about. I’ll get back to you if it significantly changes my position. But if I die in another cinematic I think I will be angry enough to crap my pants.

I have been listening to the Mountain Goats album, the Sunset Tree, pretty much non-stop since I borrowed it. I had heard a few songs from the album individually and thought they were really awesome. I’ve listened to the album quite a bit by now and those songs, while still good, aren’t the ones really doing it for me.

The Mountain Goats tend to have pretty dark, depressing lyrics most of the time and this album is no different. A couple of the songs like This Year and Dance Music seem really upbeat and bouncy at first but the lyrics are pretty messed up. Other songs like Dinu Lipatti’s Bones and Pale Green Things are so soft and beautiful and are just as bitter. I guess I’m a sucker for depressing music, even when I’m not feeling particularly bad, so it should come as no surprise that I love the Mountain Goats. I would have all of their babies.

I have read a few books by Chuck Palahniuck, the first and best of which is Fight Club. Needless to say, I loved it and I particularly enjoyed Palahniuck’s deranged style. So I read a few of his other books. Unfortunately they aren’t anywhere near as good. Many of them start strong but fail to capitalise. Choke and Lullaby were alright, but just don’t measure up to Fight Club.

Kane once remarked that it must be hard to have your first novel be so amazing that nothing you write afterwards will ever be as good. The other side of that coin is obviously how awesome it would be to have any novel be as successful as Fight Club, be it your first or last.

I have just finished reading Survivor and I found it fell into many of the same traps as his previous books. It began really well, twisted and interesting, but he failed to maintain that momentum. As the book progressed I found myself caring less and less what happened next and began wondering what the book would have been like if it had gone in a different direction.

The ending was okay but almost irrelevant. The book last me somewhere in the middle and I think I only continued reading out of a misplaced completionist drive (I play too many video games). I do like Chuck’s style, but style alone can’t keep me interested.

(Edit: Moved this here because really it’s a review, duh)

Been recently acquired Soul Caliber IV for the Xbox 360 and I’ve just now had a chance to play it. My opinion after an hour or two is that it’s sort of okay. I like the character customisation and leveling up but at the end of the day it’s still just a fighting game.

My beef with fighting games is that they are pretty limited. Any attempts to make them less limited usually involve more complicated combinations of buttons to pull off special moves. If I can’t remember the moves (anything with four or more combinations is pretty well beyond my abilities) then I just resort to button bashing. If I can’t even win by button bashing then I usually get frustrated and give up. But if button bashing is more successful than actually learning the moves then all their attempts to complexify the controls have failed.

I also played a demo for Too Human and my opinion is that it’s Too Crap.

I’ve liked the Mountain Goats for a while and after hearing their album The Sunset Tree I like them even more. So when my friend asked me to recommend some music to her for purchasing I didn’t hesitate to pimp the Mountain Goats. “They’re hot” I told her. So she went out and bought their album Heretic Pride as well as the Juno soundtrack. She left both CD’s at my house last night and I’ve been listening to them this morning and forming opinions:

Heretic Pride is not bad. It’s nice to listen to and none of the songs are really annoying. But by the same token it’s not particularly exciting yet. I might have to listen to it a few more times to start liking it a lot. But at the moment I’m just kind of alright with it.

The soundtrack for Juno is more complicated. I like the songs mostly, but I liked them more in the context of the movie. They were cute and odd and nice. Now they’re actually a little bit annoying. I think I could probably listen to the songs individually but as a whole album I’d probably get tired of it quite quickly. I’m only halfway through the album at the moment but my favourite song so far is by Cat Power (Sea of Love). She’s a hot little ticket.

I think of myself as the kind of person who would have made an admirable comic book geek. I’m obsessive, articulate and somewhat daft. Also, I like superheroes. But the thing is, I never really read any comic books as a kid and now that I’m an adult I mostly just read books. Yesterday I borrowed my brothers copies of the Amazing X-Men series written by Joss Whedon.

I like Joss Whedon. He’s funny and intelligent and his work has an endearing focus on relationships. He wrote Buffy, Angel and Firefly/Serenity which is great, I love those shows. But he also wrote Toy Story, which is just fantastic. When I look back on his body of work I can really see a theme developing. They’re about people, even when the people are actually vampires or toys or whatever, they’re about relationships and family.

Most of what I know about the X-Men I have picked up from the movies, from my brother or from the kids cartoon. I watched the cartoon again recently and I can’t recommend anything but a policy of avoidance. The cartoon is not as good as you remember. The cartoon is just bad. So this lack of knowledge puts me at a disadvantage when reading new X-Men comics. I don’t know how Jean Grey died, why the Professor has left the Mansion or anything about Emma Frost.

But the comics are so good it doesn’t seem to matter. As long as you have a basic understanding of who the characters are you can pick up the rest fairly quickly. Granted seeing a character “come back to life” doesn’t have the same impact if you didn’t know said character was dead, but you deal.

The thing that I love about these comics, aside from the superpowers and that, is that I can see Whedon all over it. I can see his sense of humour in the characters sarcastic comments and witty retorts. The dialogue is intelligent and authentic. But most of all the relationships are real, the people are hurt and conflicted and trying their hardest to keep it together. His focus on family is so perfect for the dysfunctional X-Men team and I’m really enjoying it.

I think I have been spoilt, with my first experience of X-Men comics being authored by one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, touching and exciting and it may be all down-hill from here.

“Animated acid-damaged nightmare rock.”

“The aural equivalent of a nightmarish acid trip.”

Wow. What have I got myself into? What is this…this….music.

Ladies and Gentlefolk, welcome to the world of the Butthole Surfers. Formed in 1983, this is a band that few are familiar with. The reason for this will become obvious.

This album is not an easy listen. It is everywhere. Mixes of punk, metal, blues, psychadelic and rock hammer your ears. Each song being so different from the previous. So you ask, why would I even bother with this? Well the answer is simple. It’s cool. Each song allows you to experience chaos, beauty, anger and confusion all in one swift falcon punch. Take for example ‘Hay’. This song has a heavy bass line, some weird tape effects and an old musty voice in the background shouting the song name. Then we move into ‘O-Men’. Some truly crazy guitar line layed with thick screams. Kuntz is another strangly amusing song. You need to hear it to understand. Words do not do justice.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, this is not for the everybody.

Without going through a song by song description, Locust Abortion Technician is brused, battered and crazy. Truly a strange album to behold. Oh, and if you want to give it a whirl, copy the link below…

http://www.myspace.com/losbuttholesurfers

Much love,

Dave

I finished Grand Theft Auto IV a couple of days ago. There are still achievements to attain and side missions to complete but I’ve finished the meat of the game and I feel confident to review it.

Visually the game is fantastic. It is definitely a step up from San Andreas. The city looks amazing and you can tell a lot of time and effort went into designing it. The cars look really great and when you crash them they get realistic scrapes and dings (and worse).

The combat has been overhauled again. The aiming system has been changed and while the auto-aim can inconvenient be at times, overall I’d say it is a success. More importantly the death animations take realism in a twisted direction (that I love). The addition of a physics engine is very satisfying, particularly “tripping” fleeing pedestrians with a blast from the shotgun. The death animations and the gore have been dramatically improved. Running over pedestrians has never been more fun. The impact is more satisfying, the aftermath more realistic/hilarious.

They even did away with forcing you to eat and exercise for which I am constantly grateful.

All of these are great things. And yet I’m still disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high? It did get rated 10 out of 10 fairly indiscriminately.

The gameplay and the visuals of the game are all outstanding and I have no complaints there. I may have found the change in handling of the cars slightly frustrating at first, but I adjusted. There are three main areas where I think that Rockstar dropped the ball. The first area is storyline, the second is content and the third is multiplayer.

I have only played a small amount of GTA III, but I finished both Vice City and San Andreas and loved them. The storyline for Vice City was engaging and fun and each objective was satisfying to attain. Essentially as a disgruntled mafioso setting yourself up in a new city your objective was to become the biggest player in town. That objective had complications and setbacks both minor and major, but it was always fun. The storyline behind San Andreas was interesting as well, but more convoluted (I can see how it led to the plot in IV). But the game was a step up from Vice City both visually and in terms of content. San Andreas was overflowing with sweet little additions, push bikes, quad bikes. Hell you could finally fly planes!

I won’t go into too much detail about the plot of GTA IV because of spoilers, but essentially one of my biggest problems with the storyline is the inconsistent moralising. It seems like they are attempting to portray your character as a reluctant participant attempting to avoid entangling himself in a life of crime, but less than half-way through the game he is offering to whack pretty much anyone for money. You are confronted with other peoples “conflicted” sob-stories but they are rarely convincing or even interesting, remember I bought this game so I could maim innocent pedestrians. The addition of occasional opportunities to spare people might have had more of an impact if I didn’t spend all my spare time indiscriminately murdering (both in and out of missions). One wonders if they were bowing to pressure from groups or individuals complaining about the level of violence or whatever.

Possibly more annoying than the moralising is that at no point do you ever seem to work for yourself. You spend the whole time schlepping around after bigger fish like their maid. One of the most satisfying things about Vice City was ending the game as the King Pin, with a sweet mansion and business ventures all over town.

Lastly, I particularly disliked that certain parts of the storyline seemed incredibly similar to ideas used in San Andreas, it just struck me as lazy and uninspired.

The second issue I have is that there seemed to be a lot less content in GTA IV than there was in San Andreas. It seems bizarre to me that content that was in San Andreas has actually been taken out! There are no planes, no bicycles and no way (that I know of) to customise your car. There are only three different clothing stores in the whole game and no hair cuts or tattoos. There are only five safehouses and all of these are accumulated through missions (and they’re all pretty boring). Worst of all there is no way to spend the $750,000 of cash that I have accumulated during the course of the game. Seriously?! What good is having $750k if you can’t spend it on a house or a helicopter or something?

One consolation is that now that they’ve released GTA IV we can probably expect sequels in the manner of Vice City and San Andreas. The sequels will flesh out the game and provide the level of content we have come to expect from Rockstar (assuming they don’t use all their time world-building).

Finally, the situation with multiplayer in GTA IV is probably my biggest grievance. When I heard they had included multiplayer in the new game I nearly wet myself. I could forgive the terrible storyline and the lack of content and pretty much anything else for decent multiplayer. Since finishing Vice City and San Andreas I have played them occasionally, wasting time running down pedestrians or getting into firefights with the police. But multiplayer would extend the playing of life of GTA one thousand-fold. Except that it’s only for Xbox Live.

One of the best things about video games has always been multiplayer. For me, playing people you can’t see over the internet is just not the same thing. Getting a group of guys around to cuss and kill and have a good time is what video games should be about. Worst of all is that I know it’s too much to hope that they will rectify this situation for the next game.

And I’m spent.